Knockoffs Can Boost Sales of Real Thing

“In China, people don’t pay for the software,” Bill Gates told a crowd at the University of Washington back in 1998. “As long as they’re going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.” Gates was suggesting that there’s such thing as productive piracy, or, at least, that it could be worthwhile for a company to stand down instead of combating every single intellectual-property violation.