Patents are absolutely unnecessary, and arguably immoral. Copyrights, on the other hand, I'm not so sure. They absolutely go too far both in age and scope, and the market would benefit greatly by moving to 10-20 year copyrights with stronger "fair use" protections.
But capitalism works based not just on what you can produce, but what you can withhold. It's a "tragedy of the commons" problem: if anyone can hit a "clone chair" button for zero cost, few would pay to sustain enough professional chair makers. Perhaps spare-time activity or alternative business models would supply the necessary labor, but it's iffy: see the never-ending battle between open-source and propietary software, which I expect will persist long into the future.
Believe me, I'm in favor of a free global library of all intellectual and creative human output, which algorithmically rewards all creators proportional to their results (or alternately, a society wealthy enough to subsidize its creators such that incentives aren't as necessary). But that represents an enourmous technical and political challenge, to say the least.
But capitalism works based not just on what you can produce, but what you can withhold. It's a "tragedy of the commons" problem: if anyone can hit a "clone chair" button for zero cost, few would pay to sustain enough professional chair makers. Perhaps spare-time activity or alternative business models would supply the necessary labor, but it's iffy: see the never-ending battle between open-source and propietary software, which I expect will persist long into the future.
Believe me, I'm in favor of a free global library of all intellectual and creative human output, which algorithmically rewards all creators proportional to their results (or alternately, a society wealthy enough to subsidize its creators such that incentives aren't as necessary). But that represents an enourmous technical and political challenge, to say the least.