 Broadcasting from the Bayou City, this is the Power and Market Report, exploring the business of liberty with your host, Albert K. Liu. Against intellectual property, hello I'm Albert Liu with guest, Stefan Kinsella. Thanks for joining me for another installment of the Power and Market Report, a show about the state, entrepreneurs, and the tireless pursuit of human liberty. Raised in a small town near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Stefan Kinsella pursued an early interest in the applied sciences at Louisiana State University, where he earned a bachelor's and master's degree in electrical engineering. It was during this period he discovered a passion for legal theory and wasted no time. He received a JAD in 1991, LLM in 1992, and has been a registered patent attorney ever since. There is, however, a twist. Mr. Kinsella is also an independent scholar and a leading anti-IP theorist. In his many publications, he makes the case that not only are intellectual property laws unjust, he claims that intellectual property itself does not exist. He joins me today from his home in Houston, Texas. Tell me about, let's pick it up sort of when you were, you know, just before going to college. You went to engineering. I mean, you're adequately degreed, sir. I must say you matched my MS double E and raised me a JAD and an LLM, so you're certainly adequately degreed. But you must have had an interest in hard sciences, right? Coming out of high school. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, that was always my interest, just science and, of course, philosophy too. I mean, as a young kid, you know, I loved reading the kind of pseudoscience stuff, you know, pyramid power and all that kind of stuff and religion too. But yeah, science was always my interest, technology, science. I used to take televisions apart and radios apart and all those kinds of things and try to put them back together and figure out their, you know, what made them work. And I'm talking as a young kid. I mean, before I had a systematic knowledge of anything. I used to get shocked and, you know, hurt and all that kind of stuff. So when it came time to go to college, I just assumed I would go to college because I was good in school and that was a natural thing to do. And I got scholarship offers from LSU and other universities. And it just seemed natural to me that you majored in something that was practical and interesting. And to me, engineering and math and science were interesting and practical and you could make a good career out of it. So to be honest, I mean, it wasn't back then like it is now where parents have these professional sort of guidance counselors and they take them around the country to tour colleges. And they have prep tests for the SAT and they have all this kind of systematic, extremely competitive way of doing it. Back then it was more like, you know, you're a smart kid. You go to a college you get a scholarship at and you get a job and everything's fine. So I flipped through the LSU college catalog trying to figure out my major and I thought I liked computers. So I chose electrical and computer engineering just for that reason. It was very simple. It wasn't systematic at all. So that's how I chose it and I studied electrical engineering at LSU and I loved it. I loved all four years of it. It was fascinating and I really did enjoy it. I did get a job offer with General Dynamics and another was Schlumberger, I think, right out of my BSEE degree. But I wasn't quite ready to join the workforce yet and my wife, my girlfriend then was still in school. So I decided to go to grad school just to kind of wait out the kind of quasi recession and also to just have more time to decide what to do and maybe get a better. Offer, but I was always a little dissatisfied with the restricted nature of the sciences and engineering and that it's all methodologically sort of mechanical, mathematical, and they just shun all normative things. You know, history, philosophy, arguing and those things fascinated me. So I kind of had a hunger for it and I started arguing and writing and libertarian type topics in the school newspaper and everyone kept saying, you like to argue, you should go to law school. So I decided to look into law school. So that's how I ended up going to law school just because my friends told me I like to argue and I thought I could make more money at it, which probably did turn out to be true. You know, my mother used to tell me that when I was young I should go into law because I like to argue but I don't think it was a compliment. Exactly. I don't know if it was for me either and that's kind of, it was in a way bad advice because they're thinking of litigators, right? Litigators are the ones that professionally argue for a living and I'm not a litigator. I'm a transactional type attorney. I do deals for people. I do transactional work and now I do IP work. Got a lot of questions related to this stuff I want to ask you, but first is just an observation. I came up about, looks like I came up about four years after you studied electrical engineering just like you did a master's degree just like you. And I remember when I was coming out in 94, I remember all of the ads in the trade rags, firms looking for electrical engineers to go to law school. Right. I do remember that. Yes. You were already in law school at that point, but I remember contemplating it actually for a while. There seemed to be a huge demand in the U.S. especially for scientific-minded lawyers. Now here's another observation. Obviously when you're young, you're 17 years old, you really don't know what you want to do. You have an idea of what you're good at and it seems to me that the career chooses you as much as you choose the career because of the incentives that the market puts in place. You want prestige, you want to be a high earner and whatnot. The market kind of puts that in place and then you sort of match up your skills to the market. So the job kind of picks you. Do you think that's a good thing? I mean, you probably don't regret going into engineering, but what do you think about that? The market choosing you rather than you choosing the profession? Well, I think, first of all, times have changed. It's my impression. I have an 11-year-old son now, 10-11-year-old, and when it comes time to advising on college and career choices for him, I think it's going to be a much more systematic and maybe agonizing process than when I was younger. I do think that in our system, both 10, 20, 30 years ago and now, if you are generally intelligent and competent and hardworking and have the right values, then it's not like there's just one thing that you're suited for. I think you're suited for a whole lot of things. So in a way, the problem is an embarrassment of riches. I mean, you need to narrow your choice down and make a decision at some point. I think what narrows your choices down is the choices you make. So if you choose A over B in your major in college or if you choose your first job in this or that, then that's what starts narrowing down your future choices. And there's nothing wrong with that. But of course, the market helps guide intelligent allocation of human capital resources. You get these market signals. In my case, and I don't know if it's that unusual, although I think it's probably not the majority experience. I was just from lower middle class, rural Louisiana, but I was smart and did well in school. I had decent parents who recognized that and gave me the educational opportunities to sort of keep building on that. So to my mind from my generation and my experience, the most crucial thing was just coming from a background where number one, you're optimistic and you have support. And it's never even a question that you're going to make it somehow. So I wasn't like seven or 10 or 12 thinking what I'm going to be when I'm 30 or 40. I just assumed it was just a given for me, like a metaphysical given of the universe. I just assumed I would find a way and I would conquer it and I would do really well. And then I kept getting reinforcement of that sort of attitude because I would do well on tests and do support a family experience and everything. And then you got accepted into the college I wanted to and then make good grades and then you get job offers. And so everything sort of seems to reinforce that. Now, part of that is the luck of the time, the luck of circumstances. But the less than I got from that is it's important for young kids to feel like they have an open-ended field to explore and to feel confident in themselves that they can do whatever they want within certain bounds. If you want to be a Romanian translator, if you're not good with languages or you never learn Romanian, you should rule that one out. Or if you want to be a basketball player and you're 5'2", maybe you should rule that one out. But other than that, I think that as long as you have an optimistic attitude and you think you can conquer the world and not like in a ruthless, savage way but just in an optimistic way that you're going to succeed in whatever you want to do. And then you're willing to realize you have to do things to achieve that. Like it's not just going to fall in your lap either. You have to work systematically at it. You have to have a plan. There are certain prerequisites. If you want to be a doctor, you need to go to medical school. If you want to go to medical school, you have to have certain prerequisites ahead of time, I assume, et cetera. So that's kind of my take on the way things are. But I do think you should also be adaptive. And the most successful people I've seen in my life and my career have been very adaptive. They adapt and they change when they sense that there's an opportunity out there that they're actually good at. Okay. I'm going to ask you to put your percent of Monday through Friday hat on. So forget about being an academic thinker for a second. And so say I come to you and I'm an online entrepreneur. So I got this company. I'm going to market something. And I want to pick a domain name. Should I worry about using domain names that have words that are trademarked? Is that a potential problem? Yes. Yes, you should worry. That's the problem. So the reason is because of another type of IP law called trademark law and the way it's warmed its way into international law and internet law, which by which I mean if you have a domain name, a certain type of domain name that is basically a famous mark or someone's name. Like I said, let's say you had Tom Cruise.com or Madonna.com. Okay. Now, the woman named Madonna doesn't own the word Madonna, but she's so famous and she has so much money and her markets are recognizable that if you had a website called Madonna.com, which just means mother, I think, right? I mean, maybe you want to use it to sell something related to being a mother. I don't know. Yeah. If there's a good chance she could go to the WIPO, World Intellectual Property Organization, and she could use the UDRP proceeding, Uniform Domain Name Respute. I forgot what it's called anyways. It's a way of resolving disputes about domain names on the internet. But it's a way basically of taking someone's domain from them because of a trademark complaint, even if no one is really defrauded. Okay. Even if there's really not anything wrong with the original person's use. So it allows people to be bullies. I mean, look, even Ron Paul, the Ron Paul campaign tried to stop someone who had RonPaul.com or something like that in the UDRP proceedings about a year ago, which was pretty disheartening and pretty sad. To see people using these things as weapons against their supporters and peaceful individual people. But the reality is, yes, if you're a businessman, you need to, just as when you select your business name, you need to be careful when you select your domain name. You need to talk to a trademark lawyer basically to make sure that there's no risk in using this name. Or if you use it, understand that you might have it taken away from you, you might have to switch to another. So maybe that's a reason to have two or three backup domains, right? And this search would have to be international? Well, 10 years ago, I would have said the USPTO website is good enough. The United States website, but nowadays, of course, a domain is usually meant to be a domain accessible anywhere in the world. And usually there's international and online commerce implications. So yeah, you would need to do a WIPO search. You need to do a full search. And it can be difficult. I mean, I think like even Apple, one of these famous companies lost this trademark in Mexico or somewhere recently because, you know, even with a well-staffed legal department, it's hard to make sure that you have all your rights tied up around the world. There was the, on a slightly related note, you remember the, what's the team with the American Indian, the Redskins? And the patent, the trademark office is saying their mark is invalid because it's insensitive or offensive or something like that. I don't know what's going to happen on appeal. I suspect that they will get their mark back. But in a way, most people don't realize they're not really harmed by losing the trademark because they can still use the mark. It just means they don't have the exclusive right to use it. So they can still call themselves a Redskins. It's not like illegal to say I'm the Redskins team. It's just that they don't, they can't go to the government courts and sue people who are selling Redskins t-shirts now. Yeah, which means there's going to be more of them. Exactly. So, so the trademark office by condemning the trademark is going to make it more prevalent in use. Yeah. Because they're easing restrictions. Unless the NFL has a rule that says if your team name loses trademark protection, you have to change it to one that's trademarkable. They might. Yeah, they might. They might. So they may force them to just because they want to have a name that they can enforce monopoly state restrictions on. So they may switch to another name just for that. But the point is the USPTO trademark office denying them a trademark doesn't mean they can't use the name. Most people don't realize that. Right. They can use it. In fact, anyone can use it now. Yeah. It's not a trademark. Right, right. Okay. So forget trademarks for a second. Say you have a domain name that's really cool. For instance, like powerandmarket.com. But the term might be copyrighted or something like that. Is that a concern? Okay, so let's let's talk about it. Copyright trademark and patent and trade secret of the four big types of IPs. Patent has to do with inventions basically. So this has nothing to do with patents. Okay. Trademark has to do with a mark or a word that serves as an identification of the source of a good, which is really what these domain name things are about. Copyright is an original expression of an idea. And typically copyright does not apply to a very, very short title. Like let's say the title of a book, like the word Titanic. You know, there's a movie called Titanic. That doesn't mean you can't write a novel tomorrow called Titanic. Even if it's about something, nothing to do with the original Titanic disaster. Let's say you write a science fiction novel called Titanic that has to do with some huge asteroid hurtling towards the earth. You could do that. It would not be a trademark, sorry, wouldn't be a copyright violation because titles are too short to get copyright protection. They're not original enough. Okay. So if you have powerandmarket.com, it's probably, it's not a patent issue for sure. It's not a trade secret issue because it's not secret. And it's not a copyright issue because it's too short. So really the only question is, is there a trademark out there? Typically a trademark registered in the US system. Okay. Again, that's USPTO.gov. And you look for the test, the trademark search engine, TESS. You can just do a search for a wordmark. Like you could search for power and market and see if that's registered already. If someone has a registration for power and market already and if it covers the same services that you're doing, then you could have a problem. If not, then you're probably free and clear. Okay. Which is one reason why you would have an incentive to file your own trademark registration to preempt anyone from monopolizing that name now. So this is the problem with the patent copyright and trademark system is it gives people an incentive to have to hire legal advisors to acquire protection for them that they really don't want or need. Or they wouldn't want or need in a free market. Right. Just to have freedom of action to have clearance. And this is why patent attorneys and trademark lawyers and copyright lawyers make money. We're basically paid to help, you know, grease the gears of the system for people. Just like tax lawyers wouldn't exist in a free market economy. You wouldn't have the whole class of tax attorneys or CPAs. But given the existence of the tax law, you need CPAs. And given the existence of the tax laws, they do a heroic service by helping people navigate the system and reduce their tax burden. But it does amount to an incredible waste of resources. Yes. All the fees that are paid to patent lawyers, trademark lawyers, tax attorneys, CPAs, et cetera. Look, you could say the same thing about an oncologist, a cancer doctor. It's like, well, we wish there wasn't cancer, right? But so long as there's cancer, we need to pay oncologists a salary to try to solve this and treat this and respond to this problem. But in our ideal world, there wouldn't be cancer and there would be no oncologist. In an ideal world, there wouldn't be taxes or patents and you wouldn't have patent lawyers or tax lawyers or CPAs. Yeah. It's funny because you compared oncologists with, for instance, tax attorneys, but at the same time, you're basically comparing cancer with the law and government. It's kind of going to go hand in hand. Not law. I wouldn't say with law, but I am comparing them because they're both bad things. Cancer is a bad thing for human life. And tax law and patent law are cancers on the free market economy. I mean, yeah. So yeah, there is a comparison. You're right to notice that. Yeah. So getting back to my last question though. So power market is not under trademark. You're thinking I should probably consider trademarking it and I shouldn't worry about getting a call from Lou Rockwell's attorneys. Is that an accurate summary of that? Oh, okay. Well, first of all, how do you know it's not a trademark? What? I checked. I did the thing that you recommended. I did that when I got the domain. Okay. So what about Lou Rockwell? You're saying it resembles the Rothbard title? Is that what you're saying? It is the Rothbard title, isn't it? That's right. Power and market. But like I said, that's a copyright issue. Right. So I don't have to worry about that. There's no copyright in titles and I doubt there's a trademark. I don't think that power and market has been used in commerce as a mark to identify, to serve as a source, the identifier of goods or services. I mean, I'm not aware of power and market being used out there. In fact, I'm not sure if you're doing it. You'd have to see. Okay. But you could consider it. I think my informal legal advice is the risk is low to you from what I know. Yeah. But yes, it would, there will be some reason for you to consider filing a trademark registration application on power and market for the field of services related to delivery of information on the radio or the internet in a podcast and like that. Everyone I have on the program, I want to get some type of life hack or productivity tool and you run your own law practice. You can rely on a lot of online tools, apps or whatever. Do you have something that you want to share with the audience, something that would help out a home-based business or something? I think I can. This is a radical change of subject or topic, but one of them is J2.com and I mentioned this because I use it every day for the last 10 years. It's J2.com. It's basically an online fax service. I hate fax. I hate that it's still around, but if you need to fax things, you can do it or receive faxes. You can do it through J2.com. So I would recommend that. I think there's free versions. There's professional versions. I mean, I've been using this for a long time because there are some ages. So you can, if you have a document you need to fax in somewhere, you can just go to your Gmail and email it to faxnumberatj2send.com. And this is correlated with your account. So I've loved this service. It's been really helpful for 10 years. That is really cool. Is it expensive? I don't think it's, I think, like I said, I think there's a free version and there's a paid version. Even the paid version is not that much. And then the other is something I've used for a few years now called Sugarsync. S-U-G-A-R-S-Y-N-C dot com. And it's a paid service, but it basically synchronizes folders on your computers. Mac, iPad, Windows machines to a cloud account too. And so basically it keeps, if you have multiple computers like a desktop and a laptop or two laptops or whatever, it keeps them all in sync. So if you modify a file, like let's say a doc file in a certain folder on your computer, then that change is instantly propagated to the cloud and to the other devices that are sharing that folder. It's sort of like Dropbox, but you pay a little bit for it, but from what I can tell it works a lot better than Dropbox. So Sugarsync and J2.com have been amazing resources for me. Plus I use Carbonite as an online backup. So those are pretty mundane, but those are things that help me in my daily practice. All right, that's exactly what I was after. Thank you for that. And so if someone wants to contact you about trademark issue or other IP issue, what's the best way to get in touch with you? Just go to StefanKinsella.com and they can find my email address, S-T-E-P-H-A-N, not Steven, which is an E, P-H-A-N-K-I-N-S-E-L-L-A dot com. And my email is on the contact page there and I'll be happy to talk. I'm on Facebook at NSKinsella. I'm on Skype at NSKinsella. N is my first name, Norman. I go by Stefan, but it's NSKinsella. I'm NSKinsella everywhere, basically. Okay, great. All right, so let's wrap it here. Thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it. I could go on and on with you actually. I have a whole list of things that I wanted to talk to you about. We'll have to do that another time. But thank you so much. It's an hour and a half discussion and it just flew by. So thank you so much for that. Maybe we'll do part two in person. That'd be nice. My thanks to StefanKinsella for joining me today. You can find him at StefanKinsella.com. If you'd like to hear the rest of this interview, go to powerandmarket.com slash bonus. Where you'll find free bonus content each week. And that's the Power and Market Report for Tuesday, July 29th. I'm Albert Lu. Thanks for listening.