If anything this should drive innovation not stifle it. Other hardware manufacturers are now required to innovate and actually spend on R&D to sell hardware at higher prices instead of just selling the same old designs they created in the 80.
Small businesses can't get parts at nearly the cost of a Behringer, because small businesses can't bankroll a Chinese city dedicated to making your stuff (with or without slave labor, labor costs are likewise unapproachable by small businesses)
Behringer are explicitly trying to get people to show the attitude you show, implying that small instrument and effect creators are ripping people off by not pricing their stuff like a titanic multinational conglomerate that owns cities and stockpiles parts by the millions. You cannot get the economies of scale Behringer gets.
And yeah they have a Chinese attitude toward property. I'm in the process of getting a reverb unit, a pricey one with some pretty fancy DAC hardware built in, which was so explicitly ripped off by Behringer that the clone had to be yanked from the market. You don't hear about the times they're busted because they would rather not have that be known: the publically obvious stuff is the stuff where there's not a lot of point in fighting it (see, titanic multinational conglomerate that owns cities).
You are wrong that Behringer's business model drives innovation; it explicitly makes it impossible to operate in any way other than as an open source/sharing-economy model that undercuts them as they can't literally undercut 'free'. In so doing, you have to accept poverty. That's the only way to compete with what they are. That, or try to make your money between creating a thing, having it be successful, and having them knock it off for pennies on the dollar in costs.
Did you say 'vastly overcharging'? ;)
Cloning new designs is obviously worse and maybe the patent system doesn't provide the desired protection in those cases.
It's a tough lesson, for sure, and it repeats all across industry, and it leaves a bad taste in the mouth, but making things for less profit is not making a loss. And nor is making things in China.
I'm sure Korg, Moog, Akai etc., all need to step up on pushing for greater respect for copyrights and patents in China. As do Arca-Swiss and RRS in the photography world. (e.g. there is a single Leofoto product that is not available for sale in Europe because Arca-Swiss had some success in demonstrating it is a close copy; Leofoto have moved on to other more innovative designs)
And here is an unfortunate lesson: if you continue to sell a product for the same price as you could charge before your patent expired, after it expires, then yeah. You are almost certainly overcharging, even if you don't know it yet.
But if e.g. Moog had patent protection, and all the product skill and knowledge and the killer brand, are you really saying that achieving the economy of scale was something they had never thought about, in all the time the designs were protected by innovation and design patents? They could not recognise the potential market and the possible economy of scale?
The reality is that they could have done exactly that (Marshall did, for example, and so did Fender and Gibson/Epiphone, who are not really harmed by their clone markets but have very successfully differentiated into them while selling a product that is largely unchanged for a human lifetime).
The strategy that Moog, and Leica, and Arca-Swiss, and any number of brands like this have to take is to make a virtue of making the thing the same way they always have, to the same standard they always have.
And if Behringer can say "we're not over-expensive like those guys", Moog can say "we're not cheap and nasty like those people". They can market into the clone market as a luxury, quality alternative (and even with a differentiated product -- like Fender did with the Mexican or Japanese ranges, with Squier etc).
Engaging with the idea that it is parasitic to implement an expired patent for low cost (which is wholly untrue and at odds with the system of patents itself), or buying into inaccurate definitions of "loss-leading" is in many ways just picking one of the sides in a war over a commoditised product with luxury roots. (If it is not also toying with anti-Chinese sentiment)
That's fine but they do stuff like this:
https://www.behringer.com/product.html?modelCode=P0E2V
https://www.arturia.com/products/keystep/overview
Where it is just a copied thing near 1:1 of product currently being sold, changed just enough to not be sued for making exact copy
And not just big companies but smaller modular ones like this:
https://synthanatomy.com/2023/05/behringer-abacus-a-ripoff-o...
Tho to be fair original maths is based on some old Buchla modules.
I have nothing against resurrecting stuff out of production or produced so long patent expired (they had their chance) but near-copy of current stuff is a bit much.
But at the same time you reboot that product you're going to look at your competitors' innovations, especially the ones that are now out of patent protection, and consider reimplementing the features you had to work around with your more convoluted, non-infringing methods, using the original patented method. Because if it stood the test of time it is a good design.
It's in the nature of things.
I am sure Behringer is a bit on the slimy side, but implementing expired patents is what literally everyone does.