Do you mean the right of the pen and paper manufacturer or the writer of the book? Because the writer does not let the manufacturer write whatever he wants on his paper.

In your world, how would anyone who makes an intangible product ever be fairly compensated if you could just steal it? Things like books, songs, video games, films do take real effort, time, care, talent, and loads of hard work to create, and if someone consumes that, they need to pay the creators for that consumption.

There are ton of creators on twitch that get money thrown at them when you can watch their content for free. They have ads, but they still get money thrown at them. People know that if you like something you need to support it if you want more.

We have platforms like patreon or Kickstart to fund creators and proyects.

I find a lot of people make the argument you’re making to try and justify their own theft of IP. But those same people sing an entirely different song the moment someone else begins to steal from them. I certainly hope that happens to you someday, that your hard work is not fairly compensated or stolen from you, so you can understand it from the opposite perspective too.

I’m a programmer and you can copy all my code, I don’t mind, if we all collaborate we can create better things. You can copy my application or my code, but you can’t copy my way of thinking, I will always be ahead.

It’s quite simple, if you come up with something popular, there are corporations that would happily copy it to get the money for themselves and you’re left with nothing,

You could copy the product but you don’t know how is built so you will end up with an identical but more expensive product. The is a youtuber that made a chicken sandwich from scratch and end up costing 1500$ and 6 months. Efficiency it’s important for businesses.

The company that creates the product also has another advantage and that is to be the first to enter the market, so they are not going to be left with nothing.

In that scenario the biggest advances will be in production efficiency, because even if your competitors can copy you they will not be able to sell cheaper than you.

And if people feel like their idea can’t make them money because someone richer will steal it, they’ll stop having ideas.

Someone could make your first idea more efficient, but that’s good for your second idea because it proves you’re good and more people will be willing to work with you.

There is a river in Spain too. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_Tinto_(river)