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gwern comments on The military value of shortening copyright - Less Wrong Discussion
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So to summarize:
Even granting #1, #3 doesn't follow. An increase in absolute military power can make a country less safe by sparking arms races, destabilizing a regional balance of power, or just increasing the risks of the same number of military conflicts (eg. atomic bombs made no one safer even as they represented a quantum leap in military power for every country in the nuclear club). So, any increment of military power increase has no clear relation to safety.
Worse, what really matters is relative military power. It doesn't matter if North Korea has finally developed ICBM-sized nukes if in the same time period, the US has developed AGI-powered nanobots (with freaking lasers on their heads) and can infiltrate billions anywhere in North Korea. Reductions in copyright may favor another country by reducing the licensing fees they pay either directly or in legal actions and interference and speeding up their growth. We could imagine a tiny rich industrialized country eliminating copyright and aiding the transfer of all its IP to a neighboring poor behemoth - we would expect both to grow, but the poor neighbor will grow much faster as part of its convergence and may be able to field far more dangerous military forces than the small rich one.
That's a fair summary of my thought process, yes.
One term I thought about including was "Red Queen's Race" - on a decades-long scale, with the general pace of scientific progress worldwide, societies have to research as hard as they can just to stay in the same place.
Another complication worth considering is that not all data is copyrighted; the problem copyright is claimed to have been initially developed to solve was too many people keeping their information as unpublished trade secrets. When Enigma was cracked, that was kept as an unpublished secret for quite some time; as are a number of present-day secrets, such as nuclear warhead designs. So even if copyright was shrunk to a single year, or less, that doesn't necessarily imply the immediate spread of next-generation military technology to one's neighbours.
Anyone who has played the Civilization series (on any real difficulty level) has no doubt experienced this first hand.
I learned while playing those games that it is possible to stay ahead in technological advancement without doing any research of my own. Being the middle man is incredibly rewarding.
I never said it did; I was speaking of material in general, such as civilian information - if it makes the economy grow faster, well, now they have more resources to spend on R&D themselves or to produce more of their existing arsenal or to buy more advanced weaponry from other countries.
If IP abolition did directly convey next-gen military tech to the neighboring country, that would be an even stronger argument against it, of course.