To make an analogy, it might take you five years and your life savings to prototype a new invention. Once done, it can be mass produced for pennies.
Would you invest that time and money if patent protection did not exist? Probably not, because your competition will copy your work and bankrupt you.
At any point, society could opt to eliminate patent protection and make all existing inventions public domain, at the cost of losing future inventions. But instead we settled for 20 years.
This concern did not previously apply to art styles, because they took nearly as much skill to copy as to originate. But now it does, and with no protections, we can expect nobody to put in the work of being the next Studio Ghibli. The styles we have are all we will have, but we can mass produce them.
Would you invest that time and money if patent protection did not exist? Probably not, because your competition will copy your work and bankrupt you.
At any point, society could opt to eliminate patent protection and make all existing inventions public domain, at the cost of losing future inventions. But instead we settled for 20 years.
This concern did not previously apply to art styles, because they took nearly as much skill to copy as to originate. But now it does, and with no protections, we can expect nobody to put in the work of being the next Studio Ghibli. The styles we have are all we will have, but we can mass produce them.