Favorite Economic System

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Certainly not. Simply be completely repealing all copyright law (all inventions immediately become public domain) [...]

It would be interesting if patent law and copyright law had equivalent terms.  I wonder how much support there would be for our current overlengthy copyright periods if patents were also life of the inventor plus 75 years (or 95 years for corporations) instead of 20 years.

That said, while we do need intellectual property reform, we definitely don't need to discard the whole system.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

That said, while we do need intellectual property reform, we definitely don't need to discard the whole system.

I don't see what use there is in keeping it at all. The Internet is quickly rendering the very concept of intellectual property irrelevant.

Tell that to all those people paying for downloads at iTunes and similar sites, and for e-books to put on their Kindle to read.  While file sharing has affected copyright holders, it isn't going to kill off copyright.  What it has done is severely weaken the role of publishers as the gatekeepers for what is heard, viewed, and read.  Hence, people are less willing to pay the a premium for performing that gatekeeper role, possibly to the point that the concept of a publisher will become irrelevant.  However, publishers are not a necessary component of intellectual property.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Tell that to all those people paying for downloads at iTunes and similar sites, and for e-books to put on their Kindle to read.  While file sharing has affected copyright holders, it isn't going to kill off copyright.  What it has done is severely weaken the role of publishers as the gatekeepers for what is heard, viewed, and read.  Hence, people are less willing to pay the a premium for performing that gatekeeper role, possibly to the point that the concept of a publisher will become irrelevant.  However, publishers are not a necessary component of intellectual property.

And as I've said before, the rise of three-dimensional printing is going to kill all of that. When you can produce, in your own home, virtually every invention that has yet been invented, and the only thing stopping you is the State - the Federal government, to which you, Federalist, are nominally opposed - then you will change your tune in rapid succession.

A pipe dream for the foreseeable future except in those situations where products cannot take advantage of the lower costs of mass production of identical items.  The problem with your IP-free utopia is that it kills economic incentives to distribute new ideas.  (Yes there are other incentives besides money, but IP doesn't prevent them from incenting, so no IP means fewer incentives to distribute new ideas.) Patents and copyright, provided that their terms are not excessive, spur innovation.