The value you attach to IP law - particularly copyright and to some extent trademarks - depends on the extent to which you believe ideas have a value, and that the person who has a good idea is entitled to make money by selling what it is that they made.
If ideas have no value, then protecting them is meaningless. If your idea for a kids cartoon becomes incredibly popular, you won't be able to make money or a living off it, the people who will make money putting your idea on t shirts will be Temu or Shein or whoever and lol fuck you. If you are a writer, the people who will make money off your two years of work on a novel will be whoever has a fast printing operation and can put your book, your ideas, on the market and give you fuck all money for them. If you invent a gadget that lets people put their entire CD collection on a wee credit card electric doohickey in their pocket, the company who can copy it and rush it to market first will make a killing and you'll make nothing.
So the question is, does creative labour, making ideas, deserve to be recompensed in the way manufacturing or assembly labour is. It's not just "no one will release ideas if they can't make money", because although in some ways that would happen, people also are willing to throw metric fucktons of their ideas and labour and content out there for free. Think fanworks. Even original works. So no, there wouldn't be a complete stop to ideas getting out there. The issue is more accurately the ethics, in a mercantile society, of it being legally prohibited for me to steal the loaf of bread you baked, which any fule can bake, but a-okay for me to steal your 800 page greatest American novel of the century, which not any fule can write, though many fule have tried. Instinctively we understand one of these things represents more labour and craftsmanship than the other. I can bake loaves easily, but I will never be able to write a number one record, and being able to have one of those kinds of work protected but not the other seems counter-intuitive.
Adma Smith tells us that you can have a market in any good that is perceived to have value, and the way you know it has value is that other people are willing to trade things of value for it. People are willing to pay to see movies, to own records, to own books. These things clearly therfeore have a value. Apart from vinyl collectors, no one who is a muso loser is going to tell you they attach the value to the actual physical CD they just bought, they value the music itself. What they are paying for is the enjoyment of the creative labour.
Copyright law protects ideas people from having their creativity and their labour outright thieved by the likes of Temu and Shein. This is the public good that IP law exists to protect. If you have a great idea, you should have the first (only) dibs on bringing it to the market, because you did the work to bring it into existence.
