That's not it works nowadays. Browse through a patent search engine. Anything that's not a completely obvious design patent and is an actual patentable invention gets bogged down in lawyer speak trying to be as general, broad and unspecific as possible. WITHOUT actually putting in details that shows how it works. The patents nowadays is not about releasing new information, its just obtaining a license to sue the competition and crush competitors. Basically patent trolling and defence against patent trolling.

All these posters at Slashdot seem to like nothing better to engage in their relentless China bashing. THE ARTICLE ACTUALLY STATES HE DIDN'T STEAL ANYTHING!! No espionage, no backward engineering been done! The guy brought the chips, remove the brand on the chips then relabeled them as his own. Then he wrote some fake research papers based on those chips. That's it. I guess all the slash dot readers were too busy ranting about the "evil Chinese empire" to notice.