> On the other hand, and contrary to the article, I think the current problem with the music industry is not due to copyright but due to financial monopolies (t

> On the other hand, and contrary to the article, I think the current problem with the music industry is not due to copyright but due to financial monopolies (the labels) that are outmoded but hang on for dear live. How do you think they maintain those monopolies? Hint: a lot of it is directly related to copyright monopolies. Think of the hundreds or thousands of recording artists who would abandon the labels if they could get back the ability to publish their own songs, rather than having to ask the label for permission due to copyright assignments and work-for-hire claims. > Indeed here copyright is what would protect the artist from a label to just copy the music and selling it for profit. Nonsense. Copyright creates a market for the transfer of copyright, which immediately plays into the hands of large-scale distributors by ensuring nobody can compete with them. The economies of their scale are not natural economies; they're economies created by an artificially high barrier to entry for competitors, and the artificial scarcity imposed on markets by copyright law is the primary advantage enjoyed by such large-scale distributors. > Also, interestingly, Open Source would not work without copyright. That's right. The GPL, (to some extend) the Apache License, and many other licenses only work because of copyright, which grants the owner the right to license software to you under a license. Well, jkn already answered this point, but I'll add an additional comment on this subject: We'd be better off without copyleft licensing. Software does not have to be GPLed to be open source, and in fact the GPL and other copyleft licenses actually stand in the way of many open source projects making use of code distributed under those copyleft licenses.