So, people will dump in the billions of dollars of investment developing drugs and getting them past human trials, only to have them immediately be stolen?

Removal of IP here means that you've enforced a penalty against innovators and creators, and baked incentives for grifting and leeching straight into the system. The system we have right now is flawed, but the remove all IP argument is even worse.

I'll also pre-empt the "But research is government funded" side tangent, getting the drug from a proof of concept/academic study to something that can actually be used is horrendously expensive, and this bit is completely in the domain of private industry. And if you think academia is going to replace that in this no-IP world, you might want to look into how the academia -> industry pipeline actually works.

On a more software side angle, I've found it interesting that the biggest anti-IP people I know also bemoan the general move over to SaaS.

The flaw with this argument is the assumption that incentives cannot exist towards innovation without IP protections. It's obvious why investors will seldomly invest in non-protected innovation: monopolies are just significantly more lucrative. Absent that incentive, are there no truly no alternatives? Was this assumption ever tested prior to these policies being implemented?

I think it's also worth asking why the available funding for innovation is almost exclusively in the hands of capitalists in the first place. Do they simply have superior business acumen, or are there protections / rent-seeking behaviors at play here?

I'll say this though. The answer to the first one is no, at least on a higher level. Most purple pursue things for their own self interest. Who would invest so much time, resources and effort solely for others gain. They might be great people, but they're rare. Allowing the innovators to profit from their creations nicely aligns incentives.

The problem here is that people love to pick at the current system, but ignore the flaws of their much treasured alternative.

I am extremely skeptical that there is no financial incentive to being first-to-market and building a reputation as an innovator, even at a "higher level", especially when these incentives are completely overshadowed by the ones created by IP. I don't believe all financial incentive disappears just because you eliminate the ability to rent-seek through a state-backed monopoly.

The problem here is that people also love to defend the current system, while actively prohibiting alternatives from ever taking root.

There is a difference between the concept of patents and copyright, and the very obviously broken implementation of that ideas that exists in society currently.

Saying there's no good reason for IP rights because lawyers can get their way by brute force, is like saying there's no good reason for anyone to ever eat pizza because the pizza place makes bad pizza. Please separate the implementation from the idea.

It's fair to argue that in our current court system and regulatory environment that removing IP protections would be better (i think that's debatable), but it seems intellectually dishonest to say there are no good reasons for IP at the conceptual level.