The definition of a patent is the exclusive right granted by a government to an inventor to manufacture, use, or sell an invention for a certain number of years. Patents are extremely important because they protect a person’s intellectual property and their rights to this property. Patents are an appropriate form of protection because, like physical property, a patent gives you visible proof that the inventor owns that intellectual property. Patents have many pros and cons. Some of the pros are; a patent lasts twenty years, this means that the inventor has full control of this product for this amount of time, they can control who uses this product and who it is issued out to. The inventor is also able to make a profit off of their patents by selling it to companies or single individuals. One major con is that patents sometimes place restrictions upon people creatine new inventions and publishing their ideas because of the process it takes in order to get a patent. Patents can also be pricey and you have pay additional fees at certain year marks.
I do not believe placing a global standard on patents would be efficient. The chances of a person in the entire world having the same idea as you are extremely high and I believe that this would cause people to lose motivation and desire to create these ideas that would need to be patented. Some counties have very minimal laws pertaining to patents, and some countries do not even have intellectual property at all. I think that placing a global standard on patents would have too many conflicting errors and it would cause more chaos than help. I do believe that software patents are necessary in order to protect a person’s intellectual property and their rights to it.
I believe that a person or a company should have the right to sell intellectual property that they created. If a person was not allowed to sell something that they created then they are losing their rights to their own property. They should be able to do as they please with this product. If something is fair use, I do believe that people should have the right to use the product, however I do not believe that they should have the right to buy or sell it.
Movie and music producers give people access to certain files for a short period of time in order to give people a preview of their content. These producers use digital rights management which causes their files to destruct after a certain period of time so by time time this occurs, the person has had a long enough time to get the feel of what they are previewing and they can then decide if, from there, they would like to buy the content from a store. However, there are always loopholes in the system. When people are given access to a file for a short period of time some people are able to find ways to download this content while it is available to them.
I believe that companies should have the right to sell their products. They should be able to do as they please with their own files and limitations should not be set upon them.
I do not believe that the “free software” approach advocated by Richard Stallman is an approach that should necessarily be adopted by everyone. I think that it should be entirely up to the software creators due to the amount of time and money put into creating these different types of software. Software developers spend long hours creating and testing new types of software and by no means do I believe they should be forced to make it free for everyone to use, they should have the choice of doing so.
Just like any other product on the market, once something becomes free to the public the quality of the product substantially declines in many different ways. I do not believe that software developers would bother putting the time and effort into making new and improved types of software if their product was forcefully free to the public. The developers would lose incentive to make these products the best of the best and their sense of competition would decline, resulting in a less advanced and complex product. Or potentially they could simply stop producing it all together. I do not believe that there are current funding methods out there, nor do I believe that there other modifications of the current system of software licensing that should be considered.
When it comes to copying software, I only believe that a person should be able to copy it to transfer it to another computer once they have already purchased the product. However, I do believe that creating free software to get new songs out there is a good use of free software. This is a good way to get songs out there and only gives people a preview of the song.