I’m not going to be able to compete with Coke under it’s identity, so organically I will want to chose another name if I am looking for a signifigant profit. What copyright sympathizers like you are worried about isn’t that my Coke won’t taste like Coke, but that it will. You are worried that your beloved corporations would only have a fraction of the profitability once I am able to go on a corner and sell my Tech Dirt Reader Cola on a street corner and have it so it is not only could taste like Coke, but possibly improve upon the formula making Coke obsolete.

How exactly are current IP laws stopping you? You’re free to go out and make and market Tech Dirt Reader Cola right now- well, you’d have to get approval to use the Tech Dirt name, but there’s no Coke problem. If you come up with a better tasting cola, or even one that tastes exactly like Coke, IP laws aren’t stopping you. I’m not worried that you’ll make a better drink- I would be thrilled if you made a better drink.

What I would not be thrilled about is if I went to store and bought a can of “Coke” that was filled with Tech Dirt Reader Cola instead. And would you be thrilled if, after you established Tech Dirt Reader Cola as a reputable brand, I went out and sold cans of Tech Dirt Reader Cola filled carbonated anchovy juice? The whole point behind trademarks is to reduce consumer confusion.

While Kickstarter is still young and there is no telling the scope of projects that will pop up in the future is, you aren’t going to need them to fund Avengers 2, Game of Thrones, or whatever media you are into. Again, they just want the monopoly on content production.
Of course they want a monopoly on production- every company wants a monopoly. But that doesn’t mean the alternative is better. Moreover, if you want to make an indie now, that’s fine- use a patron, use kickstarter, use whatever you want for funding.

Last I checked society has a vested interest in healthcare. Just by virtue of being able to produce mass quantities of pills big pharma will be profitable no matter what.
Uh, no. The margins on generics is pretty poor. And as far as society goes, there are 50mm people without health insurance in the US, we have the about the highest infrant mortality in the developed world, and universal coverage is a political non-starter. So, yeah, society has a vested interest, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to do anything about it.

Sure, getting rid of patents will certainly drop med prices today. I’m just worried about the next year and the next decade. Why should any company do original research or development? The major cost of making a new drug is all up-front; the actual production costs are relatively minor. So if I can copy your new drug and drive the price down to production costs, what’s the incentive for you to do the research? And don’t expect the government to step in. The US pharma industry spends ~$70B on R&D, and I don’t think the govt would make that up.

Copyright and patent laws address a major market failure- free riding. Without patents and copyrights, companies and individuals will pass on making some new goods that would make society overall better off because they personally cannot capture sufficient returns. For these things where the first object to make is expensive but the subsequent ones are all cheap, the ability of competitors to drive the price down becomes a curse and not a blessing if the initial investment cannot be recovered.

Make the case that a world without IP would be better, not just that the current one is bad.