Intellectual Property

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What about abstract ideas that can be arrived at independently? Much of scientific knowledge can be arrived at by anyone with the appropriate background and technology, which can be fairly acquired. Property rights for such ideas are unenforceable.

For instance, the idea of the gravitational equations that describe a black hole could be arrived at by anyone with detailed knowledge of Einstein's formulation of gravity. Karl Schwarzchild was the first to do so, and he gets credit for the discovery. But scientists understand that many others could and would have arrived at the same result independently, so Schwarzchild has no proprietary rights to the idea, only to his text describing that idea.