[shshhdhs]

Duplication does harm the owner, because Samsung needs to recoup the R&D money they spent and the thief does not. Because they stole the tech, the thief can undercut Samsung on pricing, ensuring that Samsung never can be profitable enough to recoup their R&D.

[geofft]

There are other ways to solve that problem. One of the more straightforward ways (with precedent in US law) is a compulsory license: allow anyone to get a license to use the invention if they pay Samsung, without giving Samsung the opportunity to refuse.

Other options include collective funding of R&D (either the government-funding model, popular in the US for landing on the moon and creating the internet and taking a photo of a black hole, or the voluntary-collective model, popular in the US for creating basically all the technology we're using to have this conversation). If collective funding is more productive, this compensates the participants for R&D. And it may be subject to a prisoner's-dilemma problem, where any one entity can profitably defect even if everyone would be better off if no one did. Creating prisoner's-dilemma situation doesn't seem like a just use of the powers of government.

[0815test]

True, but this harm is handily offset by the benefit of an expanded use for the original tech, due to the very fact of its lower price. Critically, the more the thief is able to "undercut" e.g. Samsung on pricing, the higher this benefit. IP protection is thus more socially beneficial for tech that is expensive per se, because then there is too little "undercutting" to matter, and more like a direct transfer in value away from the creators. Folding phones are an interesting case; they obviously cannot be duplicated "costlessly", but their raw manufacturing costs are low enough that IP protection for them might still be somewhat undesirable.