I somewhat agree with you. At the same time, the effort involved in creating valuable IP can vary drastically from something I throw together on my phone like a

I somewhat agree with you. At the same time, the effort involved in creating valuable IP can vary drastically from something I throw together on my phone like a paragraph of writing to a full movie production or huge investment in drug design for helping people live longer. Because of the variance in production cost and ROI for effort, vs the general ability to copy IP (just the IP, which could be loads of research that isn’t valuable without loads of capital and decades of investment into certain infrastructure e.g. TSMC), there have to be some sort of incentives to do the hard groundwork that creates valuable IP that once discovered is trivial to copy or implement, otherwise people simply won’t do it, they’ll just copy and resell and then fewer people will do the initial leg work until we’re left chasing the bottom of the barrel of the level of effort someone may invest in something they have no means of capturing return from that work and risk. And not everything can be hidden behind a web service, some IP is far more challenging to protect. So, while I tend to agree that the current implementation of IP protections is trash, I think we do need something there to encourage such work. In research we have(/had?) federal tax investment into doing such work and as a trade off, researchers get fed and live a semi comfortable or sometime decent quality of life for their efforts. I don’t have the answers to the ideal model, I know what we have isn’t great and can be improved upon in some ways, but I don’t know wha the best(TM) solution is here. I know it’s not pure unrestricted markets doing whatever they want, though.