The fact that this is being stolen from Micron who presumably weren't blind to the value of their IP make it all the more frighting. None of the companies I have worked for in the past few decades would have had any chance of resisting a motivated thief as locking down knowledge runs counter to fostering innovation.
Can you tell me how stealing these results is actually a negative to society? Is it just a negative to already extremely wealthy individuals? I'm finding no negative here and nobody is really giving me anything other than capital.
I suggest you read up on "tragedy of the commons" and maybe some basic game theory to understand why there needs to be an incentive to invest in R&D for a company to do so.
In thinking over IP reform (and avoiding getting upset about China stealing it) it'd be better to question the notion that the IP is centrally important rather than phrase things just in terms of rich vs non-rich people... A starting question: even if you know all the written details about X, can you still go make your own X? Following up, for the Xs you can, can you do it in a shorter time frame than someone who already has X can develop a better X' that keeps their ROI number positive?
The current top comment on this page posits that the answers to these for many international businesses were "sometimes, no":
> International companies in a rush to get access to the largest single market in the world have freely given away their IP, because they didn't think the Chinese could ever catch up.
I don't think this logic has changed, but instead international companies have stopped innovating as much, which allowed China to catch up. (The US did the same thing to Europe.) They want to rest on their laurels for longer instead of innovating more, and IP distribution (from sharing, theft, expiration, or otherwise) does put a timer on how long you can rest.
Some already super rich people and companies lost money, but so what? I'm sure they'll be able to put food on their families tables until the heat death of the universe.
