Intellectual monopoly privilege

Intellectual monopoly privileges (IMPs) are legal monopolies given by government over individual writings and inventions. Examples include copyright, the granting of exclusive rights to publish and sell literary or musical or artistic work, and patents, grants to inventors the sole rights to an invention. This term has been advanced by several academics including Birgitte Andersen and Thomas Alured Faunce
Harm
The World Trade Organisation Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights contains authorization of pharmaceutical patents which have great detriment to public health throught the exclusion of sick people from getting the care of existing medicines. This was explicitly addressed, for example, by the Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health. It also arises from concern about the social impact of extensions of patent terms and restictions on public health exceptions to pharmaceutical patents (such as compulsory licensing) as a result of so-called TRIPs-plus provisions in bilateral trade agreements Another rationale for the debate involves concern that the public interest may not have been a dominant consideration in the degree of social and policy influence that patents have accorded the pharmaceutical industry in particular. Major issues have also arisen about the extent to which increases in copyright terms are dangerously restricting valuable knowledge from entering the public domain. Use of terminology such as intellectual property rights also tends to promote a perception in the general public that there is something inalienable and unalterable about patents and copyright. (possibly due to a confusion of categories with international human rights or a failure to appreciate that the social and industrial benefits of innovation can be rewarded or encouraged by other means.
"It is a long and dangerous jump from the assertion that innovators deserve compensation for their efforts, to the conclusion that patents and copyrights, that is, monopoly, are the best or the only way to promote that reward."
A central component of the argument for the change in terminology is that while TRIPs upholds the rights granted to a patent holder, it allows for limited public interest exceptions and provisions, including compulsory licensing, protection of proprietary information, protection of trademarks and enforcement. This recognises, the argument runs, that patents are not a natural form of human rights, which can attach to corporations in the same manner that freedom of expression or freedom of association or habeas corpus are inherently linked in a normative sense with real people, or sustainability with the natural environment, but are really a privilege to briefly exercise a potential monopoly over specifically defined intellectual knowledge and its products granted by society in return for speedy access to and dissemination of important knowledge.
Economic Arguments
One of the features of a monopoly as opposed to a situation of perfect competition, is that the company exercising the monopoly can set prices in a market (inadequately regulated, for example by anti-trust laws) above the point where it is social efficient. This provides extra profit to the inventor or patent rightholder (not necessarily the same person) and a social cost to the rest of society. However, economists such as Edmund Kitch defend such a price mark up on the ground that (i) there are a lot of costs associated with maintaining and keeping and trading an IPR that do not show up in mainstream economic analysis, and that (ii)the system must allow for some profit from an IPR in order to create incentives to invest and invest in the new ideas.
When discussing whether patents protect firms from competition in practice, mainstream law and economics literature argues that only under very rare conditions does a patent confer a monopoly in product markets, as well as in knowledge markets. Exclusive or dominant individual control of something (e.g. a house), for example, also associated with a property, is very different from possessing an ‘economic monopoly’ which means to have exclusive right to sell into a market without competition. Machlup states:
“From an economic point of view, “property” and “monopoly” have almost nothing to do with each other. A seller who owns his wares has property but no monopoly if many other people independently sell similar things in the market. A seller who can control the price of what he sells, because no one seriously competes with him in the market, has a monopoly but not property if he does not own what he sells.”
Andersen, however, argues that:
"It is the ‘embeddedness’ of a patented blueprint, when it becomes applied (i.e. becomes technology) in products and production processes, which is the true private feature of a patent and which imposes monopoly conditions. The dynamics here is not patent blocking (important as it may be), but it is the problem of factor substitution, when the input is technology...One of the most important effects or variables that have been overlooked in the literature arguing that patents do not confer product monopolies include a true understanding of the problem of technology markets, where factor substitution regarding patent protected blueprints is not an option. That is, there is a difference between the blueprint nature of patents and patent markets, on the one hand,and the particularistic and localized nature of the technology in which the blueprint is invested and applied or embedded, on the other hand. Whereas the private element of the blueprint in the former is enforced by legal rights, the private element of the technology in the latter is truly private, as it cannot even be traded. In other words, the mainstream law and economics literature neglects the path-dependent nature of the co-evolution of a blueprint (i.e. patent protected idea) with products and process innovations. It is exactly this feature that makes the patent holder so powerful, and this is especially true over time where competencies in applying and capturing rent from the patent protected blue-print have become more specialized (although stronger) and sunk-costs are higher."

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