And how everyone developed their own nukes... the moral of the story is that if someone copied your product and can beat you, then your product is not defensible in the first place.

The allegation is not copying, the allegation is fraudulent agreements with US companies, and dishonest corporate espionage.

Can anyone really develop new technology, bring it to market, have it immediately brought by a competitor with zero R&D investment, and expect to compete? Is there something that is supposed to be magical about US technology that this scenario does not apply?

The articles cites some of the examples as "taking a photo of a disassembled circuit board" and "copying source code."

While I agree copying source code is bad, but doing so and maintaining someone else's code is a monumental task.

I think design, prototyping, commercialization, and iterations are a bigger task than maintaining an active product line. It's not 100% of the work when you can simply copy someone's work, but it might be 80%

Everyone except the United States, who figured out how to build them first.

Then use the car industry as an example: the American car manufacturers' internal combustion engines looks identical to those of the the Germans.

To quote you: "who figured out how to build them first."

In the Toyota factory museum in Japan they aren’t exactly ashamed of the fact that they bought, disassembled, and reverse engineered a Chrysler for their first few cars.

That's the opposite of espionage. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Reverse engineering is a legal form of IP imitation everywhere.

Isn't some engineer opening up a box and taking pictures something mentioned in this indictment?

That was one of the simpler ones. They are also alleged to have stolen router firmware. But frankly if you've ever tried to just "take over" even an open source project it's not a trivial task to just take someone's source code and be able to master it.

In fact it's a standard open source business model to make money off the expertise on the open source code base.

Indeed, but it’s not the Japanese whining all day and all night about how the Chinese are stealing their precious gifts to the world. :)

Isn't this exactly why the US should be worried?

And the Japanese after in the 19th C

Maybe there's a difference from wholesale copying of blueprints, design docs, and millions of lines of software, and someone remembering how things work and going somewhere else.

No, read about it if you want.

Yours really is another ironic comment.

The British at least tried to stop it by making it illegal to take the machines out of the country

The Americans sent the machines to China themselves to save a few bucks on labor.

I have "read about it", and nothing I read has seemed to justify China's wholesale tech stealing extravaganza.

Modern export restrictions are akin to making it illegal to take machines out of a country.

Even if it was somehow exactly the same thing happening, saying "you did this 200 years ago so I'm going to do the same thing now" isn't any kind of acceptable reasoning. Mauritania can't say that they are cool to have slaves because America had slaves 170 years ago. Or rather, they can say that, it just isn't very convincing.

Is it really stealing? It's ideas, it's not a human right. America has MADE it illegal, forced it through with their trade deals. Enforced anti-free trade copyright and ip ideals on everyone else to try and protect their advantage. One rule for them, 'free' trade for everyone else apart from knowledge, of course. One rule that they themselves ignored in their ascendancy, using those same 'illegal' means China uses.

It's just history repeating itself, delude yourself however you want that Amrrica holds some moral high ground by holding life improving knowledge to ransom.

I'm no China fan, but Inthis defending America is pathetic.

The amount of invention and technological achievement developed in and by the US I would guess be an order of magnitude higher (at least, maybe 3) then any amount intellectual property theft from other nations in the 17-1800s.

I would not guess this to be true of China nor likely to become true for a very long time at least.

It's actually vastly accelerated this time around, China are already overtaking America as experts in certain fields.

Because the Americans so helpfully moved all their manufacturing to China, they had to teach manufacturing and engineering to their Chinese workers to troubleshoot problems, and are now losing that ability themselves.

Turns out when you're designing a product it useful to have practical manufacturing experience, which the Americans have lost.