All nations were able to steal from each other until the advent of international agreements on intellectual property enforcement.
China is, and was, a party to those agreements, and was held to that standard.
Prior to China being a party to those agreements, they operated in the same wild west as the rest of us.
There is no Western/Eastern shit, here, merely a point in history.

You're a fucking idiot.

On one hand, we're talking about civil law. Party A sues party B.
On the other hand, we're talking about local law enforcement working with federal law enforcement.

One of those, you can shield, or provide a sanctuary, ya? One of them, you can't, ya?

Ya, your friend demonstrated perfectly the actual truth in the matter: The only part that really matters is the air interface.
There is a *lot* of room for a shitty air interface. Wires? Amps (not including DSP in this)? Even pretty low quality are easily demonstrably not discernible in a Pepsi Challenge.
Speakers, though- a shitty set of speakers will make your fucking ears bleed.

No, the myth is well propagated.
Moving to another part of the country does not shield you from Federal law.
Hollywood moved west, and continued to fight the patent troll behavior of the Edison Trust, eventually winning, with the Edison Trust eventually being dissolved for antitrust behavior.

More mythical dumbfuckery.
During WW2, initially, the UK did not want to share development on atomic weaponry, so the US created its own program.
Eventually, it independently passed the UK, and the UK asked to join.
As Sir John Anderson said, "We must face the fact that ... our pioneering work ... is a dwindling asset and that, unless we capitalise it quickly, we shall be outstripped. We now have a real contribution to make to a 'merger.' Soon we shall have little or none."
This means that the UK ended up contributing quite little to the US finished product, because they were trying to withhold it.
After they decided to join up at the table, a convention was agreed to by all parties. The UK then promptly broke that agreement (even being called out by the Canadians).
Then, when the US finished product was deployed, the UK complained that the US was also no longer following the agreement.

And I'm saying you're confusing mythology for history.

I wouldn't call the smallest decline thriving, but alright.

Yup. 6.5% of the population. That must be it.

This, is an actual accurate telling.
It should, however also be noted, this kind of industrial espionage was normal for all players before the international intellectual property regime started evolving in the late 1800s.
The French and the British engaged in it against each other as well.

Not that simple. The US is a nation of laws, and foreign copyrights are a matter of treaty.
The US has been party to such treaties for as long as everyone else has.

Damn, meant to respond to the following too:

There were not international agreements to respect intellectual property until the late 19th century.
An up-and-coming country has the same amount of obligation to respect foreign intellectual property as an established country- and that's whatever they have agreed to by international treaty.

The US violated everyone's international property prior to the Berne Convention, and so did everyone else.
That's why the Berne Convention happened.

Completely wrong.

Hollywood moved west to get rid of that day's equivalent of the Eastern District of Texas.
The Edison Trust was a patent troll.
They were later declared as such, and dissolved by the Supreme Court.

Your story is complete bullshit.

That story reeks of being apocryphal.

1) Moving west would not have absolved them of the patents held by the Edison Trust.
2) This is evidenced by the fact that the lawsuits continued, and just 7 years later, the Edison Trust's practices were ruled illegal.

Hollywood may have moved west because they didn't like operating in the same town as the Edison Trust- no idea... but the idea that it made it so that they could infringe on patents, which are Federally protected, is absurd.

Allow me to present a more realistic interpretation of what happened.
At the time, the Federal courts of New York were considered highly friendly to the patent trolls of the Edison Trust. Think Eastern District of Texas.
Being colocated with the Edison Trust gave people wanting to fight those lawsuits no grounds to move jurisdictions.
After moving west, they fought, and won their lawsuits, with the Trust later being dissolved by the Supreme Court for antitrust.

So, in retrospect, Hollywood ran from a set of courts that was later demonstrated to not be acting in accordance with the law.

Your status of a US citizen doesn't grant some kind of authority to your argument, so that's a bizarre claim.
Beyond that, it's entirely fucking wrong.

The entire world "stole" technology prior to international conventions on intellectual property, which were a late-19th century invention- and precisely for that reason.

This was the case in both directions. Unless foreign authors went through the trouble to domestically register copyrights, they did not exist.
It required international convention to change that. Do you think US authors' copyright was automatically respected in the UK prior to the Berne Convention?

Foreign copyrights weren't respected by anyone until the Berne Convention in the late 19th century.
Domestic copyright, and even foreign copyrights that were domestically registered were absolutely enforced by those who registered them.

That's mixing up separate problems.

The US did not respect foreign rights until the late 19th century. I forget the name of the convention, but critically- neither did the UK. For domestically registered rights- they absolutely were respected.