Unrestricted copying would discourage quite a few projects being started due to not having any chance to recoup investment.
While IP may be a flawed tool at times, it still is a useful tool.
Can you imagine if copyright law allowed for things as broad as: “A novel or series of novels where a boy is educated at a school for wizards”. That’s what amazons 1-click patent was like. It was more or less: we will allow a client device to send both a product id and a user id by clicking a button, that will then cause a purchase to be made for that product and client. That patent caused something as trivial as “buy now” to be locked up by Amazon for years.
I don't recall e-commerce being hamstrung by it. Do you have any more information on some cases where the patent was actually leveraged?
https://cepr.net/report/the-artistic-freedom-voucher-interne...