If your journaling your life as a thief, you could lose your freedom, if you're journaling your life as a spy, you may die. But sure, you haven't lost your abil

If your journaling your life as a thief, you could lose your freedom, if you're journaling your life as a spy, you may die. But sure, you haven't lost your ability to use your journal! Though to be fair, I'd lose my freedom or life because of what I did, not because of the thief. More importantly, if you have spent your time, effort, and savings do develop a new valuable process, and I steal it, sure you can still use it, but you LOSE the ability to use all of the profits that MY company now gains by selling products made of that same process. You lose your market advantage, you lose sales, you lose income. I'm well aware of the cost, though it's unclear whether society is strictly worse off. I imagine a lot of IP theft is Pareto superior - that shouldn't affect the calculus of whether or not we prosecute it, and I'm simply arguing about what could be. So, NO, your justifications that 'they can still use the thing that they had/have' are, to put it bluntly, merely bullshit justification for theft. Under my system, it wouldn't be theft. It'd be business as usual. It might even be better than the current status quo that asks rights holders to perform a lot of work to get their rights catalogued but doesn't do a ton for rights holders when their work is infringed upon. How much does a patent cost? Too much. How much does it cost to get an injunction at the WTO? If you have to ask, you can't afford it. And it seems that you just said it was OK to take and publish your code under my name? Care to publish your IP addr and credentials so we can freely access your journals and code to publish for ourselves (presuming that you produce something of value) If turn about is fair play. You can publish my code under your name if you permit others to do the same. The status quo is that IP laws exist and there are mechanisms to enforce it - those mechanism seem underutilized. If I had any authority in the United State or the WTO, I'd CHIMP OUT at what China's doing. Especially if I were in America and controlled a police force, I'd immediately start rattling the sabers. I'd arrest every Chinese person in America with affiliations to the Communist Party and I'd take the passport of every Chinese student (though I'd probably offer them U.S citizenship if they renounced their Chinese citizenship and really do a brain drain). I'd put the communist party affiliated people in bad conditions and use not-quite-tortue to force concessions out of China all while pounding them with an unrelenting cyber attack, very aggressive maneuvers in the South Chinese sea, and construction an iron dome of missile defense systems in every US aligned nation in Southeast Asia. What their doing is nothing short of economic acts of war and I would respond in kind.