> The origins of the fighter are equally murky, although superficial similarities to the U.S. F-22 and F-35 have fueled speculation in the West that Beijing based the J-31′s design on blueprints reportedly stolen from the servers of at least six American aerospace subcontractors in 2009.
There was some drama about China possibly obtaining US stealth technology during Yugoslavia. There is an even more crazy conspiracy theory going on that this is why we bombed their embassy.
The Yugoslavian incident involved an F-117 -- completely different low observable technology than that used in the F-22/J-20/etc.
The mumblings I've heard is that the Chinese stole blueprints from the F-22 project. I don't have a URL handy at the moment, as I'm not near a web browser.
Besides, you can Google a sized-referenced picture of an F-22 from every angle. It's a relatively well-documented airframe.
F-22 is really awesome because it has X, Y and Z properties. And to have X, Y and Z in your plane there is one good and reasonable way to make it happen. It is the obvious way. If the US didn't come up with it someone else would have. By restricting design you are stopping innovation... or where did I go wrong in reasoning this way? Honest question.
I don't think many people are claiming that all patented designs are 'obvious', even to a field expert. Just that quite a lot of the ones currently making news headlines are.
The issue of there being 'only one good way to do it' is completely separate. It is analytic that legally barring competitors from implementing even a non-obvious design, once it has been discovered/invented, restricts others from further innovating on it.
It would be difficult to argue that the US should license all of its military technology to China on FRAND-like terms. But when companies refuse to do this trans-nationally, it seems like trade war, especially if there is only one way to do it. It's an interesting question at what point the profitable IP owned by a country's corporations should be considered a strategic national asset (and IMO it illuminates some of the decisions by trade organisations and even courts).
The appropriation of any technology with potential military applications will always be governed the rules of the game -- there is no global legal authority to appeal to in such matters and nor would the USA want there to be one, for obvious reasons.
Your reasoning is perfectly valid, with the caveat that public policy typically does not have the goal of global advancement of military technology (in war, what matters is what you have relative to what the enemy has), whereas it does, or at least should, have the goal of global advancement of civilian technology (economics is not a zero-sum game).
There is more than one way to skin a cat. Look at the YF-23, the competitor to the F-22 which won the ATF competition. Other than having two engines, a wing and a cockpit, it bears little resemblance to the F-22. The same also holds true with the XF-32 and the F-35. Both were competing with similar design goals in the JSF competition, yet look very dissimilar.
