Intellectual Property

The concept of intellectual property is a relatively new idea in the history of humankind. Intellectual property is the idea that people "own" ideas and this is accomplished through trademarks or patents. On an individual level, intellectual property is beneficial in that one makes royalties off of the use of their property, on a societal level this stalls the growth and progression of human development.

Contrary to popular belief, people are often not struck with ideas out of the blue, ideas are usually developed upon or derived from previous ideas or knowledge. By privatizing knowledge, society is essentially stalling creativity and new ideas/solutions by not allowing access to how they were created. How are ideas meant to be built upon unless their knowledge is known.

In my opinion ideas and developing future technology is also stifled by the high prices required to access already existing knowledge such as textbooks. All in all I believe that we must reconsider what deserves to be owned privately as opposed to public for the sake of human development and whether it is ethical for people to "own" ideas.

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