In the world of digital music, movies, and books, the intellectual property rights of these formats have started to be questioned by many individuals. In a generation of Bit Torrents and Peer-to-Peer file sharing, the many people of the world disregard these rights in order to illegally copy formats of music, movies, and books in order to share them a dollar or two. But who owns the rights to these formats? This question of intellectual property rights is a great question that has found parents of high school age student paying thousands of dollars to record companies for the illegal downloading of music.

In this article, the question of intellectual property rights is brought up and defined. Since the social optimum scenario for the marketing of these digital formats is to charge nothing for them. Giving them away to the public is socially optimum, but charging from them decreases the amount of people using the format and decreases the social outcome of all users. In this article, the question of property rights is defined by an individual that plays a large role in the copyright movement, Mark Helprin. Mark Helprin sees that intellectual property is no different from “brick and mortar property” in which the individuals that created the media can pass it down through the generations. Even though the question of intellectual property rights is brought up, the answer to this question will eventually be answered when the generation of pirates learns to pay for the goods they use.

http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/may/01/protecting-intellectual-property-digital-age/