Doc Searls: Abolish Intellectual Property Laws General IP Issues6/5/2000; 7:17:23 AM April 21, 2000: "You know, quite frankly, I mean I'm going to go step way out here, I happen to think that if we got rid of all intellectual property law, and all copyright law for that matter, and just simply said, "Anybody can do whatever they want, we all inform each other," that's the virtue of being human, you know? If I inform you, you're different. And if you inform me, I'm different than I used to be."I understand where he's coming from but this suggestion goes way, way to far. Abolishing all IP law leaves us not free but defenseless. In re Dave Winer's recent troubles, if there were no IP laws, suppose Conxion just decided to block everything Dave says about them, realtime? Block the e-mails, snip those chunks out of Scripting News, change any image they want, etc. Dave couldn't claim copyright infringement, couldn't claim anything because he would have no property interest. With no IP laws we are defenseless in the face of those with the power to change things without our permission.This is the basic reason why integrity is so importent, and without some form of IP, we can kiss integrity goodbye. Unless we walk up to the server and extract something off of the disk, we'll never know for certain what somebody originally said. (There are ways to detect tampering with a message, but that doesn't mean you can reconstruct the original.)