After listening to Dr. Bylund, I have developed both agreements and disagreements with his claims on intellectual property laws. Dr. Bylund states that if there were a situation where a person shows another their blueprints of an idea and the shown person then takes the idea as also their own and builds on it, they were not stealing. I disagree with this statement because the first person already showed hard evidence that an idea was their own work and with their progressions, however, when the shown person utilizes the idea, they knowingly are taking something without permission. Since the original person willingly showed them the idea, one could argue that they were offering an exchange of information, however, if there was no verbal confirmation that the person could use the idea then they would be stealing. This means that I believe if someone in close proximity of another borrows an idea without permission, no matter if it was a patient idea or not, they are committing theft. I believe that intellectual properties laws should have a relation and proximity clause in order to ensure that there is no discouragement of innovation. This would prevent neighbors, family, friends, and others that have relations of some sort with the innovator from stealing their ideas for personal gain.
However, I did agree with Dr. Bylund on the statement when explaining the light bulb and other historical innovations that there were in fact people in different parts of the world developing the same ideas without knowledge of the others. In this case, there was no theft of ideas because the people had no connection or way of knowing that they were developing an idea that someone else also has. Therefore, I believe that intellectual property laws should contain a statement allowing for the protection of one's ideas without harming those who had similar ideas in other areas without any interaction with them. While this would require a significant amount of relation tracking and idea documentation, in the end, it would lead to an increase of innovation of similar categories but with different interpretations. This would increase the need to constantly reevaluate one's designs in order to be deemed the most successful or constantly improve their ideas since they would have larger amounts of competition. By editing the intellectual property laws with proximity requirements would increase prosperity for a larger amount of people while also still protecting innovators' ideas.
