Excellent debunk of the same old “copyright is a monopoly” whine we hear from the true monopolists in Silicon Valley.

For all these years, most of us have been playing Monopoly wrong.…What’s interesting, though, is how it came to be this way. It’s simple really: “no-one ever actually reads the rules of Monopoly. Monopoly is something you learn through word-of-mouth in childhood.” That’s right, since the game was released in 1935, we’ve all been playing a massive intergenerational and international game of telephone which resulted in wide-scale confusion. And if that’s not enough, I have news for you:

…that’s not the only thing a lot of people are getting wrong about monopoly.

But this time, I mean the economic concept. It’s an argument that every copyright nerd has heard… (and we all know to expect it in any dialogue with “copyright skeptics”). Here’s the short version: “Monopolies are bad. Copyright is a monopoly. Copyright is bad.” As it turns out, this argument, which appears – at least to the unsuspecting novice – to be a basic exercise in deductive reasoning, is in fact a logical fallacy.

Read the post on Copyright Alliance.