“A pharmaceutical company that develops, patents, and wins approval on a new drug...has a monopoly on producing and selling that molecule...”
“At present Henry Holt and Company has a government-granted monopoly on any economic use of the sequence of words
Some say the world will end in fire...”
“These monopolies are enforced by state power just as the Wool-Weavers’ Guild’s monopoly was enforced by state power in the late middle ages in many countries in Europe.”
Go ahead and define some particular molecule and some discreet sequence of words as a commodity if you want, thereby sneaking it under the fence of monopoly territory. All I have to say is, “[Yawn].” Big deal. Cheap rhetorical trick. No matter what label you give them, serious and honest people will never believe a random publisher’s onwership of a certain title is equivalent to the British East India Company’s crown-granted trading monopoly.
By the way, the “enforced by state power” part makes for one of the weakest syllogisms I’ve ever read. Patent/copyright = state power and Wool-weavers guild = state power, therefore copyrights and patents are monopolies, is that it? Along those lines, I might as well say my state-enforced right to dispose of my labor as I see fit is a monopoly. I also, incidentally, have a monopoly on food grown in my backyard. I am my own little cartel!
But particular molecules most assuredly are commodities—that much is clear: ethanol, propane, polypropylene are all traded on commodity exchanges. (I’d have listed metals, but they are generally traded in metallic, rather than molecular form.)
Copyrights and patents artificially commodify sequences of words, sounds, or visual images, and anything one can convince the patent office is enough like a device that they’ll issue a patent, respectively, and grant a monopoly on the artificial commodity.
This is not to say that state-granted (and regulated) monopolies are not sometimes a necessary evil: utilities requiring intrusive infrastructure are a classical example, and the Founders gave a reason to grant monopolies to authors and inventors. The problem, and the reason I take strong exception to the notion that “intellectual property” is actually property, is that by conceiving of the state-granted monopoly as a property right, rather than an incentive for the creation of art or scientific discovery, we have come to a state in which copyrights and patents, do exactly the opposite of what the Founders intended.
I chose Frost’s Fire and Ice for a reason: the monopoly held by Henry Holt and Company prevented the American release of a song using the 1928 poem as lyrics a few years back. The suppression of derivative works is exactly contrary to the Founders intent. One would think that the Constitutional provision read, “To impeded progress in the sciences and useful arts by granting to commercial interests and literary estates, for indefinitely extendable times, exclusive right to the works of authors and inventors who have died or signed away rights to their works”.
Copyright and patent law is broken, and the first crack in the edifice was creation of the notion of “intellectual property”.