[tekne]

To be fair -- IP is a regulation (it is not, in fact, natural to be able to prevent someone copying data on their own hard drive) -- so one could imagine variants of a free market which are less regulated and yet more (or less) friendly to repair/modification/hacking.

A lot of our current state of affairs is as much a symptom of regulation as of deregulation (most laws are really regulation) -- and it's unclear whether the world would be better off with more or less overall (the answer is probably "it depends" -- though I myself lean towards less)