Might be a win? The copyright system is one of the major suspects for why US industry ended up crippled and replaced by Asian labour refusing to respect US IP laws to their significant advantage. To say nothing of the corrosive influence on culture of locking down music and stories. The biggest IP success in the last 50 years seems to have been Open Source because they built a framework inside the copyright system to achieve the opposite outcome and build a thriving industry despite the lawyers trying to encourage them in alternative directions.
The people defending the copyright system should have to keep making their case until they come up with something persuasive for how they're helping.
Expand on this.
Wasn't it instead our desire to be the world's reserve currency and rely on cheap imports? You can't be both a net exporter and the world's top reserve currency.
You have to run trade deficits if you want to export dollars.
Maintaining an import-dependent economy might be a factor, economies are complicated. But there isn't a fundamental reason that taking in more stuff than gets exported should mean that Asia has to be more successful. If anything, a country in a position to import more than it exports should be seeing big jumps in living standards, rather the gains going to a country notionally taking the bad end of the bargain. And there are some easy resolutions to being a net importer and while having a strong industrial economy - import raw materials, make stuff that isn't for export as an example.