Tuesday, May 5, 2015

201101883 Hyojeong Shim/IP/Thursday 1-3pm

A Set of Law that is More Harm than Good

 

 

Plagiarism is seen as a serious breach of ethics, and is considered a theft of credit for ideas in a competitive intellectual marketplace. So the Intellectual Property Law is there to protect creations of the mind, which have both a moral and commercial value. IP law typically grants the author of intellectual creation the exclusive rights for exploiting and benefiting from their creation. However, IP laws restrict a person's right to reproduce, alter and distribute things by limiting that ability to the rights holder. It does this by restricting the rights of everyone else: if you haven't been granted the ability to reproduce or alter the work by the rights holder then you cannot. I strongly believe IP law should be abolished for the following three reasons: ideas should not be a limited property, IP laws do not necessarily guarantee creativity, and it hinders community interest.

 

Ideas do not exist, and therefore cannot be appropriated. IP is merely a monopoly privilege to take certain actions, and limit other people's autonomy. IP law punishes people for acting on information they have learned. It forces a perfectly innocent person to abstain from innocent action that they find beneficial to their goals. If the originator discloses the details of a concept to the world, or places a physical example of a product into the view of others, they are then teaching the world facts about what is possible, new ways to interact with reality and the natural world around us. But IP law becomes the threat to people and discourage them from acting on the knowledge the originator made available. This is an assault on the freedom and autonomy of perfectly non-violent individuals.

 

The best motivator for creation is usually a love of and desire towards whatever craft they are in, not the potential benefit. Some people make the mistake of thinking that people do things just to put bread on the table in all cases. I'm aware that we obviously need to eat and live, but true artists and innovators do their best work when they are genuinely interested in a topic/subject/art. Genuine interest cannot, and never has, arisen because of the potential reward that could be gleaned from something. To clarify that, genuine motivation comes from an intrinsic desire towards something. Anything else, be that money, fame, lovers, or whatever, is secondary and does not produce the same level of results.

 

Each person started with the same world; some came before and some came after. All people try to make things out of everything that is available on earth. Whether it is an idea that does not have a tangible form, or a physical good, we shouldn't take claim to intellectual property rights because everything affects each other in some way are is all correlated back to one another. Therefore, we are not the true, original owners of a certain concept. That is to say, we were given what we have by God, so in the same way we should let us give and share what we have to each other. Everything ultimately works together in unity, and so shall we.

 

Unique ideas are valuable and deserve award and respect, but not in a way that hurts one's freedom of speech and the benefit of the society as a whole. Intellectual property law has its pure and good intention to protect an individual's own creative and innovative idea, but it limits other people's autonomy, is not the only motivation for people who strive to create something new, and can socially hinder idea development altogether. Therefore, I believe abolishing IP law will bring about more benefit and advantages to the new information community we are living in.

1 comment:

  1. You made good arguments in the essay overall. I am deeply impressed with your arguments and brilliant ideas. You seem to have well organized structure consisting thesis statement and relevent topic sentences in the writing. If I could add more,, I would expect to see more counter-argument and refutation which you can make use of to further strenghten your viewpoint. Thanks for sharing!

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