I am not against intellectual property. Being an engineer/scientist, I am expected to be intellectually creative. And I will work with whatever system is in place for any given situation. If I am working for an employer, I should negotiate intellectual property terms for ideas I create which are in the employers domain of exploitation, for ideas that are outside of that domain, and with respect to whether the ideas originated or were developed with company resources or not.
However, if I come up with ideas outside of any employer or contractor domain with my own resources, my first idea is to just release said ideas to the public. I do not believe that a company has to have a monopoly on a product or service in order to make money with it.
There are many things which are products of an intelligence (or group of intelligences), which society has agreed are worthy of protecting. Some of these products are works which a person might enjoy in the whole: paintings, sculptures, books, etc. How the creator(s) enjoy or profit from their creation, is by producing copies of it (of varying degrees of perfection). Copies not authorised by (all of) the creator(s) are deemed forgeries. The intellectual protections offered to this class of creations is typically called Copyright.
An intelligence may create a product, or a means to create a product, which is a non-obvious advancement in the state of the art of manufacturing. The protections offered to this class of creations is called Patent.
Trademarks are there to protect the identity of an entity or product. But, with recent activity in identity theft, I think any protections offered under the name of Trademark should probably be usurped by whatever solutions are brought to bear on identity theft.
Quite a while ago (200, 300 or more years) society realised that these sorts of creations of an intellect deserved protection. The amount of knowledge in the world was much less than we have now, and things changed much more slowly. Creations such as paintings, books and technologies were thought to usually last forever (the value of the creation to society). Society is much different now than it was when these protections were first defined. Is there any reason to think that the mechanism that was defined then would be the best one for the job, and that only minor tuning would be needed thereafter? Various countries have been tuning a similar set of protections ever since, and it is starting to become obvious that the basic mechanisms of protections we came up with, were not the correct ones.
The two biggest problems with protecting intellectual creations like those covered by copyright and patent are the lifetime/duration of the protection, and treating the rights granted as arbitrary property.
There are too many entities who are not stakeholders in intellectual creation, who have too much control and derive too much benefit from these creations. There are plenty of other ways to make a profit, leave these rights to the stakeholders.
One requirement of patents has been that it is a non-obvious advancement in the state of the art. In some segments of the economy, advancements to the state of the art are well constrained to a certain body of knowledge. Determining non-obviousness is relatively straight forward. In other segments of the economy, we see multi-disciplinary creations. Who is to say if something is non-obvious to all combinations of knowledge that might possibly be responsible for the creation of any given invention?
Contrary to when these protections were first made into laws, some creations have short lifetimes. Some technologies only last a couple of years. Worse yet, some music only lasts a few weeks (as far as some large chunk of society is concerned). It does not make sense to protect these short lived creations for as long as less volatile creations. If some particular creation is deemed to be especially valuable to society of extended protection, then grant it special protections by legislation. Few creations warrant this kind of special protection, the King James edition of the Bible is one of the few.
It is possible that a creator dies shortly after creating some valuable work. This leaves no time to take advantage of the creation at all. In this exceptional case, there should be some mechanism to allow protection to take place for a reasonable length of time. In the case of very long-lived creations, I would expect that a generation (from the time of creation) should be sufficient, a generation being approximately 20 years. Some creations show distinct lifetimes, and so the length of protection should not exceed the lifetime of similar creations. I would lean towards offerring no more protection than 63.21205588....% of a lifetime (100%(1-exp(-1))).
I read a note that mentioned that a guy in Britain was recently fired from his new job, because of the opinions he voiced on a news program he was interviewed on. He was somewhat critical of intellectual property laws, somewhat like these series of notes. I guess you can't be trusted to work with a system that you feel is broken and in need of repair. Sort of like not being able to cook spinach for your family if you happen to hate the taste of spinach yourself.