If somebody painted a picture, in impressionistic style, of a man on a dock by water against a red sky, with his hands to his face and mouth agape, and called it "The Shriek", nobody on the planet would argue that it's not a copy of Edvard Munch's "The Scream".
Copying somebody else's work and presenting it as your is wrong. It doesn't matter if it's a knife, a painting, a watch, a designer handbag, a microprocessor, test answers from the smart guy sitting next to you in class, etc. It's wrong. If your moral compass can't tell you that, then you're already heading in the wrong direction.
Certainly there will technologies that will eventually be copied. Somebody originally came up with the backlock, and now countless companies use it. Countless makers use Michael Walker's linerlock, which Chris Reeve adapted into his integral framelock, which countless makers also now use. Eventually the AXIS lock patent will run out and other companies will start using it.
That's not the same thing. We're talking about copying another knife's design and presenting it as your own. Whether it's a Sanmenru 710* that looks
quite a bit like a Sebenza, or an MTech balisong that looks
exactly like a Darrell Ralph design, it's still a copy. And that's wrong.
It doesn't matter if it's a "victimless crime". Granted, I will not argue that Sanmenru is taking money from CRK by offering a very similar looking product at a fraction of the cost. But that still doesn't make it not wrong. They're taking someone else's design and profiting from it. Without permission, without giving credit, without royalties. That's wrong. Some people will try to give justification to it, but that statement in itself shows that it's wrong. If it was "right", it wouldn't need justification.
You cannot steal something if it doesn't actually belong to someone else in the first place. Competition is also coming up with a cheaper good.
A design belongs to the designer. Copying a design is stealing from the designer. If you've ever had an original thought of your own, you might someday balk at somebody stealing it for their own use. But you've never shown any evidence that you're intelligent enough to come up with something of your own, so unfortunately that point is moot.
*I wonder why they chose to call it the 710. Pretty random number. Why not a 709 or a 711? It just "happens" to be a copy of an iconic folder with the same name of another iconic folder? Odd...
