[TheOtherGuy]

From what I've seen in FIRST, teams that copy generally always learn something from it, and if they don't, the copy they produce is of much lower quality than the original. In FTC in 2008, 546 made a neat mechanism that worked pretty well, for the most part. We decided to post it online, and much to our surprise, we began seeing "copies" pop up all over the place. I can't say how many of them were developed before hand, but I did notice that many teams took the design to the next level, and the majority of them worked quite well. I guess one issue with copying is that there's no way to know how much work the teams actually put into refining the design, versus just tinkering with it until it happens to work right. I'll take a stab and say it's generally the former. I know 842's minibot was influenced by 118's, but I also know how much time, effort, and engineering went into making it work. The design isn't exactly something you could copy in 30 minutes and expect to work consistently.

In general, I believe copying in FIRST is, at heart, reverse-engineering.

EDIT: I forgot to ask, has anyone ever noticed a team copy a design explicitly without learning something? I guess my major gripe with copying is when teams reap the rewards for the design without any consideration of the team that "inspired" them.