Yet china's economy where IP isn't respected seems to contradict your point. Why doesn't that counterexample make you change your mind on this?

You’re asking why Chinese companies aren’t stealing from each other?

How do you know they’re not?

Nothing happens in China without State approval so maybe the penalties for encroaching on a State backed entity are quite severe?

He's saying the opposite:

1. Chinese companies steal IP from each other all the time.

2. The Chinese economy is growing quickly and Chinese companies are out-innovating their US competitors in many segments.

And the question then is: do strong IP protections actually benefit innovation? Because China seems to be a counterexample.

There is a huge difference between "some protection" and blocking the competition for many decades, because an incompetent patent office has approved many exaggerated claims, either about things that are obvious and well known by anyone in the field, but nobody was shameless enough to claim them in a patent before, or else about things that the patent filer is completely unable to do in the present, but they are claimed in the patent for the case when someone else will figure how to do them in the future.

Today the vast majority of patents are not intended for any kind of licensing and they might be even completely useless if licensed, but they are only intended for preventing competition in the market where the patent owner is active.

In order to be useful, a patent system should start to require again that the inventor shows a working prototype that demonstrates all the features claimed in the patent. Moreover, the patents should expire much faster, certainly not later than after 10 years from being issued. Perhaps a longer validity could be accepted for patents owned by individual inventors, but in any case not for the patents assigned to the employers of the inventors, as most patents are today. Also, patent owners should offer "Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory licensing" (FRAND), otherwise the patent should be invalidated.

Patents aren’t the only means of copying something. I would imagine China has a very sophisticated reverse engineering skill set. Made even easier since pretty much everything is made there so if you want the specs of some component you can just call someone up.

So?

The entire Personal Computer revolution was built from reverse engineering the IBM PC, to start the clone market, which was legal in the US!

On the software side, both Apple and Microsoft were cribbing notes from all sorts of other places.

Remixing and iterating on mostly free ideas is literally how the US used to build things!

People get all huffy and puffy about how the US has stagnated and doesn't build anymore, and in the same breath get pissed that China doesn't kneel to our absurd IP laws!

The US COULD compete if we put building shit ahead of rewarding some shithead capitalist for someone else's work.

I'm not American.

Except that you have the technical know how to keep advancing, and have already been producing them before they hit market an have been reverse engineered.

Also a lot of research is already done at, or in cooperation of universities, or with research tax breaks.

Let alone the fact that a lot of patents are absolute bullshit. There are patents on UI elements, even black rubber handles with a hand grip. Not white ones, mind you. It’s insanity and stifles innovation.

But if patents and trademarks and copyright are so incredibly important for innovation, I guess that’s why stuff like math and theoretical physics has the lowest amount of innovation, right?