Do intellectual property laws have a negative or positive impact on society and culture?

Many artists, engineers, scientists don't have the capital and skills to exploit and protect their creations. Total elimination o... [show more]

Many artists, engineers, scientists don't have the capital and skills to exploit and protect their creations. Total elimination of laws protecting the ownership of those creations would open the door for wholesale domination by unscrupulous companies. I imagine an industry of "seek out and steal" operations to rob the innovaters of their efforts.
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Intellectual property laws as they stand typically serve to enrich the content owners, which in a vast majority of the cases is no... [show more]

Intellectual property laws as they stand typically serve to enrich the content owners, which in a vast majority of the cases is not the content creator, but rather the company employing the scientist / engineer OR record label with access to distribution channels that an artist otherwise would not have access to (the internet is changing that last bit, thankfully). Whether that speaks to the need for IP law reform or abolition is the real question.

Music and science existed WELL before the notion of thought and sound as property, and will continue to do so regardless of ANY legal and cultural environment. Combine that with IP's track record of artist abuse and muzzling of culture and technology, and you've got alot of people (myself included) who doubt the utility of IP law at all. [show less]

Law is a human and historical institution so question reifies the concept of IP and misses the point. In the 18th century, de... [show more]

Law is a human and historical institution so question reifies the concept of IP and misses the point.

In the 18th century, delegating power over copyrights to a government based on social contract rather than divine right was "positive" I suppose.

Contemporary intellectual property law that artificially inhibits the power of code to generate unlimited shared and open iterations of content would have to be "negative" for the most part.

The loss of nuance in that distinction could be described as "unhelpful" or "poorly researched" or like terms.

This discussion is "entertaining" I guess.

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There are probably many other instances where this can hurt scientific progress- drug patents, for instance. Too often scientific... [show more]

There are probably many other instances where this can hurt scientific progress- drug patents, for instance. Too often scientific discovery is treated as proprietary, making it difficult or impossible for other scientists to continue or branch out from the work that has been done. Medical progress suffers in particular. Most science should be for the benefit of all. And thankfully, there is an unstoppable movement afoot, driven to some extent by web applications and technology, to make collaboration easier and more global- and scientists are beginning to overcome the fear of being "scooped" and embrace the possibilities, finding potential collaborators and connections to related research through scientific social networks, which allow them to share ideas and get feedback from their peers much faster than through traditional publishing models. And authors and their academic institutions are slowly beginning to accept that peer review via open-access publishing is equally valid. [show less]

Artistic works created independently of any corporate involvement should belong to their creators, who should be totally able to c... [show more]

Artistic works created independently of any corporate involvement should belong to their creators, who should be totally able to call the shots on what one can and cannot do with the work- while they are alive. I disagree with current copyright law which allows generations of descendents to keep art, music and writing out of the public domain and reap royalties, however. [show less]

Until banks start taking "good intentions" for my mortgage rather than money I'd like my IP protected. How else do you turn art i... [show more]

Until banks start taking "good intentions" for my mortgage rather than money I'd like my IP protected. How else do you turn art into a living? We could all live in a communist state where you don't have rights to your own IP and the state makes all the money off it. I believe that happened to the inventor of Tetris. Ask him what he thinks of IP laws. [show less]

Traditionally, authors of scientific papers have been completely at the mercy of journal publishers. Ignorance on the part of aut... [show more]

Traditionally, authors of scientific papers have been completely at the mercy of journal publishers. Ignorance on the part of authors and greed on the publishers ' side have until recently kept authors from claiming any rights whatsoever to their own intellectual output. Authors were understandably not as concerned about retaining the few rights they already had as they were about getting their work published in prestigious journals- the institutional publish-or-perish problem- academic tenure, retention of jobs at corporations and institutions. Open-access publishing models, Creative Commons licenses, institutional repositories and some relaxation of publishers' policies have started changing this tradition. Latest but not least in this trend is the NIH mandate that puts all government-sponsored (i.e., taxpayer-sponsored) scientific output in the public domain after one year. This is still inadequate, but a great improvement for you and me, who until this change were not able to read scientific or medical articles until they were really old news, unless we were willing to pay for them a second time. [show less]