Pros and Cons of Patents: Week 06 Response

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Do you believe that intellectual property laws should be allowed or should they be free public knowledge for all?
-Asked by @newtonquach

I believe that there should be intellectual property laws, and that simultaneously the ideas protected by such laws should be available for the public. In fact, this is the purpose of the current patent laws of the United States. When creating a patent, essentially an agreement is made between the originator of the idea and society, in which the innovator agrees to forfeit all secrecy about the idea, agreeing to give it fully to the public to be put on permanent record, in exchange for society recognizing who came up with this idea to begin with. As a part of this recognition, a temporary period of design monopoly is granted to the inventor so that the one who came up with the revolutionary idea is guaranteed to, if they decide to put in the effort to do so, take part in any and all profits from this idea for a time. This is done to incentivize innovation in society, since obtaining a patent brings fame, recognition, and occasionally wealth. This is a much better incentive than the alternative of spending a great amount of time and effort inventing something, only to have some company copy and mass produce it without so much as an acknowledgement to the original designer. Without such intellectual property laws, society as a whole would be much poorer in regard to knowledge, due to the lack of thorough documentation of every major innovation. This is not to say that patent laws are completely flawless in their current state, but rather that the idea behind the patent process is a very good and wise one that I believe should continue to be considered and improved upon. When this process of collecting, documenting, and publishing ideas is fully optimized, I believe that society will improve dramatically.