Actually they prevent a competitor blatantly ripping off entire chunks of your work verbatim. This encourages spending time on R&D that you otherwise wouldn't b

Actually they prevent a competitor blatantly ripping off entire chunks of your work verbatim. This encourages spending time on R&D that you otherwise wouldn't be able to justify because "our competitor will just copy-paste it". You don't need anything remotely like life of the author plus an additional half of a lifetime to realize that protection though.