Ethical and Moral Issues regarding Intellectual Property Research Paper

Ethical and Moral Issues regarding Intellectual Property - Research Paper Example Though most countries and worldwide authorities have developed IP protection laws to help these companies protect their properties, there remain significant legal and ethical issues in relation to the IP protection between companies and between countries. This piece of research paper addresses the ethical and moral issues regarding the intellectual ownership and copyright. Ethical and moral issues regarding intellectual ownership Ethics, corporate social responsibility and morality have got significant importance in business in recent years. Businesses are expected to be ethical, moral and socially responsible and thus they are expected not to counterfeit, copy and steal intellectual properties of other businesses. Intellectual property, as Credo Reference noted, is equivalent to the physical form of private property that people are allowed to own aspects of their mental creativity and innovation, images, inventions, literary and artistic works and therefore these can be traded as co mmodities and thus an individual or company can apply for an idea to be registered as their own property. There has been significant debate about the ownership of the intellectual property, but as per the definition is given below, intellectual property is the right of an individual or company that invented or discovered it. ... Â  the intellectual property, who is entitled to granting the right and who has right to transfer it contractually are some of the concerns regarding the ownership of the intellectual properties. However, when an intellectual property like patent, royalty etc have been registered with an authority, it becomes the right of a person or firm to whom it has been registered. As Freeman and Peace (2005) noted, once the ownership has been acquired, it doesn’t end except by the destruction of the material thing or incorporation to another. The ownership of intellectual property is always temporal because it is restricted in time and some point coming to an end and therefore legally, ethically and morally the ownership falls within the public domain. Maughan (2004) emphasized that the ownership of the intellectual property, though technically the highest estate, is not absolute ownership, and therefore ethically the rights of the owner are socially circumscribed in many different ways for many reasons and this may be curtailed at any time. Ethical and moral issues regarding Copyright ownership A copyright is legal to form of protection that is afforded to an original work of art or authorship that has been developed into a physical and tangible form (Ward, 2007, 1). A copyright is initially owned by a creative author or authors from his or their works. But according to the law, a person doesn’t necessarily need to create the work to be its author for the copyright purposes (Irving, 2011). A very common example is the creation of employees who work for an employer.