Intellectual property laws don't "protect" inventors or creators; they protect the IP owner, who is, quite often:
1. The first of several people with the same idea to make it to a patent office, giving them the exclusive right profit off that idea while locking the other inventors out of the profitable production of their own inventions. (E.g., all of the people who invented the telephone besides Alexander Graham Bell.)
2. A bulk purchaser of IP, like Disney, or a publisher for whom a creator works, like Disney.
In the realm of creators, let's use Batman as an example. Who created Batman? On the title page of every comic or movie featuring him, there appears in the opening credits the line, "Batman created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger."* But that's not really true. Bob Kane and Bill Finger were
initial creators, obviously, but the Batman we see today was created just as much by later writers and artists, such as Denny O'Neil, Neal Adams, Frank Miller, Grant Morrison, Paul Dini, Alan Moore, David Mazzucchelli, Brian Bolland, Jeph Loeb, Tim Sale, Bruce Timm, Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo, just to name few. (And it is just a few; those are just the writers and pencillers, not even the inkers and colorists. And that's not even touching on the people who create the actual physical or digitized final product, who I would argue deserve as much compensation as the writers and artists.) Batman is essentially new American folklore, being in a constant state of creation by the hands of many people.
*Bob Kane created the name "Bat-Man" and Bill Finger create the look and name "Bruce Wayne". They created the rest together. For years, though, it was just, "Batman created by Bob Kane," and Bill Finger's estate had to fight for credit.
These people get compensated handsomely, of course (unlike the aforementioned printers and uploaders), but they just make a fraction of what DC itself (and above it, Warner Bros., WarnerMedia above that, and above
that, as of June of this year, AT&T) makes, despite the fact that the legal entities known as "DC Comics" and the rest didn't do anything to create Batman then or now. They're entitled to nothing beyond what they invested, plus a risk premium. But because DC "owns" Batman, they (read: whoever is on the board of directors at the time) get to perpetually skim the profits generated by the labor of others: the writers, pencillers, inkers, colorists, print shop workers, digital distribution personnel, etc. If the entire production staff of all of the Batman titles from writer to printing press tech left to go make Batman comics independently, these creators and producers would be sued into oblivion, because DC "owns" Batman and therefore "owns" those comics that others produced with their own equipment and stock material. And if those comics featured appearances by other new folklore characters like Superman or Wonder Woman, they'd be sued for three times as much.
That's
one character in
one medium. That's not even mentioning all of the small moving parts that go into making a Justice League movie, the bulk of the profits of which go to DC and Warner Bros., which made nothing.
Property rights developed and evolved to deal with issues of scarcity whereas intellectual property relies on the state
creating artificial scarcity. (And scarcity doesn't get much more artificial than limiting the creation of a folk story to one company or licensed group.) "Intellectual property", really meaning ideas and knowledge, aren't property at all and "protecting" them requires not only infringing on rights of actual, physical property to enforce (e.g., the independent-produced Batman comic. For an even more blatant example of this in the tech sector, look no further than the fact that no one can open a store dedicated to fixing Apple products without buying a license from Apple even if the store is openly advertised as being completely independent and unaffiliated with them and even though "Apple", like "DC", didn't really invent jack shit), but claiming the product of others' work as your own.
I started responding to another of your posts on this topic in another thread, but I think it makes more sense to respond to it here.
She's an IP lawyer for a pharmaceutical company!?! That's one of the most corrupt industries on Earth, and intellectual property laws are what prop it up; a huge chunk of the R&D goes into inventing and patenting redundant drugs to stop or slow the creation of cheap generic alternatives to expense brand-name drugs. What IP laws protect Big Pharma from is improvement, innovation, and competition.
So your argument for JoeH getting paid mad royalties is that he pays U2 for a license?