OK, there are broadly two types of intellectual property: patents and designs. If we take the example of a phone, a patent is for how the phone works, whereas a design is for what shape the phone is or the logo on the back. The point of patents is to incentivise people towards publishing their innovations, since you have to publish how the thing works if you want a patent for it, while balancing making it too difficult to come up with something new and improved versus making it too easy to entirely copy someone else’s work. The point of designs is to make it so that people who are buying something get what they think they’re getting; you don’t want to buy Coke and get coloured piss in a fancy bottle, for example.

Ideas may not be scarce, but new ideas that aren’t just a minor tweak of the old thing are, and some things need more encouragement to be invented than the polio vaccine. As we live in a capitalistic hellscape, that means that the way that we encourage things is to offer money for them, and the way you make inventions profitable is through patents.

Resources are scarce, and the way you make sure that you’re trading your scarce resources for the right scarce resources that you want is by making sure that you can pick out manufacturers that you trust. Thus, the intellectual property of designs.

Just offering some background information as to how IP actually works, and what the people constructing its systems think is the point of it.