Why It’s Important For Us To Keep Explaining The Net And Its Civil Liberties

If Rick Falkvinge stopped saying "the copyright monopoly" and instead just said "copyright", then everything he said would make more sense, and more people might understand it more quickly, and he would be less frustrated. There is no such thing as "the copyright monopoly". Each individual copyright is a monopoly. But that's "monopolies", not one "monopoly".

There is perhaps a "copyright industry", consisting of companies and institutions that have a financial interest in the maximal copyright and maximal copyright enforcement. But those companies and institutions don't particularly have a monopoly on anything, other than their individivual copyrighted works.

For a clear statement of how copyright relates to the interests of the general public, read "Misinterpreting Copyright—A Series of Errors" (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.html) by Richard Stallman, which, unlike much of what Falkvinge writes, actually makes sense all the way through.