Comment by CyLith

> Everyone ... outside of China is forgetting and losing capabilities.

To me this is the fundamental problem with the notion of intellectual property and its protection: so much of it is trade secret and undocumented (let's be real, we disclose as little in patents as we can get away with). Companies come and go, and in the process, institutional knowledge of how to do things is lost because there is no incentive to make it public for others to replicate. This also means that once lost, it must be rediscovered later.