 I'm sure you've all seen the Ancap Ball memes of what would supposedly happen in an Anarcho-Capitalist society where there's some sort of corporate monopoly on air or when Muck Insulin TM costs $15,000 so you die. But what if I told you that those are 1,000% untrue and there is one specific reason why? There would be no intellectual property in Ancapistan and therefore no copyrights, trademarks, patents, or anything else that grants the monopoly of drug production or any other recipe of production. The only true property rights that exist are for physical property, not ideas, and that might sound really weird considering we're famously such big advocates of Bitcoin and intangible good. Is it confusing? I'll hold my hand and we'll walk through this together. A drug company does have rightful private ownership of the capital goods required to make a drug, the ingredients it's purchased to make it, and of course the final product that goes up for sale. They do not have rightful private ownership of how to make the drug because that is simply a recipe, it's just information, it's not a scarce good. If you write a recipe on a piece of paper you own that piece of paper but you cannot possibly own the words that are on it and the way that they are ordered. That is information and information is speech. Let's remember what criteria makes property a scarce natural resource mixed with an individual's pure labor. A tree is a scarce natural resource, a rock is a vegetable, even water because while running water in a stream is not owned by anyone, when you mix it by putting it in a bottle that water is then yours. You can't just point at the stream and say I own that because I say so and you can't do that with information either. If your speech was your property then when you talk and the vibration of atoms in the air reaches another person's ear you could say they took your speech without your permission and are a word thief. It's exactly the same if you write some words on your computer, broadcast them across the internet and then claim that you own them. If that were the case you would have to own all of the individual pixels on the screen belonging to the person reading those words that you typed which is obviously a farce. So when a drug company writes a recipe for how to make insulin they will rightfully own the computer hard drive that that information is stored on but they cannot own the information itself as all computer information is boiled down to binary codes, ones and zeros arranged in a specific way and let's remember bitcoin because while it's also technically just ones and zeros its combination is unique for reasons beyond the scope of this video but the hard drive that you use as a wallet for it is your private property but information is simply speech not a scarce good. If someone worked at AstraZeneca on developing insulin but left for GlaxoSmithKline and took that information with them in order for AstraZeneca to claim ownership of the information stored in that person's brain well they would have to claim ownership of the part of that person's brain that holds the memory of that information that's ridiculous right? Well that ridiculousness is literally what we have right now the baffling drug prices in America for example only exist because pharmaceutical patents create an artificial state-enforced monopoly that would not exist within anarcho capitalism. Drug prices would work the exact same way that every price does in a free market being formed out of the competition to provide the highest quality good at the lowest possible price to the most amount of people. So did you support Bernie Sanders because you wanted affordable health care? Well if so I hope this throws a spanner in your logical works and makes you reconsider how to actually achieve that goal it's a problem of artificial monopoly and I'll tell you how you don't fix that by making the entire health care industry an artificial monopoly by giving it to the government wholesale. Now that we've established the bad parts of intellectual property and why it is inherently unjustified we can't be so ignorant to say that it has no benefits at all what about artists? The painting of the Mona Lisa in the Louvre for example is a scarce good that's for sure but when you pull up a picture of it on your phone Leonardo da Vinci's ghost doesn't own your phone screen your eyes or your brain Rolex can't rightfully own the image of a five-pointed crown because it can't prevent you from imagining it in your head and just because you put one on a watch doesn't make that watch a Rolex but it is a potentially scary notion that an artist could spend hours creating a drawing with no guarantee that their work would be protected or just because it wouldn't technically be property that doesn't mean it wouldn't be incredibly scummy for someone to take that artwork without paying or crediting the artist they make money from it by printing it and selling it on shirts which you know happens all the time currently even with a bottomless ocean of intellectual property laws and innumerable amounts of money spent on enforcement just proving that it's really a waste of the time and money of everybody involved the idea that artificial monopoly and its laws are the only way to preserve art is quite frankly just lazy just because you can't immediately think of a way to do it doesn't mean it's impossible sorry to say this but you're not that bloody smart if someone is smart enough to think of a market way of doing this then they're going to be rewarded by the market with money so there is obviously an incentive there for it to happen here's another thing you might be very surprised to hear from an ANCAP one possible way of this is unions an artist union can be created in order to try and curb such activity by calling for boycotts of companies that do such scummy things and create their own avenues for rewarding artists for their work non-profit charities and business can and do exist to support artists host auctions run galleries and so much more you don't need the government to fix every problem in the world all you need is good problem solvers and a system that provides the incentive for them to pursue problems job done so going back to our drug production analogy measures of contract could exist to protect IP to some extent when that employee signed on to AstraZeneca he could have agreed to not give information to competitors if he didn't want to agree to that clause well AstraZeneca wouldn't be obligated to employ him if he did agree to that clause but then broke it he would be in violation of his contract and can be pursued in legal action so if you've thought of any reasons why despite not being a right IP should still be enforced run your hypothesis against this idea of market contract law and see what sort of conclusion you come to basically use a lot of creative thinking what you always have to do when trying to imagine how a stateless society would work is be creative because that given society itself would be a literally infinite process of devising creative solutions to complex problems what you absolutely cannot do is take examples of government manipulations within our current society to be indicative of the outcome of a hypothetical society where a government doesn't even exist or claim that the limits of your imagination are the limits of reality the truth is there might still be some intellectual property in an capistan but it would not be blanket and incredibly harmful which it currently is the fact is that free people acting within free markets will strive to find the best possible outcomes of every given situation and this will also be true in the area of intellectual property the best outcome could be no IP at all or it could be various levels of contractual IP agreements but what it certainly wouldn't be is an over-regulated subsidized price controlled and forcefully monopolized landscape of forever rising prices for medicine along with falling real wages while that's close to our current reality I absolutely guarantee you that these would both be the opposite take it easy