Are intellectual property rights essential for everything they are granted for?

Intellectual property rights are the exclusive rights given to a creator over their product/ invention for a certain period of time. Essentially the right over the creations of their minds. They have two main ideas to them, duration and breadth. uration is how many years of protection over the idea with be granted, while breadth is the decision on how similar another good can be to the original invention before infringing on the property rights. In breadth there are a further two sub!categories" #arrow and broad patents. $y granting this property right over an idea allows the %inventor% to appropriate much of its social value. This means that the inventors pay!off aligns with the creations social value, re&uired for encouraging efficient incentives. The only problem is that through granting intellectual property rights, it is essentially giving the inventor monopoly rights to the mar'et, since no other producer can ta'e their exact model and produce it for the mar'et. (onopolies are a factor of social costs, where supply is low and the price of the good is high, earning profits exceeding the natural rate of return on investment. In the case of a )atented good, this social cost of extortionate prices and too little supply, lasts the length of the patent, usually decreasing in &uality in the later periods of the duration of the patent. Intellectual property law aligns pretty poorly with economic efficiency since legislators respond to political powers who care more for their own profits than the nation%s wealth. Intellectual property rights are divided into two designated areas" we have industrial property rights, which includes patents, trademar's, utility models, geographical indications and trade secrets. Then we have copyright and related rights relating to artistic rights. )atent law originated, for inventions, from the republic of *enice. This was eventually initiated in England in the statute of monopolies in +,-..America had its first patent law in +/01. 2opyrights are a form of intellectual property rights. They would protect an industry li'e the music industry for example. 2opyrights are disputed &uite consciously &uite often, the reasons being that they are essentially prohibiting a person from thin'ing certain ideas that are the same and reproducing this as their good. 3oing bac' to the music industry, the idea of copyright can be argued easier, using an example. In a way copyrights are a lot better than patenting, basically because patenting does give monopoly rights while copyrights are less li'ely to create this monopoly power. In -114 economist 5tan 6iebowit7, did an experiment to conclude about the position and effect of the copyright protection. 8ne of his experiments was where he weighted boo's by their sales. 9e came to the conclusion that copyright increases the price but by &uite a small amount, which generally was said, to be the same as a typical royalty payment, meaning that any of the economic rents went to authors. 3oing bac' to the music industry, :.A 9arper, an American economist, said ; the right to create something and the right of the ownership are inextricably bound.< so basically if one has the right to produce music then one has the right to that music. The main problem with copyrights over music or boo's is that it is essentially owning an arrangement of words from a language and for music owning a composition of notes. Thin'ing of this economically seems ridiculous since you can not own the economic value of a noun, so a song or a house. :urthering my point, if your house goes down in the mar'et for example, because nicer houses are built, you can%t claim that you have been a victim of theft. Intellectual property rights don%t prevent you from listening to the music they prevent you from profiting off another persons ideas essentially. 9owever, there is only a certain amount of word combinations and music combinations, so it could be said these exclusive rights, often are handed out unfairly. Austrian economists enclose the idea of property rights in this case around a particular set of word arrangements. =ust to clarify, plagiarism and copyrights are different. 5till with a copyright I could record a copyrights song and profit from it because I put the owners name on the cover. >here as plagiarism would be the -nd person copying and claiming it as their own. In this case, copyrights seem unfair and allows people to benefit and profit off of something that every person has access to and essentially been excluded from the rights.

)atent is a property right which is granted for inventions which perform a %useful% function, li'e a new or improved mouse trap. A patent actually only grants the patentee the ability to exclude, so to not allow those to practice the patented idea. Industrial property rights are extremely important for the pharmaceutical industry. The use of I) system by 5(E%s depends largely on the business strategy and how strong the business is in si7e, it%s resources, it%s innovative capacity and field of expertise. ?ecently, ?anbaxy in India was fined @A11 million for its inappropriate manufacturing processes. As said before, that copyrights and patents almost gives monopoly rights so this in effect gave ?anbaxy the ability to give false information about the &uality which they were producing at. This means that they were caught for felony and so fined because of this. The )harmaceutical industry definitely deserves to have patents and it%s a good way to protect the industry. $y protecting drugs through patents, means that not everyone can Bust be ma'ing and selling drugs where ta'ing them incorectly could be a problem. A lot of second, third world countries sell pre! scripted pharmaceuticals over the counter with no prescription, often which ends up with the customer ta'ing the drugs incorrectly. >e can also see with some of the drug information, other companies or even countries can create this drug at a cheaper price, exporting it to demanding countries. (eaning the original drug producer will more than li'ely be 'ic'ed out of the mar'et. Intellectual property rights often retards innovation and tends to exploit the third world countries. The original idea for copyrights and patents were to foster the artistic and practical creative wor', through giving short term monopoly over certain uses of wor'. This monopoly was granted to an individual or corporation by the government. 9owever this power by the government to grant the protection can be corrupting. The biggest owners of intellectual property rights have sought to explain it well beyond the sensible rationale. All in all, Intellectual property rights seem to be an unfair boundary into the mar'et except in the pharmaceutical industry they seem to be a protector over the social welfare.