GTek did indeed exist before Reactrix, and their tech was just as useless for this purpose back then as it is today. It’s demoware that doesn’t work out in live deployments. The IP needed to make it robust enough to be real was owned by… Reactrix. (This is about using GTek for floor or wall media deployments; they have a lot of good tech for other purposes. GTek is a good company within its sphere of expertise.) Oh, and they “borrowed” from Reactrix, not the other way around.

As for “pooring it’s investor dollras into… R&D”… uh… you weren’t involved with Reactrix in any way, were you? Rx spent almost nothing on R&D for most of its history, but instead plowed all of its money into the direct media sales business. That’s one thing that’s safe to say about Reactrix: it went all out for media sales. It would have been interesting if it had tried technology ownership instead; Rx did pretty well tech-wise on a very meager investment.

And finally, Rx did well in its limited attempts in Asia, but was too concerned with pouring all of its money and energy into the media business to properly support those attempts. It’s not about IP “protection”, which is largely useless anywhere even when the legal system backs you up. It’s about whether your stuff works and keeps working. If there’s cash at stake, IP can be worked around somehow, whether you’re in the US or elsewhere. The engineers will find a way to do the same thing in a different way, the lawyers will work something out, somebody will get bought out or crushed, or someone will wake up with a horse’s head on their pillow.