"Whenever creating an imitation of a successful leader, great care must be taken to avoid outright intellectual property infringement; the closer the duplication, the greater the care which must be exercised. MGA Entertainment (MGA), which produced the Bratz dolls, learned this the hard way. Late in 2008, U.S. Courts forced MGA to cease and desist in the manufacture of the dolls. A jury deemed that the creator of Bratz, Carter Bryant, devised the idea while he was an employee at Mattel. In the Spring of 2009, a U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the jury decision, mandating that the intellectual property associated with Bratz dolls was the sole property of Mattel."
Making a blanket statement about all innovators and all followers is an extraordinary claim, which requires extraordinary evidence. A reference to a single court case between a pair of companies hardly passes that bar.
Regardless, reading your linked article, it seems to have a pretty positive (or at least neutral) view of being a so-called "follower". It's interesting to point out the NKOTB-follower groups like Backstreet Boys and 'NSync. Regardless of whether or not you like their music, it's hard to deny that they were hugely successful and helped push the "boyband" genre of music into greater popularity. Not saying this is good or bad from an aesthetic point of view, but it sounds good from a business perspective.
It seems fairly intuitive to me that innovations are protected by IP so innovators are always for stronger IP protections and wheras followers are always trying to skirt close to the line of infringement without passing it, and thus are disposed towards weaker penalties towards infringement.
I'm surprised at the level of disagreement this assertion has provoked. How much evidence do you really want? Are the Chinese vendors hawking illegal Harry Potter books for or against greater penalties in China for violating IP? Are the fake Apple stores and fake iPhone "KIRF" makers for or against greater IP penalties?
I mean I guess this classification loses value when you start talking about companies like Zynga that both steal and are stolen from (today's injunction). And that probably applies to Apple and many other large businesses but it seems to me that most of these companies put up a fight but ultimately accept that they have to pay for many things -- as Apple did with Amazon's One Click or the IP they buy or the Nokia settlement. OTOH Google seems to have adopted something scarily close to the Chinese pirate model.
It seems that you are conflating many separate issues, and using the red herring of Chinese counterfeiters to try to prove something in an unrelated discussion. Long patents, obvious patents, patent trolls, long copyrights, strong copyrights, trademarks, etc. are all invoked in different ways by the examples given here in your and other comments, and a meaningful discussion can be had only when it is clear which aspect of the law is being discussed, and what segments of society the proposed changes will benefit.
Many of the commenters here on Hacker News are innovators in the sense that they are creating new software with new combinations of ideas that have not previously existed. They are also against stronger IP protection, because to date, "stronger IP" has meant ridiculously long copyright terms, broad, non-novel, and painfully obvious patents, etc. Many obvious patents cover things that are essential to the writing of software and have been previously documented by academics, but companies are still using them to demand a tax on the work of true innovators, large and small. A sufficiently-skilled corporate lawyer can paint broad and obtusely-worded patents as covering anything they want in the minds of a lay jury. Patent holders claim to have "invented" things that are considered by programmers as trivial, everyday tasks in their programming. We are not "stealing" their ideas, as we never even hear they exist until a lawsuit comes out of the blue.
I could go on. Such are the landmines facing small, independent and/or open source software creators, and they do nothing but slow down innovation and limit the growth our sector of the economy. Alas, this thread has long since fallen off the front page, so it is probably best left to rest.
As I understand it[0], Mattel's claim of ownership of the Bratz IP derives from the fact that their creator developed them while subject to an IP assignment and non-compete contract.
The Bratz case seems entirely unrelated to the matter at hand, though in the closest comparison I can see, Mattel is a parasite trying to use IP laws to reap the benefits of creative work done by MGM and the designer of the Bratz dolls. The pro-IP Mattel is not the leader in this case.
[0] Edit: and, according to your article: "A jury deemed that the creator of Bratz, Carter Bryant, devised the idea while he was an employee at Mattel."
Strongly disagree. This kind of statement really needs some supporting evidence.