>protection agains't direct Chinese theft.

Man........... A detailed patent with blueprints is like a call for action for an average broke and desperate factory owner

Is that an opinion, or a peer-reviewed scientific conclusion? Just curious.

If I take a Range Rover, reserse engineer it and sell it for a lower price who is harmed? The society at large or a special interest group involved in the manufacturing of the original Range Rover? If you want to make money off manufacturing you should invest in novel things. Not things that rely on the IP system to generate wealth for you. China is booming because they disregard Western IP. IP is a construction that benefits wealthy countries for the benefit of the wealthy.

Those are two terrible arguments.

> Intellectual property done right puts bread on the table of many researchers and engineers

The same can be said for any number of things; just because you can make money doing it does not mean it is defensible to do it simply because of that reason. It is a non-argument.

> and is arguably a protection agains't direct Chinese theft.

That is called begging the question. If intellectual property did not exist, “theft” would not be theft, and nobody would create a business which would depend on it existing.

I'm not always a fan of Stallman's terminological dogma, but here I am.

Someone says intellectual property shouldn't exist. We have no idea whether they mean that software patents shouldn't exist, all patents, or even all the various laws and precedent around the not-very-related concepts like copyright, patents (or perhaps just software patents), and trademarks.

You respond with a potential benefit of one domain which is either a subset of the term the OP used, or is orthogonal because the OP was only talking about software patents, or perhaps software patents and copyright, etc.

Now the OP must respond simply to explain what was meant by intellectual property in the first place.

If instead OP had imagined RMS rudely interrupting them to complain that "intellectual property" is a poor term because it brings together many areas of law that are not related, OP would have ended up with a clearer statement with 60% fewer posts here.