&gt; Technically to consider it a rent the copyright holder would not be producing anything, which just isn&#x27;t true.<p>Even by the (overly restrictive, IMO, as it excludes economic monopoly rents that are not derived from government-granted monopolies), copyright and patent are sources of rents drawn on the government-issued monopoly right to exclude others from duplicating the covered subject matter (or, in the case of patent, even independently developing it).<p>Even that restrictive definition upthread does not included the requirement that the rent-seeker was not required to produce something in order to <i>secure</i> the government-granted privilege from which it extracts rents.