 Okay, starting on part two, I guess this will be Cancel on Liberty 416. Maybe we can do this in just two parts. I'm going to continue on here, but let me mention, yeah, in the beginning of the last one, I actually forgotten. The earlier dispute was about not books, but it was about the anarchist HBO series, which I mentioned later on. So let's continue on. And I can even say, I will give this to one person under the condition that they won't let anybody else hear it. And if they agree to that, that's a perfectly valid exchange. Okay, well, it's not an exchange, it's a contract, and it could be a valid contract, but the thing is, they don't exist. This is all just hypothetical. I don't think Larkin or his crew are going to make people sign these contracts. So the problem is this kind of language is what people use to justify IP. They say, well, you could get people to sign a contract, and therefore IP is legitimate because you could have gotten them to sign a contract. And IP, just like the government doing it is a more efficient way of doing this than having everyone sign individual contracts. So I don't know what you're talking about. Yeah, if you want, but let's think about the practicalities. Let's say you're a professor teaching in class and you tell the students, all right, I'm going to teach you a lot of knowledge and you're paying me to learn this, but I don't want you to ever use this again. And if you ever write a novel and I detect any influence of my thought on what you write, then I'm going to sue you for a million dollars and you're going to have to pay me because you're agreeing to this now. What moron would agree to this? Or let's take another example. Let's imagine a copyright free world in which there's Amazon doing this kind of self publishing Kindle stuff like they do now. So there's lots of people submitting manuscripts to Amazon for books. So let's say J.K. Rowling is this kind of welfare mom in England and she writes this Harry Potter novel and she publishes it on Amazon Kindle because she doesn't have a publisher. And it's popular. And so right away there's knockoffs, right? So she makes, I don't know, half a million bucks, but then the knockoffs start happening. I don't actually don't think that would happen. I don't think that she would lose a lot of sales because of knockoffs because why would I buy a fake Harry Potter book from, I mean kids like physical books. So why would I buy a fake one when I can buy the real one? Was it five dollars instead of seven? I mean it just doesn't make any sense. But the point is she's a breakthrough author, a breakout author. She would make a lot of money and she sells lots of books. Now I guess in the fevered imaginations of these people that are obsessed with paywalls, they imagine that especially like Larkin seems to think that the terms of service are of Odyssey and YouTube are just perfectly free market terms of service that they would have absent copyright and they're a stand-in for the agreement that this author would have with a customer, which is not a stand-in for it. So this is all just hypothetical attempt to justify doing a DMCA takedown, I believe. Okay, but anyway, imagine that JK Rowling or some publisher puts a book on Amazon and they say, Amazon, we would like you to sell this book for 10 bucks. But every customer that you have, we have a deal with you. You have to make them sign this long, onerous binding contract where they say, hey, I'm paying you $10 but I'm also agreeing to be liable for $10 million of damages. If I ever show anyone this book or learn from it or copy it or whatever, whatever the conditions are, it doesn't matter what the conditions are. Even if the condition is you can buy this book but you don't really own it. Like when you get this copy of the book in the mail, the physical book, you're not entitled to resell it, let's say. Right? You have to burn it when you're done with it and send us proof. Otherwise, we're going to sue you. Right? Again, of all these crazy conditions, trying to make a profit, which consumer is going to do this? No one. Because in a copyright free world, they're going to go to Amazon number two, Odyssey number two, whatever, who doesn't have these stupid conditions, who just gets pirated stuff without the author's permission, doesn't have an agreement with the author, and doesn't make their customers sign these stupid agreements. I mean, think about it. In a world of pirated content, it's really easy for people to get free content. The only reason they buy the legitimate content is because it's more convenient or because they want to support the author or something like that. But they're not going to like, so they're going to pay money but they're not going to like sign a contract obligating themselves to pay millions of dollars of damages if they use the stuff that they learn in a way that the author doesn't want them to. Like, I don't know, write a sequel. Like, let's say I read Harry Potter one and I don't like Harry Potter two, or three, four, five, or six, or seven. And I say, I think it'd be better if it ended this way and I write Harry Potter two myself. Well, she could sue me for derivative under copyright law. She could sue me for copyright infringement under the theory that I'm making a derivative work. But under Larkin's private contract copyright world, she could sue me if I signed an agreement saying I can't even use the ideas I learned from your book. I mean, I'm an electrical engineer. I learned lots of, I'm a lawyer. I learned lots of stuff in law school and engineering school from lots of textbooks and professors. And I've used that knowledge. Oh, no, I'm using knowledge that I learned. Oh, that's a math about the human civilization, I guess. What the hell? But the point is, no one's going to, these attempts to recreate something similar to patent or copyright law using contractual schemes are doomed to failure. They cannot work. They will not work. They're not market oriented. The only reason Amazon has these terms of service, which are unreasonable, is because they're forced to keep their DMCA in section 230 exclusions. That's it. The reason they do takedowns is because they have to, to avoid being sued by copyright fascists. Right? So let's not kid ourselves about this contract stuff. And when Larkin talks about, oh, you could have a contract, oh, you could, but it wouldn't work. And it wouldn't stop third parties. And that's not what Amazon's doing. It's a contract with Amazon and I'm not with you or the author. And the contract is only there because they're putting you up defensively to stop being, to avoid copyright, fascist copyright liability. Okay? If they give it to somebody else, they committed fraud or however you want to describe that. Yeah, well, it matters how you describe it. That's why you have to have a clear understanding of property rights and legal theory. It's not fraud. It'd be a breach of contract. And it wouldn't even be a breach of contract under the Rothbardian theory, but it would have some contractual implications, that's for sure. So if I have an agreement with someone who's a customer who would never sign this stupid contract, but let's say I do, or let's say a better example, I don't know, my publisher or my attorney or some trusted advisor or the person typesetting my book, I have a contract with them. Look, I've got the secret manuscript. I don't want to leak before I publish it. Because I need a first mover advantage. So if my typesetter girl leaks my manuscript, she's violated the contract with me and she owes me some monetary damages. That's true. It's not fraud. She's not defrauding anyone. So this why it actually matters to understand law and legal theory and clear property rights concepts and to use precise terms, not talk about owning whatever this is with two thumbs, right? It's your body that you own. It's a corporeal, tangible thing, not yourself, not your time, not your labor, not your effort. And it's not fraud or whatever it is to breach a contract. Because they didn't, you know, and if they give it to somebody else, they committed fraud or however you want to describe that, because they didn't, you know, keep up their end of the bargain because they lied. That's true. Now, if somebody else, it didn't make any d- Oops. This is another confusion. It's not a big deal, but no, they didn't lie. There was no falsehood. So that's why he says lie because deceit and deception is usually involved with fraud, right? But if you simply have an agreement to do something or to not do something or to transfer property rights in a certain way, well, if the condition happens that you agree to, then the property transfers. There's no lie. So for example, if I publish a, if I write a book and I give it to you and I say, hey, you have to pay me $10 to read this thing. And you also can never resell this book. And you can never copy it. And you can never post it online. And if you do, you have to, then you owe me a million dollars in damages. Okay. That's just a contract. It's just a transfer of titles. But if my customer, well, first of all, my customer would never sign this because someone willing to pay $10 to me, I should be grateful to not to try to impose extra burdens on them because I'm going to chase customers away or put it this way. Instead of selling the book for 10, for $10, I'm going to have to sell it for $8 now because now people are going to be less demand for it with these owner's conditions. So the whole thing makes no sense financially from a business point of view. And the reason I say a million dollars is because you have to put a penalty clause in the contract. You have to say, if you copy it or use this thing that I'm selling you in a way I don't like, there has to be a consequence for that. Otherwise there's no disincentive for them to just disregard this wish of yours, right, of the creator. So you have to put something with teeth in it. If it's $10, if it's a $50 penalty, someone's going to just say, okay, I'm going to pay the $50 and that's my, the price I have to pay to upload this book to the internet and free it to the world. So you have to make it a million dollars. That's why the copyright law has crazy statutory damages because you have to have significant penalties. Okay, so you have to have significant penalties to recreate anything similar to what the copyright system does. But if you do that, no one's going to sign it. So it's just not feasible. It's not workable. Right. Let's keep going. Now, if somebody else who didn't make any deal with me sees a copy of it and copies it and gives it to somebody else, they had no agreement with me. Now it's just zeros and ones out in the ether. And like, I don't have the right to initiate violence against them. They didn't do anything to me. And they're, they're sharing that. So, okay, you can say, yeah, and that, that's a clear example of intellectual property isn't a thing. Okay, it's not intellectual property is not a thing. I don't know why we're so casual about this. It's a clear example of why intellectual property law would be having is unjust and have an unjust consequence. Okay, that's fine. But he's good here. He's right. He's right that the he sees, unlike a lot of people that are not 100% on board with us on the anti IP bandwagon, he sees that third parties are not violating the rights of the so-called creator because they have no contract and they're not infringing on the tangible property rights of the creator. So he's good here. I get them plus points on this. I'm not sure why he understands that because again, he seems to think that you own yourself and you own your labor and you own the fruits of your labor and people should respect that, whatever that means. But let's go on. People get this weird notion and they do it with so many things, not just, not just this concept, where they think that, well, if you don't have the right to use violence, then you don't even have the right to be critical. Okay, this is bullshit. This is the straw man. No one that I'm aware. I never said that at all. And I don't think that his critics are saying that they're criticizing them for using the DMCA takedown. This is my guess, by the way. If I'm wrong about that, that's his fault for not being clear, for not naming names and giving links or whatever. But I'm guessing knowing what I know about all this. So this is bullshit. This is a pure straw man. I never said that just because something is not a rights violation, that it's moral. And I never said that just because you criticize someone for being a jerk, for being a bad libertarian, that is for pretending to want to promote the ideas of liberty, but intentionally making it difficult for anyone but rich Westerners to get it, that's a criticism. Just criticizing someone doesn't mean that you're saying they don't have the right to do it. Just like he says that people that are pirates don't violate rights, but they're jerks. My point is I can explain why someone's a jerk for paywalling their content for no good reason if they're supposed to be a libertarian promoting the ideas of liberty. I can explain why. I've already have. But he gives no reason why you're being a jerk. He even says in the earlier video, which I'll have a link to in the show notes, he even concedes. I said, well, what about some some poor kid in Africa who's making, you know, five bucks a month? He can't afford to buy your to watch the anarchists on HBO by paying for it. So I think I said something like, so if he if he watches it, a pirated version is he being a jerk? And Blarkey goes a little bit. Okay. Well, I guess fuck the African. Fuck the poor people. Fuck the ideas of liberty. You know, if you're born into a poor country, you want to you want to learn something that is free and online in the torrent sphere, you just shouldn't do it out of because you're being a jerk a little bit ridiculous of it at all. Like if I don't have the right to punch somebody out for copying and distributing my song or a newbie without the permission of the people who made it, then it must be perfectly fine. This is complete bullshit. straw man. No one ever said that. No one ever said that it's perfectly fine to do something just because it's legal. No one ever said that. But what I am saying is you need a fucking argument. If you want to say someone is doing something immoral or bad or criticizable by pirating public information, you need a fucking argument and your arguments don't make any sense. Your argument seems to be, well, the creator didn't want you to do it. I don't give a fuck about that. Keep your information to yourself. If you don't people using it, you know, you got to have an argument, dude. Nothing wrong with piracy. Nothing wrong with piracy whatsoever. And by the way, as I discussed with Patrick Smith, you could make an argument. As I discussed with Patrick Smith in the previous podcast, when Larkin scurried out after 30 minutes and Patrick and I kept talking about it after, if you want to say, look, if you're a libertarian who cares about liberty, you ought to support other libertarians trying to get their own messages out. And if some of them need to make some money doing it, you support that too. I don't disagree with that, but that's not a legal thing. That's a moral thing. That's a cultural thing. And I would agree with that, which is why I support libertarian stuff and which is why I do stuff like this for free. Right? I donate money to people. I give money to people. I give money to Libertarian Party, to the Mises Institute, to certain podcasters. You know, I do things for free like this all the time because I want to, it's my value. It's my application. It's my hobby. It's my passion. That's fine. And I think people should support things that they want to support. But that's just like saying, you should give money to charity. Yeah, maybe you should give money to charity. How much? There's no objective number. Which one? There's probably a million charities in the world. You know, there's cancer. There's American things. There's European things. There's African things. I don't know. That's up to the individual. There's no objective science to this. But if you want to say, okay, you should support people, that's fine. But that doesn't mean that you're a poop head for not buying a fucking HBO subscription. And if you pirate the anarchists. And it doesn't mean you're a poop head if you find a free copy of Joan's Plantation and you watch it. Not at all. You just chose not to donate to that charity. That's totally within your discretion. And that's just stupid. And so some people get all bitter and whiny when people... Some people. Who? He doesn't name names. So it's convenient to make a straw man out of their arguments that they're not making. To create something, whether it's music or movies or something, try to make it a little more difficult for people to copy it and spread it around. You don't... There's nothing wrong with doing a paywall. Nothing. No one says that. What we criticize is if you use the copyright system to send an effectively a copyright threat of litigation using a DMCA takedown notice to YouTube and Odyssey. That's the criticism, dude. Live up to it. Own up to it. You don't have a right to copy and spread around something that somebody else made. Like, take it a little more difficult for people to copy it and spread it around. You don't have a right to copy and spread around something that somebody else made. Yes, you do. If they can get a copy of it that's public without violating anyone's rights, they do have a right to copy it. Like... I mean, you're not entitled to it. You're not ma... Well, no one's entitled to information. No one owns information. Not even the producer or the creator. Adjectively entitled to something just because it exists. You do have a right in that if you have it and you didn't get it by fraud or lying or deceit or whatever, and then you pass it on, nobody should punch you out. So you do have that right. So you don't have a right, but you do have a right. Oh, I see. That doesn't mean you're not a jerk for doing it. Ah, okay. But why are you a jerk? What's wrong with copying information, dude? But it's... the whether you're a jerk or not, it's like I'm talking about that. And by the way, what's the fucking relevance of this poop head jerk concept? It's a way to avoid serious making... It's a way to avoid having to make a serious argument because what he really wants to say, he really wants to criticize people, but he knows he can't use the IP criticism, which is what your average status would use, someone copies my stuff. They're violating my property rights. A Randian, or a J. Neal Schulman, or a regular status. So he can't say that because he senses he can't. So he says, well, you're a jerk or a poop head, but those are such vague sloppy terms. There's no content behind it. It's just a vague pejorative or a vague criticism. So you can't really object to it because it's really just a guttural verbal, me don't like this. Okay, thanks for telling us what you don't like. Do you not like garlic? I mean, do you not like paprika? Who cares what you don't like? Because that's all you're saying when you say you're a jerk. Come up with a reason. Come up with an argument. That before, but I wanted to do this rant about the weird fact that people, some people literally get bitter and angry when you try to limit who can access what you produce. Who? Name names, dude. Who's saying this? I'd like to see it. I mean, the closest you find in identifying any names is when you name me later on in this video. And by the way, you call me Stephen. I don't know who Stephen is. I mean, if you meet a girl named Stephanie, do you call her Stephanie? Do you not a read? But anyway, the closest you come, I think you're talking about people complaining about your current movie, which I'm not part of because I've never even heard of this thing. But you mentioned our previous thing about the anarchist. And the only thing I said was in response to your claim. So let's get clear. You claim IP is not legitimate, but if someone, even a third party, who you claim is not contractually or legally liable for copying publicly pirated information, you claim, you admit that they're doing nothing wrong that deserves a punch in the face in your terminology. There are jerks. I don't know if you only mean the libertarian jerks or even the status of jerks or everyone else. I don't know. It's like, it's a vague concept. But being a jerk has got nothing to do with libertarianism. But if you're going to go run around saying this, someone's a poop head, talking like a second grader, okay, fine, they're a poop head for copying information that's publicly available. Okay. As far as I know, you already admitted it's not a rights violation to copy information or to send information to people. Is there anything wrong with consuming publicly available effects from learning, from enjoying something, from learning from it, from reading it? I don't think so. If there's nothing wrong with me doing it, is there anything wrong with another third party doing it? No. So is there something wrong with me helping them get access to it by uploading it so they can actually get access to it? I don't see there's anything morally wrong there whatsoever, whatsoever. So what he says, someone doing that is a jerk with no reason whatsoever, except he just doesn't like it because it makes it hard for him to make money in his little hobby. I simply put it out, look, well, if you're going to call people a jerk, some day moral criticism, even though they're not violating rights, well, you know, I agree that if you have a paywall up for your stuff, you have a right to do that too, but maybe you're a jerk because you're pretending to be a good libertarian who's trying to promote the ideas of liberty, but you keep your little book hidden away that only rich Western people can read. Hey, congratulations. Let's go on. And it's sort of ridiculous, it's because they forget where the concepts came from. All they know is why intellectual property is real property, and I'm not going to think anything beyond that. Okay, well, then you don't know how to think, and you're just being an idiot. Like if I, I'm going to do a concert in my... Well, that's not the case for me, for sure, I can tell you. And, and I don't think it's the case of his other critics. I think what they're complaining about, Larkin, is you saying you're against intellectual property, and you and your buddies sending a DMCA takedown notice to censor the freedom and property rights of YouTube and Odyssey. That's the problem, dude. You don't have to do that, you know. You could actually not use the rights that the copyright system is giving you, just like you could sue someone for antitrust infringement. Yeah, you can file a lawsuit. You can file a defamation claim against someone. You can file a blackmail lawsuit against someone. Those are all laws that I'm sure you would disagree with and think are unjust and immoral. You're not forced to use these unjust laws to harm other innocent people, even though you don't like them personally. There's no reason you have to send a DMCA takedown to YouTube and Odyssey, because what you're doing is you're threatening them. You're threatening to sue the user and to get them liable secondarily, because they will lose their secondary liability copyright infringement exemption if they don't comply with the DMCA takedown provisions. So you're shaking them down, dude. You're censoring free speech. That's the problem. A house, and oh, there's some people standing out of the road and watching, I'm going to close the curtains. How dare you close? Fucking strong, man. No one says this. You can do whatever you want with your house. Your closing your curtains is not violating anyone's rights, Larkin. Do you understand that? You're sending a DMCA takedown to someone to violate someone's rights. Do you understand the difference? The curtains, you believe in intellectual property, and you're an oppressive death. No, you idiot. You're not entitled to what somebody else produces if they don't want to give it to you. Bullshit. If you release it, they're entitled to do whatever they want with information. If you want to keep it to yourself, keep it to yourself. On a practical basis, what always happens with music and movies and everything else is they're going to be pirated. They're going to be copied and sent around all over the place. I know that about my music. I knew that was going to happen with the movie. It happens with pretty much everything. Yes, and that's a good thing. That's the amazing thing about this modern economy and the internet world and the digital world is that the value we get is from knowledge and information and things like this. Movies, audio, music, books, patterns of information, images. It's all digitized and it's all easy to copy, store, modify, transmit around, learn from, trade, share. This is a good thing. It's a great thing. If you don't want to participate in this modern world, keep your shit to yourself. That's going to happen. People trying to make it harder for that to happen, they're not somehow bad and evil because they're trying to limit the product of their effort getting to people who didn't. Here we go with the product of their effort. This is Lockheed and Labor Theory of Property quasi-Marxian bullshit. Well, first of all, there's nothing bad about that per se. No one says that it is. This is just another straw man. I never said that. I doubt any of his unsophisticated Rube libertarian activist critics are. They're just upset about him using the DMCA stuff. My guess, that's just my guess because he's not naming names. No one's saying that there's anything wrong with having a paywall up. There's only the very mild observation from my point, which is that if you have something that is important information for the message of freedom, then look, that's why I'm a libertarian. I want to improve the understanding of liberty and help people to understand it. That's it. Why would I want to put a wall up around myself? If you want to see the end result of this kind of mentality, just read Jerome T'Chile's book. It usually begins with Ayn Rand where he mocks the Gallambosians, Andrew Gallambos, these hyper IP quasi-libertarian weirdo cult losers who think that knowledge is the ultimate or information is the ultimate property. It's primordial property, blah, blah, blah, and it's inalienable so Gallambos's followers couldn't even spread his ideas because they didn't have the right to spread it because even Gallambos couldn't give them the right to spread it because it's inalienable. So it died away, of course. Well, that was how T'Chile mocks it, but anyway, I'm going to keep going. Pay for it. They have every right to do that. They have every right, which means you don't have the right to use violence against them because no one's saying you do. We're saying we have the right to complain or to criticize, just like you criticize people being pirates. They're trying to limit the spread of what they created. Like if somebody puts a concert on and says, okay, the deal is you can come to this concert for 15 bucks or 20 or eight zillion if you're technically swift, $2,000 or whatever tickets are. But if part of the agreement is you have to pay this much money and you're not allowed to bring in anything to record it. So the only people are going to ever hear that. By the way, that seems to, in my mind, has gone away. In the early stages of when copyright started breaking down because physical music distribution like CDs and then early MP3 sales all started disappearing because they're streaming now. Yeah, the music model changed as it should. I think we had a brief anomaly in human history from like, say, 1970 to 2000, maybe 2000, when people could make zillions of dollars selling records. That's gone. It's a good thing that it's gone. So we have to go back to performing and getting gigs or whatever. But the point is in the beginning when all these artists were getting afraid of this or the producers, yeah, they would ban, you can't take pictures, you can't film it. I think that's been relaxed because they realize it doesn't really matter and it's unstoppable. And eventually, by the way, we're going to have a world of high technology where we have cameras in our eyes and we have memory chips in our brains and everything I see is going to be stored digitally and in my wet brain. What are you going to do then? Make people wear fucking eye patches? Jesus fucking Christ. And who's going to, who's going to agree to that shit? If I'm going to go to a concert and they go, okay, I might, what, I've got to turn my fucking iPhone into a guy holding a Faraday cage basket at the front door like I'm a child? Fuck that. It's too much paternalistic bullshit. How about this? Oh, you can't, oh, Madonna's going to wear a certain color dress in Act 3. No one, you have to sign a contract. You can't tell people what the color dress is going to be. That's a trade secret. That's a non-disclosure agreement. Oh my God. Get over it. The show are the people who are there in person unless the performer is recording. Like they're allowed to make that condition and you're allowed to decide whether you want that or not. Yeah. And you know what else? Let's say I go to a concert and this guy plays a brand new song and I learn it and I think, oh, that's a nice song. And I go home and I play guitar too. I might do a riff of that or I might do a cover of it or I might do a derivative work of it because I learned it by listening with my human fucking ears. What are you going to do? Have a contract saying we have the right to audit your neuronal patterns in your brain to make sure you didn't benefit at all from this fucking concert. In fact, you have to expand your memories of it. You only get one hour's pleasure. That's it. That's it. If you want more, you pay an extra fee. You're not entitled to hear their concert on your terms on whatever you arbitrarily decide that you should have. No shit. That's property rights. That's going into a venue where someone can set the terms and also no one's entitled to lay down completely outrageous arbitrary terms that expect people to comply with them or to agree to them. They won't. You won't have anyone show up, dude. They don't have any obligation to give you any deal. And they can, for example, Taylor Swift can say you can't come to my concert unless you give me a thousand dollars. And if you think that's outrageous, okay, yeah, you can think that and you're still not entitled to be there. So this is a total straw man. No one says you're entitled to be there. No one. So who are you complaining about? Who are you talking to? How does the fact that you're making up an imaginary person who seems to think that people are communistically entitled to go to a concert, which no one makes that argument? How does it justify sending a DMCA takedown notice, which is fascist and evil, using copyright law to censor speech on YouTube and Odyssey? How does your stupid little observation justify the DMCA takedown process? I wonder. I wonder if you're going to connect it up. I think not. How's the right to do that? Does that mean I believe in intellectual property? No, it means I believe that Taylor Swift owns herself. I like how you're mocking people who are opposed to IP even though you claim to be against IP. And so do you. And you can extrapolate the rest just from that. If she creates something, arguing about whether it's property or not, misses the point that, okay, she now has this thing she made and she has control of it, in this case of... No, she didn't make a thing. Property rest don't apply to information. Live performance and she does a live performance on private property and has an agreement with the owners of the private property that people can't come in unless they pay and they don't bring recording devices. Maybe they should agree not to remember it either. Let's do that too, or not to tell anyone what it was like. In fact, they have to sign a non-disclosure agreement where they can't say anything about it. They can't even tell people they went to the concert. They can't even confirm that Taylor Swift is still alive. Yeah, it's all hush-hush. Let's control it to the max. No, if that's a condition, probably not. Everybody has their phones all over the place now. Oh, okay. So it's not realistic. Be perfectly justified in doing that. So would anybody else. So it's one thing to say. And again, if you're thinking from the underlying principles and from the concept of self-ownership. If you want to talk about underlying principles, you need to get them straight. So we need to define terms and justify them. Right? So self-ownership is not, I own this time and effort. It's your body that you own. So let's be clear. And the reason you own it is because, well, there are reasons for that. You have to go into it. And the basis for ownership of external things is homesteading and contract, not creating or producing. Both sides of this makes sense. You know, it's not okay to go beat somebody up because they found something on a torrent site and listened to an album without paying somebody else. Like they didn't have an agreement. They didn't violate anything. Well, by the way, it's not okay to beat someone up if they had an agreement either. So I don't know what you're talking about beating people up for. What is this brutalist thuggish bullshit? They copied and zeros and ones in a way that had nothing to do with the people who originally generated the content. That's totally true. And it's also totally true that the people who originally generated the content have the right to do whatever they can, which these days isn't much, to try to restrict access. Exactly. So, you know, acknowledge your reality and find a business model that works within their reality. If you can't, stop whining about it. Maybe just subsidize yourself or get donations. Maybe find a way that you can do it, that you can also spread the ideas of liberty to people that are not rich Westerners. How about that? Let's do it. And then this digital age, like I said, as soon as it's out there, it's out there all over the place. Like anybody making music and movies and any such content is gonna know that. That it's gonna be, or books for that matter. Somebody made a really crappy PDF of the most dangerous superstition. Like tons of typos because they didn't know how to use character recognition and didn't perforate it. Well, that's probably partly because of copyright. So in a copyright, so right now all the stuff is out there, but everyone's doing it underground in this gray market, right? You can't do it legitimately above board because it's illegal because of copyright. In a copyright free world, there would be legitimate websites out there that had all kinds of nice content that was pirated content. I wouldn't call it pirated, but it's copied content. Probably curated. You probably have to pay a little fee. So someone would have done your book really, really well, Larkin, if you didn't put your own nice PDF out there that was well done, which apparently you didn't. Otherwise, why would they have to do their own? But so that's gonna happen. And the fact that that's gonna happen doesn't mean people are entitled to it. And that's just as ridiculous as saying, well, if someone has a snazzy car and for some reason the doors don't lock and the ignition doesn't require a key, well, then it's okay for somebody to take it. No one says that. No one argues that. So I don't know who this straw man is directed against. No it isn't. Like how easy it is to steal something doesn't determine whether to steal. Copying information is not stealing. I thought you already agreed to that. If I walk in your front door of your house because you left it open or forgot to lock it, it is still trespass. I agree. If I take your car that you left unlocked and running with the key and the engine, it is still theft, even though you stupidly made it easier. But it's theft because you're using someone's own resource without their permission. No one owns information, dude. It's not stealing. Copying is not theft. Stealing, it's okay. Now in the case of information and communication, it's just digital stuff. Like I said, stealing isn't quite the same thing because the person still has it. But the first person who violates... That's actually a good point. I'm glad. So it's funny how many subtle things that a lot of people miss, he gets. He's right that copying information is not theft. Even the Supreme Court in the US has said this. Copyright infringement is not even theft. It's just infringement which results in damages. It's just that libertarians think it's unjust. So Larkin sees this. He sees that third parties are not bound by a contract. He somehow, he sees for some reason that the IP is not just, but he just can't go all the way. Okay, you can argue this, but to be precise, again, saying he did something wrong is a moral claim. It's not necessarily true that he did something wrong. What you would say is he violated the terms of an agreement or even more precisely, he performed an action contemplated by the terms of the agreement which resulted in liability. In other words, the contract would say something like this, you may not copy this and if you do, you owe me X dollars in damages. So he said, okay, I'm going to pay the price. I'm going to do the thing and I'm going to trigger that condition and now $17,000 of my money is yours or whatever the damage specified would be. So it's not even necessarily using something wrong, it's just now if you violate a promise to someone, you could argue that's wrong, but that's the domain of moral philosophy. That's not what business contracts are about. Business contracts, especially in the libertarian world, just specify who owns what if what happens. That's all. They're just title transfers. That's what Rothbard's title transfer theory of contract is all about. But even in the conventional theory of contract, it would be a breach of contract resulting in damages, which is monetary, a monetary payment, even that's not necessarily wrong. It's not always wrong to violate rights because rights is not a normative concept. As I mentioned earlier, it's a meta normative concept. Rights tell us what laws are just, what laws we may enforce. It doesn't tell us what our personal actions ought to be on a day to day basis. Sometimes maybe you should violate someone's rights. I don't know. If I've got to break into a law, a cabin in the woods to save my infant, that would violate someone's rights. And the law that says I may not do that is just, but it doesn't mean I should respect that law in that case. But just how the converse is also true, meaning that everything that is legally just is not moral. Like I might not violate anyone's rights by insulting my grandmother and making her cry for no reason. But we could condemn that as being immoral or wrong. Just like Larkin says piracy doesn't violate rights, but it's a jerk thing to do. He just doesn't give any reasons why it's wrong. Or like I would say, if your goal is to spread liberty and you write a little book that you're not going to make much money on, don't pretend like you're going to do the money and make it open to everyone so that more people can get the message. What's more important to you? Pretending like you're a big shot author or letting people see your work. I don't know. I know what's more important for me. The person who said, yes, I will pay to watch this under the agreement that I'm not passing it on, if that was part of the agreement. Here we go. I'm going to pay to watch this under the agreement. I won't pass it on. But later he says, if you have a watch party with a lot of people, do it with our blessing. Okay. Where's the blessing? Is this a contract? Is it just up to the person? Like what if it's a hundred people? What if I'm showing it in a movie theater, Larkin? So now we're getting into copyright distinctions. If they then pass it on, they did something wrong. They lied. They, whether you want to call it fraud. No, they didn't lie. It's not fraud. It's a contract breach. It did something wrong. They lied. And it's not necessarily wrong because that's a personal moral issue. I would say usually it's wrong to breach your promises, but that's not a legal thing. It's just something you criticize someone for. Do you want to call it fraud or even theft? Not theft. Because if you paid for something and the thing you paid for was you get to see it, but a condition of the deal was don't pass it on, then yeah, you did something wrong. And both of those can be true and are true. And why some people have a problem with this. I don't know. Well, I sort of do know because they try to think in categories where it's like, no, intellectual property isn't a thing. And that's all I can comprehend. Well, yeah, that's my, that's the title of my next book, intellectual property is not a thing. Yeah. And this entire discussion is just about whether intellectual property is a thing. Well, that's sort of one side to look at it in one way to describe it. And yeah, in that sense. And the other way is you're a jerk if you pirate public information. And, and, and it's okay to send DMC takedowns because that's just an agreement. Yeah. I guess that's the other side. Adding intellectual property isn't a thing that doesn't mean you're magically entitled to whatever magically entitled to what everybody does. And this happens in so many principles. It happens almost in all principles. Even the non-aggression principle is an oversimplification of something that, that grows out of the concept of self ownership. That's true. I wouldn't say it's oversimplification. I'd say it's a shorthand. Um, the non-aggression principle is a sort of shorthand for what self ownership means. If you want to be precise, self ownership means that I own my body. And the reason I own it is for different reasons. That's an argument for that Hoppe's argument, et cetera. But let's assume we all agree that every human person is the presumptive owner of his own body. What that means is I can control my body. And if someone uses it without my permission, they're violating my rights and they have to get my permission for it to be, for it to be legitimate. That's just another way of saying that you're not permitted to commit aggression because aggression on its face means hitting someone, striking their body without their consent. So that's just another way of saying everyone's a self owner. They're the same thing. So when you say the NAP, literally it just means self ownership. But self ownership has implications, which is ownership of other resources. So they're derivative concepts. So the primary is self ownership. So Lorcan is right about this. But the NAP is not simplified. It's just, it's a shorthand, meaning when I say NAP, I mean that I agree everyone's a self owner. And I also mean what that implies, which implies ownership of other resources according to homesteading and contract. That's what it means. Because for example, the example I've often used, if there's somebody that they're like, they look drunk or something and they're staggering into the street in front of a bus, I may just tackle them out of the way and off the street so they don't get run over. Well, that's me initiating physical force against them without their consent. No, I think his, I understand what he's saying here, but I think that's wrong. He ends up saying it's okay to do it for some reason. But I don't think you would characterize that as aggression. I think what you would characterize it as is you're using their body with their implied consent because of given, given what we know about people and the customs in the region and the implicit understandings, we understand that almost everyone would want you to grab their body and jerk them out of the way of a speeding bus. So you're presuming consent. And I think that if the victim who you rescued from the oncoming bus tried to sue you for assault and battery later, I think any jury in that town would say no, because it was reasonable of the bystander to assume he had the consent and he didn't have time to inquire. So it's just not aggression. That's the problem. People say this all the time like, oh, I'm against spanking or you're against spanking your kids, which I'm against spanking too, by the way. But wouldn't you, so people that defend spanking say this bullshit to they'll say, well, you say you're against spanking, but wouldn't you grab a kid who's about to run into traffic? Yeah, that's not fucking spanking, moron. Jesus Christ. So did I violate the non-aggression principle? Well, technically, sort of. No. But the underlying principle, no, I'm assuming they didn't want to die. So what's, okay, so what is the underlying principle? If you know what it is, if there's something other than this NAP, why don't you articulate that instead of just saying sort of, what is it that you don't want to die? Oh, that is so libertarians are now about not wanting to die. I don't know what you're talking about. And I'm assuming retroactively, they would consent to, whoa, thanks, sorry, didn't see that bus coming. Correct. And there's, you know, there's a guess involved there. Yes, there's always a guess. But the nothing about that violates the underlying principle of that person owns himself. And I'm pretty sure he doesn't want him. But the underlying principle of that person owns himself is just another way of stating the non-aggression principle. They're both, they're both oversimplified, according to you, I guess, because they're just different ways of saying the same thing. Yeah, he owns himself, which means he has the right to decide who can use his body or not. He can object or he can agree. That requires communication, which requires language and a understanding and a common language, right? And that has to be filled in with customs and presumptions. That's how language works. That's how communication works, it has to. So when I see a guy about to be hit by a bus, who's a normal fellow human in my city, and there's no reason to assume he's trying to commit suicide, which would probably be illegal anyway, because he'd be violating the rights of the bus owner and the street owner and the customers of the street who don't want to see this bullshit. So you can assume that he's not trying to commit suicide. It's a completely reasonable assumption to assume this guy has a standing consent order. Grab me if you have to to rescue me from this. It's just not a hard one, dude. It's not a problem. And so to be run over by this bus, so I'm not going to take the time to have a chat with him, because here comes the bus. I'm just going to tackle him out of the road. Everyone knows this. I know. Let's get along. I don't know. Okay, yeah. It'll probably say, oh, thanks, man. I didn't see that coming. So is that a violation of the non-aggression principle? No, it's not. You can sort of argue it as and also argue it isn't. And that entire argument doesn't stinking matter, because it's obviously not a violation of the underlying thing that matters, which is his self-ownership. So it's not. Okay. So if I saved his life, that wasn't me violating his self-ownership. That was me helping his self-ownership to. Right. So you just posited a problem no one believes and you solved it in a way that everyone already, oh, congratulations. Okay, we're back to square one. Continue because he's not plastered to the pavement by a bus. So it's weird to watch people cling to these ideas that stem from like more foundational principles, but they lose sight of where it came from and start to argue stupid stuff and they. Now this is bullshit. So if you're claiming now the foundational principle of self-ownership, okay, that's fine. Everyone owns their own body. Right. And they, by extension, they own scarce resources that they homestead or they get by contract. That's fine. Which means any law that undercuts these things is unjust like copyright law. And yet you and your buddies are sending out DMCA takedown notices using copyright law to censor the speech and the content on private platforms like YouTube and Odyssey. Okay. So that's what violates. It's not you having a paywall. It's not you making it difficult. You can make it difficult with your little paywall system. You can't make it difficult by using government copyright law. That's the difference. You got to use the right means. Not every, not every, not every in, not every in justifies the means, dude. They get all bitter when they're like, oh, you took it down when they posted it on YouTube. Yeah. You posted it on a platform where you have to agree ahead of time and I know that. No, you don't. That's bullshit. You, every, every company has terms of service and the terms of service YouTube has includes copyright infringement because they're going to be liable otherwise. They're just letting you know, hey, we are forced by the government copyright system to takedown note, to takedown copyright infringing material upon notice from someone purporting to be the copyright holder. Otherwise we're going to be possibly liable and we, our business model can't work that way. We can't live in a world where we're going to suffer millions or billions, literally billions or trillions even dollars of damages for having all this content. So we have to do this. This is not like a little friendly agreement that was negotiated between the content producers in YouTube saying, hey, would you make your users just agree to these reasonable things? This is all copyright liability management because they have a YouTube channel that you're not posting other people's stuff without their permission. That's part of the agreement. You violated that agreement and if somebody goes to YouTube and says this person violated their agreement, they didn't make that. You're not doing that. That's not what takedown notice is. You're not just saying, hey, hey, YouTube, we're just kind of letting you know we're ratting out someone who is, who's one of your users who's violating your, we just thought you would want to know because we're fucking rats. No, you're sending a demand, a takedown notice, a request. You're saying, dear YouTube, we hereby alert you that our content is on your site. We don't want it there and we demand that you take it down. And if YouTube doesn't take it down, now they have lost their DMCA exemption from secondary copyright liability under the DMCA and they can't risk that because they get a million, like literally a million of these things a day or a month or something. It's insane because there's robots, robots that do this stuff all the time. They don't have time to look at everyone and decide. So they just take them all down out of just risk aversion. They have no choice. So what you're doing is you're triggering that system to censor the speech that they're permitted to have up on their channel. You're not just doing a friendly rat neighbor thing by alerting them to a pesky guest on their site. They're not a pesky guest. The only reason they have, they're a pesky user is because they might be doing something that might get YouTube in trouble. The only reason they're a pesky, the only reason they might get YouTube in trouble is if the user's in trouble. The only reason the user's in trouble is if the copyright holder threatens to sue them for copyright infringement. The producers of Jones Plantation hold the copyright automatically by federal copyright law and they could sue the user for posting a copy on YouTube or Odyssey and then Odyssey or YouTube might be liable for the same damages, right? Joint and several liability and they have the deep pockets, not these stupid loser users who are uploading it, right? They might be liable if they lose their exemption under the DMCA, which they will lose if they don't respond to the takedown notice. Does anyone understand this except me? Jesus. These people made that. Oh, the injustice, the oppression. No, dumbass. Well, you know, Aaron Swartz killed himself, Larkin, the founder of the creative RSS, because he was facing decades in federal prison criminal charges for copyright infringement for uploading papers under copyright because the criminal damages are insane. Statutory damages are insane. One law professor, John Tarani, in about 12 years ago, did a study and he figured out that the average activity and, by the way, I guarantee you and your little buddies violate copyright all the time too, both intentionally and unintentionally, because everyone does because it's impossible to not be a lawbreaker in this statute-ridden world of IP bullshit and other bullshit, right? And so he calculated that every normal American user with a fucking computer, like 15 years ago, is potentially liable for $4.7 billion in copyright infringement damages because it's so insane. And that's probably an underestimate and it's probably much higher now, right? So it's just crazy. This is, this is unjust. Threatening someone with that crazy system is totally unjust. You violated your agreement and somebody else pointed that out another way. Okay. You know what? Guess what? Guess what you don't do? You don't go to prison for violating an agreement. You don't commit suicide because someone said you violated an agreement. Why did Aaron Schwartz commit suicide? He didn't go to prison as a 27-year-old for 40 fucking years. In order to take it down. And when it gets to the point that people who didn't agree anything, like somebody's sharing it on a torrent or somebody and somebody else downloads it, like, oh, well, like, there's, on a practical level, there's nothing that can be done about that. Oh, too bad. There's nothing that we can do. But at least we can get some other people in it. We can, we can, we can snare some or other people in this net, people that actually paid us, but not the other people that are not our customers. We can't, we can't get them, unfortunately. So we just got to let it go. And it doesn't justify violence. But it's so weird to me that people lose sight of the underlying principles to the point that they argue literally against the underlying principle. Oh, shit. Because if I own myself, which I do, and like the people who made the movie own themselves, what we make, okay, that's now ours in a very real sense. No. So here we go to the Lockean labor theory of property. If you own yourself, well, first of all, this is why it's important to be clear. You don't own yourself, you own your body. But what he's saying is this Lockean idea that if you own yourself, you own your labor. And if you own your labor, you own what you mix it with. Or I guess you own what you so-called create with it, even if it's an intangible thing, which is just patterns of information. This is what he's getting at here, which is why I'm surprised he's not pro IP because this is the kind of thinking that leads most people to support IP. I think his anarchist anti-state, anti-violence values or preferences lead him to a cognitive dissonance with this other stuff. So he just chooses the right side, fortunately, but it still infects what he's saying here. Listen, what we, and like the people who made the movie, own themselves, what we make, okay, that's now ours in a very real sense, as in when we have it under our control, nobody else has the right to decide what is done with that without our consent. That's true. They don't have a right to hack in and steal the thing against our wishes. Well, it's not stealing information. Hacking would be a trespass of your computer, but that's already covered by property law and criminal law and tort law. So what's hacking into your computer got to do with anything? So in that case, you could say, well, that's kind of like owning something, kind of. Kind of like, well, if I go to, if I go to Neiman Marcus and I stand in line at the counter, my space in line is kind of like a property right, but is it really? No. So we use metaphors and analogies all the time. So it's not a property right. No one owns, even if you make a movie, and only you have the copy. Okay, so you have the ability to prevent other people from ever getting access to it. Congratulations. Enjoy your movie on your own. Okay, doesn't mean you own the movie. Ownership is the right to exclude people from a resource that there could otherwise be conflict over, you know, an ownable thing. That's what property rights are about. You know, if you own a home, you have the right to sing in your home in the shower. Doesn't mean you have the right to sing. Doesn't mean you own the singing. It just means that if you own the house, it gives you certain freedom within that house. That's the reason we want to own resources or possess resources, is it gives us practical abilities to use them. That's it. So stop saying that they own it, just because they can stop people from getting it. You know, if you have a memory of something and you only, you know it, you don't have to tell anyone about this secret memory you have. You don't have to reveal the information to the world. If you do, it becomes public. If you don't, it dies with you. Doesn't mean you own the information. Doesn't mean you own the memory. You own your brain. You can only own physical things. And as soon as it's out there so that people can copy it, then it kind of isn't anymore. And if you're stuck in the mindset of whether it counts as owning a thing, it doesn't really work in this case because it's not a physical thing. It's information that can be duplicated an infinite number of times. And so debating whether it's property or not, both answers are wrong. No one debates that except people that are confused. As I keep saying property, the question is not whether it's property or not. Right? The question is whether it's an ownable thing. And no, no one can own information. There's no property rights in information. Generally speaking, I'd say I don't believe in intellectual property because of what that's usually shorthand. But if I record something, if I record a piece of music and I didn't want to give it to anybody, does anybody else have the right to like hack into my computer or sneak in here and take it? No, no, because you own your computer. It's not because you own the music. No. Does that mean I own it? Because that's literally saying I have the exclusive right to decide what is done with that piece of music. No, because the music is stored on your computer. You already own the computer. You don't own the computer and the stuff on the computer. That's double counting. That's like saying I own a red car and I own red. You don't own the characteristics or the features or the properties of things that you own. Likewise, if you have a computer, the music is just the way that the transistors are arranged on there. That's it. Or the charges on the transistors, right? The memories. Or if you own a book, you own the physical book. You don't own the way that the words are arranged on the paper. Right? Because if you did, you would have a copyright and you would be able to prevent other people from having a similarly arranged book. You don't own arrangements. Arrangements are just the way things that you own are shaped. You don't own their shape. You don't own their weight. You don't own their color. You don't own their age. So that kind of means I own it? Not really. Now do I own the zeros and ones that are it? Like then you get into the weird conceptual thing because it's not a physical object. And very quickly, as soon as it's released into the world, the practicalities just explode and then the concepts fall apart. That's correct. You're so close. But you got to remember, property is a practical thing. It's a practical solution to a practical problem. The practical problem is that humans are physical beings in the world and we need to act. And to act, we need to employ scarce means or conflictable resources. Right? If you're a Crusoe alone on an island, then you just have to do what you can do. You can act. But the one thing you're missing is the relations with other people. You're not part of society. So you can't trade with people. You have no company. You have no division of labor. Once you're in society, now you have intercourse with other people. You have trade. You have division of labor. But a problem comes along with that, which is that there's other people and they all need to use resources too. And these resources are the types of things that there can only be one user. So there's a possibility of conflict. And for those of us who want to live in society and civilization to have the cooperative part of human society, like trade with each other, live in peace with each other, everyone benefits, everyone prospers, but we have peace with each other in cooperation and trade, then we want to avoid the violent conflict over the use of these things that there can be violence over or conflict over. So property rights are a solution to that problem. The problem is there's a benefit to being with other people, but the problem is you could have conflict. The solution is we identify the types of things you can have conflict over and we assign them to a given owner and we make these rules there and intuitive and just and invisible and publicly known so people can respect them if they want to. The people that don't are the outlaws and we have to deal with them with criminal law and with defense. But the people they do are part of society and we can abide by these rules and do it. That's the whole purpose of property rights. But if I challenge anybody who says intellectual property is not a thing at all, because in the general sense I agree. Well again, we don't say it's not a thing. We say it's unjust, which I think you agree with in general, whatever that means. But I challenge anybody to try to describe for me why it would be okay for them to like hack into my system and get a copy of my song. Okay, first of all, he's being so okay. Do you mean morally okay? Or do you mean the law should permit it? And second of all, this is a straw man. No one says that no libertarian that I'm aware of would ever say that people are entitled to hack into your computer system just because you don't own information. Just let's be a simpler example. You don't own the memories in your brain, but you own your brain. So just because you don't own the memories in your brain doesn't mean that I'm entitled to capture your body and hold you down and torture you until you tell me what you remember. Yeah, you don't need ownership of your memories to object to the torture of the kidnapping. I don't need to say that you own the information on your computer hard drive to object to someone stealing your hard drive and using it without your permission. That I haven't released to anybody that I wrote, I recorded and I didn't give anybody permission to hear that. Unlike, by the way, the movie Jones Plantation, which you guys did apparently release. That's why it's been torrented. So what's the relevance? Do you have a right to it? Are you entitled to it? How about like any communication I have with anybody or anything I record? This is all straw man stuff. I'm going to pause here because I'm now on hour two. I'm over an hour on part two. So I'm going to stop here. I guess we'll need a part three. So I will pause here and pick this up in part three. Bye bye until next time.