I worked for a company that got acquired by a larger company who happened to have a JV with a Chinese company. A few months after the acquisition, one of us stumbled across a shockingly blatant copy of our product on the Chinese firm’s website. Same box, same ports, same darned WebUI but translated to Chinese.
Now this was a hardware product with a weekly data feed, so not only did someone at the JV feed all the specs and source code to the Chinese company, they sent them weekly updates.
Needless to say, when confronted about this the company didn’t seem too surprised we found out, nor did the understand why everyone was so upset...
The common argument "copyright period should be shortened from 95-120 years down to 10-20 years" is compatible with a criticism of the described activities because the described activities took place in less than 10 years.
The common argument "there should be no anti-circumvention provisions" is compatible with a criticism of the described activities because the described activities would violate other provisions besides anti-circumvention provisions.
The common argument "patents should be weaker" is compatible with a criticism of the described activities because the described activities would be illegal due to copyright laws, trade secret laws, trademark laws, and contract laws. It's not even clear if there were any patents involved in this situation.
The less common argument "copyright should be abolished" could still be compatible with a criticism of the described activities because the described activities could be illegal due to trade secret laws, trademark laws, and contract laws.
I don't often hear criticism of trade secret laws or trademark laws.
A) I never claimed to have that position (I probably do, but take exception to your intimation that I do or should)
B) I find nothing morally wrong with the idea that the company that finances, and the dozens of engineers that build an industry leading hardware appliance should be the ones who profit from it’s sale. I also don’t find any moral problems with the idea that an ongoing intelligence feed requiring the work of 6-8 highly trained specialists in their field also generate money solely for those engineers and the company.
Both of the above statements completely ignore the fact that this was an incident of trade secret theft. I don’t believe I ever mentioned copyright, nor do I see that as a primary violation here.
Now this was a hardware product with a weekly data feed, so not only did someone at the JV feed all the specs and source code to the Chinese company, they sent them weekly updates.
Needless to say, when confronted about this the company didn’t seem too surprised we found out, nor did the understand why everyone was so upset...