Ethics is a weird thing. So for you it is ethical that American/European manufacturers produce their products by underpaid workers, sometimes childeren, working 12 hours à day with no weekends. :?:
I challenge you to supply proof that this is happening on a significant scale in the US at this point in time. I'm incredibly skeptical that this is happening in the musical equipment manufacturing industry in the US and Europe. Mesa and their child labor sweatshops. LOL. If you can prove Mesa or Roland or Peavey or Engl, et al, are using child labor or manufacturing stolen designs, I will HAPPILY boycott them and consider them unethical, as well.
Even if you could, however, it is COMPLETELY irrelevant to this matter. Somebody else doing something wrong does not make another thing right. So really, your comment is immaterial, a strawman. Compensating a company that is essentially lifting all of their product development R&D from someone else without their permission is unethical, IMHO, regardless of what country it happens in or who they're stealing from. Again Clark's asking for an opinion. Sorry if you guys don't like accountability.
As for modeling, modeling requires a substantial amount of R&D. A lot of new invention occurs when creating models of things (we do it in the semiconductor industry as well for other purposes) and as awesome as the modelers are few would argue that they are the same thing as a complete physical copy of the things they are modeling. They're trying to do the same thing in a similar way and achieve the same results but HARDLY in the same way. The units themselves are significantly nontrivial in new design work and represent a major R&D effort that merits substantial compensation. In fact, they're much more complex than a simple tube amplifier. We also see the modeling companies partnering with amplifier manufacturers' input (Fractal/Friedman/Fryette, Line 6/Bogner, Peavey/Fender/Marshall w/ their own analog designers) and acknowledging other designers and products accordingly.
So, companies like Jet City, who are making the Soldano designs using cheap manufacturing in agreement with Mike Soldano? No issue whatsoever (as long as they aren't doing something ELSE "bad" (using slave labor or something crazy)).
But people lifting other people's designs verbatim and remanufacturing them ala Bugera is BS and should not be supported. If you are so poor/cheap that you are willing to rationalize this away, fine. But you asked for opinions, so take your medicine, son.