I am a hard case and probably make RMS sound a little wishy-washy, so I won't trouble everyone here with endless arguments (it is enough that I know that I am right! ).

I have not read this entire book but recently ran across it online - go read the first chapter to see how the artificial monopoly game is played, to the detriment of all concerned.

Against Intellectual Monopoly

The very concept of "intellectual property" is an absurdity.

I think that's a bit insulting to Stallman. Do you know of anything Emacs can't do?

Indeed. I got hit with this bug. Luckily I recovered the data. I started using a wonderful Windows mail program called Becky after that, and gradually moved further and further away from Microsoft software in other areas as well.

Lets see how would a world without "intelectual property" work:

The GPL, BSD and such licenses would be not valid because there is no copyright (copyleft?) holder.

A big company could grab a piece of code released by a nice person, use it in its own product and release this product in binary form (not code). Thus, the Free Software idea of the GPL is defeated.

You could get the source code of an app and distribute it unchanged without the legal disclaimers which are enforced nowadays. This means you could purposely make the original coder liable for any defect of the software, even when he has really placed a disclaimer(consequences vary form country to country)

If industrial patents are voided, industries will simply keep their designs and secrets undisclosed. You won't get specifications for the machinery you use and such.

I could write a book, and an editor would just print it and sell it and earn lots of megabucks without telling people who the author is, nor paying him, nor nothing.

Just saying. This is why taking extremist positions in this kind of area suck. I agree the laws are a damn mess, but the concept is not evil by itself.

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I think you forgot the fact that such effect applies in the software world, too. Just different in scale, but large enough to cause problems.

Imo, patent is a bad way to compensate the lost in research by design, even if no one abuses it.

The way people think "the lack of transparency of almost any product in the market is sane" is directly caused by patent and nothing else. Imagine if there's no patent in the first place, the social value changes back to normal, say, people immediately think "hiding things in a product we use is inherently evil", unlike people in the 21st century, who like to think that "who hides the most things have the biggest balls, that's why they win and are reliable", the change in social value means that we don't require a person to be like a freedom zealot like richard stallman and talk about good things like "freedom" to notice the problem we have today.
If there's no patent, there's simply no reason for any government to allow any product sells in general public as far as there is no blueprint or equivalence of such product in public domain, nor any sane people would like to buy any unkown products manufactured by people who have something to hide.

That said. Consider the harm it causes in the world and China in particular. There's no vaildity on patent other than being a half-truth harming people, if one claims that patent is the unique solution to address "the lack of innovation" problem, really, i think i am not the only one who prefer not to evolve at all!
I would also like to see how no one won't even attempt to make new things/ideas(including new mechanism to address this problem) ,well, even if they have nothing better to do by then....
and how people just sit and watch even if they acknowledge the fact that they are much less competitive than the rest of the world.

Stallman pissed everyone off, he is a fondamentalist and like every fondamentalist he is wrong.

Bring the sorcerers and spellcasters here. I smell a troll in this dungeon!
And not, I am not referring to anti-copyright people.

Back to the topic...

Mistake. Industry would just make copying impossible as long as they could, enforcing physical obstacles.

You say I can't patent my machine? Ok, every machine I make has a self destruction device so you can't see its innards without breaking it all. Or I can just release not documentation or specifications, which is enough in many cases. In fact, many firms choose NOT to patent because patenting would force them to disclose how things work, but keeping them unpantented allows them to keep them secret.

This applies to copyright in another way. You say everyone can copy my videogames? Eat DRM, m0therf4cker!!!

See above.

I only have free software on this computer (using Debian Squeeze). The only thing I can't use is Flash, but Flash sucks anyway, and the reason is probably because it's proprietary trash.

I've only ever had to get non-free blobs for network and video cards, and that can be avoided by using other brands. It's not much of a sacrifice if you are aware of it before buying the hardware.

sure, there're many ways to break the current laws, and in this case, they should gain no benefit on doing what you suggested as far as they have to release specifications in either public domain or release as people requested and the unpatented works can be defeated by requiring the specifications to be complete enough so one can verify whether it's feasible to do the same thing as the specifications stated, so we may at worst lose efficiency on doing the same thing as the inventor did but still better than nothing.

The reason why they will have to release specifications or equivalence to human readable and verifiable format (if the problem you stated arise, or appropriate rules will be added to ensure the closure as more unimaginable problems arise) is that we human in general are not quite sane in the current century, we are deeply overwhelmed by the linkage of "intellectual property"(whoever coined this term, you are smarter than einstein) and human rights,
and i believe that the resistance to defend freedom for original/derivative work will be enlarged (pls read my previous post carefully), if "intellectual property" is gone.
Maybe, at best, evolve to the extend that we don't need to defend it at all, say, in any developed country, we don't need to protest against killing people in general...
People on the other hand, don't want to kill people without good reason because it's virtually against everyone even though he thinks he's right.

It's true that every producers would like to forge methods to get around the laws but it's also true that producers also consume from consumers
if "intellectual property" is gone, the linkage between "intellectual property" and human rights is gone as well,so more resistance arise, less aggressive they are used to be.

i don't want to talk about bad things which i think is caused by patent (basically what i thought in my previous post), it's not quite related anyway.
Indeed, i admit that these things make me want to wipe "intellectual property" out entirely so bad as well as many other bad things but i don't think it makes me a fundatmentalist.
If anyone(I am not referring to you) thinks i'm trolling, i suggest you go live in china for a year or two and tell me what you think.

I understand your points, lolnameless. I was just declaring that, even if the patent system was taken out without "backfire" (e.g: ruining GPLed software), firms would still trying to hold the control of their creations. Maybe less aggressively, maybe not.

Even if we could travel back in time and make the copyright and patent system disappear, the need for them would be invented by someone, or enforced underground (by disclosing the details of machinery under Non Disclosure agreements only, for example).

I understand what you say, but even when there is an ethic standard, the perceived need usually beats it.

For example, in some countries, the moral standard is to carry no weapons around, which could easily be illegal. However, if a person thinks there is a good reason for him to carry it (let's say, the Mob is after him and Police is no use in that nation), he is going to circumvent the problem somehow. Maybe he breaks the rules by buying a weapon in the dark market, or he finds a loophole to carry something which is not considered a weapon by the law but kills anyway. This is the equivalent to say "A firm will use illegal tactics to hold the specifications, or find obscure means to keep them secret legally".

When there is a problem, you can bet the law will be ignored if it's worth it.

deleted.

That's funny, because Slackware also contains the well-known and well-working cdrtools which are considered non-free by some Debian maintainers because of the CDDL. (Not by me, I'm perfectly fine with CDDL, I think, it's even more free than GPL). They even replaced cdrtools with a dysfunctional fork, sabotaging their users only for fighting a license war.

So beating the dead horse xv from 1994 looks a bit outmoded for me.

I won't go into it all again but Flash is the only option for online video -- if you don't want that that's fine but it's one reason I bought a computer in the first place.
Without binary blob drivers video cards don't perform correctly. If you can live with that, fine, but if it weren't for the NVIDIA binary blob I'd still be using Windows to this day.

Nvidia is this kind of firms that emphasize the necessity of a next step, the promotion of open-source hardware. And it's possible to resolve the nvidia problem and to work for free software at a different level... Don't buy Nvidia's cards!

I let Linus Torvalds conclude!

Yep, because the ATI open-source driver is perfect and never has any problems. Oh, no, wait that has problems also.
Like I said, if you don't need accelerated 3D and video working well then that's up to you, but without them Linux would be pointless to me and I've no doubt to some others too.
For me a computer has to do what I want or it's a waste of my time and money. As things stand I'm missing two programs that I consider important and if it weren't for one being due to my specific distro and not Linux I'd probably have bought a Mac when I bought a new PC recently.