Intellectual Property is the umbrella term for the exclusive rights writers, musicians, inventors and other creators have in relation to their product. Laws include copyrights, patents, trademarks, industrial design rights and trade secrets. The term “intellectual property” was first notably used on October 1845 at a Massachusetts Circuit Court ruling in a patent case in which Justice Charles L Woodbury wrote that “only in this way can we protect intellectual property, the labors of the mind, productions and interests as much a man's own...as the wheat he cultivates, or the flocks he rears.”
Intellectual Property regulations exist to protect the personal interests of the developer and to ensure credit and rewards from a product rightfully goes to the maker. Without these laws, theoretically, creators would be under compensated for their ideas and other contributions to the public domain. Thus intellectual property policies take the same approach to abstract products of the mind as policies that are applied to physical property – only the creator should be able to reap what he has sowed and do what he like with it.
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To apply concrete, cold regulations to abstract “properties” conceived by the mind is a flaw in itself. Because of this, a problem lies in the “monopolizing” power of patents and copyrights often utilized by large companies and corporations. For example, a dominant pharmaceutical company gains proprietorship of the patent for an extremely effective cure for a widespread disease. It is costly and developing countries that may need it the most can’t afford it at the price set by the company. Due to the legal restrictions of the patent, companies in developing countries are red taped from creating and distributing the cure at a more affordable price and are instead limited to less efficient generic medicines and treatments. The patent successfully fulfills its selfish duty.
Although ideas, unlike physical property, are indefinite and can be re-used and duplicated indefinitely, the public domain is at the mercy of the companies who hold the intellectual property – products that could benefit all of humanity. Only those who have the money actually benefit from the discovery. This unfortunate situation can also be applied to many other corporate-owned intellectual properties like college course books, efficient car engines and other essential designs, inventions and innovations.
Many copyrights are directly tied to large corporate entities that have the power to enforce the policies, but may also hinder creativity and innovation due to the influence of corporate ideologies. Musicians are especially affected by this when they agree to work with major labels that obligate them to a set of policies that dictate what they can and cannot do. Also, major label contracts tend to contain a mile-long list of technicalities pertaining to royalties that weigh heavily in the favor of the company. So in the end, the musicians can get screwed over while the company cut-and-runs with the money.
With free global information exchange made possible through the internet, precedents set in the music world by Radiohead through their optionally priced album In Rainbows, and the start of the community-based licensing group Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org/), the masses are starting to take back the power of intellectual property from the rich few. However, the issue remains full of complexities that cannot possibly be covered in this one article. It’ll be a long while before we attain the ideal equilibrium between the interests of the public domain and the creator, and a world in which great ideas can be freely distributed, used and improved by the people.
