Wow I'm late to the party
Shocking in my opinion Lee and Andy have sunk blood sweat and tears into these atties and no doubt many many pounds too in development then they get knocked off.
I mean I'm not disagreeing with you or saying your point is invalid, but it's simply supply and demand. If you create a market and a want for something, if you suddenly narrow the sales spectrum or simply can't keep up with supply and demand, in this day and age there is no excuse not to outsource production if you can't keep up, and if you don't then someone else will. No one plays fair to each other in business, if everyone played nice you wouldn't have the likes of Virgin, Tesco, BT, British Gas etc.
Imagine if the situation was applied to something like Phones (and where legalities were weak, as in the vaping market) and apple released a new fancy iphone which is totally innovative. They made a huge racket about it, got tons of reviewers to say how good it was and then boom it sells for a premium price. Cut out supply, create a higher demand for the product since everyone wants it and no one can have it and then third party sellers who do have them, increase the price even higher because people are that desperate they're willing to pay for it.
Now lets say, Android thinks 'wait, we can copy what they've done there' and 2 months later is pushing out pretty much the exact same thing for less than half the price and you can get it anywhere.
It's not the best example and due to them being such big companies lawsuits would be everywhere, but it's essentially (and I say this VERY loosely) sort of what happened, isn't it?
I disagree generally with clones stealing the original identity, but if you create a market for something and then say "nor, you cant have it or you can only have it from this place for THIS amount of money" and someone else comes along basically giving the market exactly what they want, with enough money left over to buy another two if they happen to get a shitty one, or lose it, or break it, or simply don't wanna pay 3x more for something that will operate and function exactly the same?
I really can't believe ANYONE would be surprised
But then again, the only real reason people care about this is because most of these 'unicorn' products are coming from us, the vapers that know exactly what they want. If it was a big company like Sony who made some stuff that got cloned, no one would bat an eyelid would they? I think it's all very much double standards