How much federally funded research becomes a product you (or anyone can use) that isn't protected by some intellectual property? Hint: its not a lot. Because people don't work for free, chemicals don't buy themselves, research and development needs to be paid off. If you want to upend capitalism and the market economy, fine, but figure out a sensible way to do that before trying to break the current system by removing the mechanism the creators and inventors and commercializers of new and novel things are able to do that.

I am talking about IP-protections more generally than 'copywrite' alone per parent's discussion. Moving copywrite more in line with patents would be a sensible change.

But US maps are not as good as the Ordinance survey ones in the UK

It's Ordnance Survey.

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Ordnance, I though that got privatised as we can no loger design our own pistol or a rifle :-)