Intellectual property - monopoly on innovation?

Intellectual property (IP) rights are legally recognized exclusive rights to creations of the mind.^[1] Under intellectual property laws, owners are granted certain exclusive rights to a variety of intangible assets, such as musical, literary, and artistic works; discoveries and inventions; and words, phrases, symbols, and designs. Common types of intellectual property rights include copyright, trademarks, patents, industrial design rights, trade dress, and in some jurisdictions trade secrets.

This is from Wikipedia for a definition of intellectual property.

Is it a monopoly that encourages innovation by protecting the inventors hard work and encourages them to invest more time and resources in their endeavors?   Or is it a legal entity that blocks later comers from improving on the initial filer of the claim?


What about drugs that involve expensive development and approval cycles.  The pharmaceutical companies may need protection to recover these costs but are they setting the cost of drugs unnecessarily high, blocking access to the population?  Should third world countries pay less for these drugs?





The general public do not seem to think much of the legality of downloading music and movies. Their arguments range from "it does not cost the company anything" to "my payment only goes to the big media companies".  Are these arguments justified?









Then there is the libertarian's argument (from Wikipedia)

Some libertarian critics of intellectual property have argued that allowing property rights in ideas and information creates artificial scarcity and infringes on the right to own tangible property. Stephan Kinsella uses the following scenario to argue this point:

[I]magine the time when men lived in caves. One bright guy—let's call him Galt-Magnon—decides to build a log cabin on an open field, near his crops. To be sure, this is a good idea, and others notice it. They naturally imitate Galt-Magnon, and they start building their own cabins. But the first man to invent a house, according to IP advocates, would have a right to prevent others from building houses on their own land, with their own logs, or to charge them a fee if they do build houses. It is plain that the innovator in these examples becomes a partial owner of the tangible property (e.g., land and logs) of others, due not to first occupation and use of that property (for it is already owned), but due to his coming up with an idea. Clearly, this rule flies in the face of the first-user homesteading rule, arbitrarily and groundlessly overriding the very homesteading rule that is at the foundation of all property rights.^[78]

 In the software development area, is open source shareware preferable to proprietorial? Is the "walled garden" analogy for Apple restrictive or more controlled versus the MS-DOS open platform?

Isaac Newton, famous for his laws of motion, said he "stood on the shoulders of giants" as a way of acknowledging that he is merely adding on to some great ideas before him.  It can be said that no ideas come out of a vacuum and all inventions are modifications or building on previous knowledge.  Therefore, granting monopoly for any invention, even for a limited time, necessarily slows the adoption of these ideas by others.

Are current patent laws with "patent troll" companies serving more patent lawyers than innovation?

If you think that intellectual property is not a concern, think of the price of drugs, music, media, and everything that you use. On the income side, our economy is moving more and more on the intellectual front rather than the manufacturing of hardware.  From developing video games and iPhone apps to coming up with new ideas and trends, developed countries are more and more a knowledge economy depending on protection for that knowledge.

We cannot make a living on ideas without paying for other people's ideas.