IP law has many problems, but one of the GOOD things it does it limit the risk of engaging in expensive research projects. If you find something, you get a mono

IP law has many problems, but one of the GOOD things it does it limit the risk of engaging in expensive research projects. If you find something, you get a monopoly on that discovery for X years. If some country or company ignores your monopoly, then why should you make the discovery public? Why should you spend hard time and money researching something that you'll never see the profit from at all? That hurts everyone. IP law encourages research. And specifically, it encourages you making that research public in order to get a government monopoly on it. Now, we could argue about nuances on how long such a monopoly should last, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find people willing to throw good money after bad in order to get someone else rich. Researchers would keep as much as possible as corporate secrets, and medical research would slow down significantly.