Yes. What part of proprietary information or corporate assets don’t you understand. If I invent something and choose to patent it, it is my work at first inventing it and second securing my RIGHTS to my Intellectual Assets through the patent.
No one has the right to appropriate what is mine. If this person was truly the entrepreneurial, he/she would take my idea and improve on it or alternate engineering a better product. It happens all of the time in industry and there is no theft of intellectual capital.
Appropriation of others rights still is illegal in this country; for how long, it is unknown. There was an attempt to abuse Eminent Domain but lately that is being pushed back through the various State Legislatures. The rule of law exists at different levels. If the Supreme Court chooses to abrogate the rights at the federal level, it is still a right of the states to legislate the protection of a person’s property. Taking what belongs to someone else is never right.
At present, lithium-ion battery technology is not yet practical for automotive use, though it's conceivable that at some time in future it might be. Suppose I were to patent the idea of powering a car using lithium-ion batteries. I doubt such a thing has been patented before, nor done before, so there wouldn't be any disqualifying prior art. Should that mean that in the event someone manages to make practical automotive lithium-ion cells I should be able to demand patent royalties when they're put in cars?
I agree that patents and copyrights are necessary, but the present system for administering them is severely broken. The patent office doesn't have any good way to discern what ideas are genuinely novel and non-obvious, versus those which would obviously become obvious should some possible technological advance occur.
Because even independently-developed inventions can be held to infringe patents, patents are supposed to only be issued for ideas which are sufficiently non-obvious that independent derivation would be unlikely. It should be obvious that in today's climate patents are often issued in cases where independent derivation would be not only likely, but nearly inevitable. In what way should that be considered a 'good thing'?
Article 1 Section 8 mandates (among other things) that Congress set up an intellectual property regime to promote the "progress of Science and the useful Arts..." Unfortunately, today's implementation of patent is horribly broken. Patents can be issued on broad areas of technology instead of specific implementations of an idea. Patents can be 'submarined' until someone else has invested heavily in an implementation, and then sprung by surprise. Doing engineering and science in the US like walking blindfolded through a roomful of rakes, which is why the engineering and science is mostly being done in Asia today.
And what about the actual originators of patentable ideas? When you take a high-tech job, one of the standard documents you sign is a handoff of your patent rights to your employer. If you're the engineer who comes up with a winning new idea, someone on Mahogany Row gets a new watchband for his Rolex while you lose your your job to someone cheaper in India.