That’s because you have little experience with how developing countries actually operate.
One common ways developing countries use to build their industrial know how and capacity is to get a foreign company to create a development in it. A factory, manufacturing center, or R&D site. Companies are much more reluctant to do so, if the host country is not willing to protect their IP.
I was taught the industrial revolution got kicked off in america by samual slater memorizing the design of english textile mills
hollywood was a place for the film industry to build not just for the sunny weather but because they were far away from edison’s patent lawyers
and of course we all know how america handed intellectual property to china without any hope of enforcing IP, they seem to have developed quite rapidly
but i grant you USA and China may be exceptions, but stealing IP looks very profitable to me
"How did the rich countries really become rich? In this provocative study, Ha-Joon Chang examines the great pressure on developing countries from the developed world to adopt certain 'good policies' and 'good institutions', seen today as necessary for economic development. Adopting a historical approach, Dr Chang finds that the economic evolution of now-developed countries differed dramatically from the procedures that they now recommend to poorer nations. His conclusions are compelling and disturbing: that developed countries are attempting to 'kick away the ladder' with which they have climbed to the top, thereby preventing developing counties from adopting policies and institutions that they themselves have used."
-- Ha-Joon Chang, Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective
This is roughly the thesis of How Asia Works: You need industrial policy. So... yes you do need good institutions (low corruption, etc), but that doesn't mean doing what the World Bank tells you to (what is normally meant by "good institutions").
That's how they operate now due to developed nation pressure. They don't want us developing if their companies can't profit from it.
My country once banned imports so that national industry would be forced to develop. The Lua programming language exists because of this policy. Also, plenty of companies would either license or reverse engineer and clone foreign products. Now my country is some kind of globalist hell. It's painful to see in legal doctrine ideas straight out of WHO, IMF, UN, etc.
It's so disgusting it makes me wish China success despite their repressive state. They have an amazing strategy: entice the west to hand over intellectual property on silver platter, develop industry, get rich and then, who knows? We'll have to watch to see what their end game is.
For a developing country signing up to an IP system under which most of the important IP assets are foreign... I find it hard to see an argument.