Against Intellectual Monopoly

inhibit competition but allowing copyright such as the General Public License (GPL) that serves
to enhance it. However, we think that the government trying to enforce antisecrecy
agreements such as the GPL makes little more sense than its enforcement of secrecy
agreements. Moreover, we doubt in practice that, in the absence of copyright, source
code secrecy would prove an important practical problem.

    5. The estimate of Linux's 25 percent share of the server market is from http://news.
zdnet.co.uk/software/0, 1000000121,2122729,00.htm (accessed February 23, 2008).
    6. Statistics on the popularity of Web servers can be found at http://www.netcraft.com
(accessed February 23, 2006). Updated information about the Netcraft Web server
survey, reporting that as of January 2007 Apache stands at 60 percent of the market
and Microsoft a distant second at 30 percent, can be found at http://news.netcraft.
com/archives/web_server_survey.html (accessed February 20, 2007).
    7. Brown (2005).
    8. A fairly complete, but short enough to be readable, story of the open-source software
movement, drawing interesting and clear parallels with two nineteenth-century
episodes of collective invention in the complete absence of intellectual monopoly
that we also often quote - for example, the Cleveland blast furnace and the Cornish
steam power engine - can be found in Nuvolari (2005).
    9. Information about the viability of the Red Hat approach to producing and distributing open-source software can be found, for example, in Gilbert (2005), which
reports that Red Hat revenues were growing at a rate of 46 percent a year in mid2005, and in Flynn and Lohr (2006), who describe the details of a deal between
Novell and Microsoft through which the latter would ensure that Novell's version
of Linux could operate together with Windows in the corporate environment.
    10. Plant (1934), p. 172.
    11. Plant (1934), p. 172.
    12. The earnings of English authors from American publishers is discussed in Plant
(1934). His perspective on intellectual property is similar to ours.
    13. In 1850, the U.S. population from the census was 23.2 million; in 1851, the U.K.
population from the census was 27.5 million. During those same years, per capita
gross domestic product, in 1996 U.S. dollars, was roughly $1,930 in the United States
and $2,838 in the United Kingdom. Literacy rates in both countries were roughly
85 percent. Thus our conclusion that the market for books was of similar size in the
two countries.
    14. The story of the 9/11 Commission Report is from several sources, primarily Koerner
(2004) and Wyatt (2004).
    15. Koerner (2004), p. 1.
    16. Wyatt (2004).
    17. That the St. Martin's version was a best seller is reported in the Washington Post
(2004), with the Norton version at No. 1 and the St. Martin's version at No. 8.
    18. May (2005).
    19. Associated Press (2005).
    20. Details about the Iraq Study Group report and its sale performances are widely
available on the Web, e.g. at http://www.cnn.com/2006/SHOWBIZ/books/12/07/us.
iraq.book.ap/index.html (accessed December 25, 2006).
    21. The initial print run of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was widely reported;
see, for example, http://www.veritaserum.com (accessed February 23, 2008).
    22. Information on J. K. Rowling's previous occupation is from an online biography at http://www.essortment.com/jkrowlingbiogr_reak.htm (accessed February 23,
2008).
    23. The same Spanish newspapers involved in the Gedeprensa project have been quite
eager to publish editorials by one of us and fellow Spanish economist Juan Urrutia on a wide variety of economic subjects. Not surprisingly, they have refused to publish
editorials by the same authors criticizing the Gedeprensa proposal. In case you are
interested, the editorials are at the Web site http://Iasindias.com/articulos/grandes-
firma s/gedeprensa.html (accessed February 23, 2008).

    24. The story of Benjamin Day is taken from Surowiecki (2003), available at http://
www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/07/14/030714ta_talk_surowiecki (accessed February 24, 2008.) who correctly notes: "This is how American business worked until
very recently. Innovators came up with new ways of selling products, handling
suppliers, running organizations, or managing information. If the ideas were good,
the innovators got rich, but they also got imitated, which made them less rich
than they might have been. It was great for everyone else, though. The