Edit: Question: In the post they talk about the Japanese taking photos of products. I'm not sure if I'm understanding what happened correctly, but if I am, shouldn't we make a distinction between just clever inference/reverse engineering (which is legal and done all the time) and outright IP theft/industrial espionage? I see IP theft/industrial espionage as being about stealing information not legally available to you, but reverse engineering and imitating a product are about trying to figure out how something works that you legally already have access to, and inferring things based on that. I feel like if a country has done the former, we shouldn't compare it to one that does the latter (currently apparently China)?
Edit: Question: In the post they talk about the Japanese taking photos of products. I'm not sure if I'm understanding what happened correctly, but if I am, shouldn't we make a distinction between just clever inference/reverse engineering (which is legal and done all the time) and outright IP theft/industrial espionage? I see IP theft/industrial espionage as being about stealing information not legally available to you, but reverse engineering and imitating a product are about trying to figure out how something works that you legally already have access to, and inferring things based on that. I feel like if a country has done the former, we shouldn't compare it to one that does the latter (currently apparently China)?