Nope, you read me right. Once it's out in the wild, it's out of the maker's control. What they DO have a lot of control over though, is the availability of the original, and the price of the original. Make it available and affordable, you increase supply and demand, and more fully profit from both. Drop the ball on either one (or in the case of most authentic makers, both), you just create an opportunity for somebody else, even though you may have "created" that market.
As for the "right to send it to China", there's nothing "unethical" about selling a product you bought to somebody from China, unless you subscribe to an impossible and failed set of ethics that says the creator of a tangible good owns it even though he sold it on the open market. That dog don't hunt, that dog has never hunted.
In some cases though, I'm pretty sure the authentic makers don't care one whit...they sell all they make (and at a high profit margin), they deliberately target a boutique, upscale market, so they lose very few (if any) sales to Chinese knockoffs. There's no warehouse full of authentic Vapor Flasks languishing for want of customers, as an example. Usually, there's customers languishing for want of a Vapor Flask. Demand, and it wants an outlet. Then there's those that just aren't able (or willing) to pay $300 for a bit of aluminum, brass and silicon. Demand, and it wants an outlet.
Now where I draw the line is somebody trying to pass a clone off as an authentic. Everyone in this thread knows that what Focal, Fasttech and 3Fvape are selling are knockoff Flasks. But Joe Consumer at the local Rape and Mortar paying $300 for a $50 clone thinking it's the real deal, that's fraud.
