And this is the reason the abolishment of Intellectual Property won't make the world any more chaotic or unfair.
Ideas are meant to be shared, and the market competitiveness will reward the ones that best execute them.
Ideas are meant to be shared, and the market competitiveness will reward the ones that best execute them.
Neither of which can protect an idea.
Law concerning Trade Secrets comes closest to protecting an idea. But that doesn't preclude parallel development whatsoever, only theft.
Unfortunately, this is not true. Yes, it all begins with an idea but that idea takes tangible form at some point and it takes money, work, and ingenuity to give it that tangible form. And, while our minds can freely conceive away at the idea stage, it takes a lot more than that to execute. When we do, we create value. If the law does not protect that value for its creator, everybody suffers.
Take a fictional animated character. Pixar's Toy Story characters all no doubt had limited value as mere abstractions when first proposed but today have enormous value after having appeared in several hit movies, having been made larger-than-life by imaginative scripting, and having been powered by mega-marketing dollars into vivid images that millions of people can identify and relate to.
Someone can and will profit from the value embodied by those animated characters.
If it were not for the protections of copyright law, the creators of those characters would be robbed of the value of what they have created. The thousands of hours of work they put into developing the story lines, into shaping the animations, and into the countless other tasks that took years to accomplish would ultimately be diluted or wasted at any time that any knock-off artist decided to take those same characters and exploit them commercially as his own. And, without copyright protection, any person would be free to do so. He could not only distribute unauthorized versions of the movies themselves but he could also make his own movies (or books, commercials, or whatever) based on those exact same characters.
Copyright law blocks such efforts and gives he owner of the copyright the exclusive right to exploit the creations he has made, both as embodied in existing works and as used in future derivative works.
Without copyright, every fictional creation would be up for grabs by anybody without any accountability to the original creator. This would apply to books as well. Anybody could do a Harry Potter book and seek to exploit the value built up by the author of that character. Conceivably, there could even be thousands of books about that character, to the point where the value of the original was so diluted as to be destroyed. No one could control the quality because no one has any rights to the intangible property represented by that character. It is all shared. Everybody owns it and nobody does. This means, of course, that no matter how much time, effort, money, and ingenuity that someone invested to make something valuable in a work of fiction, that value could be taken or destroyed by anybody who had a mind to want to try to capitalize on it.
I think such a system would be deeply unfair to creators of such works. It took a lot for them to give their ideas value. That value should be protected and not be exposed to misappropriation or destruction just because it is now easy to make copies of tangible embodiments of their creative efforts.
I will grant that this is not all one-sided. IP rights have been abused, and often badly so. The ludicrous extensions of copyright terms for the benefit of Disney are but one of a host of examples.
But the world would be more chaotic and more unfair if those who create intangible value have no way under law to protect that value for themselves. IP protections give them that ability. To abolish such protections would have many and varied consequences, most of them bad for those who take great ideas and give them great implementations.
I'd be very interested in a consideration of what would happen a hundred years later, when copyright is just a historical footnote on Wikipedia. Would there still be superstars of creation (like Pixar, Rowling, etc.) who find new ways of exploiting their creations? Or would we eventually find a way to crowdsource enormous cinematic and literary creations, with, as you said, the creation being owned by everybody and nobody? Would society as a whole benefit in the long term, despite losing out on the future creations of our current creative powerhouses?