America’s deadly obsession with intellectual property: Privatizing life-saving technology like vaccines and clean energy is bad both for the coronavirus and the climate crisis

IMO, IP laws in the US have definitely gone quite a bit too far in favor of private interests over the public good (which you can thank Disney and the Pharmaceutical industry for), but the idea of IP is not a fundamentally flawed one. Without any IP laws, major corporations could simply take any/every good idea that someone else comes up with and use their already established marketshare, branding, and economy of scale advantages to crush that person's own attempts to make a living from it. And on the opposite side, you can basically kiss large scale private R&D goodbye without IP laws, since the ROI would potentially be undercut so much by allowing anyone to utilize their discoveries, that none of the big players would likely even try to innovate anymore. After all, why would they spend money on R&D, when they could instead just wait for someone else to come up with an idea or discovery first and then steal it for themselves?