The ironic thing is that if you do not like their products, you are saved.
They only hunt potential customers.
That's one of the weird results: producers and consumers have become enemies. Producers don't trust consumers (as every consumer can become a lethal kind of competitor), so they put DRM on their products. Consumers don't accept the validity of the high prize they need to pay for something that has effectively zero-production-cost, and are severely restricted in their freedom: legally (by IP-law) and physically (through DRM).
The economics of information is characterized by almost zero production costs, so the development costs are the dominant cost factor. You can in a certain way say that the value of software decreases when there are more copies of it, but I think it's better to think of it as the cost per user that becomes less, as you spread out the development costs over a larger number of people. The value, in terms of usefulness, remains the same.
The main problem of not having an "intellectual property" system is: how to motivate people into doing development. Sometimes you don't need to take any measures for this: I think this is the case in software development, as is proven by the development of free software, and e.g. all the stuff made for free in the Orbiter community. You shouldn't over-estimate the costs involved in software development: often, it's quite doable for a passionate individual, or a small company, to do something significant. I (commercially) developed a simple CAD application, and I estimate the total development costs (my working hours) around 1000 euros. That's around the costs of a single license of a typical CAD system! While our system is a lot more simple than, say, AutoCAD, it is actually quite powerful, and even if we only asked E100 per license, the costswould be compensated by only 10 licenses.
I believe
software development can do without IP-law. Maybe you'd need some laws to force the release of non-obfuscated source code (just like food producers are obligated to list the ingredients), but that would be all. The question is how it will work out in other sectors.
The "
music industry" is hit very hard by the effective absence of IP-law, and many people there are already changing their business plan, e.g. to get money from live performances instead of CDs. It will be very interesting to see whether they will be succesful or not. The big record labels are a thing of the past anyway, as the internet allows a much more direct connection between the artist and the fans. I think the whole point in music is not whether people are prepared to make good music, but it's whether they are financially capable of doing so full-time, without spending time on additional jobs. Most artists don't earn much, so they're already passionate enough about music even without being paid for it.
Movies are another story. You really do need a lot of money to make a high-quality movie. Maybe movie theater income is enough, but that would require some kind of IP-like restrictionson movie theaters.
I have serious doubts about the whole
patent system. I'm currently studying patent law (an optional course at the university here), and while reading I really started thinking this isn't The Right Thing. Of course, it is a kind of fair to give the inventor a compensation for what he did, but the whole patent system gives a compensation that's related to the number of people using the invention, not to the amount of work that's gone into it. And what is worse: it restricts the freedom of others to play with technology, even for completely non-commercial purposes.
My alternative would be a kind of "value added tax" system. Whenever someone wants to use a certain piece of information for earning money (e.g. by selling a piece of software, by selling a product that implements a patent, producing products by using certain software or a patented process, live-performance of music or other works, selling music or movies), that person needs to give a certain percentage of the added value to the developer of the information. The actual percentage is defined by law, and no licenses are involved. The developer can not restrict the rights of anyone by license, as there are no licenses. Also, if someone does something entirely non-commercially, that person is completely unharmed by this system. After a certain amount of time after creation of the information, the obligation to pay is dropped, and the information becomes public domain. The developer can decide to drop the obligation sooner, or allow certain specific people to use the information without paying for it.
The normal mode of operation is that the "commercial salesman" finds out who he has to pay, and pays the compensation voluntarily. It would be the responsibility of the developer to identify people who violate this law. When someone is caught selling something without paying to the developer, while he knows he should, that person needs to give a compensation to the developer that largely exceeds the costs of voluntary paying.
Not just my kids, but myself also. I used to have some software very similar to ModPlug Tracker when I was at uni ('93-'96 - EDIT: found the link: 
