They absolutely pay for the process. Without huge capital asymmetries, price competition actually works and the underlying costs actually set the floor of the market. It's a much more sane system.

It's when we decide that design theft is defensible because it creates inferior, copycat goods that are cheaper, and that's somehow been defined as laudable progress by you in this thread.

What you call design theft I call commoditization. Of course businesses and creators fear it, because they want to capture as much value for themselves as possible, and so they will paint it as theft if they can get away with doing so.

But commoditization is great for consumers and has been for centuries, and high-quality luxury goods are still available for those who care to spend more money on that sort of thing.

> What you call design theft I call commoditization.

Then you're factually wrong. Commoditization does not include design theft. If we're talking about handcrafted sunglasses and then someone else makes a machine-created alternative that looks different but has similar properties, that'd be more inline.

That said, defining designer goods as "commodities" is a hell of a stretch for that word. Assuming good faith, you're drawing a parallel. But if I were not very firmly and strenuously looking for a good faith explanation, I'd worry you're just using "an economics word" to make it sound like you have a theoretically backed argument.

> But commoditization is great for consumers and has been for centuries, and high-quality luxury goods are still available for those who care to spend more money on that sort of thing.

Considering actual commodities by the dictionary definition, this is true up to a point. But it doesn't really apply to finished goods.