The author quotes someone named Hettinger who lists five justifications for allowing intellectual property and, fairly neatly, dismisses four of them, allowing only that it might be that IP protections encourage the production of innovation. A more important argument would be the discouraging of trade secrets (if you invent something and patent it, your invention is protected; if you rely on trade secrets then others can still reverse engineer and copy your work).

I'm not sure I disagree with the author (or Hettinger) but they have missed an important counter argument.