“Intellectual property rights” is an umbrella term used to cover the broad spectrum of copyright laws, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets. In recent years, laws governing IPRs have come under attack because they apparently inhibit technological development, stifle creativity, and hinder innovation. Many claim that they are, ironically, hindering the very aspects of technological and cultural growth that they were created to protect. However, copyright laws are fundamental to any society that embraces at least some free-market principles. Although there may be a few rare cases where IPRs might have had an undesirable result, for the most part, modern copyright laws are a great framework which aids the development of technology and reinforces cultural expression.
Let’s take a look at why the barebones of certain IPRs, such as copyrights and patents, have been so effective and necessary in the modern world. Firstly, copyright laws are essential in allowing artists, creators, and other inventors to receive profit from their works. To be sure, there would be artists and inventors who continue to create regardless of whether or not copyright laws existed. In fact, copyright laws weren’t even necessary before the invention of the printing press, until which copying something like a book was so laborious and of such poor quality that it was rarely done. However, with today’s peer-to-peer file sharing, the copy and transfer of creative works is so common that without copyright laws, profit would be minimal.
For instance, consider the movie industry in Ghana and Nigeria. Both countries have an extremely high rate of piracy, to the point that copyright laws are essentially useless. While both countries continue to produce movies, the average profits from a new movie in Ghana are approximately $20,000, after which the movie is too widely pirated to sustain any profit. By contrast, the film industry in North America—where copyright laws are considerably stricter—is a multi-billion dollar business, that provides jobs for millions. Without the guarantee of profit that copyright laws provide, how many fresh, bright-eyed producers, writers, or actors would be able to make a living off their passion?
Similarly, patents are also essential in aiding technological development. While copyrights are the protection of reproducing any tangible works, patents shelter ideas. The main type of patent, a “utility patent”, usually places any unique methodology or solution under protection from those who wish to use that same unique idea to make a profit. Unlike copyright, which may easily last a century, a patent expires after 20 years, after which anyone is free to use the idea. There are also very strict requirements for patents: an idea needs to be new, creative, and not something that people who have an “ordinary skill” in the field can discover on their own.
The benefits of patents are obvious, though some may use a few choice side-effects—such as the case of patent trolls—as an attempt to debunk the necessity of patents. A patent troll is a business that purchases patents and profits by suing companies who are violating these patent rights. Many claim this is barbaric because patent trolls are profiting from patents without having any attempt to create technology from this idea, or to further improve the idea. However, the existence of patent trolls actually enforces intellectual property rights. These litigation-greedy businesses are the ones who have the money to file a lawsuit against multinational corporations, which many smaller businesses might not be able to afford. As a result, this actually decreases the monopoly multinational corporations have on intellectual property.
There may be some cases where intellectual property rights have actually lead to a perversion of what they stood for, such as the closet YouTuber’s dismay when his harmless video was taken down because it included clips from the latest Nicki Minaj song. “If all you care about is poetry from [closet poets] or home videos or open source software from IBM engineers … copyright is not so important,” writes Justin Hughes, a Professor of Law at Cardozo Law School, in The Economist. “But if you care about films targeted (and financed) for the African-American and gay communities, copyright matters more.” Hughes also goes out to point that freedom of expression hasn’t been stifled as much as people claim it has, citing the plethora of blogs, personal websites, amateur photography-sharing resources like Flickr and Facebook, which have sprung up in recent years as a means for said self-expression.
True, IPR laws aren’t perfect, and true, they could use some improvement. However, it is an erroneous assumption that the general structure of modern IPRs do more harm than good. Let’s not forget that without the same type of copyright laws we have now, artists like Nicki Minaj would not have any incentive to record songs in the first place.
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