I have no trouble imagining what the world would look like without such laws. If you were allowed to make and sell unlimited copies of a movie, it would be impossible to sell DVDs for more than the raw material cost. If you were allowed to screen a movie for an audience the movie creators would earn nothing. The result would obviously be that any sort of high-budget movie would never be created at all.

And this exactly demonstrates your blind spot. You start from the form of the existing movie industry and try and imagine how they could survive if IP laws were removed.

You are not trying to imagine a world where the current movie industry has never existed, and how such a world would develop without the existence of any IP laws.

I could easily point out that competition is the strongest reason why businesses must invest in R&D, at least if they want to last longer than the sales cycle of a single product. IP laws are just a way to reduce the effects of competition.

This is completely incorrect. Expensive research would in many areas be completely impossible because you would just bankrupt yourself. After you spend millions or billions on creating a new pharmaceutical drug there would be companies selling generics for production cost on day 1.

If your research is so easily copiable that competitors could beat you to market in 1 day, then it wasn't worth anywhere near the value you think it has, and you'd be a fool to depend on it as a important part of your business model.

Meaningful research will give you months, if not years, of time-to-market advantage. When that advantage is over, then you'd better have more R&D in the pipeline to keep your advantage over your competitors.

You could no longer gain a competitive advantage from research and as such very little research would happen at all. The situation quickly becomes a race to the bottom/tragedy of the commons type situation.

Wrong.

If you don't do research, then any of your competitors who do, will take your marketshare with better products and services. The fact that you no longer have to worry about getting sued for whatever ideas you use will only accelerate R&D. The result is a neverending arms race of better products & services at cheaper prices for consumers.

The only issue is that the competing companies can't suppress their competition through IP challenges, so they'll have to compete based on execution. Assuming intelligent leaders, this will probably result in less profit for all competitors, but for the benefit of the consumers.

It's beneficial for society as a whole that research takes place, but because it's a losing proposition to do research the equilibrium lands at

You keep saying this without any real argument as to why it will be so. At least I'm using basic simple market theory description of competitive forces as my basic concept.