Brad, most GT companies are small companies. Let's take the three companies in question here as examples - Carpenter, Hammerhead and Craftbait. The owners have invested a huge amount of their own time and money to develop and come up with original designs. Designs like the Sea Frog are nearly ten years old and yet the designer is continuing to test and make subtle alterations to his design. These companies, however, are too small to copyright their designs or even trademark their product names. You then have (what are generally) Chinese or South East Asian companies that have invested absolutely nothing in the design simply copying the designs at the request of some middle market operator. You wonder why a GT2 is so expensive - I'd suggest it might have something to do with the investment in the product, not to mention the quality of the finish and componentry used.
I will admit that I haven't always been so sensitive to the issue but having seen the effort Konishi of Carpenter goes to in the development and testing of his poppers and being personally involved in the development and testing of the Fullscale poppers has given me a very different perspective of what is involved in getting a lure "right". To a lot of people, the prototype looks the same as eight iterations before but the effort and time involved between those six iterations is enormous. Also, any special characteristics of the lures had to be thought of by someone - In Fullscale's case, it is the wiring on the lures which is the best in the industry. You can imagine how galling it for the designer to see some cheap sweatshop in Asia copying these characteristics.
Regarding your criticism of Neale, the reality is the moment you post pictures of anything on any forum or even anywhere on the internet, you in effect forfeit any rights you have over them as anyone anywhere can download the pictures. If you have a sensitivity to maintaining proprietary rights to your photos, I suggest you don't post them. If you wish, GTpopping will respect your photos and I will, with the exception of the original post, remove all the photos.
