For IP there is a market failure if you don't have government regulation. IP is non-rival and non-excludable, and non-rival non-excludible goods don't really work well with free markets.
There are three general ways to address that. (1) Ignore it, which tends to lead to underproduction. (2) Have the government pay for production of IP, which becomes public domain. The downside of this approach is the government has to decide which IP to pay for. (3) Give IP the necessary properties by law for it to work well with a free market. This can fix the underproduction problem but does result in underconsumption.
It might be possible to address the issue in (2) of the government deciding what gets funded. One common suggesting is to fund production through a tax on something that tends to correlate with consumption such as internet access. The money from the tax would fund creation, with the money a work earns going up the more it is downloaded. There'd have to be something to deal with cheating though.
There are three general ways to address that. (1) Ignore it, which tends to lead to underproduction. (2) Have the government pay for production of IP, which becomes public domain. The downside of this approach is the government has to decide which IP to pay for. (3) Give IP the necessary properties by law for it to work well with a free market. This can fix the underproduction problem but does result in underconsumption.
It might be possible to address the issue in (2) of the government deciding what gets funded. One common suggesting is to fund production through a tax on something that tends to correlate with consumption such as internet access. The money from the tax would fund creation, with the money a work earns going up the more it is downloaded. There'd have to be something to deal with cheating though.