Intellectual Property: A Look at American Socioeconomic Values
While American socioeconomic values aren’t popular everywhere, they’ve been good for America and other countries who believe in them. Private property rights are one of the cornerstones of American socioeconomic thought and intellectual property rights must be included under that umbrella.
The argument for intellectual property rights is straightforward and the positive effects of having those rights in place are undeniable. If intellectual property did not exist, then people would be unable to benefit financially from their ideas and would be far less likely to spend the time, effort and personal capital it takes to bring those ideas to fruition. In the case of corporations who spend billions of dollars in research and development to bring a product to market, they would be unable to recoup those costs and would inevitably fold.
People who make the claim that developing countries are harmed by the enforcement of intellectual property rights are missing several key points. First, when governments ignore intellectual property they contribute to unemployment not only in the United States but in their own countries. In addition, if corporations stopped spending those billions on research, then new discoveries in medicine would cease. How would the third world benefit from that?