Are intellectual property rights getting too greedy?

Question

It seems the moment someone comes up with anything slightly new, they patent it and say no-one else has the right to try it too. Is that really their property to be the only one to own the right to do till the end of time? Imagine how many everyday inventions would be purchasable or makable only by given rights such as the wheel, the light bulb, electricity, what kind of restricted world would we live in today if it had always been this exclusive with their rights?

Answer 1

I think you may be seeing IP rights in a very limiting scope. The point is to protect the inventor, the business owner, the artist. With that protection also comes hand in hand with the sharing of these ideas.

If ideas were never shared in the marketplace, where would we be? Imagine if Bill Gates had never shared his ideas about the new BASIC programming language that he and Paul Allen developed…would Microsoft exist? How would that have impacted our world today? Let's take it back even further: what would life be like if Louis Pasteur had never shared his ideas about heat treatment, what we now call pasteurization? The sharing of ideas has brought us to where we are, good and bad.

The free flowing of ideas has been and will continue to be important to our world development. Of course, protecting those representations of those ideas of yours, whatever form they take, can be just as important. Would Bill Gates be the richest person in the world if he had not secured all of his intellectual property rights?

Hope that helps!

Answer 2

Firstly, a patent is not indefinite. Eventually, a patent expires.

Secondly, most great ideas that are shared with the public first go nowhere, because people resist change, so they just say 'it will never work'. Someone has to develop the idea, test it, create a prototype, and prove it works before anyone will take it seriously, and that takes time, effort, energy and money.

The reason we have new ideas and inventions is because people can profit from them. Many of this 'intellectual property' took years of hard work, trial and error to develop. People would not work so hard and then share their ideas if they could not benefit from it themselves.

Imagine that we passed a law that said your great idea is owned by all the people, and you get nothing for it. How hard would you work on it. Would you stay up nights, risking your own time and money to develop an idea if you could not personally benefit? Most people would just go home and watch TV and drink beer, and the best ideas would never have happened.

This is why the patent office was established. Those societies that do not have such a system do not advance. People have to have a personal incentive to work hard to develop new concepts and then prove they are workable. Then society will recognize the value of it, and buy the product, at the price that they are willing to pay. So the inventor is rewarded, jobs are created, the public gets a new product or service, and everyone wins.

What's wrong with the inventor getting rich? If his idea is in demand by thousands or millions of people, then he had served thousands or millions of people. Even someone working for minimum wage would get rich if he could work millions of hours, would he not? It's the same idea, you serve more people, so you get more money.