The approach of replacing net asset taxation with what amounts to property insurance is a good one and indeed one I've suggested as part of an anarcho-capitalist model for government as mutual insurance company (ala Lysander Spooner). The basic income then becomes, literally, a dividend to the shareholders in the mutual insurance company -- which maintains defense of national territory as the foundation for all other property.
As for intellectual property, there are genuinely heroic inventions that need to be rewarded because technology development is damn expensive and money needs to be placed in the hands of proven inventors. The problem is patents are the _only_ asset that is de facto taxed by the Federal government -- when it should be the only asset that is _exempt_, if any. Moreover, the legal fees of maintaining filings world-wide should be picked up as a natural security measure -- as well as defending intellectual property as though it were sovereign territory. Finally, the standard of "non-obviousness" needs to be much more strictly enforced to prohibit patent trolls. For instance, I don't consider my invention of the massively multiplayer first person shooter 3D game to be particularly heroic or "non-obvious", which is why I've never made a big deal about not receiving much in the way of royalties from the follow-on industry. It was something that was bound to happen one way or another as more people got their hands on computers with graphics and networking capability.
On the other hand, probably the most pathological example of intellectual property in history is MS-DOS, so you cite it at length for good reason. However, if the property value assessment is, as I have often suggested, a market-based liquidation value, from virtually the moment that IBM made the decision to distribute MS-DOS with their 4.77MHz 8088 PC, the tax rate on Bill Gates would have been so great that he would have had to very quickly sold MS-DOS to some legal person that had at least as great a vision for the future of operating systems as DRI.
There were a number of operating systems around at that time but few that would run on the 8086/8088 hardware. One with multitasking was the iRMX86 OSsupplied by Intel with its 8086/8088 chips for real time development. I don't know how or why they overlooked that. My suspicion is that the real reason they chose MS-DOS was that Bill Gates's mother had direct contacts with the IBM board of directors.
If that's the case, it would make me feel quite a bit better about my decision to abandon development of an 8086/8088 OS -- a development that started before the first silicon was shipped while I was at the PLATO project where we modified the CDC Cyber COMPASS assembler to produce the instructions documented on the preliminary datasheets, and execute on an emulator running on the Cyber 6500 during off-hours.
The reason I initiated that project, with some of the PLATO system programmers (Ray Ozzie was a system programmer at PLATO but was consumed by his work on the Z80 firmware) was that I foresaw the horror of a bad operating system becoming the network-effect atop Moore's Law, and wanted to head it off. Others, primarily Steve Freyder, agreed and pitched in.
It was obvious to me that whoever got the critical mass OS for that platform would have a natural monopoly and lock out competition -- including superior operating systems.
I abandoned that project only because Mike Pavloff at Control Data HQ offered me a position at the Arden Hills Operations where I could pursue a mass market version of the PLATO network which would have, using Ozzie's Z80 firmware, bypassed the personal computer era entirely with a Mac-like UI and built-in 1200bps modem starting in 1981 with a monthly service charge of $40/month including "terminal" rental. We had that system benchmarked out at a scale that could have deployed nation wide late in 1979, but Wall Street analysts smelled blood and were ripping Bill Norris (the Nebraska farm boy that founded CDC with Seymour Cray) limb from limb due to his billion dollar investment in PLATO. CDC middle management mutinied and reneged on their agreement to let me pursue a mass market
version of PLATO. I fled CDC and tried to revive something similar at Knight-Rider's joint venture with AT&T, but that is another story.
Suffice to say, when I saw MS-DOS I knew a horror had been unleashed and that Gates would become extremely wealthy.
If Freyder and I had been able to, somehow, beat Gates's mother and get our OS distributed by IBM, do I think I would have deserved to be the world's richest man? Hell NO! I consider my foresight to be no more than the ability to identify a bottleneck in the trade routes of Moore's Law that, if one could occupy, one could extract an enormous revenue stream from; and if my position on net asset taxation hasn't made it clear that I would not consider such foresight to be a "creative spark", I don't know what would.