The usual argument is that protecting "intellectual property" encourages the production of culture, ie. you are forced to buy copies of CDs instead of copying t

The usual argument is that protecting "intellectual property" encourages the production of culture, ie. you are forced to buy copies of CDs instead of copying them for free, which means that the artist earns more money and thus there is a financial incentive for them to record songs. Obviously the same argument can be taken to apply to TV, movies etc and IIRC is more or less implied by the US constitution (it says that a system of limited rights may be permitted for the progress of the creative arts, or something like that). I guess the same thing is taken to apply to innovation as well, that Apple is encouraged to invent a cool new operating system for their mobile phone because they control it exclusively once they've done that. The argument would run that if anyone could then just copy it, Apple wouldn't gain relative to their competitors by creating it so wouldn't have spent the money in the first place, and hence less innovation. I'm not necessarily arguing for this point of view - goodness knows I think that it's too far-reaching and over-enforced at the moment. That's just a description of some of the usual arguments in favour of it.