Many complain about the fact that Chinese companies often steal American products and re-engineer them and send them around the world to be sold in mass. In fact you do not have to look very hard in the United States on retail shelves to see knock off products of such. Many are made as inexpensively as possible, often with cheaper and inferior parts and brought over by the shipload. You cannot blame retailers for buying these products at a fifth of the wholesale price and wishing to resale them for just under the average retail price to the consumer. But each item sold that way which has been stolen or copied means fewer products are made here and that is upsetting to those who work in the American manufacturing sector. If you lost your job, I am sure you would agree.

Recently a think tanker and Autoworkers stated that if you are an innovator and think that a patent will help you against a Chinese company stealing your work, forget it. He said very matter of factly;

?find a way to protect your innovation before it gets "Shanghia`d"... and you see it on a shelf in Wal-Mart, marked with the obligatory but tiny `Made in China`...?

I completely occur and have some comments on that matter too:

http://worldthinktank.net/wttbbs/index.php?s=b2d4e30bc3274fcf8a37fdef298522fd&showtopic=136

What I find totally a miss is with the Patent Theft and in our nation the costs associated with filing patents and time to get them approved. It is a complete sham on the American Innovator and the sharp minds of the American people. Too bad really because this slow process at our PTO prevents entrepreneurs from making money on their ideas and innovations and parlaying that up into entire entrepreneurial R and D Companies.

http://ezinearticles.com/?id=122767

Further the total disregard by other nations to honor these patents is preventing those who would normal wish to innovate from doing so. If these issues continue unchecked we will see a dwindling of innovation in the United States and further losses of monetary trade deficit outflows and jobs leaving for foreign shores. Think on this in 2006.