Certain protections of design/research aid the consumer/society.
If all hard work is copied with no limitation, then this severely limits the amount of money you can spend on r&d to remain profitable.
Take medication for example, the r&d lead time is many years long and a huge culmination of factors, but duplicating a known-formula can be trivial.
How this applies to business: as society relies on competing bodies to spur innovation, there is a direct consequence if we remove the ability to compete:
If unfettered duplication of a product is legal, and this duplication can occur in a shorter timeline than the time required to acquire profit from the product(i.e when taking away the costs of development) then there is no business reason to ever develop the product to begin with.
If all hard work is copied with no limitation, then this severely limits the amount of money you can spend on r&d to remain profitable.
Take medication for example, the r&d lead time is many years long and a huge culmination of factors, but duplicating a known-formula can be trivial.
How this applies to business: as society relies on competing bodies to spur innovation, there is a direct consequence if we remove the ability to compete:
If unfettered duplication of a product is legal, and this duplication can occur in a shorter timeline than the time required to acquire profit from the product(i.e when taking away the costs of development) then there is no business reason to ever develop the product to begin with.