Speaking of Monopoly....

If I ever had the motivation to write a 100,000 word post about why intellectual monopoly (intellectual property, to some) does more harm than good, and should be scaled back dramatically, if not eliminated outright, it would look a lot like this, a book by Michele Boldrin and David Levine called 'Against Intellectual Monopoly'.

The short version is that patents and copyright cause more harm by hurting consumers via the restriction of the sharing of knowledge and contents that they create benefits by encouraging people to create more new copyrightable or patentable ideas/content, and that there are better ways to encourage innovation than granting perpetual (or near perpetual) monopolies to creators of such things.

Via Ezra Klein.