Maybe I'm a bit too much of a STEM-headed engineer but I think you are making a false comparison.

UX is fleeting. Even the best UX will grow stale over time as styles change, and it's style propagates (as it will if it is truly revolutionary) it will become mundane.

Technology breakthroughs are hacks in the laws of physics. Humanity hasn't fundamentally redesigned the Steam Engine since James Watt. It just can't become more efficient. Nobody cares steam is mundane, or well understood. We still use it in nearly ever power plant.

So no I don't stand why people feel the need to own something as fleeting as a singular moment in the pseudo-cultural-artistic space Product/UX design fits in knowing that it'll pass and forever be looked on as an out of style relic of a by-gone age. To do so honestly and earnestly makes you sound like a diva.

Trust me, a lot more work went into the iPhone's design than you'd think.

One analogy is brute force searching for an approximate solution to an optimization problem.

It's problematic when others take your solution if you did all the brute forcing.

Design is only fleeting inasmuch as an approximation could be fleeting. Others build off an approximation to find better solutions. But without the earlier solution, we'd find ourselves in a much different part of the sample space.

> From a software perspective you can't imagine how you'd feel if a critical piece of your business software was reversed engineered and copied by a competitor?

Definitely, could definitely understand if it was about money/business. But that is never mentioned when designers get angry about their designs being stolen.

I think it's not about money/business. I think it's a different mindset where a "stolen" design devalues your own contribution. A developer who makes a breakthrough never feels like their contribution is devalued if someone else copies your idea; quite the opposite, copies validates that you made a genuine breakthrough.

I think the substantive difference may be that a design isn't a standard or a protocol or a shared library or even just open source code; it's not, unless the designer explicitly chooses to make it so, a common resource. If you take my kind of crappy Python scripts for turning Markdown files into an ePub and make them less crappy, you're taking something I released as open source and making it better. If you take my web site design and reproduce it on yours, though, you're not improving on something I've intended to share. You're just saying, in effect, "Hey, that looks cool, so I'm taking it." I may not be particularly bothered by it, depending on context, but I might have put an awful lot of work into that to craft a specific--and hopefully unique--look for my site. You didn't put any more work into your site beyond what it took to copy my work. In effect, I've done design work for you without compensation or credit.

In Xiaomi's case, what they're doing is, more or less, that last bit: the only work they're putting into their designs is the work necessary to make them look like somebody else's designs, expressly because the designs they're copying are successful in the marketplace. If I was a designer they copied I wouldn't be very thrilled by that. Money definitely plays into that, but credit for the design work is a big part, too.

It could be that I came from the creative world, but when I develop a cool feature and someone copies it and they don't attribute what they are doing to me, I feel devalued. It makes me quite mad. And that's what is happening here. Apple painted the Mona Lisa and now some upstart is selling prints of it for cheap and not giving credit.