I disagree, in my opinion it is the opposite, IP and copyright laws of today do more harm than good, they stiffness innovation and creativity. The reason I think is at least two fold, one it incentivizes companies to stop innovating once they get a leadership in the market, since no one can use the innovation they can "camp out"on it and just pluck competition when they are at infancy, using their size and dominant position they can just buy any starting company that tries to innovate further. There is many examples of that, like kodak killing its own development in digital camera so to not jeopardize their camera film business. Same with electric cars, there was companies in the 70s that started doing it, they were just bought and the development interrupted, and because they have the IP on said innovations they can just not do it since no one else can either.

The second is that I argue that if a innovation is so easily replicated only by seen the end result or cursory explanation it really is like impeding people to do basic stuff, you see that a lot in software patents and video game mechanics. And last not forget that scientific advancements don´t happen in a vacuum, they build on top of previous innovations, and when just the author can build on top of its innovation it really slows it down. You can see it in how research and scientific achievements are done since the enlightenment, one research does something and share with the community and all over the worlds other researchers tries to build on top of it, otherwise everyone would be starting from scratch and would take so much more time. On the topic of researchers, must of the innovations and scientific advancements are done buy researchers that do not see any benefit of IP laws, be it in universities or companies, their IP are owned by the companies and universities, and universities are the more important ones because a lot of basic research are not immediately profitable, it is a slow climb of steps, each new paper, each new small improvements until it gets to a point that it can be applied.

And lastly I just wanna point out that Linux (and other FLOSS OSs) have being the leader in innovation on the operation system topic, and in fact Linux is the one pushing Microsoft to do more than just stagnating.