It is arguably so that patents, trademarks and copyright are fundamental in safeguarding innovators against malicious people that pursue to use their products without permission. This is what may be termed as bleaching of patent rights or trademark rights. This has remained something that has left quite a number of jurisdictions to provide laws that prevent other parties from working around intellectual property rights of other people.

However, research and development is key to economic sustainability, product improvement and fair competition. The world is composed of different talents and there is none which is a hundred percent. This means there is need to have a way in which obtaining intellectual property rights do not in themselves impede others to work around people's innovations.

The main emphasis for this reflection is that there can be no patent or trademark or copyright which may be immune to improvement. This means other people can re-invent the product so that it is more valuable to the end users or say to make it user friendly, a product may be enhanced due to safety of the public and because an innovation may turn out to be obsolete. Therefore, there should be that freedom to improve other people's innovations for the sake of the common good.

Intellectual property law, in and of itself, has evolved significantly. There are provisions that talk about the rights of the holders when it comes to patents, trademarks and copyrights. However, that has not excluded exceptions to such rights; the reader may consider the case of TRIPS Agreement which outlines the rights of innovators but also proceeds to present the exceptions to the same rights in given circumstances. For instance, Article 28 of the TRIPS Agreement outlines the main rights conferred to the patent holder. First and foremost, is the ability he has to prevent third parties from working around his patented product if without his permission. In the case of trademark rights, Article 16 provides that the owner reserves the exclusive rights to block other parties from using his trademarked product without consent.

As can be seen the rights conferred to the owners may themselves suppress product development. This becomes a hindrance to research and development. Thus, the emphasis is that there is need for more laws that would invite potential innovators to assess the current products whether they are safeguarded by IP rights and see what can be done to make them more user friendly and beneficial to the society. As indicated earlier, openness to competition is very crucial because the world cannot be driven by a one-sided intellectual properly system.