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Well.... the whole premise is that copyright is a type of property, or that it should be. You could replace "legal monopoly" with "property rights" and it works equally well for both songs and buildings. You are only able to collect rent for a building because exclusive property rights give you the .. erm.. right to allow or deny(exclude) use of the property . This could also be called "legal monopoly" though not in the more modern antitrust influenced sense of the term. I don't really have a problem with copyright being a "made up" legal fiction. A lot of things are fictions made "real" by laws, customs and such. The questions (IMO) shouldn't be around what is real or not, based on some abstract reasoning. It should be about what is beneficial, practically, in our time. Anyway, I think we need to rethink patents and copyright entirely. For patents, it isn't entirely clear they work as intended (incentivising innovation). The downsides, at least, seem more visible now than before. Copyrights in the digital age.... It's just a completely different thing. A book or song or whatnot needed to be published regardless of copyright. Print costs, retail, etc. The only difference was royalties. The difference between a public domain and copyrighted work now is much bigger. Free means flexible, accessible, obscurity tolerant... For a lot of works, copyright by default is like burning the only copy. Combining and reworking is also different in this age. |