PROPERTY

Opposing Intellectual Property

Essay

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Opposing Intellectual Property

Intellectual property is a concept that surrounds the innovations by people. This involves literary and artistic works, inventions, designs, images, symbols, and names used in business organizations. It is often split into two groups of property. The first being industrial property including trademarks, patents, designs, and regional indications of source. The other group involves copyrights on artistic and literacy works of books, playwrights, poems, films, and music, art, and architecture outlines. The controversy that surrounds intellectual property is the authenticity and limitation to new innovations. Brian Martin suggests that there is great support against intellectual property. He suggests that it slows growth in new inventions and restricts developing nations. A more effective solution for intellectual property could be civil disobedience, promotion of non-owned information, and support of a more cohesive community (WIPO 2012).

The government and legislation create big amounts of data. Their production of information involves statistics in the fields of the economy, population, health, regulation, and other reports. This data is financed by all the money given to the government by consumers through taxes and should be accessible to everyone. However, in the United Kingdom and Australia, the governments state a copyright on public laws and various decisions on judicial issues. In this aspect, the people of the country actually require legislation to state or utilize laws governing them. If it is not restricted, there is another option which happens in the United States of America. Information created or gathered is sold to corporations with the highest bidding. In the end, information that should be available to the public and is financed by their taxes is actually given to firms and converted to privatization.

Besides copyrights, patents are another intellectual property that gives the owner of a creation an exclusive right for the invention while it is restricted to the public in terms of creation, usage or sales. The main purpose of intellectual property is to stimulate innovation yet patents are being utilized to restrict innovation by others while selfishly fulfilling expectations. One fine example is the US organization of telecommunication known as AT&T. In 1875, this company had patents specifically created for one purpose, to monopolize telephones. This limitation actually hampered the growth of the invention known as the radio for two decades. Another example is of the company General Electric which utilized patents to hinder creation of fluorescent bulbs in order to protect their own incandescent bulbs.

A new intellectual property that has made the limelight is biological information. In the United States of America, the judicial system has supported on the patents of genetic codes. Some of these codes are found in the environment but are protected as long as it is possible find a manner in which they can isolate the genetics. This introduction caused several organizations to create patents on various genetic codes on various agricultural products. For example there are companies actually having patents on genetic manipulation of a full species of cotton and soybeans and are being ...