Back in my day, copying a competitor's feature was denounced as ripping off. Just because it's institutionalized as a "hack" is no reason for assigning it much more importance.
> Back in my day, copying a competitor's feature was denounced as ripping off.
Going all the way back to the Founders, U.S. law has encouraged copying competitors' (publicly-known, unpatented) useful features.
The rationale is that society benefits as a whole when better ways of doing things get put into practice as widely and as quickly as possible.
A second-order benefit is that the prospect of being "ripped off" encourages innovators to keep innovating instead of resting on their laurels.
A worthwhile read on this point is the Supreme Court's 1989 decision in Bonito Boats v. Thunder Craft Boats [1], in which the Court unanimously struck down as unconstitutional a Florida statute prohibiting plug-mold copying of boat hulls. The Court said, in part, that "imitation and refinement through imitation are both necessary to invention itself, and the very lifeblood of a competitive economy." The only permissible restrictions on copying of publicly-known useful articles, said the justices, are those of federal patent law, which have been crafted by Congress to strike a nationally-uniform balance between the interests of inventors and those of the rest of society.
