 This is Stefan Kinsella, a libertarian patent attorney in Houston, Texas, and you're listening to the Prometheus Unbound podcast. You're listening to the Prometheus Unbound podcast, episode one, interview with Stefan Kinsella. This podcast is the audio counterpart of the Prometheus Unbound webzine, a libertarian review of speculative fiction and literature featuring news, reviews, and more. And we are your hosts, Jeffrey Allen Poche and Matthew Alexander. Libertarians talking about speculative fiction. I'm the editor of Prometheus Unbound, an independent scholar and political philosopher, and a freelance writer, editor, educator, and web designer. And I'm the Prima-leading Spanish-speaking soccer-watching heterodox author of libertarian science fiction novel, Witherwee. So Jeffrey, what's been on your agenda recently? What have you been reading? Well, I haven't had a lot of time for reading lately. I've been working on the website and planning the podcast and everything, but I did manage to finish reading Cameron Hurley's book called God's War. I think the third book in that trilogy just came out recently, but only the first novel so far. It was interesting. Is that fantasy? It's kind of both science fiction and fantasy in a way. It's kind of those science fantasies where the magic is kind of explained by science. It's an interesting book, some interesting world building. It's set some, I guess, a specified time in the future, definitely thousands of years on a different planet. And it's Muslim cultures, some different countries that war with each other in Holy Wars. And the entire economy and so-called, I guess, technology and magic systems are based on genetic engineering and bugs. Everything is weird. There's cars. They call them buckies or something and they're powered by bugs. And there's the magicians all control bugs. That's one of the things that I'm not sure about with the book is because I'm wondering if human beings actually learn to coexist with bugs so readily. We're talking about regular size bugs or big bugs or what? Regular and giant big bugs, but mainly there's bugs in every building. Some people are just crawling with bugs, especially the magicians. They're so prevalent that it's, I don't know, I'd be grossed out by it, but maybe people get used to it. I don't know. So that's one of the issues. Well, that's very interesting and imaginative, though. Libertarians might not like the book because the main character and protagonist is, I think we consider her to be very evil. She's a government assassin and mercenary, who one of her main jobs has been to go and pick up boys who've deserted from the front, you know, the front lines of the war and bring them back or kill them. Interesting. Yeah, she's done a lot of bad stuff in her past. You don't have to like antagonists to enjoy the story. True. We're going to be performing, so that's one good aspect of it. And there are some other good side characters that are more appealing to us. Another issue ahead of this book is, despite the imaginative worldbuilding, there were some anachronisms that threw me out of the story on occasion. This is thousands of years in the future in a Muslim country on a foreign planet, and yet we still have sodas and bottles, vodka, whiskey, things like that. So it's, you know, those kind of things that are contemporary, are those really still existing? I mean. Yeah. I mean, I don't know if it's a car, referred to as gas pedals, even the cars are powered by bug juice or whatever. Yeah. So it's cool. Anachronisms like that kind of threw me out of the story sometimes. But it was an interesting story, interesting worldbuilding, and I've never seen an economy and magic system based on genetic engineering and bugs like that before, so. So are the bugs magical or what do they do? Well, there's some kind of weird, like the magicians have some kind of weird like mental connection with them so they can control them and stuff and they can do a little bit of healing and other things, but they can use some bugs to communicate or spy on people and control them for defense and attacking people and things like that. And then there's also these gene pirates and genetic manipulators who they had the technology to like, you know, repair limbs and that kind of thing. Yeah. It's interesting. OK, is there a review forthcoming? Yeah, I need to get that one written up soon. If I won't be out before the episode airs, though, so we'll see. So what have you been up to? Reading wise, not as much recently. I've been doing a lot of writing. The last novel I read was by John Ringo. And no, for kind of a lot. I forgot. I forgot the name of it. Can't think of the name of the novel, but it's kind of an interesting premise. A gate shows up in the solar system and we get our first introduction. We humans get our first introduction to an alien species. The first to come through are just kind of neutral traders. They won't bother you. You don't bother them, that type of thing. The next group that comes through, though, is bent on imperialist domination. So there is the earth comes under the dominion of this other species. The main character in the book discovers that maple syrup is highly addictive to a certain alien species out there in the galaxy. And he winds up practically cornering the market on maple syrup and gets super rich selling that across the galaxy. And he uses his wealth to build a resistance to the species dominating the earth. I can't believe I can't remember what the name of the book is. But it started out very interesting. I thought it was an interesting premise. I was engaged following along, but it didn't really give you any great characters. It didn't delve into anything a whole lot. It was a lot of like highlights, like you would you would touch down with the characters for a moment as they discussed some big project they were going to do. And then it would fast forward through a few things. And then you'd go to another meeting where they'd talk about another project they're going to do. And there wasn't anything really in the story to keep my attention. It felt like it was really glossing over a lot of things and went over a lot of ground and sounds very plot focused. Is it an older book? No, it's not. It's not that old, a few years old. I think, John, I think John Ringo is an older writer, though, so it's probably got an older writing style. Well, it didn't strike me as an older writing style. Honestly, it struck me almost like an outline for for a bigger novel. Just hitting kind of the main points. And you never really get in with the characters and in any interesting scenes of tension or whatever. It's just going through the major plot points as they have meetings discussing what they're going to be doing. No real memorable characters. The reason I picked it up is because there was a in one of the reviews of my book, someone had compared an aspect of my book to John Ringo style writing. So I was kind of curious to read that. OK, I guess you have a review up for it before long, huh? Yeah, actually, that'll be my next one. So live free or die. That's the one I've heard about that with names. Yeah, live free or die. Didn't that win the Prometheus Award or something? It may have it. I wouldn't call it libertarian. That doesn't mean it's not going to win the award, though. No, no, you're right about that as we as we found out this year. You don't have to be very libertarian to win the Prometheus Award for best libertarian novel. No, you don't have to be libertarian, full stop, omit the word very. I think they're desperate for for different entries. But sometimes even the one book we read McLeod even expressed surprise on his own blog that his book had been nominated for a Prometheus Award. He said, I don't know what they're doing, but that's not the first time I'm sure. We can have a link to that on the show notes as well as the ones of mine. I just remembered another criticism I had for the Cameron Hurley book. And it's not a major one. But the main character, her name is Nix. She's supposed to be this badass assassin character. But for maybe two thirds of the book, you don't get to see much of that. She almost seems incompetent. Maybe it's because her opponents are so badass themselves that she's having a hard time dealing with them with her motley crew of mercenaries. But you don't get to see how badass she is until towards the end of the book. And it could be done on purpose to show that despite how badass she is, she's not only badass in the world and and she's facing better funded opponents with greater number who know more about what's going on than she does, but it seems like almost too much telling enough showing. So I'm not sure which of the which is the case here. But the start to book out certainly be a good idea to show her at the height of her powers and then have her run into something that causes her some problems. Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Have a scene somewhere early in the book to show how badass she is. So in context, you understand that when she's struggling later on, it's because her opponents are badass too. Yeah. Well, I think we probably going on long enough along to the main course. Indeed. So we've got a long interview with Stefan Kinsella for you. It's a little over 15 minutes long. Stefan is a patent attorney and a libertarian legal scholar best known for his opposition to intellectual property. We asked him on the show to discuss his love of science, fiction and fantasy and the problem of intellectual property and piracy in the digital age. And now on to the interview. Stefan, thanks for joining us on the podcast. Glad to be here. I know you're a fan of science, fiction and fantasy. I think I've also heard that you've read comics as a kid. Do you still read comics? Well, yeah, I've gone through phases in my my life where I read them for three or four years, five years, and I stopped and I picked them up again. And since I've had a kid, I have a nine year old now. So he's into Marvel comics now. So I'm rereading them again with him, but he's passed me up. So he knows things about the Marvel universe and DC universe that I don't even understand right now. Maybe you can tell our listeners what your favorite works of genre fiction or science, fiction and fantasy. That's one of the things. You know, I have always just loved science, fiction and fantasy. Pretty much science fiction is my favorite among these groups. Among fantasy, I mean, I could pick out the ones I've really liked, which is like Marion Zimmer Bradley, Miss of Avalon, Stephen R. Donaldson and, you know, of course, Tolkien, those kinds of things. But science fiction has really been the thing I've really loved. And so I don't know about the genres among those, but there's just too many to list. But, you know, of course, the main science fiction guys, Werner Wynge, I guess that's how he pronounces last night. I've never actually been quite sure how you pronounce his last name. I've heard so many different ways like Mises, Mises, whatever. But Werner Wynge, Wynge, whatever. Also, the the Hyperion guy, Dan Simmons, Hyperion books. I love those books. I love some Orson Scott card. So those are some of the ones I've really enjoyed. Matthew has a view of Hyperion. You love that book. Oh, I liked it quite a bit. Yeah, I read it for the first time just a few months ago, or maybe it was last year. I I loved it. Also, of course, a Heinlein. His the moon is a harsh mistress and also to sail be on the sunset and, you know, starts our troopers and time enough for love are some of my favorite books by him. Yeah, Heinlein is popular among libertarians. Yeah, although I've wondered in recent years, whether he really is that libertarian, I'm not really sure where he's coming from. He seems to experiment in his different books with different themes. You know, Starship Troopers is not as libertarian in my estimation. Now, as I used to think it was, it was kind of no, not at all. Oh, yeah, militaristic. Right. Yeah, it's more fascist. And I mean, he has some cool ideas about you can only vote if you served in the military, that kind of stuff. So he's sort of limiting the right to democracy. And I like that aspect of it. But the idea that you get to vote because you served in the military is not really the best. That's probably going to shock some of our listeners that you actually don't like democracy. Tom. Yeah, that's a whole can of worms. I don't want to open right now. OK, what about in film? What type of science fiction fantasy have you liked in film? Well, I remember I was, I don't know, a young kid. When I saw Star Wars in 76, you know, I was 11 years old. And I of course love that. And Star Trek, I've always been a trekker and a Star Wars. And, you know, just the classics, the classic, the classic sci-fi movies. Really, one of my favorite movies of all time is probably Groundhog Day, which is not that science fiction, but it's a little bit. So it's just more fantasy. Yeah, more fantasy. You mentioned you saw The Hobbit recently. Did you like that? You know, I didn't like it. I didn't dislike it, but it was too long. And I just think it just tried too hard to get the magic of the original trilogy of movies, which which were fantastic. I thought something about it just didn't click with me. It was just the technology of it. It was the I saw on the fast frame rate and it's had that soap opera effect, which made it seem kind of yeah, it was more clear. But in the 3D, I thought it was unnecessary. It was distracting. So it just I give it like, you know, 2.5 or something. Unfortunately, it's lower than Matthew gave it. I actually saw that I saw over the weekend. I meant to put a comment on the website. I'll probably do that soon. I think I grew a lot of the criticisms that people have had about it. Well, I think I might have enjoyed it more as just, you know, your eye candy. Yeah, I just enjoyed watching it. But did you see the 48 or 24? I think I saw 24 and I didn't see it. It didn't look all like a cartoony to me. So I think I saw 24 frame rate. I read one reviewer. He said, you can see the contact lenses in Gandalf's eyes. Oh, really? 48 frame rate at some time. Well, one thing that I kind of wish you'd covered in your review, I hadn't read the book in a long time. So it struck me when I saw the movie. There's how much of a unlibertarian jerk Gandalf is in the beginning of the movie. He vandalizes Bilbo's door and trespasses on his house and basically has a party against his wishes in his house and drags him on a dangerous journey against his will. It's almost an unlibertarian angle to the story. Although, you know, the last time I read the book, I wasn't yet a libertarian. Same here. It struck me when I watched the movie again. Have you read the book recently? I read the book recently about a year ago with I reread it with my son at like a night time, you know, and my wife just because they had never read it. And watching the movie, I was thinking, man, there's a lot in this movie that is not in the book, which was which actually didn't bother me. I assume they grounded it in Polkin's note. I think the Rattagast stuff was not in the in the book that I recall. And of course, they didn't bother me. It's just that you could tell that they were putting a lot in. It wasn't in the original. And I wonder if they're trying to drag it out just for monetary purposes to have a trilogy or whatever. But it was just something of a movie just was below the level of the first trilogy of movies in my in my and my wife's estimate. Yeah, I think some stuff they got from the appendices, another background of material that he wrote. And other things like Rattagast, they almost entirely made up. He was mentioned in the Hobbit, but I think that's it. He never makes an appearance in the book. And one person who's a Tolkien scholar mentioned that the whole rabbit thing, the super rabbit sled might have been made up by Guillermo del Toro. Before we move on to your forte, you know, show property. Can you maybe mention a few of your favorite libertarian works of fiction for our listeners? Yeah, I mean, I used to, you know, I've gone through phases in my life where I I look for libertarian fiction sometimes and sometimes I don't for different reasons, but I think early on, of course, I loved like Jane Neal Shulmans alongside Knight. I loved, of course, Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. I would say that the Fountainhead Atlas Shrugged, which are sort of libertarian fiction, at least Atlas Shrugged were the catalyst for me getting interested in all this. In retrospect, I honestly, I think of the Fountainhead as more of a. A tale of IP terrorism. I don't really I mean, it's got some individualism messages, but not really realistic and anchored in the way that the real world works in terms of satisfying your customers and in terms of politics. I'm just wondering what I really ever saw in the Fountainhead, to be honest. Atlas Shrugged, I loved. I recently reread it for the third or fourth time and I thought it was much better than I thought I would think it was at this point in time. But of course, there's also Elnil Smith's The Probability Broach and The Galatin Divergence, which I loved. And you know, when you're sort of a young libertarian, you read these things and you see this whole world portrayed and you get these ideas of how things could happen and they just stick in your mind. I mean, all these ideas in The Probability Broach and Galatin Divergence about the way criminals were dealt with. I remember there's a scene in one of those two by Elnil Smith where someone is a suspect in a crime and he's caught and he's put in a like a four store hotel for like four or five days until they can figure out what happened. And the reason they put him there instead of putting him in a jail was because in case they're wrong, then the damages would be much less because he's put it put up in a nice hotel for a while. You know, so there's all these kind of cool ideas and those kinds of books. You know, of course, you know, Inran's Anthem and some of the works I've read in more recent years to like we and others. But it's hard to identify explicitly libertarian fiction now that's not too preachy, et cetera. But I always look for it. I think that's a major danger for libertarians attempt to write fiction, especially if they've read Inran before as they tend to be too preachy, almost like Bible bumpers hitting people over the head with their libertarianism, like long speeches, giving out theory and all that stuff. Yeah, I think one thing about Rand that I actually have come to appreciate. I really believe her when she explains that her motivation for being a philosopher was just to inform her storytelling. I mean, she just wanted to be an artist. And I think she tried really hard and out the shrug, for example, to portray a world in an artistic way, right? And the philosophy informed it, but it wasn't about hitting you over the head with philosophy. Although she did that, but maybe that was just an artistic misstep. But her attempt was to portray a world. I think I read by Vence, a printer with a few years ago, a book called the I want to say the Black Arrow, the Black Arrow. Yeah, I don't know what you thought about it. But I honestly, I just it was it was just horrible, horrible, horrible. I had trouble believing the characters. Yeah, plus it was very misogynistic, I thought. But I'm reading I'll tell you what, I'm reading one right now by. Do you guys know of Robert James Bittonato? Never heard of him. Yes, I do. He's a objectivist. He's like an old school objectivist. He used to edit the the magazine of the David Kelly groups. I guess the Atlas Society called the new I think the new individuals or whatever. He's sort of a he's doing his own thing now, but he was sort of popular in the early 80s. He had a lot of these audio tapes. I used to listen to this guy. I've met him. But he is an anti Ron Paul anti anarchist. Kind of guy. And he he was the guy that actually broke the story about Willie Horton. Remember the guy who was the. Oh, the the the kind of a scruffy looking. Kind of dangerous ex black felon during the George Bush, Michael, new caucus campaign. Yeah, I remember. So he broke that story and readers digest. So that's his sort of one of his claims to fame. And so he's really big on he's big on crime and punishment. Anyway, he's got a he's got a new novel out. It's called Hunter and I'll be honest, I'm about one half through it. And it is an impressive work for a first effort. I mean, there's a little bit of that. He's telling instead of showing in it. And you can tell he's kind of criticizing these governors who allow, you know, who grant pardons or clemency to prisoners too early. So he's kind of got this objectivist idea that, you know, bad guys should be put behind bars. And I understand where he's coming from, but he doesn't have the anarchist approach to it, but it's it's a good novel. I'm actually enjoying it. I'll be honest, I'm halfway through it. And it's one of the best quasi-libertarian books I've read in a while. Interesting. Is it talking about a short novel or is a big thing? No, it's it's so it's so my it's my iPad. But I'd say it's a, you know, regular length of. I won't say Tom Clancy because Tom Clancy writes big ones. But I'd say it's the equivalent of a 300 or 350 page novel. But it goes pretty quickly and he's pretty good. He could flesh out his characters a little bit more. But it's it's I'm actually impressed. And I want to see where he goes with it. That makes me want to read it now. Because we have a I republished a podcast from Geoffrey Gumbach's Libertarian Tradition podcast. It was really really published on the Mises Institute website. Mises.org a while back on Bidin' Otos Hunter. And I think Riggenbach, if I recall, wasn't quite so enthused about the novel and used it as an opportunity to bash objectivist subculture. Well, I'm only halfway through, so I don't know. And I don't remember Riggenbach's review of it. But apparently, my understanding is Bidin' Otto, you know, he's he's sort of in his waiting years in terms of. Career, et cetera. I think he's no longer editor of that magazine for Atlas Society. And I think he was looking for a new career. So he started writing this novel. And I think he self-published it or something like that. And he had pretty good, you know, sales on Amazon under the Kindle imprint, create space or whatever it is. And he's done pretty well. So I think he's got a sequel coming out. It was actually a pretty cool story from an not IP really, but really from a way you can use modern technology to find an audience point of view. And I read a lot of the reviews and you got to be careful reading the reviews because you don't know who's a guy's friend and who's, you know, yeah, being paid. But but so far I'm I'm actually I'm impressed by it. And I mean, I don't think I could write something near that good. I see some flaws in it, but it's not like an amateur work at all. It's it's enjoyable. That's a check that out to put that on my list. Yes. It's 10 times better than Black Arrow. You mentioned in discussion of the fountainhead IP terrorism. I guess a good way to get back to, you know, what you do, you're a patent attorney at one of the leading, if not the leading libertarian theorist on the issue of intellectual property. Some of our listeners are probably not be libertarians and not know a lot about intellectual property. So could you give us a very, very brief explanation of how intellectual property arose and what the common misconceptions about it are? Yeah, sure. Yeah. So I'm a I'm a patent attorney and I've been a libertarian and a patent attorney for about the same amount of time, about 20, 25 years. And about 20 years ago, I started thinking hard about this issue and realized there was something really wrong with the idea or with the with the arguments being given at the time for this idea of patent and copyright, which called intellectual property. And the more I thought about it, the more I came to the conclusion, which a lot of other people had also, which it's hard to, you know, 20 years before the Internet, it was hard to find this. Now you can find it all over the place. But in retrospect, in recreating and seeing the strands of this thought, there's been a strong undercurrent of opposition to patent and copyright for a long time, even for centuries in a way, depending upon the phase of history that you're in. Basically, what happened was a couple hundred years ago, or even several hundred years ago, depending on where you want to say this really started. Governments and kings started using their power to suppress speech and ideas because it was threatening to them or to the predominant religion of the time, or they started granting monopolies to producers who were their cronies to, you know, let them be the only manufacturer of playing cards and only guys that could export, you know, sheep, skins or whatever. And those are called patents. So the origins of copyright were in censorship that is trying to stop the spread of ideas. So in other words, the official publishing company that's authorized by the crown would have the right to determine which books could be published. This is the origin of copyright. And, you know, it was kind of formalized in the Statute of Anne in 1709. And the origin of patent was in the Statute of Monopolies in 1623, which again was a way of formalizing this grant of monopoly privileges, which is really mercantilism and protectionism. So basically all these laws arose from the government trying to control thought and trying to grant favors to people has really nothing whatsoever to do with the free market. Well, as these things became institutionalized and bureaucratized and then democracy came into play and then the US Constitution started trying to congeal and embody some of these ideas in 1789. It got put in the US Constitution, became part of the fabric of the Western legal tradition and spread across the world and the other Western democracies and Western industrialized nations. So basically the what you have is the government telling or giving these monopoly rights to favored people, people that produce works of art or literature in the form of copyright or the people that come up with new ideas in technology, inventors, research and scientists, people like that. And they have the right to go to the government and to ask the courts of the government to, you know, impose fines or penalties or even put people in jail to use their ideas without their permission. And this has become come to be called intellectual property. And in my, you know, my opinion, that is just a propaganda ploy. It was never originally called intellectual property. It was called patent and copyright or even monopoly. And the people that were in favor of it were in favor of it. But they were kind of cautious about it, like Thomas Jefferson. You know, they knew that it was dangerous to let the government grant these monopoly privileges. So they thought they should be very restricted in their ability to do it. But as, you know, as as it came under attack by economists and by people saying, wait a minute, this is not free market. This is not property rights. This violates freedom of speech, et cetera. So the the people that had entrenched interest in this started calling it, well, it's my property right. So they called it intellectual property. So now we've come to a point where everyone in the mainstream that's in favor of, you know, the Western quote unquote capitalist system thinks of one aspect of property rights as being intellectual property. So if you attack it, they say, well, then you're against property rights. You know, so they don't they don't either. They don't know what they're talking about or they do. And they're being disingenuous and they don't really care about the truth. They're just trying to defend the status quo. And I've seen libertarians make that very argument, too. You're not in favor. You don't respect property rights if you're not in favor of IP. Right. And you could make the same argument for welfare rights. I mean, you know, someone who's on social security, you know, they think they paid into the system and they have a property right in getting paid this benefit until they die. And they think of it as a property right, too. But that's because the government has entrenched this property right in the system. And of course, the culture, the culture and the scientific community, you know, everything becomes distorted because of this, you know, and people get used to business models that rely upon this, you know, they get used to charging a software royalty. They get used to getting royalties for their music. Microsoft and Apple arise and they they have certain business practices that would only be possible with with a copyright or patent system in place. And everyone gets used to it. And when you suggest that we got to get rid of it or change it, everyone freaks out. That kind of segs nicely into our next segment for us is what sort of distortions in the movie industry and in the publishing industry are due to IP? Well, people that are interested, we can't go into it in too much detail here. But if you go to my website, which is C4sif.org, Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom.org. I've got some blog posts collected there on a lot of these of examples and horror stories about what has happened. So one example was that actually the the entire the entire fact that Hollywood arose as an industry and one of, you know, one of the most influential cultural forces on the planet. It actually started in, you know, the the movie industry was was started in New York and the Northeast Corridor. And there was these patent wars. OK, these patent threats got started with. I don't remember what was projectors or some kind of technology. So there's this entirely convoluted story about why the movie industry migrated west and ended up in Hollywood partly to evade the mafia and and patent. Unbelievable. So that's that's one thing. Now, by mafia, do you mean the government or do you mean the real? I mean, the real mafia, but they wouldn't be able to do this without the no, no, the real mafia and plus the government and the patent industry. It's crazy. I mean, let me give another example in the trademark area. Trademark is another type of intellectual property. There is a case pending right now before the US Supreme Court, which concerns the first sale doctrine. That is a copyright doctrine that says that if you sell a book to someone, let's say a physical object like a book, of course, in the old days, all things were physical objects. Then you can charge them. Monopoly price, because you have the copyright. No, no, you can prevent competitors from selling a similar book. So that means you can charge. I'll hire the market price for that book. But that's all you get is that one bite at the apple. They call it you get to get your monopoly price, the first sale. And that's it, which means that your customer now owns that book and he can resell it to someone else or he can loan it to other people without being in trouble with copyright law. He can't make a copy of the book because that'd be a copyright issue, but he could resell his book at least. That's why there's a used book market like on Amazon, right? Or in used books first. And that's why libraries can loan books because of the first sale doctrine. Well, some guy a couple of years ago in. I don't know, Thailand or Indonesia somewhere. He moved to America. He was a grad student and he realized that there was a huge price discrimination being charged by Wiley, one of these academic publishers. They were charging, you know, hundreds of bucks for a book for grad students in the US, but, you know, 20 bucks in Thailand. The paper might have been a little bit thinner, but it was the same book. So what he did was he got his relatives to buy the books at the price overseas, ship them to him in America. And he resold them to people in the US. He wasn't, he was, you know, engaging in arbitrage. He was making a killing and he was theoretically not violating copyright because the books were actually not pirated books. They were actually published, printed and sold by Wiley, but in another country. Well, they didn't like that, of course, right? They want to engage in price discrimination and use the copyright monopoly to rape the consumer in the local country to the highest degree possible. And in the US, that's, you know, among the highest. So they sued him and the court held that this first sale doctrine because of the way the copyright statute is worded, does not apply if the first sale is outside of the country. Now, now, and the circuit courts in the US have split on this. So we're waiting for the US Supreme Court to decide. But if they hold that the court in this case was correct, what that theoretically means is that every library in the country, you know, in the US, every book that they have on their shelves that was bought overseas can no longer be resold or even loaned without violating copyright law. And not only that, like if you have a watch or a piece of furniture or anything with an artistic design on it that's potentially copyrightable that was manufactured outside the country, if you own this piece of furniture or whatever this painting, you can't resell it without violating copyright. You'd have to get the permission of the guy you bought it from, which you might not even know, right? So now we have an orphan works problem, which is a which is a book problem usually affecting the world of real goods. And the reason I brought up the trademark issue, you talked about distortions. Another case that was similar was the Amiga or a mega watch case, where Omega had Costco buying watches like let's say as a $10,000 watch. And but it was being sold for like $4,000 in Costa Rica or something. So Costco sent buyers down to Costa Rica to buy the watch and they're reselling it in Costco stores here for eight thousand or something like that. So they were selling it far less here than the retail price, but they were making a big arbitrage profit. So Omega didn't like that. So they came up with a copyrighted like world logo design which they just kind of engraved on the back of the watch, a tiny little world logo. And now they could claim that there's a copyright being violated because the first sale doctrine doesn't apply to the sale outside the country. And they won that case. So all these issues are coming to a head. Now, that's an example of cultural distortion where you have trademark logos or copyrighted logos being put on the back of watches, which are physical, functional items solely to take advantage of an artificial IP law so that you can engage in protectionism. And another example of that is in the field of, you know, high end fashion where you have like the Louis Vuitton logo is put all over the purse. Now, why do they do that? It's kind of weird, right? I mean, if I buy a Toyota car, I don't have the Toyota symbol all over the car. I mean, it might be on the front, but it's not all over. It's not part of the car's appeal that it looks like a Toyota symbol. But these high end fashion designers don't have copyright and patent protection so they can be knocked off. So what they do is they start embedding their designs in the products themselves to make it part of the culture so that they can use trademark law to stop people from knocking them off. Now, that's not a huge horrible thing in society, but it is a distortion. I mean, I don't think we would have this entire field of goods being made like this, if not for patent and IP and copyright law. People who support intellectual property will probably say that these are just abuses and that we just reform the system to prevent these abuses. It'll work OK. So maybe you could briefly explain, you know, why that's not good enough and why intellectual property as a whole is unjustifying. I guess it depends upon your approach to it. It's it's it's almost like taxes. You could say that if you reform the tax system, it could be better. Right. If you give the taxpayers a bill of rights, if you have to make the government bear the burden of proof that you invaded taxes or if you lower the tax rates from fifty four percent to thirty two percent, that's an improvement. But what's the optimal rate of taxation? I mean, the libertarian would say zero percent, right? Or at least if you're a menarchist, it would be some very small rate that's sufficient to fund a barely minimum government. So that'd be like two percent or one percent or half a percent or something like that. And analogously, in the field of IP, you can improve it by curbing abuses. You but all that really means is you reduce the strength of IP rights, which is analogous to reducing the level of taxation. So if you make patent terms smaller or if you make the copyright penalties for violating copyright less, in other words, you can't go to jail or you reduce statutory penalties from seven thousand five hundred bucks per infringing act to two dollars or maybe no statutory minimum, but you have to actually make the the the victim proof damages. That would reduce the harm caused by these laws. That's true. But it wouldn't stop the basic injustice, which is that the government is giving someone the right to tell other people what they can do with their own property. Basically, the the purpose of these laws is to slow down competition to prevent there being what they call, you know, dog eat dog competition. So the idea, the main argument for IP is that, well, if you don't have a monopoly over your idea, then if I go put an idea into the market, and if the main selling point of the idea is something that's, you know, in the way it looks or the way the way it works, then someone else could just observe that and easily compete with me. And if they can easily compete with me, it's going to be more difficult for me to maintain a profit for a long enough time for me to keep my cost of investing in this idea in the first place. Therefore, the government has to slow down competition and keep people from competing with me. But you see this idea is nothing different than the the same idea of the infant industry argument or the idea that we need to have tariffs to protect, you know, the industry in our country, you know, like the steel industry needs to be protected from competition from the Japanese, for example. Otherwise, they couldn't make a profit and our steel industry is going to go out of business. So all this is just tinkering by people that are kind of central planners who want to say, we think we know what the American industry or the entertainment industry or the innovative or inventive industry needs to look like. And we don't think we're going to have enough of it unless we camper with the market and stop people from competing with these guys. We need to give them a break from competition. So essentially economically, it's nothing different than if the government were to have a completely free market and they were going to tax everyone and take that money and give it as a as a reward to the people the government thinks have promoted, you know, the come up with the most innovation. So basically, if the government were to do this, honestly, they would just tax everyone, you know, take a thousand bucks from every family in the U.S., have a panel of experts. And at the end of the year, the government would say, OK, if you think you've come up with a great novel or a great poem or a great painting or a great movie or a new innovation for a smartphone or whatever, come present your claim to us. And if we think you're worthy, we'll give you a million dollars to reward you. That's exactly what the patent system does. It's just hidden, you know, just like the tax system is now where we have withholding, right? People don't really see or where we have sales tax and you don't really see the taxes that are being taken from you or we have tariffs where we don't really see the cost the government is imposing on everyone. So the problem with the system is that it is anti competitive. It undercuts property rights. It's protectionist. It slows down innovation on purpose. And it imposes costs on all society without being transparent about it. My impression of intellectual property right now is that there's some type of tipping point that's been reached where a system that was always bad has just become absolutely absurd. Is that your impression of things in the last 20 years or so? Yeah, so for patents, I think that patents have always been bad, but they've just sort of been like a drag on society or on the economy or on innovation. And they've also distorted things, right? Because the patent system rewards some types of innovations, but not others. So, for example, it rewards practical gizmos and creations, but it doesn't give a patent right for abstract ideas, basic science, basic research, mathematical theorems. So, of course, that tends to distort and lead to a skewing effect in the economy where companies will throw more money behind the former and not the latter because you can get a monopoly behind one and not the other. Just like the fashion industry tends to put their money behind designs that they can get a trademark behind, right? So, I mean, so you can see this the distorting effect. And I think it's accelerated in the in the last 20 years, not because of the internet so much, but because of internationalization and just because of the pace of technological change. I think the internet's helped to expose it and to publicize it. So now we're all I mean, every day or two, you can read it. I mean, just two or three days ago, there was this company called Marvell, which makes some kind of chips. They were hit with a one point two billion dollar patent jury verdict for infringing, I think it was Cornell or no, it was it was Carnegie Tech's University, Carnegie Mellon University's patents. And the judge, the judge could still triple that with what's called trouble damages. So it would be a three billion dollar verdict. And it's not it's not even over yet. I mean, if they win, then I mean, I mean, I mean, I don't know about much about Marvell, but I don't I mean, they're not like on level Apple. So three billion dollars is a lot of money to a lot of companies. Not a lot of companies make three billion dollars of profit. Right. And of course, now you have the situation where the big companies all have understandings with each other. Yes. But none of the little companies can break in. And that's a natural flow in a free market is the little guy innovating and breaking into the scene. Yeah. So I think what's happened in the patent arena as the innovation technology arena is that the patent situation has definitely gotten worse because these rights have become they become part of the economic currency of Western quota and quote, capitalism, because, you know, you know that if you have this right to sue, you can sell it and trade it. And that's why these patent trolls have emerged. Patent trolls are so called non-practicing entities who can sue people and they don't really make the products. They just go around collecting tolls, although in my view, patent trolls are less harmful than actually practicing entities because the patent troll just wants a fee. He just wants you to pay a little charge. You can go about your business. But I guarantee you, Apple, as, you know, the quotes from Steve Jobs have made clear he wanted to kill all of his competitors who were who made anything similar to an iPhone or to an iPad. He wanted he wants to get the government courts to issue an injunction saying, Samsung, you cannot or Google even. He's a little bit afraid to sue Google, I think. But you cannot make a competing device at all. Or you've got to change it a lot and make, you know, gimp it up and gum it up. So that's bad enough. But I do in the copyright front, I think you're right. I think in the copyright front, copyright was always in the background. I think what happened was copyright arose out of censorship, as I mentioned earlier. But one reason that it became a little bit more popular with the statute of Anne and similar laws in Europe in the 1700s was because it gave the author the copyright instead of the printers and the publishers. So in a way, it liberated them from what had previously been the control of the censor. So before before copyright became institutionalized, the government had the stationers guild and these other these other institutions with which they could use to prevent publication of a book. After the statute of Anne, the author held the copyright, which meant he could give permission for people to print it. So in a way, it was popular because it liberated them from outside censorship, but it became seen as the right of the author to stop people who didn't want to publish it and publishing it and became seen as a way of making money and then gradually morphed into that. But even so, it wasn't that harmful. It gummed up the works kind of like the patent system did and still does today until I think the copyright term was extended and extended over and over again by corporate interests like like the Disney Corporation. You know, it used to be 14 years originally plus 14 years. One more extra term you could extend it to and you had to apply for it and you had to pay a registration fee. Now it's automatic. You can't get rid of it. And the term is like 70 years after you're dead. So we're talking 100, you know, say 150 year terms for copyrights now and with the explosion of the Internet 15 or so years ago. It's of course gone crazy in terms of the amount of copyright infringement has exploded because the Internet is a copying machine. That's what it is, right? And so the amount of infringement has gone crazy. The penalties have gone up and the government is now using it. The state is using it as an excuse to regulate the Internet. So basically you have the state using pornography like child pornography, terrorism, online gambling and parroting copyright piracy as an excuse to regulate the Internet because they hate the Internet, right? So the state is using copyright as an excuse. Which they tried to do last year with SOPA and PIPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, and they protect, I forgot what PIPA stands for. They failed, but they're implementing these things piecemeal one by one. So I do think it's much, much worse. I think copyright is much worse of a threat to liberty than patent is. Patent is a huge cost on society, but it slows things down and just imposes a kind of like a tax. But I think copyright is an extremely severe danger. But luckily, I think that the advent of torrenting and encryption has allowed people to find a way to get around it. So there's a silver lining there. That kind of brings me to the next point I wanted to touch on. What do you see happening in the future? You've got the forces of Mordor at the top. We're trying to impose their intellectual property laws. But then at the grassroots level, you have all these new technologies for circumventing things. What's going to come out of all of this? I mean, it's hard to predict. I think it's a little bit like the drug war, where I mean, the drug war has been obvious, quote, failure. If you want to look at it like that for three, four, five decades. But the government still keeps ratcheting it up, saying that it's like the war on terror, right? It's a failure, but they just want that they use that to demand more resources. So it's a little bit like that, you know, unlike the drug war, though, I think most people have an intuitive sense that there's just something wrong with putting people in jail for smoking marijuana, which is why we see the breaking of the dam. I mean, I think that, you know, medical marijuana laws and 20 states now, and I think that marijuana decriminalization is going to spread too. But the problem with IP is it seen as a type of property rights. So there could be some inertia there. On the other hand, the young people and people that are good with the Internet, everyone's a pirate and everyone knows this, right? So I think that there is going to be a big growing battle between the media companies, Hollywood, the software industry and the big entrenched kind of oligopolistic technology companies in the West like Apple, Microsoft, these kinds of companies. And there they have the influence over Congress, right? And then the U.S. is still the big player on the block. And the U.S. is trying to twist the arms of all these other countries like China and Russia, etc., Canada, Mexico, India to adopt our kinds of IP laws. And they make they make some progress, but it's kind of halting. My hope is and I think there's some reason to think this is that gradually over time, people are just going to see that copyright is just sort of like prohibition at a certain point in time. Everyone's going to realize this is nonsense. It's crazy. But what I'm really afraid of is that until we break this utilitarian mindset that everyone has and everyone's brainwashed with that the purpose of law and the purpose of government created law is that we need to come in and tinker with things to try to make sure there's enough innovation and enough creativity and have a balance. As long as we have that mentality, it's going to be hard to eradicate it all together. But my hope is that as a practical matter, copyright is going to basically become a non-issue. It's going to become something that's going to be applied only to commercial interests and people that are visible, which means more and more people will become invisible. They'll use the internet, the dark net, you know, encryption, torrenting, etc. And they're doing it already. So I think that's one really good thing. So I just hope that over time, people start looking at IP as a joke and they start realizing that it's it's nothing that's not really part of property rights, not part of liberty, not part of justice and that it becomes illegitimate in people's eyes. Let's hope. I think something that many aspiring authors or established authors and even readers who listen to our podcast might be concerned about would be how our creators, artists, what's their incentive to write a book or produce a movie if there's no intellectual property laws to protect their work and make sure they get paid for it. How are people going to make money? Or should they be expected to make money doing these creative endeavors in the absence of either enforceable property rights or if in a society that recognizes that copyright and patent are illegitimate? Yeah, and I actually understand that. And I think people get used to a certain society. And when you talk about changing things radically, they get nervous. And also, they, you know, they're somewhat subject to the propaganda spread by the pro IP interests where they demonize people like us as being anti-mind, anti-creativity, anti-artists, whatever. I mean, I'll hear this all the time from these inventors. I'll say, well, you're against a little guy. This is you're just going to help the big companies. Of course, they don't even understand that patents help big companies to arise because you had Apple and Samsung and Google and Motorola. These guys can counter to each other, come to, you know, a settlement, pay each other royalties and go about their business. Because they have patents to rattle against each other. But I think for the artist, I think, first of all, I think they should realize that the patent system and the copyright system don't guarantee anyone any money in the first place. It's always been the case, as I understand it and throughout history and even now that most small unknown artists don't make much money at all. It's always been a side either a passion or a hobby and the publishing companies and the intermediaries or the middlemen or the ones that have the power and they have the power partly because of the copyright system in the first place. In fact, you can see that there's this this interesting phenomenon the last two or three years of hundreds of novelists making a living off of just selling Amazon ebooks for on Kindle, you know, for like a dollar ninety nine or nine cents or three ninety nine a book without even having a publisher. So they sell it for a lower price. They get an audience, et cetera. Second of all, I think we have to realize that the copyright system comes from having a government in the first place. And the biggest threat to prosperity, of course, is the state. If the state were to get out of our way and quit taxing us and imposing regulations, everyone will be richer right off the bat just by the government getting out of the way. So if you get rid of the government, which is the cause of the problem and they would they wouldn't be able to impose copyright law, they also wouldn't be able to tax. So that's another thing. And finally, I would say that most artists now either don't make much money or to the extent they make money, they could easily make as much in a free market. So I was talking to someone about the Harry Potter phenomenon and just brainstorming. Now, the danger is when you give one of these examples, which I'll give you my ideas on this in a second. But you give an example to one of these people, the utilitarian mind to person, they say, well, how am I going to make money in a free market? And you give them an example. You say, well, maybe you could do it this way. And then they'll say, OK, well, maybe that'll work for me. But what about for poets? So they always come up with another question. They're never going to end with their questions. But they ask a question about novelists, for example. Or so I say, well, you know, J.K. Rowling didn't write Harry Potter. She wrote it as a welfare mother in London or something. So she would she still would have written it. And in the world of where there's a lot of piracy like we have now, maybe she would have self published on Kendall. Maybe she would have made thirty thousand dollars. I don't know, but she would have become very popular because the books were popular and piracy would have made her even more popular. Well, now she's got a million, two million, ten million, thirty million kids out there in the world who love her stuff. So now she's writing number two. So she thinks to herself, well, I'm going to put a little note up on my website saying I've got number two written as soon as I get five million subscriptions for five bucks each. I'm going to release it. Well, I guarantee she would have gotten that. That's twenty five million bucks. Now, I don't know about you guys, but that's a lot of money, you know? I mean, and then she could have done that repeated times with the other five books. So she easily could have been worth a hundred, two hundred million dollars just from novels alone, even in a world of piracy. And then she could have, you know, by the time the third or fourth book came out, then the movie industry would be getting interested and they'd be saying, hmm, let's make a movie of Harry Potter number one. But there's no copyright law, so there's no barrier to do. You don't need her permission. So there may maybe there'd be two or three Harry Potter movies from different competing studios on the drawing boards. Well, one of them might go to to J.K. Rowling and say, listen, if you will agree to be a consultant and to, you know, to say that you're in favor of this movie and that ours is the official authorized version, we think we could sell more tickets to your fans because they're going to if there's three movies out of Harry Potter number one, most people can't afford to go see the movie three times. They're going to pick the one that you authorized and endorsed and you cooperated on because they're going to think that's the official version. We'll give you, you know, five percent of the movie receipts or whatever. This is just what I came up with sitting down as a patent lawyer, thinking about this kind of stuff. And I guarantee that authors and novelists and creators and artists are going to think of all kinds of a myriad of ways that they can use their celebrity, their fame, their reputation to make millions of dollars in a copyright free world. And, you know, of course, we have Kickstarter. We have other platforms like that that would arise and that have arisen already that that are just multiplying the ways that you can profit in a copyright free world. We have flatter FLA TTR, which is a way that your fans can give you a little donation to really like your work, et cetera. It sounds to me like in the hypothetical scenario you gave about getting the movie made of your book that Rowling would probably have more influence over how the movie is made without copyright than she does with it, because with copyright, she has sells the rights to the movie producers. And then that's it. She's got a picture. Yes. And so they do whatever they want. But if in this in your scenario, they have to carry her favor in order to get her endorsement and so that she might have more influence over how it's made that way. Yeah, I think it's possible. I mean, I think in her case, she was such a popular success by the time she made the deal. She probably had an inordinate amount of influence over the movies. But as a general matter, I think you're right. I mean, not only that, I mean, listen, she's not going to go out and spread love about her, the movie made about her book, unless she really believes in it. So they're going to really want to please this author because they really want her to believe in and to promote the work and to participate in, you know, number two and number three and number four down the road. Yeah, I agree completely. I think without copyright, you have the same kind of distribution that you do under copyright with traditional publishers in terms of who succeeds and who doesn't as an author. You'll have a few people who somehow become viral and break out and make crap loads of money and you'll have people who get by with a few hundred sales a month or some people with even less. And that's the same thing that happens now with the traditional publishers. You have a few, you know, breakout stars who basically support everybody else that the company publishes and most people don't make enough to live on. Yeah, I think with technology, you know, that model may be changing a lot because the cost is going down. And my friend, Jeff Turk and I talk about this a lot. And one thing you mentioned brings us out is that people talk about the smoother advantage, right? And sometimes the IP proponents dismiss that. You say, well, you know, you can just instantly go compete with someone. Well, you I don't know how many books were published this year, probably 10 million or 50 million books were published in the world this year. I mean, it's tens of millions of books are published every year. And I'm just talking about books. I'm not talking about paintings or posters or magazines or movies or whatever. Just just say books alone or TV shows, whatever. So you've had tens of millions of books published. And like you say, some of them are hits and some are not. Well, if you're a pirate, you can't just go copy everything that comes out. And what good would that do? I mean, are you going to go in the business of hosting a server like the Internet Archive and do the world of service and copy the entire world's output of literary production every second? No, you're going to be selective. And what you're going to do is you're going to sit back and you're going to wait and you're going to see which books the breakout books, which are the popular ones, which means you have to wait and see. In other words, you have to wait and see which ones become popular. So we realize that, OK, finally, Harry Potter is popular. And now I know that the one of the vampire movies that are out the Twilight books, the Stephanie Meyer books, they've become the hit, but not these other books, right? So when you finally realize one book series has become popular, then you go pirate it. But by the time you do that, it's already become popular. And the authors already sold millions of copies. In other words, you wouldn't have known to copy it unless they've already sold millions of copies. So the first mover advantage is almost like an a priori thing. It has to be there because you don't know who to copy unless you wait and see what's popular. So what that means is the author can always sell a lot of copies of a popular work before people get wind of the fact that it's going to be worth copying in the first place. And that's not to mention just the loyalty that fans will have. I mean, I heard Tolkien, someone was selling his books in the U.S. without giving any of the proceeds to him. And he addressed his fans and asked them to stop buying those copies. And they did. And they went out of business. Yeah. No, I think there's something to that. And that also that also goes to what's unnatural about the current copyright system, where it lasts for, let's say, 70 years after you're dead. I mean, I don't know if people would feel the same loyalty towards, I don't know, Christopher Tolkien or maybe his grandson or whoever is alive now, who's the owner of this, or maybe maybe it's Warner Brothers. I don't know who owns it now. But I don't know, you know, but during Tolkien's life, I think people would have some kind of loyalty to the guy, which means the natural kind of life of this loyalty thing is during their lives, which sort of makes sense, right? Because he's the creator. He's the one who should reap the reward for it. Yeah. And the heirs of talented creators will have to work for a living instead of instead of living off of their parents, you know, work. Yeah. Or they could do what they could do with what Brian Herbert did. And he could maybe take his dad's notes and fashion them into prequels. And, you know, all he's done, he did something valuable for the fans and maybe they would reward him for keeping his dad's memory alive and for doing the work to give them something they enjoy reading. Yeah, he's not just living off of royalties. He's actually producing something. Yeah, he is to actually earn the money he gets. I think we're coming up on an hour and we promised you half an hour interview. So I think it's probably about time to wrap it up. Could you tell our listeners where they can find more about you and intellectual property and your arguments against intellectual property on the web, your website and Twitter handle, that sort of thing. Yeah, it's everything's linked at c4sif.org or my personal website, stephanconcella.com. And my Twitter handle is NSConsella. In is for Norman, my first name, so it's NSConsella. And they can find you on Facebook and Google plus under the same Facebook. It's also Facebook slash I think NSConsella and also Facebook slash c4sif. We'll be sure to put some links in the show notes. Yeah, thanks for joining us today and giving us an hour of your time. Yeah, we appreciate the time. I enjoyed it. Good luck with your podcast. Thank you. Thanks, guys. OK, that's it for our first episode. We hope you enjoyed the show. You can find out more about our podcast at Prometheus dash unbound.org slash podcast. And you can find the show notes for this episode at Prometheus dash unbound.org slash pup 001. If you haven't already, you can subscribe to our podcast only RSS feed at Prometheus dash unbound.org slash podcast feed. On our website, you can also find links to our Google plus Twitter and Facebook pages and sign up to receive email updates in your inbox. You can find out more about me at gaploché.com And as gaploché on most of the major social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, that's gaplachee. I'm also on Google plus, where I'm the most active. So please look for me there. Matthew's website is in development right now, but we'll be sure to let you know what the URL is when it's ready. You can find Matthew on Twitter at witherwe. That's W I T H U R W E and at Facebook dot com slash go crew go crew. We'd love to hear from you. So please do send us feedback. You can send us voicemail at 225-257-9596 or by using the Google voice widget on our website. Or you can send us email at feedback at Prometheus dash unbound.org. Be sure to stay tuned as we have more great content for you coming up in future episodes. Next up is our first discussion episode in which we'll be talking about libertarian speculative fiction, as well as introducing our today's tomorrow's writing prompt and fiction forecast segments. And after that, we have an interview with Jeffrey Tucker and the editor of laser fair books. If you have any questions for us about libertarian speculative fiction or for Jeffrey Tucker, please send them in soon. 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