Throwing patents, intellectual property, and copyright into a single bucket and simply label it "bad" doesn't help to improve the current situation, neither does abolishing it. The way I see it, there's definitely reason in protecting ideas and the result of creative work, even if that result is a sequence of bytes. Society would be worse off if we didn't have any incentive to produce art, or software.
That's not to say the current situation is ideal – far from it. But I strongly believe your suggestion would lead to chaos, and it's dangerous to go there.
I made this case in the grandparent post. To reiterate: the presence of scarce and non-scarce property rights creates a contest between two things that we pretend to be the same thing (property) but which follow different dynamics (scarce vs non-scarce). Government must rule that one dominates the other. In the developed world, the way this plays out is that government rules non-scarce rights to overrule scarce rights. Removing the non-scarce rights would therefore lead to a strengthening of scarce rights.
> Throwing patents, intellectual property, and copyright into a single bucket and simply label it "bad"
But that is not what I did. I made a well-grounded first-principles argument, and then supplied examples as a form of illustation.
You have quoted "bad" here as though I said it, though I did not.
> Society would be worse off if we didn't have any incentive to produce art, or software.
You say this as though it is certain but present no evidence.
Hitchen's Razor, "what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."
While you are forming your case - some things to think about.
(1) The large body of great work in theatre, chamber music, literature, sculpture, painting that were produced in a scarce-rights world with much lower GDP and living standards. Bach and Beethoven, Shakespeare and Chekov - these people all operated in scarce-rights regimes.
(2) That the design of copyleft licenses used by linux, apache and other dominant software systems are written to cancel out key protections of copyright. If copyright is such a good thing, why do the best software systems go to such lengths to mitigate it?
(3) The friction created by patents systems against invention. There is no way to do A/B testing in economics, so how do you supply evidence that the world with patents has better productivity than the world without it?
(4) The entry and evolution of Chinese businesses in technology fields where they had no previous presence. China is an ecosystem that gives no respect to non-scarce property concepts. I expect you will appreciate the irony of this.
There is a contest between scarce rights and non-scarce rights. At the moment, developed-world nations default to a position where non-scarce rights overrule scarce rights.
Example 1. Consider your ownership of a computer. A computer is scarce property. In a regime that respects only scarce rights, you could do what you like with it. In the regime that runs developed countries at the moment, there are all kinds of things we cannot do with it due to "intellectual property" rights. If you paid a company for some software in the past, you cannot do maintenance work on that software because the person who wrote it own the copyright to it. Even though you own a hard disk, you are not allowed to make copies of bits on that disk that are held to be copyright-protected. There are non-scarce things you are not allowed to distribute, non-scarce things you are not allowed to bundle, legalese garbage you have to pay lip-service to, etc.
Example 2. Imagine you manufacture mobile phones. One day you get a nastygram from a competitor who says that you are infringing on their patents. You send your team to look into it. They learn that years ago this competitor was able to secure patents on some basic techniques. In some places, patents have been granted on some things that are fundamental - it is not clear whether it would even be possible to operate in the domain without using these approaches. Your engineering team unknowingly reimplemented those same ideas from first principles while they were building the phone. You are left with a choice - 1. pay up; 2. try to appeal the patent (good luck training a non-technical judge or jury in this highly complex domain to a standard so they can reject the patent); 3. find a way to achieve outcomes without infringing on the patents. Again - non-scarce rights are severely impacting your reasonable use of scarce property. (In a scenario similar to this, Intel failed in the mobile phone space a few years back despite strong support from Apple. Quallcom has very strong patent coverage in that space.)
By law you own the metal and silicon that is in front of you. Yet there are all of these laws that prevent you from making free use of it, with each of them being grounded in somebody else's non-scarce "property" rights. How did this come about? About a century ago, governments started changing the concept of property from what everybody had understood it to be for thousands of years (scarce goods) to the arbitrary "bundle of rights" definition, and begun attaching the benefits of property to things that were not scarce. Then trade agreements were used to establish these as international standards.
Above you said that I was proposing a dystopia. Not so. The dystopia is what we have now.
A constitutional limitation of property rights to scarce property should strongly strengthen scarce property rights over what we have at the moment.