"Stealing" the physical design is legal after 10 years in the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit_layout_desi...), or 20 years if there's a patent, and that's how we avoided having a single giant company own everything and halt innovation forever in the First and Second Industrial Revolutions. So I would say that stealing the physical design is good.
(I guess it was also important that at the time it was illegal for one company to own another, which was a significant obstacle to the rise of conglomerates like Standard Oil.)
