Missing the point on Microsoft General IP Issues6/5/2000; 7:13:51 AM April 10, 2000: I missed this article on Friday... it has some great stuff in it.

The state is involved in creating [intellecutal-property based] monopolies, because there are choices to be made in designing property systems. Lots of them, in fact. One can agree with the idea that there should be intellectual property rights without answering the question "How far should those rights stretch? What conditions should Microsoft be able to attach to its software licenses? Restraints on competition? On criticism? To get the benefits of the state property grant, should it have to make source code available under a compulsory license? Should it be able to use copyright law to restrict its competitors from making "interoperable" products?"

In the Microsoft case, indeed in almost all of the digital monopoly cases, the dominant company will have to build its strategies around the contours of the original state monopoly we call intellectual property. Expand those rights, and the monopolies form quicker, grow larger.

If I had my way, when all was said and done, while I'd clean up the system and eliminate a lot of ambiguity, which might immediately seem to constrict the rights people currently seem to have (like, oh, say, public annotation), it would actually contract the 'rights' of the owners significantly. Kiss the DMCA goodbye, for instance. (Making the act of breaking copyright protection for the legal purpose of creating a backup copy? Nonsense!)