What extent to which the Law of Intellectual Property meets the needs of modern society?

Answer 1

wow - what a broad question!

Intellectual property (patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets). some say that by offering protections for intellectual property we encourage people to invest and research new ideas and inventions by giving them a brief monopoly (patent) in the market.

Answer 2

Surely the Law of Intellectual Property really only came into its own with modern society? Before worldwide instantaneous communications ideas could be 'stolen' and exported to places where it might be years, if ever, before anyone found out.

One problem now, though, is that several people might come up independently with the same idea but the first person to get the rights to it would see everyone else off even if one of the others had the idea earlier or has a better version of the idea, e.g. an analogous situation might be Betamax vs VHS where the inferior system, VHS, won out because of the financial clout of its backers.

Another problem is the fact that organisations are taking as intellectual property stuff that by moral right should be available to everyone, e.g. medical genetic progress emerging from the human genome project, etc.

There is a very dangerous precedent emerging in the modern world that basically says 'Everything has to belong to someone'. On this arguement an American water corporation that bought up the privatised Bolivian Water Company had it written into Bolivian legislation as part of the deal that the water company owned the very rain that fell and it became illegal for Bolivian peasants to save and use run-off from their rooves, collected in water butts!

There are increasing numbers of corporate attempts, increasingly successful, for what used to be a common part of speech to be hi-jacked for a company logo or advert and become the 'intellectual property' of the said organisation.

This is sheer lunacy.