> Given that many brands are not exclusively a maker's mark, most folks can't even be reasonably informed in the first place without asking. But even if we ignore that, it's worth pointing out that your argument only is true for small independent designers. Big brands absolutely do sue if they feel their design has been copied, and they win.

If your complaint is that the legal system unfairly benefits whichever entity has more resources, I completely agree, and I wish this was a cause that more people would champion.

> But isn't design theft specifically depriving craftspeople and artisans of renumeration for their work, which we have been implicitly confining to product design?

We're getting into semantics here, but theft as a philosophical, moral, and legal concept has a very specific meaning. You can only steal "rivalrous" goods, which harms the stolen-from party for obvious and intuitive reasons that anyone can understand.

It's only recently in human history that we've begun to assign rightful ownership to intangible non-rivalrous things such as ideas, inventions, designs, words, and the like. And that came about not for moral reasons so much as for utilitarian reasons, e.g. perhaps we will incentivize more creation if we give creators temporary monopolies over profiting from their intangible ideas.

Of course, any copyright owner is financially incentivized to extend their ownership for as long as possible, and so thanks to lobbying from companies like Disney, copyrights now extend dozens of times longer than their original length. And we also have new propaganda terms like "intellectual property" which were intentionally created to get people to begin thinking of ideas as property, and copyright violation as theft, and immoral. Unfortunately it seems to be working.

But it's not theft. Nobody is actually being deprived of any goods. Nobody is actually "stealing" any designer's work from their shelves and drawers. This is 100% about people wanting to be granted exclusive legal access to profit. Which is fine if they want to lobby for that, but using words like "theft" is inaccurate and propaganda, and injects a moral component where there is none.

> You're not only making value judgements and spuriously arguing that design theft is a victimless crime

I don't think my argument is spurious at all, so I explained it more detail above. I'm genuinely curious to see you build a case for why this morally bad.

To my mind, at best, the victim's complaint is some version of, "I should be able to profit more from activity X." That's not a moral argument to me. That's a legal and economic argument about to best structure our capitalistic society to incentivize creators. But I would like to hear your framing.

> You're arguing that if it is not illegal, it should not be something we can hold them accountable for.

No, not at all. I'm arguing that it's not actually immoral (see above). Thus, by process of elimination, this is either a legal matter or no matter at all.

> If folks know these things and choose not to buy the artisan good? Very well. But you're arguing that not only shouldn't they have that choice, but that to even ask for it or expect to be able to make it is itself wrong because no law was broken.

We must be talking past each other, because I sincerely don't understand why you think I'm arguing this. Where am I saying that people shouldn't have this choice? I've said the opposite.

I think Allbirds should have the right to brand its goods as Allbirds so people know who made it, Amazon and other distributors should not be able to obscure that information, and other companies should not be able to copy that mark. I believe all of these requirements are true today, too.

Consumers have choices and they have access to information, and from my perspective, you're simply worried that they will choose Amazon, who you don't want to win.

> The "point"? That's not the historical interpretation of capitalism any economist takes seriously. Unrestricted capitalism rapidly destroys free market competition by exactly these mechanisms. The debate is about if that is good or not.

Yes, the point. Nobody is saying capitalism should be unrestricted. In my view, capitalism is created by restrictions. It's all about restrictions.

It's an attempt to limit the ways that people and companies can profit so that they're forced to do so in ways that create value for consumers, e.g. innovation, lower prices, easier access.

That requires regulations against profiting in ways that destroy value for consumers, e.g. anti-competitive practices, misleading consumers, collusion, corporate espionage, bribery, violence, blackmail, creating unsafe products, dumping toxic sludge in rivers to save money, etc.

Of course, the regulations we have aren't perfect, and never will be. It's a messy business with moving targets.

But no, I don't support unrestricted capitalism. Quite the opposite. In fact, I think the term "unrestricted capitalism" is basically nonsensical and an oxymoron.

The difference between you and me is that I don't believe that turning boutique products into commodities is theft. Further, I think it's a clear win for consumers, as evidenced by the fact that they're quite happy to pay for cheaper and more easily available products.

Maybe this means that some businesses (like Allbirds) will find it harder to live up to their lofty billion dollar valuations. Maybe it means that some small businesses fail. Often, big businesses fail, too, for similar reasons. But that's the game they're choosing to play. Success isn't guaranteed, and I personally don't like it when business owners feel so entitled to success that they expect the rules to be changed in their favor.

> The demand is not to work hard. It's to acknowledge the work that made a good or service possible rather than taking the benefit of that away from the origin.

Sure, I don't disagree, but hard work is one of many components. Hard work is not sufficient on its own -- you could imagine someone working hard painting a wall that nobody needs painted, and creating zero value for anyone, possibly negative value. Hard work is also not always necessary -- you can imagine an cheerful dad coaching little league baseball, having fun, barely working, yet providing value to all involved.

It's not the hard work we should be rewarding. It's the final result. And by rewarding the final result (via consumers purchasing goods), we indirectly reward all the constituent parts that are required to produce those results, which might change over time and from industry to industry. It's much simpler and more accurate than trying to place a value on hard work.