Allowing people to own physical items as business inventory or production equipment and compete with each other for the customer's dollar is entirely possible without the existence of copyright or patents. You would then be relying on some combination of open source, charitable contributions and patronage, industry joint ventures, personal itch scratching, etc. to create writings and inventions, but books and the wheel were created before patents and copyrights were.

More likely trade secrets, NDAs, non-competes, and increasingly invasive DRM. In addition to the direct financial incentive, part of the logic behind IP law is to foster a more open market because that should be to the benefit of society at large in multiple ways.

Patents, for example, ensure that at least some minimal description of the process gets published for others to take inspiration from.

These are all also creatures of the law. If there was no copyright there would be no Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In many cases they can't work, e.g. because of the analog hole or because the mechanism of operation is observable to anyone who buys the product.

The incentives to uncover those things are also much stronger in modern day because of the connectedness of the world. If there were two wheelwrights in your town and one of them had a secret process, no one but the other would have any use for it and if they found out they wouldn't even have any else to tell it to.

If someone had a secret video encoding strategy today, some hobbyists would reverse engineer it and post it on the internet.

> Patents, for example, ensure that at least some minimal description of the process gets published for others to take inspiration from.

Have you read a modern patent? They're inscrutable, and to the fullest extent allowable attempt to claim the overall concept of doing something rather than describing a specific implementation.

Careful not to confuse illegal with unable.

> [can't work because] the mechanism of operation is observable to anyone who buys the product.

That was my point about increasingly invasive DRM. Without IP law, the only way for large swaths of industry to sustain themselves would be to deal exclusively on extensively secured platforms. Imagine a scenario where all paid services (software, streaming, and quite literally everything else) was only available on hardware attested devices rooted with only one or a few players.

In the hypothetical scenario where it is explicitly legal to copy any binary that you gain possession of (ie copyright doesn't exist) I think that's what we would see.

> If someone had a secret video encoding strategy today, some hobbyists would reverse engineer it and post it on the internet.

Which is why patents exist. When companies decide how much to invest in what this is taken into account.

Notably due to the lack of popularity (and thus lack of adoption) of patent encumbered video and audio standards, anyone trying to make a direct profit effectively dropped out years ago. At this point it's driven by behemoths that realize significant downstream cost savings.

> Have you read a modern patent? They're inscrutable

Yes, I'm aware. Consider how much worse things could be though. No hint, every employee who worked on it under both NDA and non-compete. Imagine how much more difficult the labor market would be to navigate if the government didn't intervene to prevent overbearing terms in such a scenario. Consider what all of this would do to market efficiency.

My point was never to disagree with your broad strokes (that the free market is perfectly capable of functioning in the absence of IP law). Rather it was to point out that despite all the downsides, IP law does clearly offer some collective benefits by significantly reducing incentives that would otherwise drive greedy individuals to act against common interests.

We already have some content where this has been attempted. That content is on the piracy sites. And that's when breaking the DRM and piracy sites are both illegal.

They simply wouldn't use a business model where they first make something and then try to charge people for it after. Instead you might have a subscription service, but the subscription is patronage, i.e. you want them to keep producing content and if enough people feel the same way, they make enough to keep doing it. But the content they release is available to everyone.

> every employee who worked on it under both NDA and non-compete. Imagine how much more difficult the labor market would be to navigate if the government didn't intervene to prevent overbearing terms in such a scenario. Consider what all of this would do to market efficiency.

The assumption is that such NDAs would be enforceable. What if they're not?

> Rather it was to point out that despite all the downsides, IP law does clearly offer some collective benefits by significantly reducing incentives that would otherwise drive greedy individuals to act against common interests.

The greedy individuals could be addressed by banning their attempts to reconstitute copyright through thug behavior. The real question is, would we be better off without it, if some things wouldn't be created?

Likely the optimal balance is close to the original copyright terms, i.e. you get 14 years and there is none of this anti-circumvention nonsense which in practice is ineffective at its ostensible purpose and is only used to monopolize consumer devices to try to exclude works that compete with the major incumbents. But the existing system is so far out of whack that it's not clear it's even better than nothing.

I think you could reasonably expect the iOS model to become the only way to purchase paid software as well as any number of other things where IP is a concern. You would have hardware backed attestation of an entirely opaque device.

> Likely the optimal balance is close to the original copyright terms

I'm inclined to agree.

> in practice is ineffective at its ostensible purpose and is only used to monopolize consumer devices to try to exclude works that compete with the major incumbents.

I'd argue that was the actual purpose to begin with. Piracy being illegal means that operating at scale and collecting payments becomes just about impossible. DRM on sanctioned platforms means the end user can't trivially shift content between different zones. The cartels are able to maintain market segmentation to maximize licensing revenue. Only those they bless are permitted entry to compete.

> the existing system is so far out of whack that it's not clear it's even better than nothing.

I agree. I think the current system is causing substantial harm for minimal to no benefit relative to the much more limited original copyright terms.

> The assumption is that such NDAs would be enforceable. What if they're not?

So in addition to removing IP legislation this is now a hypothetical scenario were additional regulation barring the sorts of contracts that could potentially fill that void is also introduced?

> The greedy individuals could be addressed by banning their attempts to reconstitute copyright through thug behavior.

You're too focused on copyright. The behavior is simple defense of investment. The players are simply maximizing profit while minimizing risk.

Keep in mind we're not just talking about media here. This applies to all industrial R&D. You're describing removing the legal protections against cloning from the entire economy.

If you systematically strip away all the legal defense strategies then presumably one of two things happens. Either the investment doesn't happen in the first place (on average, which is to say innovation is severely chilled market wide). Or groups take matters into their own hands and we see a resurgence of organized crime. Given the amount of money available to be made by major players whose products possess a technological advantage I'd tend to expect the latter.

I really don't like a scenario where the likes of Nvidia and Intel are strongly incentivized to fund the mob.

It's a huge mistake to assume that no one will step up to the plate to do illegal and potentially outright evil things if there's a large monetary incentive involved. Either a sufficiently low friction legal avenue is provided or society is stuck cleaning up the mess that's left. The fallout of the war on drugs is a prime example of this principle in action.