Carl Angelo C.

Magbuo
BSIT 4-1
Topic: Intellectual Property
Sub-Topic: Intellectual Property Rights
Opinion Paper No.: 1

Any economically valuable, one-of-a-kind output of the human mind is referred to

as intellectual property. Intellectual property includes books, music, movies, artwork,
patents, chemical formulas, and software applications. The belief that peoples have the
right to own property is widespread across the world. Is this right extended to intellectual
property as well? To answer this question, we must examine the philosophical basis for
a natural right to property. An English philosopher named John Locke developed a well-
known theory of property rights. In The Second Treatise of Government, Locke makes
the following case for an inherent right to property. For instance, people have a right to
property in their own person. Nobody may lay claim to another's person. Second,
people have the right to self-employment. People should be allowed to reap the benefits
of their labor. Third, whatever they have gained from Nature via their own labor is theirs
to keep.

Consider the following scenario: you live in a neighborhood surrounded by

common forests. Everyone had a common right to it if you went into the woods one day
and cut down a tree, sawed it into logs, and divided the logs into firewood. Your work
has been united with the wood by the time you've finished splitting the logs, and it has
become your property. You have the option of burning the wood in your stove, selling it
to someone else, storing it for the winter, or giving it away. According to John Locke,
people have an intrinsic right to the products they have obtained from Nature through
their own efforts.

One of the many cases of copyright infringement in the Philippines under

Intellectual Property Rights is the case of 'Skusta Clee,' or Daryl Jake Borja Ruiz, a
singer-songwriter and rapper from the hip-hop group Ex-Battalion or ExB, wherein he is
accused of copying the beat and rhythm and applying it to Deym - 90's Gang, by a K-
pop fan that he steals the tone and beat from a K-Pop group. Skusta Clee was accused
by a K-pop fan of stealing the tone and beat from a K-Pop Idol group 'Bigbang' song
'Ddaeng,' which was published in 2012, while Skusta Clee's song was released four
years later. Aside from the vocabulary they used, if we pay great attention to the beat
and rhythm of both songs, they are quite similar. The beats-per-minute (bpm) of the two
tunes differ, with one being roughly 6-8 bpm quicker than the other. Because the
creators of the two songs are different, each song has a distinct chord pattern.

The authority of legal standards must be drawn, at least in part, from

considerations pertaining to their moral value, according to natural law legal theory.
Natural law legal theories are divided into various categories, each with its own view on
the role of morality in determining the legitimacy of legal norms. John Austin's
conceptual jurisprudence proposes a set of necessary and sufficient criteria for the
presence of law that distinguishes law from non-law in every possible world. Classical
natural law philosophy, such as Thomas Aquinas' concept, deals with the intersection of
natural law moral and legal notions.