What are the controversy of intellectual property rights?

Answer 1

I see it as a partly a definition problem. The controversy is what is intellectual property? If you write a book or a script or make a painting it is your intellectual property, ie you have a copyright. So what is the problem? The problem is that some people see all information/knowledge as public domain. They seem to not be aware that people make their living writing. If I write a book and you copy it and sell it or publish it for free, because you believe all information is public domain you are taking food from my children's mouths!

The problem is really how far to you go. Can you protect a sentence? Or a web page or an image?

The people against intellectual property and copyrights are in a fantasy communist socialist world that does not exist and cannot exist. The fall of Russia proved that. People need incentive: working and simply getting bread and butter for hard work is not enough. So if you do not pay people for their hard work they will not work so hard or at all. You think that Mozart, or Beethoven, Sir Conan Doyle or Shakespeare would write, if they never made any money and were starving? Not likely. Yes they would write some because they like it, but you would never see it!

So the only controversy is the weird people that get paid for 9 to 5 jobs and do not create intellectual property, except for their bosses. You think any of them would write a book and put it in public domain while having their home taken from them, not likely!

There seem to be some straw men, and perhaps other fallacies, in the previous contributor(s) argument which neither describe the controversies surrounding intellectual property rights nor articulate their own position well.

While the domain of intellectual property is rather extensive, in legal, political and ethical terms, the argument can be boiled down to essential elements:

Are information and ideas property?

And more fundamentally:

What is property?

These are rather grandiose issues which have been debated for centuries, if not millennia.

In this context, does the producer possess a monopoly on ideas or, once an idea is published, does it enter into public domain.

One of the most poignant quotes on the matter comes not from the pen Marx or Engels or any of their followers, as others above would believe, but from Thomas Jefferson:

"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."