As an adult I still don't understand what's the problem ;) It was a working computer, and apparently a nice one (offering a lot more bang for the buck than an original Apple). Why does it matter that someone slapped a fake Apple logo on it?
There were a couple of companies that reverse engineered the ROMs and created clean room copies. Apple still sued them, but they lost in court. Franklin Computer sold a lot of legal Apple II clones in the US for example.
Apple sued Microsoft, over just the "look and feel" of Microsoft Windows.
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Round_Rects_Are_...
It's a dis-incentive to investment. If society allowed the fakes then the market would be overrun by copies and in this instance Apple wouldn't have had the resources to create the Mac.
We're still stuck with the "everybody has their own designs and specifications" problem on (ARM) phones and tablets and it's affecting both operating system choice and operating system maintainability in major ways.
I dread to think of a world where software written for HP computers wouldn't work on Dells, and where Lenovo's wouldn't be able to run Microsoft software. Developing software would just be needlessly expensive and annoying.
I think there's a very solid case to be made that "illegal clones" are actually good for progress.
PS: there's also this interesting take that Germany's quick industrialization in the 19th century was mainly driven by ignoring British copyright law:
https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-copyright-...
Having a Wintel monopoly hasn't been great for customers though.
I've always thought that one of HP's biggest failures was ceding control of their platform to Microsoft.
Really? Would the PC industry have been as successful -- and its products as widely accessible -- if left up to Apple and a dozen expensive almost-but-not-quite compatible Unix clones? I think not.
The Apple II was an open system, but creating a compatible BIOS that wasn't a copy would have been impossible -- even for Apple, because of widespread software that made creative uses of the variables and entry points in the firmware. the Mac was intended to be a closed system.
http://cini.classiccmp.org/pdf/Apple/Apple%20II%20Reference%...
You could get similar documentation for all Radio Shack products and many others.
MITS didn't set out to make their Altair 8800 an "open system". In their case it wouldn't make sense not to have the full documentation for the customers that were building their own machines from kits. But this resulted in clones and in competitors rebranding their "Altair bus" as the S100 (standard 100 pin) bus and making improvements to it as a group resulting in MITS losing control. So IBM should have known what would happen, but probably thought they were too big and important for history to repeat itself.
The PC was made with off-the-shelf parts; only the BIOS is copyrighted and, as analog31 said, IBM published the source code and schematics. That's not the same thing as condoning "blatant copying"; IBM went after clones with infringing BIOS. Most, however, followed Compaq's example and used clean room techniques to build their own, or purchased the Phoenix and other BIOS made the same way.
Almost all Apple II clones of the type described in this video infringed on Apple's intellectual property. The only exceptions are a) the Laser 128, and b) the post-lawsuit Franklin models.