People copying other people's works happened all the time. Why not? It saved them a lot of time and effort. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, why not steal someone else's design of a wheel and thereby save a lot of time and effort that could have been spent on more fruitful activities?
Even Ves did so himself a few times back on Aeon Corona VII. The incentive of ripping off other people's works constantly beckoned to him, and hardly anything held him back from using these shortcuts.
In ordinary circumstances, the MTA's licensing system did a good job of tracking how much other mech designers copied from other designs. Not only that, the MTA automatically allocated an appropriate proportion of earnings to the original designers.
