Property difference.

IN Pakistan, intellectual property is viewed with the same lens as tangible property that includes land or physical assets. This should not be the case as intellectual property is hardly a tangible form of property.

Conventional property law aims to offer property owners protection for life, whereas intellectual property law offers limited rights to inventors so that the latter can capture the value of their invention for a specific period of time.

One of the main reasons behind the existence of conventional property rights can be traced to what is known as the 'tragedy of the commons'. Finite natural resources were being overused because there was no mechanism in place to allocate them efficiently unless they were handed out in the form of property. To apply this idea to intellectual property is fundamentally flawed.

Information, for one, cannot be depleted. It is a public good, which makes its consumption non-rivalrous and non-excludable. For example, my use of information does not impose any direct cost on anyone and it is not something from which others can easily be excluded, the exception being trade secrets.

Intellectual property is not a response to scarcity.

Intellectual property, then, is not a response to scarcity, as conventional property law is. In practical terms, it is a conscious decision to createscarcity of the property invented or authored by someone in order to artificially boost the economic returns on it and incentivise inventors or authors. In fact, intellectual property falls somewhere in the basket of the 'tragedy of the anti-commons' which is the result of excessive property rights. The protectionist view of traditional property rights, therefore, cannot be applied to intellectual property.

The intangible 'thing' that is being protected by intellectual property rights is information of which patents, trade secrets and copyrights, as well as reputation, are the subject. According to this principle, information is taken out of the public domain and placed into the hands of the creator solely because of what the latter has added to the information. That means that inventors share information concerning their inventions with the public but prevent others from making, using or selling it on the basis of their contribution.

Ultimately, intellectual property rights are separate from tangible assets and unlike traditional property laws where your claim is restricted to the property being trespassed upon. The separation...

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