IP is important in the current capitalist world. In an ideal world I absolutely think IP would be abolished but without it there would be no way for a small company to make something and not have it stolen out from under them by a mega corp.
I do not think current IP law is perfect or even very good now but under capitalism it is something that is necessary. Even in open source it matters because without it all the licenses in the world would not matter.
So what should be done so that authors and inventors are fairly compensated under our current economic system? I am not in support of capitalism to be clear but we are stuck with it for the foreseeable future and I don't want small authors to have large companies just steal their books and reprint them.