Is this a serious question? They are stealing results of very long and expensive R&D, commonly know as Intellectual Property, or "IP". Producing this locally would require a sufficient mass of experience talent and lots of time and money. It might not even be possible to catch up.
The fact that this is being stolen from Micron who presumably weren't blind to the value of their IP make it all the more frighting. None of the companies I have worked for in the past few decades would have had any chance of resisting a motivated thief as locking down knowledge runs counter to fostering innovation.
Stealing these results is a negative to society because it prevents the inventor from making profit on their inventions and from recovering their R&D costs. It is bad because it discourages companies from investing in R&D and from making advances in science and technology.
This makes me question whether it is actually a negative to society, then; should we, as a society, rely on the incentive of profit to push technology forward, if this incentive is such a fickle thing? If it depends on keeping information secret? One of the favourite arguments of the liberals and capitalists is that the free market is efficient, but where is the efficiency in companies and individuals needing to re-create the same R&D over and over again?
>They are stealing results of very long and expensive R&D, commonly know as Intellectual Property, or "IP". Producing this locally would require a sufficient mass of experience talent and lots of time and money. It might not even be possible to catch up.
Can you tell me how stealing these results is actually a negative to society? Is it just a negative to already extremely wealthy individuals? I'm finding no negative here and nobody is really giving me anything other than capital.
We wouldn't have modern computers if it weren't for IP laws. The semiconductor industry would have collapsed and stopped investing fab research if they could have just waited and immediately stolen any better design.
I suggest you read up on "tragedy of the commons" and maybe some basic game theory to understand why there needs to be an incentive to invest in R&D for a company to do so.
The Soviet space program is an example of an economically unsustainable program kept alive by money being pumped in from external sources (govt tax revenue). Capital is most certainly required to make these programs work in order to purchase the fuel, basic materials, etc.
Open source is a good example of where innovation can work because all it takes is people donating their time. It doesn't require $15 million of rocket fuel and a $100 million rocket to make a commit to Linux.
Government-backed research works well when there is no immediate commercially useful aspect (e.g. basic sciences, space exploration), but it's incredibly bloated and slow compared to business R&D that has competition and motivation to make discoveries.
Where are the socialist programs producing processors competitive with Intel/AMD? Where is the socialist program producing an electric car people want more than Teslas?
The “ideas and thoughts” that you mention are not one-off ideas that somebody came up with in 10 minutes. The big concern is that what is stolen is ideas that are the result of decades of investment in R&D with significant monetary value. Just because manufacturing can be done on the cheap doesn’t mean that coming up with the invention didn’t take a 100x investment.
IP isn't remotely valued proportional to its investment, and a lot of highly valued IP doesn't take such efforts to create. Indeed in some cases how could it, if the innovation requires a random walk through the design space? The first company that found it might have just gotten unlucky with a path that took decades of trial and error when a different path might have found it sooner or cheaper (but no one else was looking, or were on yet another path).
In thinking over IP reform (and avoiding getting upset about China stealing it) it'd be better to question the notion that the IP is centrally important rather than phrase things just in terms of rich vs non-rich people... A starting question: even if you know all the written details about X, can you still go make your own X? Following up, for the Xs you can, can you do it in a shorter time frame than someone who already has X can develop a better X' that keeps their ROI number positive?
The current top comment on this page posits that the answers to these for many international businesses were "sometimes, no":
> International companies in a rush to get access to the largest single market in the world have freely given away their IP, because they didn't think the Chinese could ever catch up.
I don't think this logic has changed, but instead international companies have stopped innovating as much, which allowed China to catch up. (The US did the same thing to Europe.) They want to rest on their laurels for longer instead of innovating more, and IP distribution (from sharing, theft, expiration, or otherwise) does put a timer on how long you can rest.
And now that research is available to society as a whole to benefit them in an open and likely now cheap way.
Some already super rich people and companies lost money, but so what? I'm sure they'll be able to put food on their families tables until the heat death of the universe.
It’s not as simple and clear cut as you make it out to be. The IP theft actually destroys many small businesses and companies that were trying to disrupt an industry by coming up with something original. There are many cases like this one:
https://money.cnn.com/2018/03/23/technology/business/america...
