If intellectual-property protections were clearly beneficial for makers of physical things, you'd expect China to have adopted them by now: but their manufactur

If intellectual-property protections were clearly beneficial for makers of physical things, you'd expect China to have adopted them by now: but their manufacturing sector appears to be thriving without. So far as I can tell, the problem IP laws originally solved was that wealthy people wanted another way to create monopolies and extract rents. For that purpose, they certainly are effective.