But that all means nothing for companies who buy Virtuoso copies from from guys trading WaReZ in pedestrian underpasses in BJ.

A number of quite reputable SoC brands here in the PRD are known to be based on 100% pirated EDAs.

This is not a critique, but a call to think about that a bit.

In China, you can spin-up a microelectronics startup in under $1m, in USA, you will spend $1m to just buy a minimal EDA toolchain for the business.

Allwinner famously started with just $1m in capital, when disgruntled engineers from Actions decided to start their own business.