I think it depends on how many gloves are taken off. China in its position would want to sustain global trade and actually more and more respect the current international order, if there is any.
But I don't think the other players want that order to live forever, so we will see. I just hope we don't get WW3, and that's good enough for me.
The coke recipe has never been patented, afaik, and similarly certain high-end things were patented only because the main company was hiring a subcontractor to do something. For example, Samsung flat out copied iPhone exactly almost.
So, my thinking is that there could be less patents, because they’re less likely to share the technology and patents might let others copy stuff.
Samsung didn't copy the damn iPhone. This is revisionist history. HTC was on the scene for popular Android smart phones before Samsung, and they also didn't copy the iPhone. Early Nokia Symbian devices were on the scene before HTC and they also didn't copy the iPhone. Touch screen phones were going to happen. Apple made the first, popular one, but they were going to happen.
We’re talking about transfer of critical technologies or knowhow, and how company relationships lead to such situations. Not Apple vs Android contents or how touch screen phone were already meant to be. A lot of industrial countries fail to manufacture good phones, not because they don’t have the capacity but they lack the knowhow.
Samsung was the original manufacturing partner for Apple, which allowed them to amass incredible amount of knowhow to create their own, and before that they were not even in the phone market much, yet alone launch their own phone.
In the initial years HTC was one of the biggest Android manufacturers and their phones didn't really copy the iPhone.
Samsung was just better at marketing and other business aspects.
> and before that [Apple] were not even in the phone market much, yet alone launch their own phone.
This applies to Apple, too. Samsung learned how to make them. As did HTC, Sony, Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo, OnePlus, etc, etc. Turns out, making smartphones is a very competitive business, but a lot of companies were good at it, at least for periods of time.