The person who made the flash freezer, for example, was just one person. If he couldn't protect his patent, despite definitively changing the face of global food preparation, why should IBM have any intellectual property?
I'm not familiar with the invention of flash freezing. Did the inventor just patent the idea of freezing food fast? That sounds like a pretty obvious idea that should not be patentable. Why give someone a monopoly on quick freezing?
Or did the inventor patent a non-obvious mechanical device that is capable of quickly freezing food? Giving the inventor a short term monopoly on that device in exchange for publishing the blueprints sounds like a reasonable deal.
In the case of flash freezing, hasn't the market shown that the idea of quickly freezing food (to preserve the food without producing large ice crystals) was novel when he invented it? We have been able to freeze food for hundreds of years, and nobody was doing it that way until 1924. That sounds like a non-obvious novel idea to me.
Sources: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/how-newegg-crush...
"After years of work on his own process, Birdseye invented a system that packed dressed fish, meat, or vegetables into waxed-cardboard cartons, which were flash-frozen under high pressure"