The reward of a novel invention is enough to keep it going. Look at science. All ideas are published and shared and you don't have this freeloader issue, because the rewards follow innovation even when those innovations are pubically shared. Also take a look at your own work. Chances are you are freeloading on someone else's ideas with everything you do, and there are huge chunks of process that you are only able to do because someone decided to make those ideas freely available to other people.

But science has a big system of distributing money up front to people to do the work of innovating. There is no such system in place to fund people developing innovative products that require significant up front investment.

Also the "product" of science innovation is the actual innovation and being first to publish. An equivalent freeloader problem would not be someone copying the idea/papers after they are released. It would be spying inside the laboratory, copying the ideas and releasing competing papers before the actual researcher releases their own. If that was happening, I am sure you would object.

What have these rewards truly given us?

The open/free scientific communities are responsible for most tangible benefit - meanwhile, those reaping the biggest rewards give us... planned obsolescence

I understand the sentiment and even agree to an extent, but the reality is things are abused and wasted as well - to a shocking degree, in pursuit of 'mine'

False. Tangible benefits are frightfully hard to bring about. Nobody does that for free. Newton came up woth calculus, shared it for free, and transformed the world.

But all tangible benefits arising from that involved a lot of people, a lot of work, and a lot of risk. Planned obsolescence, bad as it may be, is a non-issue in the bigger picture.

Within the context of this comment thread ("freeloaders" copying the R&D of the "inventive ones"), it seems like the opposite is true for global innovation: inventive ones are being punished by freeloaders copying their work and being able to offer it for a lower price, due to not having to recoup R&D costs/investments (among other factors).

In a way you can also explain it as standing in the shoulders of giants. Get the stuff that was already done shared out of the way and encourage more to be built on top.

The current system only seems to accomplish that goal if you are focused on the inventiveness of lawyers.