I figured — finally! Someone who feels my pain! Those little red green plastic houses that always get lost. The paper money gets all mixed up. And those cheesy Atlantic City locations! Who needs it?
But Against Monopoly isn’t against the Monopoly game (even though, none too ironically, they use Mr. Monopoly as a logo). It’s a group blog about, uh, monopoly. Intellectual property “monopolies,” i.e. any intellectual property (they say in their own copyright notice, “We don’t think much of copyright”).
It appears — if there’s a mission statement or an “about” or even a “home,” I can’t find it — to mostly be a very-anti-IP-rights blog. People, including people experienced and knowledgeable in the law, are getting fed up with overreaching by Big IP; that’s getting pretty obvious. And those people have technology on their side.
It looks interesting and iconoclastic (literally, I guess). It has Justin Levine, whom I know a little by total coincidence because of a recent comment here and from the SoCal Law Blog. But do iconoclastic and counter-cultural have to mean incomprehensible? It’s not as if pro-IP blogs should have a monopoly on organizational coherence. But check it out.
Originally posted 2014-02-27 18:09:58. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
Houses are green. Hotels are red.
IP rights are not “monopolies”–except in the sense that everyone has a “monopoly” on the market for his own goods.
Green, red — damn it, Bob, I want to “innovate”!
Their blog is indeed over the top. But you know, my point is that this is the sort of reaction that results from the overreaching that I document regularly here. I have been arguing for years that IP stakeholders are going to get blowback for their years of overplaying their hands, and I think that time is now.
It sure as hell is for copyright. Now that copyright is basically “forever,” the world — not methodically, but this is the result — is saying okay, fine. Screw copyright, then.