 Thank you for listening to Critical Thinking is Required. If you enjoyed this podcast, please visit criticalthinkingisrequired.com, a community for those on the perpetual journey towards truth. On the CTR website, you will find links to our Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube pages, an archive of all the other various CTR podcasts, the CTR blog where articles are updated weekly, and a variety of other resources. Thank you again for your support and for listening to this podcast. Now put your thinking cap on real tight and get ready to think critically. After all, it's required. Hello, and thank you for listening to Critical Thinking is Required. You're about to listen to Interview 27 with Stefan Kinsella. And today we're going to talk about intellectual property and the broad topic in about his book Against Intellectual Property. Mr. Kinsella is a registered patent attorney. He's the founder and executive editor of Libertarian Papers, among other things. And you can check out more about him at StefanKinsella.com. Thank you for taking the time to talk to me today. Sure. Glad to be here. Hi, so I normally ask this question to people I talk to, and I'm just wondering why specifically are you a libertarian? Like, how did you get there? What happened? What did you do to get there? So I was like in 10th or 11th grade in high school in Louisiana, and a teacher who knew I liked to read recommended the fountain head to me. So I started with the on-rand, and that just opened up her works and the works of others that she led me to, like Henry Hathaway's and others led me to economic reasoning. And I think just a passion for justice and for individual rights and for consistency led me to finally just adopt the ideas wholesale. And I eventually would like to rockboard Mises and others and before a few years passed, I was... Okay. It's always interesting how everybody always has that same beginning. I started with Atlas Shrugged, and then Henry has economics in one lesson, and that's kind of what led me to where I am. But I've had friends that read Atlas Shrugged and are like, what is this? This is garbage. So it's like, there's something before that too. But I also... I find that most people that have that view of on-rand are usually already libertarians who came to it in a different way, and they have this sort of disdain for her thoughts. People that read it like first really like it, or they like something about it. So it's interesting. I mean, my view now actually that I think Atlas Shrugged is still fantastic, but I actually think the fountain head, which is what got me started, I think the fountain head is actually pretty un-libertarian because it basically advocates intellectual property, terrorism, and this kind of bizarre narcissism on the part of the main hero. So I think I guess the strongest characteristic is some kind of bizarre individualism, which makes some people track it to aspects of the libertarian idea. But I don't really think the fountain head is that libertarian. Atlas Shrugged is much more so, I think. Definitely. Okay. And there are some people who listen to this who go to law school or recently graduated or maybe lawyers or something. And I'm wondering, do you have any advice to either young lawyers or students in law school, or maybe just general advice or even advice when it comes to if they were thinking about patent law or taking that big old test? I do. I actually have a long blog post which I can send you the link to, maybe you can include it in the show notes or something. Yeah, definitely. I have an older post, so it's called something like advice to anarchist libertarian law students or prospective law students. But I've gotten questions like this many times over the years. And I and friends of mine have cobbled together. It's not systematic, but just a variety of comments and advice and things like that. I guess my main advice would be a couple things. On the ethics front, I would say you just should not engage in a profession that you just can never square ethically. Like, I just think you can't work for the drug enforcement administration, you know, preventing people from doing drugs. You know, you can't work for the federal prosecutor, putting people in jail for victimized crimes. Other than that, there's a loss of legal protection that you can get involved in to make good careers. And so I would say among those careers actually get rid of the ethical issues and get past the ethical issues. I think you have to focus on the career as a practical career and just you really, you're not always going to be able to integrate any ethical, any libertarian considerations into it. In other words, I would just focus on your career and not try to be a libertarian. I would almost view being a libertarian is like someone who's a Methodist or who's a Pentecostal or who's a Catholic or a religious. You know, they go to church on the weekends with their hobby or their side thing. I know it's important to people in their lives, but I've just seen it so many times ruin people's career aspirations because they keep asking, you know, who's a libertarian lawyer that I can hire or what kind of libertarian profession can I get involved in. And I do think that there are certain boundaries as an ethical human being that you shouldn't cross. Okay, but I don't think that you want to be a libertarian attorney. You want to be an attorney that's good or whatever your profession is or your career. Okay, so let's talk about your book against intellectual property. I was going to just talk to you about it, but then I decided, hey, it's short. So I read it yesterday. It didn't take very long and it was pretty good. And it kind of like, it took everything and kind of made it easy to read in a really short, not very long book, which is easy for someone like me. And I'm just wondering what's the main thesis of what you were writing there. So I wrote that book in 99, 2000 because I was a fairly fresh, young patent attorney at the time, and a libertarian and interested in libertarian political philosophy and rights theory and economic and legal theory. And I just saw a lot of confusion in this area and I just wanted to sort it out myself. So I did, and then I decided to write it up because there wasn't a lot out there in a clear way. And by the way, in the last, I guess, 12, 13, 14 years since it's been published, I've written a lot of blog posts and other articles. So my plan right now is to publish a brand new work in about a year, just restating the whole thing from scratch. And the tentative title is Copy This Book. And I think it'll be even more basic and present things from the ground up better than the original did. But the basic thesis is the same. The basic thesis is simply that the purpose of property rights is to help us avoid conflict in a world of scarce resources. And that is, we all humans live together in a world of scarce resources. And property rules are simply designed to help us use these resources without violent conflict, so that we have a rule that specifies who the owner of a resource is. And the particular rules libertarians settle on are the ones that we all know, the first person who uses it, or the person who gets them by contract, et cetera, is the legitimate owner. And that also pretty much follows from that. The thesis of the IP work is that intellectual property laws are in conflict with property rights. That is, they undercut and invade property rights by the power of the state. And there's a lot of harms that flow from this in the field of copyright and patents in particular, which are the two main types of the intellectual property law. So the idea is that intellectual property, in particular patent and copyright, are based upon a flawed understanding of the purpose, nature, and rule of property rights. And that the state institutes them, and it basically amounts to a type of legalized theft or taking, it sets up monopoly privileges. It protects people from competition. It permits people to use the power of government courts to take other people's property to put it simply. So it's really just another example of the way that the state corrupts natural law by the power of legislation and allows property and wealth to be redistributed from one class to another. And that is actually what copyright and patents do. Copyright-basically, respectful free speech and corrupts the artistic culture. And patent system reduces and stifles innovation and sets up artificial oligopolies or monopolies, such as in the case of the smartphone companies, for example, like Apple and Samsung and Google. Pretty much have a lock on this market because of patents, and small competitors are locked out of this battle, and the consumers pay the price for all these patent wars that go on. And in the field of copyright, we have restrictions on what you can do with information that you've learned from the culture, which results in the government seizing power over companies, seizing their assets, as in the case of the mega-upload, the mega-company down in New Zealand, putting people in jail, threatening to regulate the internet, which is the greatest tool of human freedom ever devised and ever known. So copyright and patent are two of the worst things that the state does, I believe, and there are complete corruptions of property rights, the free market, and natural law. People don't realize this because they fly under the banner of property rights. They're called intellectual property rights, which is just a propaganda term which was come up with by the advocates of patent and copyright because in the 1800s, all these free market economists were saying, what the hell's up with these patent and copyright laws? They're basically an infringement on individual rights at free market and property rights. So the defenders who were starting to rely on these laws started saying, oh no, it's a type of property right. So they started calling the property rights just to defend these laws, but that's just complete propaganda. So my problem with patent and copyright is that they're completely un-properitarian, un-free market. I would even argue they're un-constitutional, and we'd get into that if you want to. Okay, so my understanding there were four different types of IP law that you talked about in your book, and it was trade secret, trademark, patent, and copyright. And I just want to talk about two of them real quickly, and what's a trade secret? What is that briefly? So a trade secret is some information or knowledge that is held by a given company or person, which is not widely known and which gives them some kind of competitive advantage in the free market. That's what a trade secret is. Trade secret law is the doctrine that the government courts will step in and they will issue an injunction against a third party to prevent them from spreading information if it's not yet made public, which is a part of it that's un-properitarian in my view. There's nothing wrong with keeping information secret, but the problem is the government courts will enforce the trade secret right against even a third party, not merely a contractor or a former employee, but even against a third party. So I believe trade secret law is totally un-properitarian, although it doesn't do that much damage in practice. Okay, is it similar to civil theft? No. I don't think it is similar to civil theft. Trade secret just means you can keep information secret, which you don't really need a special law for. Anyone is entitled to keep information secret. Okay, so no one's actually taking the property or the item. Let's say it was the recipe for KFC, whatever, and it was locked somewhere. I mean, if someone shared it, that's different, but if someone actually took it out of there, that's what I'm wondering if it's civil theft. So the typical example would be you have employees which have access to information owned by the company, okay? And they have an agreement with the company that they have to keep this information confidential even after they quit, like the recipe for KFC or Coca-Cola or whatever. Okay. So, under standard contract and even fraud law, you could have them liable if they violated their contract, which is a contract, an obligation of confidentiality. Trade secret law goes beyond that. In other words, you don't need trade secret law for that. All you need is contract law. Right. Trade secret law lets the owner, the so-called owner of the competence information go to a court to seek an injunction not only against the formal employee who is about to reveal the information and promise not to reveal, but against other people that need to reveal the truth who are third party. Okay. It's kind of like Edward Snowden taking the information and then him giving it to Greenwald, and then Greenwald would be punished. Yeah. Kind of something like that. That would be a better analogy, exactly. Okay. Okay. So I get that. What is that? And what's the libertarian view? Well, trademark is the right that did arise under common law, just like trade secret did, unlike patent and copyright, by the way, which were totally statutory and did not arise under common law. Trademark is just the right associated with the source or the identifier of the source of goods. Okay. So it has to do with the source of goods. So Coca-Cola is another example. The Coca-Cola company sells a can of soda called Coca-Cola that tells consumers that this is from this producer or this supplier. Trademark rights are basically a right of the original user of the trademark to prevent other competitors from using a similar mark that might confuse consumers. And therefore, a lot of libertarians think that trademark, even the copyright and patent are a problem. They think trademark is sort of rooted in the idea of fraud, like you're trying to deceive or defraud consumers. And therefore, it's somewhat legitimate, which was a little bit my original view, which I did hint at in the A against the IP article. But I've since come to even reject trademark rights for several reasons that I reject trade secret. You basically don't need, if trademark is rooted in the idea of fraud, all you need is fraud law and contract law. So if someone commits an act of fraud or someone commits an act of contract breach, then fraud law and contract law will handle those situations. Trademark law necessarily adds something else on top of it, which hits on the libertarians. Trademark law basically says that, number one, well, there's at least three problems with trademark law. The first one is that the plaintiff, the person who has the right of action, is not the defrauded consumer. It's the company that uses the trademark. Okay, and second, you don't have to prove there was any actual victim who actually was defrauded. So for example, you see trademark law being used in anti-competitive ways by, say, the makers of watches or purses or fashion goods who have been seized, which are so-called knockoffs, okay, of these goods. Even though the people buying them know that they're knockoffs. So if you buy a $20 Rolex watch at the dock, you know, in Turkey, you're not really being defrauded. Because you know very well that it's a fake Rolex. So there's no fraud actually in this case, and yet Rolex can get in a court order or a police action against the manufacture of these knockoff Rolex watches, even though there's no consumer fraud. So libertarians who claim that trademark is based upon fraud are just wrong. They just really don't know what they're talking about or they don't understand trademark law. Okay, so it would only be for the consumer who's actually defrauded. So yeah, so I think a legitimate action in a pre-society would be the consumer who's defrauded. Maybe even a class action, maybe even a number of consumers. Okay, I'm not even whirling that out. But they would have to sue saying that they were defrauded by some vendor who is selling them good that were not what was represented. But the thing about this is this is going to be such a small problem in a pre-society because you have one of two cases. Either you're a legitimate business starting up and you're going to get a lot of investors and a lot of investment, right? And in such a case you're not going to have people just give you money to start a business which is a knockoff of McDonald's Coca-Cola because you're going to get sued by a bunch of class actions from before the consumers. Or you're going to start a new business, right, which is not the same one. So it's just really a non-problem in a pre-society. Clawed on such a scale would be a very small problem. And therefore the whole trademark thing is a rich area. So I believe trademark and trade secret are both illegitimate types of IP. And by the way, there are others other than the four you mentioned, but they're fairly recent. There are database rights in some countries. There are so-called moral rights in some countries. And there are civic inductor mask work protection rights in the U.S. like the way that a civic inductor design is configured. So you have all these new kind of IP rights all the time. In fact, you even have like the NSA and the special federal regulations which prevent people from using federal seals and things on their websites. It's like a quasi-IP. But the big four are trademark, trade secret, copyright, and patent. Okay. And then I was doing some research and there's something called the Patent and Trademark Office. And I'm just wondering... Patent and trademark office. Okay. So the trademark... Federal agency. And when you make a trademark or you do a patent and you go through the legal system, you do like send something to them. And I'm just wondering... And then they actually approve it. Because I know there's a Supreme Court case coming soon. And they would actually approve it or put a stamp on it and say, this is okay. Well, sort of. I actually... And I have never quite understood why the... Well, trade secrets is primarily a state thing, although there are federal aspects to it. Trademark, copyright, and patents are handled on the federal level by two different federal agencies. The Patent and Trademark Office and PTO handles trademark and patent, and the copyright office handles copyright. I don't really understand why they're divided that way. I believe that the copyright office is under the Library of Congress. The trademark act is actually unconstitutional, I believe, because there's no authorization for federal trademarks in the Constitution. But for some reason, the trademark law and the patent law are handled by one agency, and the copyright law is handled by another agency. Ever since the early 80s, and since the U.S. exceeded to the Byrne Convention, which is a copyright treaty which we pushed on other countries, copyright is automatic, so you don't have to apply for copyright. You have a copyright automatically in an original work of creative expression as soon as you stick it in a tangible medium, which means as soon as you write something down. As soon as you write it on paper, as soon as you email someone something, you have a copyright in that created content automatically. You don't have to put a copyright notice on it. You don't have to register it. Those are just formalities which are not necessary. In the trademark field, you have state trademark rights automatically as soon as you start using a mark in commerce to sell a product. But you can get a federal trademark registration by filing the registration. So that is an application. You do need to apply for it to get the federal mark, although even if you don't apply, you still have state trademark rights. Now, patents are a different field. Those are basically all or nothing. You have to apply to get a patent, and if you don't apply, then you don't get a patent. And there are no patent rights. If you don't, the idea becomes publicly known. No one else theoretically can get a patent on it either. So the patent system is an application system. You have to apply for it. Okay. For the patent system, are they elected or is it just some random people? So the patent system has a commissioner, which is appointed by the president. So that's a political office. But it's basically a bunch of bureaucrats in Crystal City, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., which is sort of like a post office. It can collect its own fees. And it's pretty much as far as I understand it. Not only is it self-sustaining. I think they actually make a profit, but of course the federal government patents that off every year. So they make a profit, in a sense, by charging filing fees for the patent applications and other things. And they use that to pay these bureaucrats and technical specialists. So they hire a lot of engineers who are just patent examiners. So there's like a huge core of 10,000 relief people divided by technical specialty, computer science, biological sciences, material science, mechanical, hundreds, hundreds, hundreds of specialties. And when you submit a patent application to the patent office, some first office reviews it and decides which group to send it to. And then they send it to that group. And that group now has ownership of it. And they have to assign it in an examiner to examine it. So that's how that process works. Okay. And since we're talking kind of on patents, I'm just wondering just generally, like, if we got rid of patent laws, wouldn't we have less research? I was wondering, like, let's say Ebola, and let's say there were companies that were trying to come up with a vaccine. Why would they invest in creating that vaccine if someone else could just take that product, look at the ingredient, you know, basically take the same ingredients and all that stuff and then just build it themselves and then sell it? So I think you have to look at the different arguments for patents and for copyright in general. But the original, there's a clause in the Constitution in Article 1, Section 8, which says that the Congress has the power to protect the works of basically scientists and artists for limited periods of time, which is the original authorization for patent copyright law, which, by the way, is why the federal trademark law, I believe is unconstitutional because there's nothing about trademarks in there. But in any case, the purpose as enumerated in the Constitution is to promote the progress of science in the arts. So it's a utilitarian purpose, sort of long lines that you're alluding to. That's not the only argument induced in favor of these laws by their proponents, by libertarians and others, who think there's sort of a natural right to these things that you create because you've created them. You have to create a new, useful idea that you own this idea. Okay, but most people argue for patent and copyright law on utilitarian grounds. What they say is that without patent law, without some kind of artificial government protection of a producer of ideas from competition, that they would be facing competition too easily or too early, and they would have a reduced incentive to come up with these ideas in the first place, like pharmaceuticals or software or whatever. Okay, so the idea is that if the government gives you a temporary monopoly on this invention, then you know you're protected from competition for just 17 years or something like that. Okay, so now I know I'm protected from competition, so I have an increased incentive to engage in research and development because I can recoup my cost because I can sell these products at a higher price, which is normally called an economic monopoly price, and I can make a higher profit. And so the whole idea there, first of all, empirically, this has never been proven. This is the assumption of the utilitarian or empirical argument for IP for patent. And it has never been proven in the history of IP law. It's always argued like this, but the data has never demonstrated this. The patent clause was put in the Constitution in 1889 before we had a lot of data. It was basically to revive the movement of the statute of monopolies from England in 1623. So they just get it because they were used to that system in England. They didn't have a lot of data. And in the 200-plus years since then, there's never been any data to verify the claim that it does increase innovation. In fact, the data shows the opposite. It shows that patent system reduces innovation. It reduces competition. It distorts the economy. It distorts the structure of research and development and scientific discoveries. And not only that, even if it did increase innovation, it would have to come at the cost of something else. It's like any government program. The argument that the patent system encourages or increases innovation is sort of like the idea that NASA is a good program because we have spin-off technology, like we have Tang. They had to develop Tang as some kind of drink that the astronauts could drink. So we're better off because we have Tang. Well, we may be, we may not be. I don't know. I'm not a big Tang fan. But the point is we spent billions and hundreds of billions of dollars to develop Tang. And that had to be at the expense of something else that was not developed or some other use of the funds that could have been, people could have used the money for. So nothing is costless. There is no doubt that the patent system distorts the economy. No one, no one can seriously with straight face deny this, which means that some things are engaged in more frequently than otherwise and other things are discouraged. For example, you cannot get a patent on basic mathematical algorithms or scientific, physical proofs of the laws of physics like d equals nc squared cannot be patented. Applications of these things can be. So what this means is that companies will devote more resources to things that can be patented and others that won't, to things that won't, less than, less than things that can be patented. So this does distort the economy. It distorts the structure of research and development, which implies that if we were to give them the patent system, things would change. There's no doubt about that. Some things would be probably more invested in. Other things would be less invested in. But that just means we'll be turning back to a natural level that we would have in a free market after government intervention. Okay, now just to transition. I always had this idea of coming up with this company where I would dress up like Curious George or Mickey Mouse. I have a four-year-old daughter, so I'm always thinking, there's no businesses like this around here, and I'm sure there's a reason. And going to birthday parties and having fun and making money that way. And I'm just wondering, what am I violating there? Patent law or copyright law? It's not patent law for sure. It's probably copyright or maybe trademark law. And in fact, this happens. I can give you hundreds of examples of things like this. There are restaurants which do not have the waiters saying, happy birthday, you know, the classic song, happy birthday to you, to patrons when they have a birthday, because they're warned that they have to pay royalties to the owners of the copyright to the happy birthday song. So they make up a new song instead. Okay, same thing in movies or documentaries. And there are companies that make cakes for birthday parties, and they cannot put Mickey Mouse on there because they're going to be sued by Disney, et cetera, under copyright or trademark law. So what they do is they either make up something that's like Mickey Mouse, so it's kind of not quite as good. It's always kind of a rip-off. Or people tend to go to these fly-by-night, little Vietnamese bakeries down the corner where the owners don't give a damn about copyright law. So it's not legitimate. You have to go to the gray market or kind of go underground to get what you really want. So there are innumerable examples of this. Have you ever seen Nathan for you, that show on Comedy Central? No, I've heard about it. Okay, there's the one he did where he... because I guess there's an exception, because there's always exceptions to laws, where a parody is protected and he did the parody of Starbucks, and it was like, I forget what it was, like Stupid Bucks or something like that. Yeah, I saw that. I saw that whole stunt, and the law does recognize some exceptions to copyright infringement, which is called a fair use doctrine, and one of the artisan-related developments of that is called the parody exception, but it's not really clear-cut, and the point is it's not like there's a statute saying you can do A, B, and C. So you could have a lawyer or a friend of yours who knows the law, who can tell you. I think you're pretty much covered, but that doesn't mean that the owner of the copyright can't sue you anyway, and if they have millions of dollars and you don't have any, then you're still screwed, and there is a similar parody exception for trademark. So there are some exceptions that governments have carved out. In a way, this is good in a way it's bad. It's good, of course, because anytime you reduce the extent of a law, it's a good thing. You know, if you reduce the income tax from 34 to 32%, that's a good thing. It's not ideal, but it's good. If you reduce the extent of trademark and copyright law, like carving out an exception is a good thing, but the bad part of it is that this is what the government does. They impose these arbitrary laws, which are for the benefit of special interests, which harm the average consumer in mostly invisible ways, and then there's an especially visible or egregious application of these laws. The government will back up and they'll make an exception for that. So when you confront a proponent of IP law, even libertarians, and you say, well, don't you think it's wrong that I can't whistle a tune in my bathroom that I heard on a movie yesterday? And then they'll have the convenience to use, wow, there's a fair use exception for that. So they keep coming up with these exceptions with sort of smooth over the rough edges of the application of law to everyday people so that they don't have to confront the reality of what these laws would be if they were applied consistently. I mean, most of us who believe in property rights believe that if you own a piece of property, you really own it. You own it forever unless you get rid of it voluntarily, and you have the right to prevent people from using it at all. It's basically an absolute doctrine. It's hard applications of that, but we believe that. And it's only tangible property, right? Well, yeah, I'm just saying in regular property law, apply the tangible material objects. We all have this belief that it doesn't end at a certain arbitrary time, like it's not just a 50-year right or a 20-year right or a 100-year right. It's yours forever. And other people just can't use it without your permission. But in the field of IP law, you have to apply patent and copyright law in the same way, which self-advocates the patent law and copyright law on a favor of actually. They believe that patent and copyright should be perpetual and should be extended to cover things that it doesn't cover now. For example, patent designs are not covered by patent and copyright right now, and perfume smells are not covered by copyright right now, and food recipes and bartender drink recipes are not covered by any of these IP rights. And there's a whole lobby up there trying to extend the field of IP protection to these things. Some people want there to be copyright in newspaper headlines. In fact, I think this is recently passed in Germany. So, you know, there's always a desire to extend the scope of IP law and to extend its penalty and to extend its duration. If you were to make patent and copyright law last forever, like regular property rights last, then we would be stifled as a society and as an economy. You couldn't do anything. You couldn't cook food. You couldn't use fire. You couldn't read. You couldn't use the alphabet. You couldn't communicate. I mean, there's so many things you couldn't do because you would have to get permission from hundreds or thousands of people scattered around the world who are the descendants of the original creators of the alphabet or fire or this technique or that technique. It would stifle the world. We would basically die. I mean, literally, I think we would die as a species. It's almost a property right to enforce as a real type of right, like real property rights are. And therefore, the proponents of these rights back off, it's just like the people who advocate a minimum wage. You know, they'll say, well, we need to raise the minimum wage from seven bucks an hour to $13 an hour. So what do we libertarians say? We say, well, I'm going to raise it to $100 an hour or $1 million an hour because everyone will be better off with $100 an hour or $1 million an hour. And the proponents, they always back off and say, well, we don't want to go too far. They sense, they know that if they proposed or if they got into place of a minimum wage for $100 an hour, the economy would grind to a halt and we'd have massive unemployment. Everyone would starve and die. So they just push little incremental changes to help the people that benefit from these laws like Walmart and other companies that pretend like they're harmed by minimum wage law but who are actually benefited because they're already paying minimum wage. And so these laws only hurt their competitors, not them. Same thing with patent and copyright law is that these laws are never pushed for to be enforced just like regular property rights, but they're defended as if they're regular property rights and they're not. Now, one solution, like let's say we took, do you have a few more minutes? Sure. Okay. So one solution, like let's say we got government out of the way completely. It would be contract law or you'd have some sort of contract would determine whether someone has a right to intangible property or something. So the way I view it is, well, first of all, I think property law is the fundamental thing. That is the allocation of the right to control resources that people can have a conflict over, which are scarce resources, material things in the real world, things that we use as means in the real world to accomplish things. Contract law is just a consequence of that. Contract is just the exercise by an owner of a piece of property as to who gets to use it. And that exercise can be expressed orally, I'm sorry, verbally orally in a written fashion or it can be exercised in a complete fashion or in a partial fashion. So I can give you a temporary or complete or a perpetual right to something. I can tell you something or I can temporarily rent it to you or I can give you a partial right or a complete right. That is you can use it for whatever purpose you want. You can destroy it or you can only rent my Avis rental car and use it to drive around town and you can't destroy it, you can't sell it, et cetera. So you can do whatever you want as the owner of a resource because you're the owner. So contract is just the expression of will of the owner. So contract in my opinion is derivative on the fundamental notion of property. Right. Now, when it comes to what actions you're permitted to do in a free society or you're permitted to use this information, I think that basically is a question either of a property rights, which boils down to criminal law or tort law or trespass law, or it's a question of contract. Like, did you actually agree not to perform this action? And if you did agree to it, what penalties did you agree to pay if you violate this restriction? So I think, yes, it would basically come down to contract law. I think it's completely absurd and unrealistic to imagine that it would be a widespread practice for people to agree to pay millions of dollars in penalties if they use information that they've learned on the free market. Like if you read a book and you learn something from it or if you observe a competitor making a product and you want to compete with them by making something similar or even identical, it's almost impossible to imagine anyone would agree not to do this or that they would agree to pay, you know, absurd fines if they did that. But that would be the only way you could make such a system work in a free market by contract. The idea is that it's conceivable. I'm always surprised. I forget what they're called, but anti-competitor clauses. I don't know what the name is. It's escaping me. Non-compete. Yeah, there you go. And I'm wondering, like, because people actually sign that, which is kind of crazy, the idea that you can't work for a business for three years or something, or you can't work for a similar business or maybe a competitor or something. So it's conceivable. Those types of things are conceivable, but if you understand the way those are very limited in scope, either they're about one or two years at most, and most states won't enforce them past one year anyway, both states won't enforce them at all. And all it says is that I'm giving you training and information in a particular case, and you have to agree not to go use this information to hurt me within a certain timeframe. Sometimes people find that in their interest to sign. Sometimes they don't. But the point is, even those contracts only find the one person who signed it, that is the employee, okay? Patent and copyright are what we call in the law, in-rem-right. They're rights against the world. They're rights against property. They're rights to property. They bind people that have never signed a contract. So the idea that you could use a contract model to come up with something like, you know, a property is ridiculous. It's literally impossible. You just cannot bind third parties by a contract between A and B. It might bind A, and it might bind B. And even that I'm skeptical of because of libertarian ideas about inalienability and other things and the theory of contract. But even if you could bind those parties, it would only bind them. It would not bind third parties. And you have to bind third parties to make any IP system work at all. That's a great point I didn't think about. So I have one final question, and it's kind of a nerd question. So let's pretend we're 30, 50 years down in the future and, okay, I imagine it being like a video game. There was a book, Ready Player One, that I read that was excellent, that I kind of view the future like this. And everyone has these pods in their houses in this massive online gaming world. And I'm just wondering, and this is more of a property question, I suppose. And if in the game I created something and it was a sword, okay, it's kind of nerdy. Or maybe I created something inside of it. And there was only that one item. Do I have, is that my property? Well, a similar question has come up for me with regard to Bitcoin and whether Bitcoin should be considered property. So my view is no. And although I don't think it matters, even if it answers yes, it still doesn't change the IP analysis. My answer is no for a couple of reasons. Number one, the rules of the game are specified by either an implicit or written contract between the people that are participating in this scheme, this game, right? So it's like if you enter someone's bar and they have a rule about whether you can have guns or not or whatever, everyone there is, they're on the owner's permission and they've agreed to certain rules. So the first answer would be, let's look at the contract that everyone who's participating in this game agreed to and see what it says. And even then, it still wouldn't be a property, right? Because it's only a property, it's only a right as among the people that have agreed to it. And then I just think, I'm not a big gamer, but I think the hypothetical is a little bit ridiculous because you say there's only one and they created it. Well, you didn't really create an it, you didn't create a thing ontologically. All you did was arrange pixels on a computer screen and it was the rules of some program. And I don't understand why there's only one. I mean, it could be copied infinitely, easily. The rules of the game permitted it. So if it's scarce, it's artificially scarce and it's only artificially scarce by the rules of the game itself which everyone's participating had to agree to. I think a similar analysis can be applied to Bitcoin although I'm not quite sure about this yet. I don't think Bitcoins are property. In fact, I think the word property is another thing that you would have to look into in detail. The word property ought to be used upon careful reflection as a relationship between a human actor, an agent, an owner and a particular resource or really between the owner and other people in the world regarding a resource. So to call the thing that's a subject of a property right to call it property is to confuse the issue. Agree. If you wanted to be technical, I would not call, let's say I own a watch. I don't think the watch is property, technically speaking. The watch is a resource. I have a property right in the watch. Right? So the question is not, is the watch property? The question is only this. When we identify a resource that can only be used by one person at a time, there can be conflicts over that resource. Okay? So then the question is, who gets to use it? So what's the property right that we say to? And libertarians say that, well, there are certain rules that specify who's the proper owner of that resource. But the question is not whether the watch is property. The question is, who has the property right to control this resource, this watch? And so when people that advocate in all of the property, they start to substance to the word property for the thing itself, they load the question, because they'll say, is an idea property? Well, the question isn't whether an idea is property. The question is, when we identify a scarce resource, who's the owner, who has the property right in it? And the idea is just information that we use to guide our actions. An idea is not the resource that we can have conflicts over. You and I can both use the pattern of information to make a watch using the resources that we have under our disposal. We might have a conflict over who gets to use this piece of gold or this piece of metal or this piece of glass or this foundry. We could have conflict over that, and property rules are designed to determine the owners in those cases. But we cannot even theoretically have a property conflict over the use of ideas or information or knowledge. Ideas and knowledge guide our actions. Our actions implore these scarce resources. There are two different things. Property rights apply only to the second one. I completely agree. Well, thank you, Stefan, for taking the time to talk to me. I greatly appreciate it. I enjoyed it. Thanks a lot. Thank you very much for taking the time to listen to this podcast. You are among the very few that listen to the whole thing. It's a rare occurrence like seeing a unicorn or finding a politician that doesn't lie. 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