Banning data/information and its use, literal 0s and 1s, is not just a violation of the free market, but of liberty itself. It is nothing short of tyranny. Keep in mind that by the law of supply and demand, data once created has no monetary value, since it can be duplicated infinitely. Any such value is thus something artificially maintained by the state using force to restrict its duplication. It lets companies charge whatever price they want for data and products built using said data, without competition for decades, which is terrible.
The justification given for such an infringement upon our freedoms is that it promotes creativity and innovation. We will discuss how in today's world, the idea that art and science would be significantly hindered without IP protections is untrue. The aforementioned monopoly caused by IP is a much worse effect than any benefits it may possibly have.
We have to distinguish between two types of creations. We'll discuss how the cost of coming up with both can be recouped without intellectual property and its awfulness.
By the Kickstarter model – if a high enough number of people agree to pay your desired price, you take all their money and give them all the product. Otherwise no one's money is taken and the product is never released. This latter condition is needed so people don't just wait for cheaper copycats.
The latter situation isn't a novel scenario, the company miscalculated the demand, spent resources developing a failed product, and will have to eat the losses, something that will always hapoen.
Let's say company X spends $14M to discover a much better production method, and starts using it to sell cheaper/better goods in the market. Big company Y decides to spend tens of millions to discover it themselves, and at great speed, hiring many scientists, and conducting lots of trials simultaneously. It looks like it'll take Y only 60 weeks to make the discovery, and 20 weeks to bring it to production.
Within that time, X realizes they won't be able to make $14M profit. So they decide to sell the discovery to Y for $12–14M on the condition that Y waits 40 weeks before launching the product. Y agrees, because they save time and money. During those 40 weeks, X makes $6M profit, bringing their total to $18–20M. The $4–6M is a more than excellent return for the time X spent discovering it.
Now that both X and Y have the discovery, they can either compete against each other, in which case all is good, or they can act as one and fix prices. In the latter case, big company Z decides to spend 10s of millions to discover it themselves and beat XY's pricing, in which case the story repeats.
The use of exact numbers makes it seem like this example is attempting to fool you somehow, but the only essential part is another company having the capability to rediscover the method. They won't even have to try, Y can just offer to buy it, with the implication that they will go all out trying to rediscover it unless X agrees to sell.
Thus no human effort is actually wasted discovering the same thing multiple times. Now things might not work out this way all the time, but in a free market, it will most of the time, and that's enough. Remember, the alternative we're trying to prevent is one company being able to charge whatever price they want for a potentially must-have discovery, for decades.
