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Patent is quite different form industrial secret under the current legal stricture. Having a patent gives one the legal standing to (call on the violent powers of the state) to exclude (would-be) competition. Whatever it was, if it were patent, there wouldn't be espionage necessary; one can look up the details in the patented idea/design at the patent office. So obviously whatever was allegedly "stolen" was never patented.
As for the whistle maker, my take is that: why should we assume that the company would last forever just because it had a good idea once upon a time? The company obviously had quite profitable sales before someone came along and copied what is evidently quite an obvious innovation. It was the inventor's responsibility to decide what to do with that windfall. Plaughing it all into an relatively inefficiently manufacturing facility was obviously not the best investment. While I'm all for innovations, let's not forget that to the extent that someone else can handily undercut the original mfr's price despite brand cachet of being the first-comer (e.g. iPhones and iPods command enormous higher profit margin over "copycat" smart phones and MP3 players, just like Macs had over Windows PC), every bloody cent extra profit that the original mfr can collect from banning "copycat" comes directly from the consumers.
I'm skeptical of the "private property" claims regarding ideas. Normal private properties are exclusively owned by one individual (or jointly by one set of individuals) because of limited supply nature of the goods: i.e. if someone else has your car, you no longer own it. i.e. they are economic goods. Non-economic goods, i.e. goods that have super-abundance, are usually not privately owned at all. For example, I can not claim ownership to the air that I just breathed out, and charge everyone else for breathing it in (well, unless you are someone one step ahead of even Al Gore I suppose, trying to collect CO2 tax on breathing). Duplicatible ideas are not goods of limitable supply; in fact, they are infinitely duplicatible at almost zero cost. If a car exactly identical to mine can be "copied" into existence at next to zero cost, there wouldn't be any point in private ownership to such a car at all; its market value would just be like air or dust in the wind. Any attempt to enforce no duplication in that scenario would be like trying to levy a tax on breathing.
The claim that innovation would stop without patent doesn't hold water either. The microprocessor industry has been using cross-licensing agreements for decades precisely to get patent hurdles out of the way. No one can claim that industry has been lacking innovation. In fact, Rambus was the first major company (run by lawyers not engineers) in the industry that tried to live off patents instead of innovations, and what a fiasco that was to the industry. People innovate because then they can sell more products; it makes little sense to protect innovators who can not make goods quickly and cheaply to satisfy consumer demand but would prefer to live off the one-time innovation as some kind of economic rent. We witness what that kind of market manipulation by the government leads to in the pharmaceutical industry: a cluster of fat-cat rent seekers.
posted by 96.233.42...
, Thu, 6 Jan 2011 23:03:23
, Fri, 7 Jan 2011 15:31:58, Fri, 7 Jan 2011 16:23:21, Sun, 9 Jan 2011 03:24:46
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