Copyright, the hot topic for this week. There are two arguments to this copyrighted debate, one saying it is great and needed throughout all industries, the other calling for an abolishment of all copyright and intellectual property laws. Both of which have advantages and disadvantages and will displease some people.
At the moment copyright plays a huge part in any industry, allowing businesses to gain competitive advantages over their competitors. As a new product is released, the copyright laws are promptly put in place to stop other manufacturers copying this product. This makes sense, a company should be able to protect their innovation which they have spent x amount of money on researching, developing and producing. It would be unfair for a rival company to be allowed to take that from them at no cost. However there seems to be little to no limit as to have far copyright laws can go. A products image, packaging, production process and function can all be copyrighted. For example, Cadbury has recently copyrighted the colour purple forcing rival company Darryl Lea to change their main colour to blue. Also have you ever notice why there are no other drinks available with a bight shade of red on the bottle or can, you can thanks Coca Cola for that one. Looking at this it is scary to think how far copyright laws can go, don’t even get me started on apple.
The other side of the argument is to rid the business world of these laws which only hold people back. In theory business would strive to innovate as quickly as possible and be the first to release a new state of the art product into the market place. Big business products would be easily copied by smaller businesses allowing a better allocation of income. It would also give greater freedom to smaller business that can freely alter and update products. At the same time this abolition could have an adverse effect. Businesses would slow development as each would wait for others to spend the money in research and development only to steal their idea and produce it cheaper. Not only this but there would be an increase in cartels and insider trading as companies would constantly try to steal these ideas before they are released. Small businesses could also be affected as big businesses could take their new and innovative products and manufacture them at an increased rate with better resources resulting in taking the market share from them.
The only fundamental way to make everyone happy is to find a middle ground, but what is the middle ground. That would mean finding logic in copyright laws which is merely a pipe dream.
No comments:
Post a Comment