Ultimately it doesn’t matter what’s written on parchment, people are going to act how they’re going to act and if there’s not enough buy-in to an idea it won’t be followed without draconian punishment. Like the drug war, draconian punishment and privacy-invading measures must be taken to stop something which few see as having a victim. When actual victims are harmed, they, or others who care about them, report it so such measures aren’t needed. Lest it be thought sketchy that prevailing opinions determine what is considered right, most people wouldn’t kill or violently harm others even if there was no law against it. The law simply codifies prevailing taboos in such cases.

While information may be non-scarce, effort isn’t. However, if one performs effort with a full understanding of the rules ahead of time, they can’t cry foul later. Effort alone is not enough to warrant ownership: I could paint a beautiful mural on the side of your house, but I don’t get to keep it. Creators in a culture of openness and information exchange would have to adapt to a similar understanding.

What of creation of art and ideas? If people want those things, they’ll pay for them – period. The internet has opened many avenues for artists and researchers to receive compensation for effort. Some of them that spring to mind: the long tail, assurance contracts, micropayments, distributed patronage, freemiums, etc. Even if it is somehow accepted that art and idea creation are goods in and of themselves, there now exists ways to pay for their production without draconian laws, spy networks, DRM and other property-locking mechanisms, and (most importantly) censorship.

Societies require truth, trust, and trade. Humans are information traders. IP laws restrict trade and, in the case of patents, restrict the utilization of truth. Societies and humans have long survived without IP laws, they have not long survived with censorship and invasive, draconian institutions.

O.K., so let’s put forth an axiom of ‘An idea is a good, for
which there can never be a scarcity.’ Basically the ideas itself always exist
with infinite quantity. And that there is no depriving of property right to the
original thinker, because everyone who enacts an implementation of the idea is
doing so with a ‘instance’ of the good, not the original thinker’s good itself.

Now let’s go back to the granddaddy, ‘Man acts.’

Here is where I hit some problems that leave me unsure of
how comfortable I am with the first axiom. Will a man act to discover more of these
limitless goods which require investments of time and research, if all other men will simply wait for him to do so, and profit
as equally from them as he will, i.e., his own ability to profit from the
labors of his thinking and investment of time in research secure him no gain
other than the ideas ability to provide himself, personally, benefit. In
essence, do we lose a substantial profit motive and force for innovation in the
world by adopting the first axiom?

I tend to lean toward LvM’s thinking as Jacob Huebert points it out in a article he wrote covering Libertarian attitudes regarding IP rights, 

“He wrote in Human Action that it is “unlikely that people would undertake the laborious task of writing” such things as “textbooks, manuals, handbooks, and other nonfiction works,” if “everyone were free to reproduce them,” and that it is “very probable that technological progress would be seriously retarded” if inventors and those who finance their work could not have a patent’s help to recoup their expenses.”

(Read the article on the LvMI site here, http://mises.org/daily/5025 )