The R&D departments at GM, Ford and Chrysler were so inept they couldn’t figure out intermittent wiper blades despite decades of automotive dominance. No problem. They just “swiped” them from small inventor Robert Kearns starting in 1969. His lawsuits against Ford and Chrysler were dragged out from 1978 to 1990 and from 1982 to 1992, respectively, letting the crooks cash in on technology they stole. Automatic transmission and power steering were other big fails for Big Auto, with independent inventor Oscar H. Banker providing the creative brilliance to keep American cars moving.
The poster child for “IP theft” is not China (who innovates tremendously in high-speed rail, high tech weapons and elsewhere) but the sloths of Microsoft Corp. who can’t do anything original. The Seattle-based software blob copied Windows from Xerox, word processing from WordStar and WordPerfect, spreadsheets from VisiCalc and Lotus, data compression from Stac Electronics and an internet browser from Netscape. Microsoft still attempts to replicate Google’s web search with their lackluster Bing. And before all that, they trotted out a DOS operating system strangely similar to Gary Kildall’s pioneering CP/M software. Other than that… those computer geeks in Washington sure know their coding! And Bill Gates, the son of a lawyer who briefly enrolled himself as pre-law at Harvard, also knows how to use federal lawfare to prevent anyone else from doing the same.