Why can't you catch up to major players without IP?
I am of the opinion that any IP is antithetical to societal progress. If people are free to copy that means we get to remove the monopolistic pricing of goods. If people are free to improve then our ideas and products become better and better, rather than having a single player guard an antiquated model and prevent others from iterating on the idea. If information flowed more freely people interested in making money would have to continue to innovate and while it may hurt a few individuals who could run with a single idea for 20+ years, it would bring up society as a whole.
You vastly underestimate the cost of investing in IP development - perhaps because you come from a background where research is trivial??
Developing drugs, building special fabs, etc can be hundreds of millions spent in research that needs to be incentivized. If the option to just copy the person that does all of the work is on the table, anyone who does the research investment will be immediately undercut in price and the whole system encouraging expensive R&D will collapse.
>If information flowed more freely people interested in making money would have to continue to innovate
If information flowed more freely without IP protection, the winning move is to not actually invent things and just copy whatever the current leading products do. Maybe that's what you call "innovation", but it's a pretty big regression from actual inventions and major leaps forward.
Case in point, software has been growing every year, just take a look at newly invented algorithms on Wikipedia, and they end up in new systems too. Especially in distributed systems where we have innovations like consistent hashing, paxos, etc. Imagine if those algorithms had to be licensed. Want a load balancer? Pay license fees. Want horizontal scaling? License it. Watchdog process? License that. Etc. After all, somebody or some company invented those things and it wasn’t really that obvious beforehand. Should they not be entitled to some share of the profits if it benefits other companies? Yet I’d argue that we’re all better off learning from each other’s work.
I am of the opinion that any IP is antithetical to societal progress. If people are free to copy that means we get to remove the monopolistic pricing of goods. If people are free to improve then our ideas and products become better and better, rather than having a single player guard an antiquated model and prevent others from iterating on the idea. If information flowed more freely people interested in making money would have to continue to innovate and while it may hurt a few individuals who could run with a single idea for 20+ years, it would bring up society as a whole.