Intellectual Property, the Law, and Morality

Intellectual property can refer to any one of the following two things:

	The first is connected with “creations of the mind”; this can be in the form of music, art, literature etc.
	The second is connected with those works themselves.

The law of intellectual property caters to the legal requirements such as copyrights, trademarks, patents and licensing rights etc. Licensing rights is similar to lending an idea to another party.

As per the basic intellectual property law, the persons who hold any one of the above abstract properties have a number of exclusive rights to the concepts. This encompasses the basic philosophy, imaginary character and the content of a completed work of art or entertainment.

Normally, intellectual property rights are given to goods which are non-rival in nature. In technical terms, one can say that these are goods that can be used by one person without stopping another person using it. These are products that are possible to be shared easily by reproducing at a little or no cost from a non-exhaustible original. A typical example for this is photocopying a comic book and distributing free to others without depriving the original owner of the property of his originals.

A lot of debate has been occurring with the increase in the usage of high speed internet as regards to the morality issues on owning, buying and borrowing intellectual property. It is not a straightforward case like black & white or good and evil and these issues are difficult to split. The artists who own the intellectual properties do not have a common opinion on this. On the one hand, the band Metallica sued several of their fans for downloading their music for free on the internet; on the other hand Trent Reznor, allowed free downloading when their latest album was released.

There is a thin line of demarcation between the theft and legal use of intellectual property morality for the listener; nobody seems to know the exact answer for this.

This is a complicated issue; irrespective of the fact that you have got expertise in IP law, you might still get into problem because of a loophole or an unexpected lawsuit. If you are totally ignorant about IP law you won’t be prepared for anything. In case you are planning to sell anything designed by you, you should acquire sufficient knowledge on intellectual property law. The design can either be a comic book or a t-shirt or a greeting card.