What are the pros and cons of intellectual property?

Intellectual Property Rights Pros and Cons

Your company’s name, logo and even your products belong, well, to your company. In a perfect world, that’s how things would remain. These are all forms of intellectual property – you own the rights to that property (intellectual property rights). However, this is far from a perfect world. A quick look at the number of lawsuits revolving around IPR should highlight just how easily one company can infringe on another’s rights, even unintentionally. It also seems to make sense that if you have rights to intellectual property, you should fight for those rights. Is that always the case? Actually, there are quite a few pros and cons here.

Filing Lawsuit to protect intellectualproperty rights in Vietnam

Intellectual Property Rights Pros

There are quite a few pros to protecting your rights in terms of intellectual property. For instance, patents, trademarks and copyrights all give your business important advantages and incentives. Trademarks allow you to build your brand and create a stronger company. That applies to every other company out there, as well. Copyright ensures that a creator continues to own his or her artistic creation (books, artwork, graphic design work, etc.). Patents foster invention and innovation, as well as encouraging inventors to fully explain what’s being invented and how it works.

Intellectual Property Rights Cons

While there are plenty of pros in favor of protecting your rights, there are a few drawbacks here as well. For instance, copyright can be given to works that truly don’t deserve protection under the law, and patents can be given to frivolous things (Amazon’s patenting of “pictures on a white background” is a perfect example of patent frivolity). Other cons involve costs – protecting your rights can be very expensive. Intellectual property rights lawyers (IPR lawyers), court costs, settlement fees, filing fees and numerous other costs can mount very quickly, making protection of intellectual property rights expensive for even very large companies.