This is the fundamental flaw with open research and open source. You can't have both open access and working intellectual property protections, especially when there are jurisdictions that don't care about your laws, or are even actively encouraging theft.

It's easy to complain about China but that's what the Mainland Chinese system is designed to do. If they're able to break ours then that's just survival of the fittest. Adopt of perish. Who says you have to roll over and simply let them get away with it? Why are our universities collaborating with these "researchers"? Name, shame and blacklist them.