 The Latter-Day Liberty Podcast, episode 19. Hello everyone, welcome back to the Latter-Day Liberty Podcast with your hosts, Matt Kent and Daryl Portzline. Once again, we are here talking about a very interesting topic. Today, we're going to be discussing intellectual property and intellectual property rights and how they're protected and maybe some of the, I don't know, problems that come along with that. In order to talk about that, we've actually got Stefan Kinsella with us. Stefan Kinsella is a practicing patent attorney, a libertarian writer and speaker, director of the Center for Study of Innovative Freedom and founding and executive editor of Libertarian Papers. We really do appreciate him being here. We want to welcome him to the show. Welcome Stefan. Hey, glad to be here. Awesome. Okay. So, digging right in, like I mentioned in the intro, we wanted to talk about intellectual property and so, first off, before we get started, I did want to make sure that we're all starting off on the same footing on the same page. So, when we talk about intellectual property, not necessarily how you and I might view it, but how it normally is referred to, what are we talking about when it comes to intellectual property? Well, okay, so we have, this is such a hard topic to discuss in a short timeframe and I've struggled with it over the years. If you do a short version of it, people aren't going to get it. Intellectual property, most people think of it as, so most people just think of, you know, to them, laws in the background, laws there to protect what's important in life, right, in a legal sense. Property rights, land, cows, I don't know, cars, contracts, owning your wife, whatever. Just a joke, just a joke. But and so, most people also understand that the intellect is part of what makes us human and what's important, right, so the way we create things, we create wealth, the way we have transformed the environment is through our intellect and that involves intellectual creativity and innovation, right, scientific innovation, engineering innovation, machines and also artistic and other types of creations and the law has sort of, for various reasons, which we can go into if we need to, but has grown up to protect those types of interests as well and people naturally think that the law should protect things that are like economically valuable and important to them. So intellectual property, I would just say from the common person's point of view is a subset of the things that property rights or law protect and intellectual property primarily protects inventions, which is covered by legislation called patent law and it covers artistic or creative, artistic creations, right, which is covered by copyright. There's other things called trademark and trade secret, but that gets us too far afield. So most people sort of think those are subsets or types, maybe weird types, but types of property law or property rights. But, you know, from the perspective of libertarians who've looked at it closely, we have, or at least I have a lot of problems with it. And by the way, I'm a patent lawyer, as you guys know. So I actually practice this. I've been practicing since 1992 or 1993 as a patent attorney. So I know the field very well and, you know, I tried for years to find a justification for what I was doing for a living. And I wasn't satisfied with Ayn Rand's justifications and other people's justifications. And so I searched and searched and searched and searched. And finally I concluded, I realized why I'm coming up with no answer. And that's because this is actually contrary to property rights. And we can go into that if you want. But my view is that intellectual property is nothing but a restriction against competition, it's a protection, it's protectionism, and it's completely contrary to justice, property rights, the common law, free markets, everything. Contrary to what most people think about it. Yes. And let me latch on to kind of something you said there. And maybe you can elaborate a little bit. So you're actually, it sounds like you're actually advocating that intellectual property is not really property at all. So what makes it, what's different about it that makes it different than, you know, a car or your house or your land? Right. Well, over the years, as I've discussed this with thousands of people, I've come to think that that way of putting it is like, like the question is not what's property. So we have to go back to why we're asking the question, what's property? What do we mean, what do we mean by the word property? Um, the word property is just, I mean, if you think about it etymologically, it just means a characteristic or a feature of something. It's a property of that thing, right? So I think what happened was we, we recognized in the dawn of human history that there's the possibility of conflict over scarce resources. And some of us sort of becoming civilized and we preferred cooperation to violent conflict. So there naturally emerged norms or rules that determined who could use a given resource when there's a conflict. So you, if there's a conflict over a resource, there's a rule that says, who's the owner of that thing? Who is the proper owner of that thing? Who's the proprietor of that thing? That's where the word property comes in. Who's the proper owner of that resource? So the word property really means who's the proper owner of a thing? And then we naturally just start using casually in informal speech, the word property to refer to the thing. But in reality, the right way to say it is here's a resource that people can have a conflict over who has a property right in that thing or who has, who is the owner of that thing. So to call the thing, the property is a little bit confusing. Because when you ask the question, you just ask, you're saying, is that thing property or not? That's never, the question is never is a thing property. The question is, is this thing something people can have a contest over? And if so, who's the owner? Who's the property owner of that thing? The question is never is, is it property? And so the objection to intellectual property is not that ideas and recipes and innovations and inventions. The objection is not that they're not property. The objection is that to try to recognize them as property in the law all always necessarily undercuts the existing property rights of owners. And the reason is that let's just take a patent, which covers an invention, a new idea, a new way of doing something, a new mousetrap, or let's take a novel by Shakespeare or play by Shakespeare or a novel by, you know, some modern author. J.K. Rowling, for example, the Harry Potter author. These ideas or patterns are simply information, but it always has to be stored or represented on an underlying substrate or physical medium, because information can never exist in an abstracto like by itself. It can't just be free floating. It has to be in patterning of an underlying material thing. That's how information exists, even if it's in your brain. Your brain is a substrate. So information can never exist on its own. It's always an in patterning of a thing. But that thing is already owned because it's a scarce resource that someone has ownership of, according to normal property rights. So if you were to say, for example, if you own a red balloon, you own the red balloon. But if you say, because you own the red balloon, you own redness. Well, then that means that you own everyone else's red balloon or everyone else's red thing in the universe, right? So that would give you property rights in their things that they've already owned. So the fundamental problem with intellectual property is not that the things represented are not property, is that they're not scarce resources. And when you try to assign resources in them, you cannot do it. But what you end up doing is reassigning resources and already owned scarce things. So it basically intellectual property always amounts to a type of theft, a type of institutionalized theft or reassignment of resources. Could you elaborate on that just a bit more? Like I mean, I've I've looked into this as well. And I and this is something that actually very much intrigues me. How how does that end up being a theft? You know, but because like so. So let's let's take I ran for I ran is one of the premier defenders of intellectual property. So she would say, for example, that the reason you should have the intellectual property or patents and copyrights is because the foundation of rights is the creation of material values or values. OK, now that's one argument she has. Now, I think that's completely flawed and we can go into that if we have time. But she also says, like in Galt's speech, she has a Howard John Galt saying no man may initiate the use of force against another person. So that's like a foundational libertarian principle. We all sort of we recognize that fundamentally the only way to violate individual rights is through force. Now, force is an actual material thing, right? Force means the physical manipulation of a scarce resource because force can't manipulate ideas. I mean, force only manipulates physical things. Just think about the the non aggression axiom principle or the non initiation of force principle that even I ran propounded. She said, you cannot hit another person. So what she's saying is, as long as you don't physically manipulate or invade the borders of someone else's body or the things that they've acquired, then you're not violating their rights. So she recognized and I think libertarians recognize that really in the end, when you're talking about rights, OK, rights are something that are enforceable in the law, in other words, forces in there for a reason because physical force is used to actually wrestle control over a given resource. So if let's take us, let's let's transport it to the modern realm. I sue you for infringing my copyright. OK, now, I don't really want your ideas. What I want is your money. So I want to use this law as an excuse to take your money. So our dispute is really over your money. Or if there's a patent lawsuit, OK, if I sue you for infringing my patent, like let's say I'm selling EpiPens and I'm selling them for a thousand dollars a piece, even though it cost me a dollar each to manufacture, I'm selling them for a thousand dollars each because I have a monopoly because the law, the patent law says no one else can make an EpiPen. OK, this is actually slightly reflective of an ongoing suit right now. Although there's the FDA is involved as well, but just an example. If I if if I'm selling these pins for a thousand dollars a pop, I'm making a monopoly profit. If someone else starts making a competitive EpiPen with their own factory, their own resources, I can use the force of the courts and the force of the state and the force of the law to make them stop selling that pin. So I'm basically assuming control of their factory. In other words, I'm assuming a property right. What I really want control of is there is their factory. I want to have a legal right to veto how they use their factory. And in the law, that's called a negative servitude, which is type of property right. So I'm using the patent law to assume control of how they use their own property. And as I said in copyright, I'm using copyright law. I'm using the force of the state and the courts to use state force to tell people you can't make a copy of this movie. You can't make a you can't make a sequel to this novel. You can't publish it on your own paper. So I'm basically using these laws as an excuse to assume control over how they use their own resources that they that they owned. So that's why I say that patent and copyright law and actually all forms of intellectual property law are disguised forms of theft because they basically reassigned property rights from the natural owners to people that the state grants intellectual property property rights to. OK. And and and I really like that that example that for me, that that clears up quite a bit of the I don't know if I would see the theoretical side, but you know, the explanation behind it. So when this comes up and I've had these discussions with with quite a few people, including a friend of mine that's that's very liberty leaning, you know, but that whenever it comes to this kind of stuff, I feel like with intellectual property, we talk about patents and we talk about copyrights. And when I talk about getting rid of those, the argument for those things usually turns utilitarian, right? There's there's always the reason is is is for the benefit of everybody else. And the first thing that usually comes up is, you know, how would we incentivize people to invent things? I mean, you look at the Wright brothers, right? They came up with the the the airplane specifically for the patent. Anyways, what would you say to that? Well, there's so many. So the problem with people that are in favor of IP is nine tenths of the time, they really don't even understand the IP. They're in favor of like they'll even the proponents of it will confuse trade secret trademark copyright and patent. And I understand that because it took me a while to learn it myself as a specialist, but they're in favor of a system they don't really understand. And then if you point out the numerous obvious injustices, I mean, I can give you a thousand examples. They will just say something like so they have two responses. They'll say, well, I'm not in favor of that. OK, or they'll say, well, even regular property law has injustices. So they're almost saying, well, yeah, it sucks, but what you're in favor of sucks, too, so the whole world sucks. So there are they don't really have a positive argument. Their argument is that, well, I don't know. So if you say, well, OK, if you're if you're not in favor of the current system, what exactly are you in favor of? And they'll say, well, I don't know. I'm not an expert. And you're like, OK, well, I don't know what I'm defending. And then they'll say, well, I'm not in favor of state law legislation. I'm just in favor of natural IP law. And I'll say, well, what does that look like? They say, I don't know. And I'll say, well, but you're defending the current IP system, which has all these injustices, which you every one I come up with, you agree is unjust. They'll say, I'm not in favor of the current IP system. And they say, well, let's abolish it. They say, no, I don't want to abolish it. So there are against people that want to abolish it. So that means they're effectively in favor of it. OK, so that's kind of the the the framework for how you how how these people approach this matter. And even though I don't understand it, I want to get people that will enforce it for me. Something I don't necessarily I can't explain, but I do want. Yeah, so they say they're not in favor of it, but there are against people that want to abolish it. And yet they don't have a theory of the system that would be better. So I would say there's a couple of problems with their argument. Number one, with a utilitarian argument. Well, there's so many problems, we can only go into a couple. There's the Austrian argument that values cannot be cardinally measured, right? Values are subjective and they're not interpersonally comparable. And even if they were, it would be unethical to take money from A to give it to be just because B would be better off. They still theft. I mean, that's kind of a fundamental ethical principle. So there's so many problems with it. But another problem is they don't have any evidence to back up their case. All the evidence that I can find, right, from done by empirical minded economists and other researchers is either ambiguous or they conclude we can't figure that out, right? Or they just say, we don't know. Or we kind of think it's our intuition. They have no evidence, really. All the evidence indicates that copyright and patent both severely distort and retard innovation. So all the empirical evidence we have is that at best it causes a lot of problems. So if you were just a pure, utilitarian, empirical minded person, you would have a heavy bias against intellectual property law. You would say, look, let's not restrict people's natural liberties to trade and compete and to have free speech and freedom of expression. And by that, I mean to publish books, to publish criticisms, to quote things, right, or to innovate, to build incrementally in other people's innovations or to compete with them, to do what they're doing in the market by having similar products. This is what we call the free market. So patent laws obviously restrict that and copyright laws obviously restrict what you can publish and what you can say and what you can perform and what tattoos you can have on your face. I mean, this is literally true. So just it seems like the obvious view of this is that it restricts liberty. So if you're at all liberty minded, then you would have to have an argument to overcome this. In other words, the burden proof is on you. And if your argument is utilitarian, there's just no evidence there. So that's less like the first reply to the utilitarian is to say, provide your evidence because the evidence I've seen is against intellectual property. There is just no proof and it's just common sense. How would give the government giving a monopoly to someone for 20 years over an innovation, which allows them to stop competition? OK, which obviously would retard people from innovating in that area because they can't sell products that they come up with in that area during the period of a monopoly. How would that even be expected to incentivize innovation? It doesn't. It simply doesn't. All it does is incentivize someone to reveal their secrets earlier than they otherwise would. That's called disclosure in the patent law in order to get a monopoly. But they're doing it to get a monopoly to have higher prices on products. OK, so that's one argument. The second argument, which is more fundamental, I would say is when someone says to me, hey, cancella, you're against patents, but what's the incentive to innovate without patents? Now, the presumption to their question is that the purpose of law is to come up with incentives for people to innovate to the to the optimum amount. I guess, I mean, my answer is I don't really care. The purpose of law is to protect property rights and to do justice and to solve disputes when disputes arrive and to let us live in cooperation and peace together. The purpose of law is not to ensure that there's the optimum amount of mouse traps in the world. Right. The purpose of law is not to ensure that there's the optimum incentive to innovate in the world. That's like a central planning type of you. It has nothing to do with libertarianism, nothing to do with free whites. I don't know why people even ask the question. So I actually get annoyed when people ask me, well, and by the way, most of the time, the questions are not serious. They're disingenuous. So someone will say something like, how am I supposed to make money as a novelist in your world? You know, like it's like it's a challenge. Like if I don't give them an answer, then they're going to be a favor of statism. Like, you know. And so but sometimes I'll say, OK, well, here's how a novelist can make money. You could you could do it, J.K. Rowley, that you could write novels. You could sell them on Kindle. You could tell your fan. You could build a fan base. And you could you could consult on movies by giving them an imprimatur. You know, you could say I have the sequel coming out. And if I get 10,000 people on Kickstarter, giving $10 each, you know, whatever, there's ways people could come up with. And so as soon as you answer the question, they'll say, OK, well, how am I going to make money if I'm a poet? In other words, they will never stop with their questions because they're not really serious about their they. They want a guarantee that whatever their vision is of the ideal society is going to be supported is very similar to the libertarian dilemma when people say, OK, you want to get rid of the welfare state. I'll agree with you. If you can guarantee that there will never ever be a poor person ever in your libertarian society is not taken care of. So they want to guarantee it. They want us to say, who's going to take care of the poor? And you say, well, charity is going to take care of them. And there won't be as many poor people because we'll be richer. That's not good enough for these people because they want a guarantee. But of course, there's no guarantee in the state because the state's going to collapse, right? And there's going to be poor people created by their policies. But they just want to think that they're in favor of a guarantee, right? It's the vision of the anointed. Self-congratulation is the basis of social policy. Right. There's kind of an unfair standard there. Definitely seems seems that way. Now, I kind of wanted to to make this a little bit more real because you actually kind of asked opposed, you know, kind of what a very common question and said that often these questions are disingenuous. I have a very similar question from a listener who actually just so happens to be my dad, one of our three listeners. And he is actually he is actually a musician and he he composes music on occasion and he hasn't really gone very far with that. But he said, you know, if I wanted to take composing more seriously and and write compositions and try to make money off of that, how could I possibly make money off of that? Right. People could just copy it for free. And so what would you what kind of at least what kind of ideas do you think could could help ease ease his mind on that? OK, well, there's a few things. First of all, I don't mind answering questions if they're like serious, like people just curious, like how would it happen? But if the premise of the question is unless you unless you show me a way that's guaranteed for me to make an income, then I'm not going to support what you're in favor of. Then they're not really in favor of liberty or justice, because their goal is to make sure they have a guaranteed income. I mean, it's like having an argument with someone who's on Social Security and you say, look, I'm a libertarian. I think we should abolish Social Security. They're like, well, how am I supposed to get my income? If I mean, that's not really the right question to be asking. OK, but I would also say the following things. Number one, empirically, and I think common sensically, we all know the truth is that most people create artistic works not for monetary profit. This is just the way the world works. People create and even even inventions, they do it for other reasons and they can profit from that in various ways. Second of all, in today's digital world, whether we have copyright law or not, there is piracy that is widespread. It is and this is one reason I'm against these laws is because they're unnatural. They're unnatural because you just cannot stop the spread of information, which is what these laws try to do, but they always fail. They have people that are victims of these laws, people that are in jail because they copyrighted too much, they pirated too much. But there's going to be millions of people that skirt these laws because it's just unnatural. So the point is, whether you have copyright or not or not, if you have a new innovation or a new idea, people will be able to copy it, emulate it, build on it and pirate it, whether there's copyright law or not. And in fact, of course, that's the movie, the movie studios, for example, and the book publishers face and the music industry faces this right now. As soon as they release a new song that's popular or a new movie, there are millions, if not billions of pirated copies available right away on the Internet. This is happening right now. OK, so whether we have IP law or not, this is a reality that the producers of this content have to face. So the question that your father is asking is basically if we didn't have IP law, how would what would we see? Well, we would see what we're seeing right now. We would see a world where copying is easy and you have to deal with that and you have to find ways around it. OK, now, in particular cases, music, production, novels, we can we can we can we can predict what probably would happen, which is that a novelist could do what I proposed earlier, like J.K. Rowling could write the first Harry Potter novel as an as a welfare mother, what she did on the subway or whatever she did. And then she gets a following. She sells them for ninety nine cents on Kendall and then people start pirating her. She makes five thousand dollars, ten thousand dollars. I don't know. But then she gets a worldwide following and she says, hey, all my million fans out there, I have a new novel out there. And as soon as I get, you know, one hundred thousand people to give me five dollar pledge to buy my novel, I'll release it. So she's got five hundred thousand dollars right there. And then five movie studios start moving in to make a movie version of the first novel, which they can do freely because there's no copyright. And one of them says, hey, I'll get more, more of her fans will come to my movie if she endorses it. So they offer to give her one tenth of the royalties if she reviews the script and endorses it so she can get deals that way. And then she can have novel number three and four and five. You know, a musician can obviously, you know, I just went to the Coldplay concert in in in Dallas, much to all of my friends dismay because apparently Coldplay is no longer cool. I don't know. I took my 13 year old there. I thought they were pretty cool. But I still like them. They prop, I think I estimated just by ticket sales, et cetera, for for like a three hour concert in Dallas, they probably made half a million dollars or a million dollars each that one night from purely performing on stage. Even if they had given their music away for free or it had all been pirated, they would have made a million bucks each in one night. OK, because of popularity had nothing to do with copyright. People want to see people perform live. So for music, people can perform live for novels. They can do sequels or they can do endorse the movie rights or they can get a job teaching English because they're a well known novelist. There's any number of ways you can profit. And this is just two examples. The problem is when you give answers to these questions, the answer the questions will be nonending because they will just turn to the next question. Well, what if I want to make origami bird figures with my paper clips? How am I going to make money off that in your world? I don't know. This is, you know, I can't give an answer for everything. I can just tell you that we should abolish patented copyright law. Yeah, and and and I think that personally, I have I mean, kind of like what you're saying that if you want to know what it would look like without these laws, it's kind of already happening. I mean, you just you cannot keep the innovation that's going on down. It's it's going to keep coming back. And I'm just I think that we need to I at least personally have a lot of faith in in the ability of I mean, entrepreneurs have been dealing with tough situations and figuring out how to monetize things for for thousands of years. And I think that they will will be able to continue figuring out ways to do that as the spread of information becomes easier and easier. Well, I think so, too. But I think we have to realize there are some things that is going to be hard to monetize and people will find it difficult to find ways to monetize. But you know, the free market judgment of that is you shouldn't be doing that. I mean, if you can't do something that turns a profit, just don't do it. Well, I'm going to say most of those things are probably hard to monetize now. Anyways, right? Like that. Well, of course, they're hard to monetize now, too. So the only way to monetize it, the way to understand the real implication of this IP view is that some advocates of it, some of the like some of the utilitarian advocates, like even like Bernie Sanders, number one and Alex Tabarak, a libertarian, they say that we should replace the patent system instead of giving people monopolies over their inventions, right? Which obviously harms competition and innovation. We should have we should let there be free competition and innovation. But the government should take tax dollars, give it to some kind of special committee. They can give out prizes every year to people to come up with the most valuable innovations. But they're talking like $80 billion a year for medical innovations. Now, I'm a patent lawyer, so I understand that the patent system is very wide in scope and covers hundreds of fields of technology, medical devices of which is just one narrow slice. So if you take this idea and you extend it on a principal basis to the entire field covered by patents, in other words, if you say, OK, let's replace the entire patent system with a taxpayer funded reward system. OK, so you have to multiply this 80 billion, which is just for medical innovations by all the the entire circle, the entire pie of innovation that the patent system is designed to incentivize. We're talking like $20 trillion a year. I'm not joking. I mean, this is maybe even more. So it's like, you know, the federal governments, I mean, the United States GDP is 16 trillion a year. The federal government's tax revenues are about 4 trillion a year. We're talking 20 trillion a year or more to replace the patent system with sort of an efficient utilitarian version of it. Now, what does that tell you about the damage that the actual patent system is doing? It's probably retorting innovation by trillions of dollars a year. Right, because that's because that's what they want to replace it with. That's what that kind of thinking leads to. It leads to taxes and government grants of privilege and government grants of taxpayer money, redistribution of income. The entire thing is completely, completely. It's like the most antithetical thing to the free market you could think of. And yet these people, these hucksters, have been booed with us in the thinking that it's a property right. So they call it intellectual property used to be called, by the way, the patents patents originated in something called the Statute of Monopolies in 1623 in England and copyrights originated in the Statute of Ann in 1709. And yet you now have it called intellectual property like it's a natural property right, which is completely wrong. It's not a property right at all. It's not natural at all. It's completely a creature of legislation and completely the result of government attempts to reduce competition, right, to protect favored people from competition and to restrict freedom of press and freedom of speech through copyright law. See it now. And OK, and I I am totally when you've gone through some of these numbers, I've read I was reading another article the other day specifically about the medical license or the medical patents and stuff like that and medical devices and that alone as well. You've you've brought up in the past that, you know, it actually kills people because you can't get medications out in time for people that, you know, and it just I don't know that kind of stuff. Well, OK, let me interrupt real quick and you can continue. But I just listened the other day to the Yaron Brooke podcast. Yaron Brooke is like the leading objectivist guy after Leonard Peacock, I guess. And he had Adam Mossoff, who's the leading objectivist proponent of IP on and they had a whole episode just like in the last week or two on intellectual property. And it's the most it was like two hours of the worst. It would take me like 20 hours to do to Fisket, right? As like every other sentence was so bad, but in the middle of it, someone someone called in and they said, what about the EpiPen, right? So this EpiPen example, they said, oh, this guy brought the EpiPen and because of patents, he's raising the price really high. And so these guys start snickering and Adam Mossoff says something like, oh, well, the EpiPen, see, this is another example of people don't understand IP and they criticize it. He goes, the patent expired a long time ago. The reason that they can charge so much is because the FDA gives them a monopoly. So first of all, I'm not actually sure that he's right, there's no patent on it because I think there's an ongoing patent lawsuit. But let's let's assume he's right. What he's saying is what he's saying is we should criticize an FDA granted monopoly, but not the patent monopoly. It expired a long time ago. So during the first 20 years when there was a monopoly, that was OK. It's like the most ridiculous argument for this stuff you can imagine. So my point is the FDA and the patent system both combined to create monopolistic protections from competition, which cost prices to go up. And it does literally cause supply to go down. And it does literally cause deaths. And there are documented cases of people that have died because they can't get medicines because there is a limited supply because there's only one supplier and they can't supply enough in a given surge or whatever. Right. And I've got cases on my website at C4SIF.org, which documents some of this stuff. There's there's something called Fabry's disease, just FABRY, Fabry's disease. People have died because there's only one supplier of the drug and the FDA combined with patent protection has limited the production of supply in America. So people think this is academic. It's not just that it's not just you have to pay $15 instead of $14 for an ad deal or something. It's really causing restrictions of supply and causing people to die, like literally. This is awful. Now, this is awful. When you put it that way, I think you've got us convinced. So this will probably have to be our last question. But I wanted to get your thoughts on. On maybe maybe other. So taking us back to a definition of property or at least this idea of scarcity is important when we're talking about property rights. Yes. What about property that's not as tangible as things like land? But is still scarce in a sense. So the only example I can think about the top of my head is like radio frequencies. Your use of a radio frequency could interfere with my use of the same frequency. Is it OK to have a right in that kind of property? Or what are your thoughts on that? Well, I've written on this before. I'm I that's one of the more gray or difficult areas. Just like rights on the moon or rights in the atmosphere or rights in the ocean or air or airspace like, you know, where the where the airplanes fly, fly, things like that. But the the fundamental thing to recognize is that the ultimate issue, the ultimate function of property rights and the ultimate definition, ultimately, property rights is a property right is the exclusive right. Well, it's the right to exclude, actually. I we can't get into legal theory here, but it's not the right to use. It's the right to exclude other people from using. So for example, if you have a gun, it doesn't mean you have the right to use it because some ways that you could use it could hurt other people. It means you can stop other people from using it without your permission. Same thing with your body. You have the right to prevent other people from using your body. So ultimately, rights are negative. The rights to prevent other people from using a given resource that you could have a conflict over. Right. So ultimately, a property right is the exclusive allocation of the right to use or the right to exclude the use of a given resource over which people could have a conflict. If there's no possibility of a conflict, there's no purpose to a property right. So property rights are always, always necessarily some kind of indication of a who the owner is of a given right. OK, so when you come to the more gray area cases, the difficult questions like electromagnetic spectrum, what you asked about with a radio wave question like who can broadcast in a given area. The the law that has arisen in the common law in the Roman law has largely been based upon these common sense, more or less libertarian notions that recognize that look, we have a scarcity of resources. Sometimes we have a conflict and when we have a conflict, we have to decide who is the better owner of that resource. So we go to some kind of neutral tribunal, a court or a judge or an arbitral committee, whatever, right? And we try to find who's the best person that has the best claim to this resource. And we can come up with arguments for this. And that's all we can do in such situations. We can say, look, I inherited it from my father or I was the first one to use it or I got it by contract from this guy, but we come up with arguments, right? And then we try to do justice in this case. And over time, principles emerge that we call property law, right? Or property rights and these rights people recognize and they are guided by them in society and over time, they get more and more refined as people get more and more wealth and a more capitalist society and they have more and more money to afford to litigate ever more trivial disputes that they otherwise would have settled without any written description of, right? So over time, the law gets more and more granular and gets more and more refined. And if it's more, it's too egregious or people sense that the decision that has resulted in a line of cases, they don't like it. They can contract around it. At least they're aware of what the rule is in the given community. And they can say, look, I don't agree with this rule. Let's have a contract and let's agree to a different rule. So over time, and then the law recognizes the contracts people make because that's part of custom and part of a tradition and part of how people interact and that informs the way you interpret their their future dealings with each other. So over time, the law will deal with these things. To come back to your question, the common law in America was actually starting to develop a common law of property rights in the electromagnetic spectrum, which, by the way, was written about by two great objectivists, thinkers, David Kelly and Roger Donway, who are both friends of mine. And I know and it's called a Lezé Parler. You could look up this little monograph and they were explaining that in the in the early part of the nineteen hundreds, the courts were starting to develop property rights in this new. scarce medium and then the government intervened and created legislation and they created the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, and they just took over the whole thing and they have co-opted it in that way. So it was basically a wholesale expropriation of this entire field of property. So what we have now is not a representation of what we could expect to develop in a in a in a decentralized private system. What we had early in the nineteen hundreds is more of an indication of what we can expect. And so I ultimately am lean towards the way the courts were going, which is that if you are the first one to start using a given scarce spectrum in a given region, then you have a property right in that and other people can't interfere with your communication. Now, it's a complicated area, but that's kind of an indication of how I think it should be approached and would be approached in a private law society. So that's interesting that, yeah, the the market was already solving that problem before somebody else stepped in. It seems to be kind of the the running theme for the for the government as far as I I can see. But well, you know, Stefano, we really do appreciate you joining us today. And we this this has cleared up quite a bit for me. I will put another plug in there for your book against intellectual property and we'll actually put a link to it. It's either on I've seen it on your website and I've seen it on the Mises Institute's website. But it really was that that last I don't know, I would say that the last nail in the coffin for me as far as intellectual property goes. So I would recommend it to others to read as well. But but thank you so much for joining us today. If people want to get to know more about what you're doing or follow you a little bit, is there some place they can go to do that? Yeah, just my my basic website, stephanconcello.com will take them to all my writings and that should get them there. I have a kind of my podcast. I don't really do a regular podcast like you guys do. I just every time I do an interview, I just put this on my podcast. So it's just an RSS feed. It's a collection of of everything I do that's in audio or visual form. Plus, my writings are all all there for free. Awesome. Online. Awesome. Well, we would just appreciate you getting permission to use this one before you do. I'm just kidding. No, that's great. We really do appreciate it. And we will have that link on on the show notes page for this episode. It'll be on LDLpodcast.com forward slash 19. But again, thank you so much for Stefan. Thanks so much. All right. That will wrap us up for today. Thank you so much for joining us. And we will see you again next week. Remember to check out the show notes page for this episode. It'll be LDLpodcast.com forward slash 19. And we'll have all the links in there that you can find out more about Stefan everything that he's doing. And again, I would just that a plug for his book against intellectual property. He makes he he's able to take his time and make all of his arguments in there and it works out really well. So anyways, we will talk to you again later. We'll see you.