> If someone created that commercial movie, of course, they're are going to want to sell it. Who else, besides the owner, should have a right to sell movie tickets or DVDs for that movie? Pirates? Consumers? Who's being silly now?
Still you :)
The donut analogy fails because other people can sell donuts that look and taste exactly like the donut shop owner's donuts. This is normal competition and is a good thing. If the donut owner has some patented formula where only he can sell specific types of donuts, that's a statutory monopoloy again, but it's a patent monopoly, so let's focus on copyright.
As far as "who else should have the rights?", let's start with noting that, in the absence of copyright, everyone would have the rights to create and sell copies of the work. For works that are sufficiently old, this is what happens, with the result that you can pick up the complete works of Shakespeare for $3.99 off Amazon (fake example don't ask me for a link). All of society benefits from these lower prices, much more than societies benefit from cheap donuts because donuts are bad for you and lead to obesity and other health problems.
Of course, the problem with zero copyright is that the creators don't get paid and, therefore, many people who would create copyrighted works if they could monopolize the sales of them will instead choose not to create copyrighted works. There are a number of ways to resolve this. One way would be just having the government directly pay people to write books, paint artwork, and make movies. There are problems with that. Another way is copyright. There are also problems with that.
All in all, I think giving copyright owners some type of time-limited monopoly over their works is a good idea. So, to answer, "Who should have the rights?", I'd answer, "the creator only for about 20 years, and then everyone". It's not that copyright is bad -- it's a creative solution to a real problem. The issue is that right now, copyright lasts for 70 years past the death of the author. That's too damn long: most copyrighted works make a lot of money at first, and then revenue goes way down, so, pretty soon after the work is released, we could expire copyright on it and the creators wouldn't lose much, but society would gain quite a bit. 20 years is plenty of time for Marvel to recoup its costs for all their big-budget movies about buff men with giant, magical hammers.
But, like I said before, my opinions on copyright aren't really relevant to whether copyright is a monopoly. It is, and it is so described. This is true no matter what you think of it.
---linuxrocks123