Harnessing permanent magnetism? Putting aside any energy generating schemes that would break the laws of thermodynamics, is it possible or is there a motor which generates power using a permanent magnet?  So that the energy wouldn’t be coming from nothing but from the atoms in the magnet being misaligned.
 A: The idea of a "magnetic motor" pops up on the interwebs almost weekly, accompanied often with youtube clips of the device "actually running", conspiracy theories about the idea being suppressed by government agents, and so forth. Too bad it is impossible. 
The best disproof I have read about the fundamental idea of building a motor out of permanent magnets with no electrical power input runs like this- and please, I invite the experts here to check the reasoning to make sure I am remembering it correctly:
The field created by any magnet (except a monopole, which I will omit from the discussion) exhibits a property called "divergence". The divergence of the magnetic field happens to be zero, which is another way of expressing the fact that every field line emerging from one pole of the magnet loops around and ends on the other pole of the magnet. The argument goes that if the divergence of the field is zero, then there is no way ever for a magnet to be cleverly smuggled into the proximity of another magnet in such a manner that the two magnets will magically ignore one another- until at some point they wake up and suddenly repel each other, and in so doing insinuate yet another magnet into position and repeat the process, etc., etc. and thereby create a motor that performs work with no power input.
This fact does not stop people from tinkering and dinkering with fistfuls of artfully contrived links, levers, cams and gearwheels with precisely-machined magnets stuck in strategic locations throughout, in the mistaken belief that a "free-energy"  or "over-unity" perpetual motion machine is just one experiment away from reality. 
It also does not stop fraudsters from duping venture capitalists and even governments into believing that their free energy motor is real and worth spending millions of dollars developing. This took place in Europe not too long ago, with the whole shebang going down to wreckage and ruin, winning prison sentences for the perps. 
A: In my opinion the answer is: energy is conserved, if kinetic energy is extacted using a permanent magnet, it will be at the expense of demagnitization of the magnet. Here is a link with some estimates of the amount of energy stored in a permanent magnet.
There is energy stored in a permanent magnet  which slowly becomes demagnetized if it is used for moving masses.

A magnetic circuit-based approach to deriving stored energy provides an intuitive understanding of stored energy in permanent magnets. The resulting energy expression is also consistent with all granularities of analysis, from magnetic circuits to 3D finite elements calculations.

