The converse of liberal IP laws is that once a company gets enough money and resources, they can just poach smaller companies for ideas, before they get any real traction.

Less innovation will happen because more people will be secretive (since there are less protections) or we will end up with a few large companies owning everything.

You also can't deny the fact that the US is probably the most innovative country in the world and has fairly strict IP laws.

China has very lax IP laws and most companies end up just copying, because nobody wants to risk capital for R&D if it's just going to get copied by someone.