The government-granted monopoly, not so much.
Exactly. What a lot of economists tend to "forget" is that markets also include black/illegal markets and markets that are hardly controllable by the government.
It's not a question of ethical vs unethical, but about which evil you consider to be the worse.
You can’t even have a market of IP without government granted ownership of IP.
This tired old trope that Government vs market doesn’t work here
You're essentially arguing that there isn't a market for air. But there is. This is the market served by submarines and firefighting gear and spacecraft and HEPA filters.
If no one had a monopoly over copies, you'd still have a market to supply them, they'd just generally be really cheap and the supplier would be someone like Cloudflare. Likewise there would still be a market for creating works, because people would pay for commissions. There might not be as many of them, but there would still be a market.
Sure you can. See Germany in the 19th century with no IP protections. Business and prosperity boomed!
Consider also the incredible success of open source software.
What on earth are you thinking? For essentially all of human history, every work of art was produced for the market, and it was impossible to own any IP.
You are unfairly taking credit for the fundamental human need of self expression, and assigning it to your preferred ideological position.
Can you name 5 famous stories, before year 1500, that were made ‘for the market’?
Even penicillin was not created for the market. Most scientific discoveries weren’t.
Because I know what it means to create something for the market?
> Can you name 5 famous stories, before year 1500, that were made ‘for the market’?
Given that I've already pointed out that all such stories were made for the market, how do you expect me to answer this?
Can I name five famous stories from before the year 1500?
The Tale of Cupid and Psyche
The Shahnameh
Nüwa Knocks a Hole in the Sky
The Divine Comedy
The Epic of Gilgamesh
> myths of Ancient Greece, the bible, ancient folklore about fairy folk - none of it was produced for a market of any kind.
As I have already pointed out, all of these were produced for a market. Why would you state otherwise? What do you think it means to offer something on a market? (Why do you think the general term for the space where these things live is "the marketplace of ideas"?)
> Even penicillin was not created for the market. Most scientific discoveries weren’t.
Penicillin wasn't created at all, as you suggest by calling it a "discovery". But we use it today because it was offered on the market by someone who hoped to receive the rewards that the market would offer for it.
You made unsubstantiated assertion that lays claim to a millennia of human history. You offered no evidence of any kind.
> I know what it means to create something for the market
Firstly, that that statement itself is debatable. Secondly, one would need extraordinary knowledge of history to make claims about for thousands of stories written across thousands of years.
I cannot help but conclude that you are an ideologue and you believe there is no life outside ‘the market’ and when I write something in my personal blog, or invent a story for my child, that’s ’the market’ too.
I find this level of ideological appropriation repulsive.
Notice how your argument, if true, would defeat the point of the monopoly. If there were ten books that were all fungible with one another then each of the suppliers would want to lower prices to increase sales and you'd end up at the marginal cost, which for digital products is zero. And sometimes this even happens -- there is a lot of free-as-in-beer software, free-with-ads news websites etc. But the context of lending libraries is for when that isn't the case. You don't need to get a copy of nginx from the local library because you can get it for free from the authors.
There’s a two-sided marketplace for creative works, where publishers need to get works from creators and license them to customers. They want to maximize their own profits, but they also need to make a certain amount revenue as all methods of distribution have fixed costs.
Let them eat competition.
Unless you mean specifically textbooks, which are inflating because piracy has destroyed the demand (the annual revenue of the textbook market is down ~33% since 2014, despite increases in both prices and enrollment in colleges). You can see the causal link here as increases in pricing are lagging decreasing sales. If the prices were driving the decreasing sales you would expect the opposite behavior.
https://archive.attn.com/stories/1164/heres-exactly-why-coll...
Between 1975 and 2014 college books outpaced inflation over three times.
BMW is a trademark. You can't take a Kia and put a BMW badge on it. You can, in principle, make an exact replica of a particular BMW model and put your own badge on it, and in that sense BMW doesn't have a monopoly on "BMWs" except insofar as some of the parts may be patented or (for the software) copyrighted. But that isn't an analogy, it's the original thing.
Notice what happens when you take the original thing (intellectual property) out of the equation, your statement becomes "Bayer has a monopoly on aspirin", which they don't, because the Aspirin trademark became generic and it's not under patent.
Taking intellectual property out of a conversation about intellectual property has predictably strange and totally irrelevant results. Why is that surprising?
This is the same as saying a carpenter has a monopoly on their work. They can sell it to an employer up front by the hour or afterwards as a good. But no one else can come along and take it without paying.
You can try to subdivide any particular market but you still can't get yourself out of the second half of the post: If the products were actually substitutes then the prices would approach the marginal cost. If they're not, they're not.
College textbooks are an obvious example of this. Anybody can make "math textbook" but only one of them will have the homework problems your professor will assign in them, so you need that one and the publisher has a monopoly.
You literally have a government granted monopoly on producing books. How can you even bring in the free market into this?