Yes, but the IP protections should not last as long as they do currently.
In the short-to-medium term, IP can promote developing new ideas that someone wouldn't be able to follow through on themselves. Let's say I make a better mousetrap, but my ability to produce mousetraps is limited by what I can make at my kitchen table; I can't afford to build a mousetrap factory that can scale up to the demands of the market. Thanks to intellectual property, I can patent my better mousetrap, and then license the design to a company or consortium that has the wherewithal to build a factory. I can be financially rewarded for my clever mousetrap design, and the people can see that better mousetrap on store shelves instead of me only being able to sell a small number to my immediate neighbors. It's win-win.
Similarly in publishing, if I write a popular new novel, someone else can't just read it, set up their own printing press to make copies of it, undercut the price by 10%, and steal half of the sales.
In the long term, however, IP can stifle innovation. Copyright in particular is very lengthy in the U.S. and much of the west, at approximately 95 years. Why is Steinbeck still under copyright protection, more than half a century after the end of his life? Haven't we long been at a point where his family has been amply rewarded for his talents, and East of Eden should be part of our cultural heritage? Mickey Mouse has only started to exit copyright protection this year. Talkies have started to enter the public domain, but the vast majority of expired-copyright films remain silent films. Why shouldn't I be able to make a remix of King Kong 90 years after its release?
For products, where the term is 20 years from filing, it's a bit more nuanced. That can be reasonable, but is more situational. In my mousetrap example, it might take a couple years to get that mousetrap factory built; we might not be talking a full 20 years of profiting from the invention. But in certain areas, innovation can happen quickly; if you patented a web browser technology in 2005, it's still patented now, for example. And that problem is amplified by the number of patent trolls filing "junk patents" on things that already have prior art, hoping the patent office reviewer doesn't know about the prior art and gives them the patent anyway, or filing extremely broad patents, i.e. "if you click this Buy Now button, you automatically buy it and will get it shipped to you, and you don't have to go through a confirmation page". Patents shouldn't be issued for things like, "what if we put four columns on the front page of our newspaper instead of three?", but for things that require significant design work.
The 20 year case can also be problematic with medicine; 20 years of exclusivity is a long time before less expensive generics can reach the market. If we assume a capitalist model of funding medical research (another topic of debate), I see why a certain period of exclusivity makes sense as research isn't cheap, but for things like RNA vaccines or cures for the common cold, that are widely adopted, the amount of money that the original creator receives can be astronomical. Some of that covers failed research efforts in other areas, but from a public health and affordability-of-healthcare perspective, a shorter term could be beneficial.
