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So anything which communicates between two pieces of hardware wouldn’t be covered by IP laws?

Yes. It seems pretty obviously true to me that there should be no legal right to prevent interoperability and no recourse against adversarial interoperability.

The right to say "Compatible with X" or similar where X is a brand should also be protected.

So I sit down and invent some wonderful new interconnect. It would be be a big advantage to put it into certain kinds of video equipment. I don't make any video equipment, so I license it to companies that do. Should this be impossible? New communications tech should only be created as trade secrets, by industry-wide consortia, or altruists?

This is getting close to arguing against IP as a general concept. Which I don't really object to very strongly, but presenting it as a special carveout for communication doesn't make sense to me.

Ideally, yes.

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