All the world loves a clone. Except for those who are really freaked out by them.
The pharmaceutical talk hits home. I pay attention to a group who's always begging for donations to find a cure and bragging about new drugs their research has helped come up with. DONATIONS so that I can end up paying $500 a month, every month for the rest of my life, for a modified aspirin. And that's the cheap one, the actual drugs they are coming up with now are more like $1500-$3000 a month, every month for the rest of the person's life. They claim research costs as the reason it's so expensive, research that was donated or tax payers funded.
That is what is unethical and yes those patent rights should be taken from those companies. That's the price you pay when you take other people's money. Don't like it? Keep your hands out of my pockets.
I'm as objectivist as one can be but it's not objectivist to cry socialist when taking from someone who used socialism to get it. You're missing the whole point if you think it is.
But we're talking ecigs here. They're flashlights with resistance wire and maybe a protection circuit, possibly a transformer. There's really not much to clone.
I don't think the majority complaining about clones has any idea what an infringement actually is. Either everything is infringing on the first
ecig or very few "clones" are infringing on anything. You can't have it both ways and draw the line where you want it to be.
I've had my art work stolen, actually taken from me without compensation, copied and sold for profit. I know this for a fact. There's not a thing I could do about it because to be an infringement it has to be an exact copy and the mold making process doesn't make exact copies because of shrinkage.
I'm also fairly sure I had an idea (same one that was stolen above) taken from someone I went to school with. Can't prove it, and even if I did I couldn't do anything because it wasn't an exact copy.
I don't think electronics goes that far but judging how many similar electronic
devices there are they're probably close.