[...] Nintendo was caught on these mini NES console for using pirated NES game images from the internet, because they still contained the header and metadata information that cartridge dumping tools and emulators use. [...]
That one made me chuckle... the legitimate companies ripping off pirates?
Yeah, its particularly funny that of all the companies out there Nintendo was caught. They are easily the most copyright obsessed company in the whole gaming market. Not only do they constantly press legal action against emulator developers (since they always had a huge gripe against piracy), they even go after people uploading gameplay videos of there games on youtube. That's like if Tesla asked everyone who does a car review to give them a share of the video revenue because they created the car that they are using in the video.
I have worked in several companies, going through product development cycles with them.
They take the competition's stuff apart and try to learn from it, but nobody ever attempted a direct copy - they wanted an improved design, not a copy.
Yes most proper companies indeed do that. In order to compete with the other companies product you have to be familiar with there product, if anything to compare its performance with yours.
But when it comes to most chinese companies they will want to make an exact copy. They will rip it apart, scan in the whole PCB, trace it out, make a copy and start producing it. They see a product sells well, so they go and make the same thing, but cheaper, so that people buy there copy instead. Sometimes the copy is actually genuinely good, other times its complete garbage that ruins the reputation of the original product. This is why you see rubbed off chip partnumbers in mostly Chinese products, they are trying to defend the design from being copied by the next guy.
Yes (unless the code is open-source of course). And that is understandable too. Now it all boils down to "repairability", and companies won't bother much (at least most of them) as long as there is neither market drive or some regulation.
Even though the idea is getting more popular, I do reckon that a large majority of consumers still don't care about repairability much - they'll favor the price tag, that is, the initial cost. So I guess, at least in the short to mid-term, it can only be enforced through regulations, and not from market drive. There is some attempt at regulating this in the EU, but at the moment, as I see it, it's more like a "cosmetic" directive than something really helping repairability in the end.
Solution though, once companies are working towards this goal, is pretty simple. If they use closed source, they just need to make firmware updates/replacements available with easy to use tools. It could use encryption so that reverse engineering would be made tough. Sorted. Now for the case the company goes out of business - then unfortunately it would definitely be a matter of regulation, and not individual will. If companies going bankrupt were forced to publicly release the source code/repair manuals/etc of their products, then it would solve the issue. The legal implications may be complex though.
Even people like Keysight that used to make some damn nice service manuals back in the HP days are not doing it anymore. Pretty much any piece of test gear they made up to the 1990s came with complete schematics of everything. These days all you get is a high level block diagram that turns out to not be all that useful and a troubleshooting flowchart that usually ends with "Replace board A3". Tho if you lost the contents of a ROM chip back then it was a problem since you could not get the ROM image anywhere, tho you could call up HP and ask them to sell you a new ROM chip with the data already in it. These days they likely won't sell parts this old anymore, so your best bet is finding a guy on the internet that dumped the ROM contents and still has the image file laying around (Had to do this before).
Then again todays test equipment is often a lot less repairable purely due to complexity. If you have a blown acquisition ASIC in your scope well you are screwed, not like you are going to go swapping that huge expensive unobtanium BGA chip even if you could just buy one for 50 bucks. Tho in my opinion there should still be schematics to help fix the more common simple power supply issues and similar. Also an image of flash chips, such as for the case of the X3000 scopes bricking themselves, im sure someone would gladly go trough the trouble of pulling the chip out, flashing it and putting it back in if that's what it takes to make a perfectly good scope work again.