[jampekka]

IP is a huge drag on the progress of mankind.

Ideally there would other ways than economical to facilitate production of intellectual goods. Ownership economies are exceptionally bad in non-scarce resources.

There are some alternative and less destructive ways to handle the economy already in place. Academic institutions generally don't claim or enforce IP (paywalls are more a corporate than academic thing). Many library systems pay authors (notably not the publishers) for each loan from public funds. Open source software is funded via services (and increasingly with ads, which is not necessarily great).

State enforced monopoly on ideas or lumps of matter isn't the only way of structuring the economy. Alternatives haven't been discussed in 30 or so years, so it's understandable that many have hard time even conceptualizing such.

[_flux]

Is IP on names also a huge drag? Would it be beneficial to the mankind if I—or anyone—were able to just make their own Linux or Nginx, with no relation to the group that originally made it?

Arguably "first come, first serve" policy on names per domain is a good one and serves to reduce confusion.

[jampekka]

Monopoly on usage of a name not so much, although how it is implemented (or enforced) has substantial problems too. Companies regularly hijack commonly used words as "property" and/or push their monopolized names to the general vocabulary (e.g. iPhone, iPad, App Store, Googling, Kleenex, Xerox) especially in the USA and then literally police how people can use the words.

Yes, they should lose the "property" if they do so, but in practice they lose it decades too late if even then.

Also trademarks being sellable means that at any moment the product with a trademark can have nothing to do with the original holder, partly defeating the rationale.