more on more on Is Real's 'hacking' of iPod legal?

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Steven Kitson <skitson () greenend org uk>
Date: August 3, 2004 8:28:39 AM EDT
To: "dave () farber net" <dave () farber net>
Subject: Re: [IP] more on more on Is Real's 'hacking' of iPod legal?
Reply-To: Steven Kitson <skitson () greenend org uk>

Chris Savage writes:
> But giving the producers monopoly rights over their IP -- control over
> what happens to IP as though it were a table or a car -- says that in
> *this* realm of economic activity, monopoly is somehow good, not bad.
> Which makes no sense.

This is a common fallacy and misses the point of what a monopoly is. If 
a
creator has the right to totally restrict copying of a particular work,
that is not a 'monopoly' any more than my owning my own car, and 
therefore
being able to restrict who may borrow or buy it, gives me a monopoly 
over
the entire car trade.

A monopoly happens when one individual (or company) controls the whole
supply of a particular thing. The analogy in the world of IP is not of,
say, a composer controlling who can record his own songs but of a single
company owning the rights to all the music in the world -- or of a 
single
company being the only one able to supply music which can be listened to
on an iPod.

That's where the monopoly comes -- not at the level of the producer 
owning
the intellectual property of individual works that they produce, but at
the level of some person or company attempting to become the only way by
which those works can be disseminated. That person or company then 
becomes
a monopoly.

A creator owning the exclusive right to reproduce their own work is not 
a
monopoly situation.

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