And just as the US accuses Chinese entities of IP theft, this is how the US got its industries established as well. Some famous examples include the spinning mills (actually an amazing story involving memorizing how the mills work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Cabot_Lowell_(business... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Slater) and ignoring foreign copyright (http://blog.tavbooks.com/?p=714 for some discussion or a more interesting one here showing how even then book piracy helped authors: http://www.trademarkandcopyrightlawblog.com/2017/01/charles-...)

Of course the British had smuggled out the design of Italian silk factories and rubber seeds from Brazil, breaking the Portuguese monopoly....it was ever thus.