One thing to note is that every piece of software is born with a government-granted monopoly (copyright title) around itself. This monopoly is strengthened by t

One thing to note is that every piece of software is born with a government-granted monopoly (copyright title) around itself. This monopoly is strengthened by the fact that software has strong dependencies that don't exist for other kinds of creative works. You can't buy and run a Windows app without also buying and running Windows[0] - there really isn't an analogue to this in other forms of creative media. If you ran any other kind of business with the same level of monopolistic zeal as a software company does, you would almost certainly be in violation of antitrust law. [0] Yes I know WINE exists. It doesn't really affect the argument here; the fact that it's legal to reimplement APIs merely puts upper bounds on the size of the software monopoly. And those bounds are really high - reimplementation is far more difficult than just, say, pirating Windows.