Greentext

If you write a book and pour your heart and soul into it, then you self-publish and it catches on, and some douchebag dropshipper republished it on CreateSpace and sells it on Amazon with Print-on-Demand, and sells a million copies while your sales of your own book drop off to nothing, you'd be upset, wouldn't you? Don't you think you deserve at least some legal protection?

When an idea becomes a part of humanity's shared intellectual heritage, it shouldn't be owned by anyone. Books take 90 years to enter the public domain, so generally the authors are dead by then. But nobody can patent "gears," "screws," or "levers" as concepts, because they've simply been around so long.

But if someone draws a specific schematic with precise dimensions, and arrays them in a specific way to achieve a result, then that's a unique invention that they should have the rights to for maybe 5-10 years.

It should be loose enough that someone else can draw a different schematic inspired by that one that achieves something similar, but not simply copy-pasting the same schematic.

The fact that the rich get away with intellectual property theft while hounding the poor for anything close to a trademark violation is an injustice and a symptom of financial oligarchy, but that's less to do with IP laws per se and more to do with governments skewing everything in favor of the rich.