Reasons for Proctection

Intellectual property (in the U.S.) is fundamentally about incentives to invent and create.¹

Granting intellectual property rights to an author creates incentive to make more creative works. By allowing the author to make money out of his creation and a monopoly on the copying, a return on investment could be established. Without such protection, free-riders would rein the imaginative output of artists and inventors. The monopoly is balanced the limited duration of the protection. The control granted by the current intellectual property laws will expire within a prescribed time.

There is some opposition to the control granted to intellectual property rights holders. Some people prescribe to the theory that ideas should be shared for all to all to benefit. If we regard the ideas we create as our property, then we should be able to protect the same like we protect our own home. The Lockean natural rights theory states that the labor of one’s body and the work of ones’ hands are own by the actor. Further, the theory also states that whatever is taken from nature by someone and is mixed with his labor, it becomes his property.²

In today’s world, everyone wants to make money. This instinct is what separates the men from boys, the leaders from the followers. To economically benefit from the one’s own ideas is the fundamental principle in entrepreneurship. Our government has sought to protect intellectual property through a series of laws amended over the years to keep in tune with the current trends.

If inventors, artists and businessmen (yes, even those guys) see that there can be little or no return on their ideas, they will stop making them. We see the day when the new songs cease, no new paintings or works of art are made, and no new inventions. Just think, if have no intellectual property rights, we will still be stuck listening to music with tape recorders and pressing endless buttons to skip or playback a song. We would have to watch movies through reels of film in our own home. And worse, start a car by turning a rotor with our bare hands.

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¹ Intellectual Property in the New Technological Age (Robert Merges et al., 3^rd Edition, Aspen Publishers, 2003, p. 10).

² John Locke, Two Treatises on Government reprinted in Intellectual Property in the New Technological Age (Robert Merges et al., 3^rd Edition, Aspen Publishers, 2003).