In any case, whether patents help or hinder innovation is an empirical question that deserves study! Instead of just assuming that they _must_ encourage innovation, because they say so.
> Wouldn't everyone be copying all the best ideas from everyone else? Wouldn't that be a good thing? Both in general and for innovation?
No because this incentivizes copying over innovation. There is little reason to invest in R&D when anyone can copy your idea. Consider the COVID vaccines. Each cost billions in R&D. If they could be copied then a company that specializes in production could invest all its money into that and spend nothing on R&D. Eventually no one will be willing to invest in innovation until someone comes up with the idea of protecting IP again.
Wouldn't everyone be copying all the best ideas from everyone else? Wouldn't that be a good thing? Both in general and for innovation?
(And even if only the richest companies did this, they would still have to compete against each other's copy-cat implementations of those ideas.)
We don't necessarily have to re-hash this discussion, other people already had it, eg at https://sciencebusiness.net/news/79887/The-Great-IP-Debate%3...
In any case, whether patents help or hinder innovation is an empirical question that deserves study! Instead of just assuming that they _must_ encourage innovation, because they say so.
You can also get a start on the literature by following the sources of this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_and_patents#Innovati...