Week 06 Response -- Intellectual Property Laws: The Good and the Bad
This post is in response to the question What are the advantages and disadvantages of having intellectual property laws? posed by 
Since attending the talk by Dr. Bylund last night, my perspective has been widened on this topic. First, starting with the disadvantages of intellectual property laws, I believe that the focus and purpose of intellectual property laws is not on the consumer which poses many problems. When the purpose of these laws is not to provide options and better products for the consumer, the goals of entrepreneurs and businesses becomes skewed and there is greater opportunity for abuse of the system. As they stand right now, intellectual property laws create situations where entreprenuers must create value instead of seeing where the need already is--they must create demand for their product. This specifically poses a problem when we consider the use of patents in medicine and hospital equipment. There is less focus on preventative medicine because there is not as high of a demand for it as a life ending illness or debilitating chronic illness, so resources are focused on the latter because consumers will pay an astronomical amount of money for lifesaving care if there is only one option or available solution. A similar stall happens when small parts are patented, so when a new piece of technology requires a specific part, they must purchase the right to use said part. This makes affordability of potentially life saving technology all the more expensive or inaccessible. These problems lead to the creation of monopolies in the market especially when the existing intellectual property laws are abused through patent and copyright extensions excessively.
However, the advantages to intellectual property is that it incentivises transparancy of the process required to create a product, thus reducing the need for trade secrets to be kept. If trade secrets were to become more beneficial than transparency, corporations would safe guard all of the information that it takes to create a product in order to reduce the risk of anyone else being able to recreate it and split the market for their product. Additionally, when we think of creative works, intellectual property seems especially beneficial as it reduces the prevalency of plaigerism. Without these laws, an already successful author, musician, artist, etc. could easily take the work of a lesser known artist and use it as their own, and the true creator would have no availability of power to combat it.
All this being said, I do not have a firm stance on whether or not any intellectual property laws should exist, but I, at the very least, believe that should not remain unchanged. In the status quo, the example I used about a small artist having no power over larger known artists using there work still stands along with many other small businesses and individuals. In order to challenge a business or entity that is using your work that is patented, you must sue them, and in that fight, typically the one with the most money wins. Additionally, the ability to purchase patents themselves from the inventor/creator ought to be stopped as that is often used to further the existing monopolies who can purchase patents from inventors, so that their company is the only one who is able to produce products of a certain kind or quality. Lastly, we need to figure out some method of reducing the length a patent can be for that is reasonable, fair, and beneficial to both creators and consumers.