Or sell the wheat to someone else for less than market value because you don’t have to own land, equipment, hire people, learn to grow it, plant the seeds, look after the crop, deal with insects and other issues, manage regulatory requirements, pay property taxes, provide health insurance, carry liability and property insurance, deal with the losses during a bad season or failed experiments, have a financial buffer to deal with market fluctuations...and more.

Yeah, aside from that stealing something from someone who created it takes the same effort as that expended by the rightful owner.

Except this analogy doesn't make any sense, because what's "stolen" here is the IP. So it's not like stealing wheat from a farmer. It's like a farmer stumbling upon a plant useful for food production, calling it "wheat", figuring out how to plant and harvest it, and then demanding that he be the one who controls who can or can not grow or use this new "wheat" thing, and that he gets paid by all other farmers who grow it. And then someone else (the "thief") calls bullshit, and grows this "wheat" anyway.

Applying language for material items (like "stealing") to IP only muddies the waters. There's plenty of cases where one could find moral justification for compensating the "inventor" (e.g. countless of hours invested in try-and-error search, use of expensive equipment), and there's plenty more of cases where the purported "inventor" is just a greedy asshole trying to get rich by abusing the society (e.g. patent trolls, DMCA abuse, speculative patenting by companies and individuals alike). In times where IP frameworks are both misaligned with the nature of information, and frequently abused to prevent the very things they're ostensibly meant to promote, this whole space needs a total overhaul.

China's approach may be throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but taking a global view of technological development, it's probably for the better.

The issue here is that the addition of work later in the process, does not mean there is no work -- and thus no claim to value -- earlier in the process. It's a response to it doesn’t matter if you take something from someone because you still have to work to do something with the concept or technology.. Just because people have to work to make something saleable of the concept or technology, doesn't change anything.

You might argue that "finding" or "discovering" stuff is not work and in naive cases you are right. Regarding wheat, though:

* There is a lot of work that has gone into virtually all edible wheat varieties. We don't eat wild wheat.

* Finding stuff you can actually eat was at one time a lot of work, and sometimes dangerous.

* Saving seeds and saving the knowledge of identifying characteristics of food stuffs was at one time far more difficult than it is now.

If people do work, and we benefit from it, and they don't benefit from us benefitting, that's crooked.

I'm not arguing discovery is not work. I'm arguing about the limits on returns on discovery, because those need to be balanced with the rest of society.

In this particular example, from a more global point of view, it would be best if the farmer who discovered new food was incentivized to share the knowledge without restrictions, as widely as possible, because not doing so means lots of unnecessary people sick or dead.

> If people do work, and we benefit from it, and they don't benefit from us benefitting, that's crooked.

I agree, but there has to be diminishing returns on that benefit. Otherwise, each discovery is forever holding the civilization hostage. You can't run an economy based mostly on rewarding the estates of inventors for their past inventions. At some point the discovery has to be owned collectively, by everyone, and become a building block for next discoveries.

Current western IP systems sorta recognize that, at least in theory. In practice, we're dealing with a) protection periods not reflecting the reality of modern industries, and essentially putting a brake on progress; b) a system that's thoroughly gamed, and no longer serves the interests of society. Between ridiculous copyright extensions, vague patents, obvious patents, speculative patents, trolling, rights trading, MAD via patents, the system legitimizes rent seeking, and does not incentivize people to create/discover things in order for them to benefit the whole.

well to be sure - to add some details in your analogy for it to be an exact comparison, the farmer "stumbled" on this plant in someone else's nursery. a nursery that person nurtured for quite some time and expects to get a return on