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NihilCredo comments on I've had it with those dark rumours about our culture rigorously suppressing opinions - Less Wrong
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Not only is intellectual property law in its current form destructive, but the entire concept of intellectual property is fundamentally wrong. Creating an X does not give the creator the right to point a gun at everyone else in the universe who tries to arrange matter under their control into something similar to X. In programming terminology, property law should use reference semantics, not value semantics. Of course it is true that society needs to reward people who do intellectual work, just as much as people who do physical work, but there are better justified and less harmful ways to accomplish this than intellectual property law.
Such as?
To take my own field as an example, as one author remarked, "software is a service industry under the persistent delusion that it is a manufacturing industry." In truth, most software has always been paid for by people who had reason other than projected sale of licenses to want it to exist, but this was obscured for a couple of decades by shrinkwrap software, shipped on floppy disks or CDs, being the only part of the industry visible to the typical nonspecialist. But the age of shrinkwrap software is passing - outside entertainment, how often does the typical customer buy a program these days? - yet the industry is doing fine. We just don't need copyright law the way we thought we did.
Well, a lot of "service" software that you interact with is running on someone else's computer. You could rip off the HTML and CSS of a search engine or a web store and not have anything particularly useful without the backend.
Software industry has been a service industry for much longer...
There are support contracts, there is customization, there is custom development.
Look at RedHat: it is a billion-dollar company selling boxed software which would take nearly no damage if copyright and trade secret laws were brought down. After all, it manages to compete with CentOS. Of course, larger near-monopolies would take a larger hit, but smaller players would gain and the amount of employed programmers would not change dramatically.
As for webservice software... Well, the pendulum is always in motion. A large data breach of suitable nature can swing it back.