 You're listening to Liberty Beat Podcast, a show about liberty, society, and the world around us. This is episode 33, recorded Sunday, February 17, 2013. If you like what you hear or even if you don't, feel free to drop us a line at libertybeat.ca. The site has show archives and the latest instructions on how to join us on the air and share your opinions live. Also, please check out our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash libertybeat. I'm your host Daniel Benoy and with me is David Shepard. Hello. And Chinaman. Hello. And a very special guest. How about you introduce yourself? Hey, this is Stefan Kinsella. I'm really glad to be here. I'm an attorney and libertarian theorist in Houston, Texas. My main website is StefanKinsella.com. All right, welcome to the show. Stefan, I must admit you are a personal hero of mine. I've never heard anyone speak so eloquently on one of the most important topics to me, which is intellectual property and the menace that that is. Oh, thanks very much. It's one of my big hobby horses, as you can tell. So how about you tell us a little bit about intellectual property? What is it? I think it's like a very misunderstood concept. Yeah, I think it is. And look, I'm actually an intellectual property attorney and I'm a hardcore libertarian. And early in my intellectual property career, I decided or discovered that IP is a totally invalid, unlibertarian idea after my soul searching and thinking and researching about it. But it's taken a good 20 years for me to kind of unsort these issues. They're very confusing. It's hard to figure out. I see the same old arguments over and over and over and over again. It's unbelievable. Half the time maybe they're insincere, but they're not always. And I understand the confusion. It's not an easy issue. Honestly, I think what happened is that there was a big mistake introduced early in political theory, which has sort of infected the entire edifice of thought that we have inherited. And that is sort of this Lockean and even Marxian idea about labor and the importance of labor and its relevance to value and property and economics. And I think that the problem is that people sort of think that you own yourself, whatever that means, because self is sort of a big concept, right? If you say you own your body, that's a clear concept. If you say people own themselves, that gets a little bit more murky. So then you say, well, you own yourself, so you own what comes from yourself, which is labor. And therefore you own what you mix your labor with, which is the Lockean idea. So I think this is sort of the background. A lot of people don't put it explicitly like this because they're not really familiar with Lockean ideas. But you hear this all over and over and over again. You hear people say, well, if I spend my effort to develop something that's valuable, then I own the fruits of my labor, don't I? So they keep repeating this over and over again as if it's clear that the purpose of law and justice is to make sure that everyone has some kind of property right to profit from the fruits of their labor, which I think is completely confused and wrong. It reminds me a bit of school, sort of like you expect gold stars and just approval alone is what you're seeking first for your effort. Yeah, and not only that, I mean just this kind of basic idea sounds more socialist than capitalist. It's like everyone is entitled to a certain societal return on their efforts or things like that for existing or for doing what they're expected of them. It's like the effort itself is the thing that you get rewarded for rather than the actual product. Right, and the Austrian idea is that nothing has value intrinsically. People demonstrate that they value things when they act to achieve them or they pay for them or they try to. Yeah, it's easy to show that too. I could take some valuable resource and spend a whole bunch of labor turning it into a gaudy piece of art that no one likes. So my labor doesn't actually imbue that piece of art with value. But wait, how about weight lifting? If I go to like, you know, go and train with like a bunch of heavy weights and I just keep lifting them all day long. I mean, I'm putting in a lot of effort. Do I deserve money for that? Well, I mean, if you think about physics, right? The physics idea of work is forced move through distance. So if you push on a wall for an hour, you might sweat, but you've done no liberal work in the physics sense. And as an analog, and I'm leery of metaphors and analogies, but in scientism, however, this is a pretty good one in the economics concept. If you spend a lot of money or time on something that no one wants to buy, it's worth nothing. It doesn't matter how much you put into it. In fact, one of the copyright ideas that was struck down years ago by the Supreme Court was called the sweat of the brow doctrine. And what that said was, you have a copyright in something that you had sweat of the brow, which means you put a lot of effort into. So the classic example was like a map. So it takes a lot of effort to make a map, like you have to go around the country, surveying, et cetera, and making the map. But the problem is under copyright doctrine at the time, you had to have something, you had some had something called creativity or originality, right? So when you make a map, there's really nothing creative or original about it. Yeah, you're sort of making a copy of the earth, basically. You're just telling people, yeah, you're telling people facts. And so for a long time, you could get a copyright in a map because of the sweat of the brow doctrine and the Supreme Court in the the feist F E I S T case rejected that I'm 30 years ago, something like that. So it made it harder to get copyrights and maps. So guess, so guess what people started doing? They started actually putting what's called traps, copyright traps in maps like paper streets. Yeah, they a fake a fake cul-de-sac or fake street. And so they would just put a fake street on the map and so that they could prove that someone else copied it because, you know, there's no real cul-de-sac. And I guess they claim that that's their art. And that that's original and creative, this false idea about reality or whatever, because that's what fiction is, I guess. So now their maps are a blend of fiction and fact, solely to get to take advantage of copyright protection. There's lots of other examples of similar ways that copyright and patent, which are types of IP, which you asked me about, and which I haven't generally generally defined yet, but I think we'll get to it. But there's lots of examples of how these things corrupt and distort culture and science and innovation. So for example, Hewlett Packard is not in the business of selling printers. They're in the business of selling ink, right? So what they want to do is they want to sell a bunch of laser printers and they want people to buy the cartridges. But the problem is that if they spend a lot of money making a good printer, which is done and people buy it and they don't make much profit off of that, and then they buy generic print cartridges, then they don't get their profit margin on the ink, sorry. So what they do is they design a circuit that really performs no function except to mate with the second circuit on the printer. So the cartridge has a circuit, the printer has a circuit, and they have to mate with each other to activate. And then they patent those things and therefore a generic competitor couldn't make a print cartridge that's compatible with their printers because it would be infringing the patent. It's interesting because it's sort of patenting something that artificially limits the usefulness of a device. It seems sort of like the opposite of improving things. I've seen these chips actually in various devices in printer cartridges, satellite receivers, all sorts of things. And some of the worst part of it is that they're very simple chips. There's nothing that special about them. They're patented and it's almost this sort of trap that says, oh look, you could build this in about eight seconds if you had the right kind of lab. Just go ahead and do it so we can sue you. Yeah. And another example in copyright, that's patent which covers invention. Another example in copyright would be this Omega or Omega watch case where Omega sells watches and Costco, this big discount chain in the U.S., well, they would go down to some South American countries. I can't remember the countries like Costa Rica or somewhere. And they would buy the authorized Omega watch there, which was sold at a cheaper price by Costco because of price discrimination. So let's say the watch is $19,000 here and let's say $9,000 there or something like that. They would go buy it there legitimately and they would import it back to the U.S. and sell it in Costco for, let's say, $15,000. So they were basically engaging in arbitrage. So Costco didn't like this because they want to price discriminate, which I understand. And there's nothing wrong with price discrimination. The problem is they want to use these monopoly anti-competitive privileges of the state called patent, copyright, and trademark to stop it. So what they did was they designed this little world logo symbol and they put it on the, they estged it in very small print on the back of the watch, which is a copyrighted symbol now. And then they accused Costco of violating the copyright. And Costco's first defense was to say, well, on copyright law, there's a first, sorry, use defense where first sale defense, the first sale doctrine, which means you can charge a monopoly the first time, but after that, which is why you and I can sell each other our watches or we can sell each other a used book because it's not a copyright infringement. And the court ruled that the first sale doctrine only applies if the first sale is inside the borders of the U.S. because of the way this arcane copyright statute is written. Oh, that's pretty cheap. This is heading up to the Supreme Court. But if they actually finally rule in Costco's favor, I'm sorry, in Omega's favor, what that potentially could mean is that libraries, let's say around the United States, can no longer even relend used books that were purchased outside of the country or that Amazon cannot, can no longer allow the sale of used books. You know, they have these used books they sell from their customers if they were printed outside of the U.S. So it's potentially huge impact on free speech and freedom of expression, especially with the Wiley versus Kurtzang. Say again. Wiley, John Wiley and Sons versus Kurtzang. Yeah, I think that's the current case heading up to the court now. And then in the field, so that's copyright. I talked about patent and copyright just given examples of how these laws distort practices so people can take advantage of these monopolies. In the field of culture and sort of fashion, there's very little trademark or copyright, very little copyright or patent protection in the field of like purses and clothing, etc. So there's a huge knockoff industry, right? I'm surprised with that too, because that actually, you know, if you're going to go for art only, that's actually a form of art. There's, you know, there'd be very few people who'd argue that that isn't actual art. Right. No, there's obviously artistic aspects to it, but there's functional aspects too. And the problem is you have these legislated artificial laws that just emerge like trademark, patent and copyright, and they don't cover everything. They cover their little domain because they're trying to please special interests they were trying to please. So there's gaps, of course, and there's inconsistencies too. But in the field of fashion, it's always been a free-for-all and it works fine. It's a multi-hundred billion dollar industry. But what you see people do is like these Chanel and Louis Vuitton purses and shoes and luggage, they slap their trademark all over it. It becomes part of the design and they do that because then they can sue knockoffs because they're violating their trademark. So they don't have copyright or patent. So what they do is they actually embed their trademark as part of their design. Now I have no idea if in the free society, you know, Hermes or Louis Vuitton or Chanel would actually have their symbols embedded as part of the fabric or the purge or shoe design. But I kind of doubt it. I think what happened is they did that just to take advantage of trademark law. So they looked around at all the IP laws out there. Which one can we take advantage of? And so we probably have an entire cultural, you know, industry that has been distorted and perverted because of- Yeah, rather than focusing on making a better handbag, they're instead focusing, they're putting resources into the legal side of things. Yeah, how to put the word Gucci in the background on it. Yeah. So some people might say though that this is a good thing because some people may want a genuine Gucci bag and, oh, there's all these knockoffs floating around there. Well, so I would say that, well, I don't think that the purpose of the founders and establishing the government was to make sure that people knew that they were buying legitimate Gucci bags. I mean, it's kind of silly. And furthermore, I'd say that almost no one is ever defrauded. I mean, seriously, have you ever in your life ever even talked to or met or even heard of a single person out of the seven billion people on the face of the earth, ever, even a single time, who bought a Rolex watch for $20, who thought they were getting a real Rolex? Well, there have been situations- Back of a truck. Back of it's not the real deal. Like there's been situations where even this has happened to me where I've wanted the original, just because I wanted the original. It's not that much different from a knockoff, but I wanted it. And then it turned out that what I got was a knockoff. And it seems to me like that that was fraud against me. But that doesn't necessarily draw the line, though, between that and trademark. So what was the case? Could you explain that again? What was the case? If I go out seeking an original of something from the guy who invented it, or the guy who created it for the first time, I make the purchase, but it turns out that what I purchased was a knockoff. Yeah, I think that would be fraud, but that never happens is what I'm saying. I mean, when does that ever happen in reality? For one, if you're a fan of something, it's just actually this sort of thing. I don't know if it's the entire situation happened to me, but I've heard of it happening to others seeking the same interests that I have, where they wanted to get something original and genuine, and they got something just as good. But it wasn't from the actual people. Modchips, for example? And now I have to say, I used to be in the business of selling and installing Modchips back when they were still legal in Canada. They're now kind of not legal. But yeah, the Modchips were one of the most funny things I used to find knocked off all the time. And I was thinking, you know, of all things, this is probably the hardest one for the original company to actually try and do something about. Because then they got to come in, they got to describe what the Modchip does. The court's going to look at them kind of sideways like, why are you even here? Can you guys tell me, what's a Modchip? Basically, it's a chip you'll install in a game console. And once it's installed, all the protection on the game console is gone. Well, not just a game console. It could be a chip that you install in a printer, for the example that you gave earlier, that essentially changes the code inside the printer just manually by like wiring into it so that it can accept a generic cartridge. Basically, it removes these short security protections. What would a fraudulent Modchip be? So these are not made by the manufacturer. So they're inherently sort of black market kind of things. Yeah. And then in fact, actually, there's usually three or four companies in most of these sorts of markets that will actually come up with the original ideas, build the actual original piece of equipment that does the modifications necessary. And then oftentimes you'll find, it's usually from China. China Labs, it'll go and dissect the chip, figure out everything about it, and then build an identical one that obviously does everything the same way. And there you go. You've got your knockoff. Yeah, I mean, a couple times. You've got device to let you use knockoffs. Look, I've had to buy like a replacement battery for my cordless phone at home. And I look up the little serial number on the back of it, or the model number, and I go on Amazon and I see these kind of grainy pictures. And you can tell it's kind of an ease knockoff. Yeah. Okay. I buy for $3 and I get a battery and sometimes it works as they don't, but there's no really fraud. But yeah, there's no problem if you know what you're getting. But the problem comes when you're essentially being deceived either explicitly or implicitly. You think you're getting it from like the original manufacturer, but it's not. Yeah. And the Gucci bag example is another good one of this. The originality of the Gucci bag is pretty much this entire value. It's a status symbol. Yeah. And so if you get a knockoff, even if it's physically identical, if it didn't come from Gucci, then it's not what you wanted. Yeah. How about this? What if you went to see a rock concert? You know, like, I don't know. You wanted to see a rock concert and they lip synced it. Okay. I don't know how that relates. Right. You know, like some Justin Bieber fans go to see Justin Bieber and they find out that he's lip syncing his concerts. Right? I mean, they're going to the original source. They're seeing Justin Bieber right there, but he's playing a recording of himself. It's not the real thing. So let me point out something here. So you notice the example you guys are giving. You're giving examples of possible or real fraud, although I think they're kind of far-fetched because I think in most of the context, you know, there's no fraud going on. And you're giving an example of a contract breach because you're saying, I mean, unless there's a contract breach, there's no problem. I mean, if Justin Bieber promises to sing the song live and he doesn't, then maybe he rips you off for your $140 ticket or whatever, right? So the thing is, people always do this. They say, well, because contract breach is wrong and because fraud, we all agree that fraud should be prohibited, therefore, IP is valid. So that's the reason. That's quite a leap. They do this all the time. So they'll confuse copyright with plagiarism. They'll confuse patent with contract breach. And they never have a coherent argument that, I mean, look, you don't need trade. We all agree we should prohibit fraud. Then why do we need trademark law? Well, yeah, that's the whole point, right? You don't need copyright, trademark, or any of those other laws to enforce fraud law. If you're defrauding somebody, that's a simple case that can operate in a vacuum of any of those other items. Just like the other intellectual property laws, this is injecting a third party into the situation. There's party A that did the selling and party B that did the buying and B feels that they've been ripped off. But then there's C who made the object that was kind of emulated, who thinks that they're involved in this defrauding situation and has legislation to back them up. And it's really not valid. Well, yeah, well, in the case of trademarks, so what you have is you have Chanel using the government to stop someone from selling a bunch of fake Chanel bags, right? Now, they're not the victim of fraud. They weren't defrauded at all. And the customers of these bags weren't being defrauded either, theoretically. I mean, yeah, there are some that knew what they were getting. It's assuming that the customers know that they're buying something that looks like a, you know, that bag but isn't. Yeah, so that's true. It doesn't even require them to have been defrauded. Like they may have known exactly what they were getting. But that's the whole problem with copyright, with trademark, is that it doesn't require a showing of fraud. It only requires a showing of a likelihood of the possibility of consumer confusion, whatever that means. So, and not only that, Chanel is not the victim, but I guess they're really looking out for the rights of their potential future customers who are going to buy a $20 Chanel bag at the dock in Turkey, when really like these guys are potential Chanel customers. I mean, come on, seriously. So, the whole thing is preposterous. It's not really about fraud. It can't be justified with fraud. And copyright law cannot be justified with plagiarism complaints. And patent law cannot be justified with, oh, you competed with me. That's so unfair. You stole my customers. It's like, well, I didn't know you owned us. I didn't know you owned your customers. I think the whole customer argument is always so silly, too. When I was in college, we used a piece of software that cost $13,000. I went to a store. I was like, just for the heck of it. I'd like to see what's the cheapest version of this software. It's got to be a student edition, right? And they're like, yeah, we looked up. It's $13,000. It's like, okay. And of course, there was a copy that floated around the whole classroom that everybody made a copy of. And yeah, okay. Let's say they did come and sue us. We're college students. We probably have five bucks. There was no way ever we would be a customer of this company, but they would treat us as if we ripped them off of $13,000 that we never even had to start with. And you wouldn't have spent on them. They didn't lose a sale. And but their implicit logic is that they were entitled to that sale, which means all these IP disputes are not really about what Tom Palmer calls the ideal object. In other words, it's really literally impossible to have a property right in an idea because it's not something you can control and contain. You ever hear people say that there's war is fought over religion? Well, really, religion is never a battle. I mean, that's just the excuse you use to try to kill someone. So in other words, the dispute is over their body or their land. In other words, I'm going to stick a spear in your body or I'm going to take your gold or your house or your woman for this reason. And that's because you have the wrong religion. In other words, people confuse what the dispute is really about. The dispute is always, always, always about scarce resources, which is people's bodies or physical property. If the dispute was about ideas, then the weapons too would be ideas. Exactly. And you notice the IP supporters are never happy with letting that be the way we settle disputes. In other words, okay, so you took my idea, so in retaliation, I get to take some of your ideas. Okay, fine, go ahead and take them. They always want to take some of your money or some of your land or put you in jail. Well, which country was it? Malaysia? There's a country that, I think, Wipo decided was going to be allowed to have $25 million of a copyright fraud against the US. Antigua. Antigua, yeah, that was it. It was not Wipo, the WTO. WTO. It's an ongoing thing. It's been going about five years now. Yeah, that's coming to a head. I find that hilarious because it has to be one of the first times I've ever seen where it's like, okay, so since, you know, we can't have this idea going out of the states of having gambling, we're going to let you steal some US ideas. Sounds like a plan, you know? Yeah, it's actually kind of cool. It's like Antigua giving us a finger. Of course, they're going to get nuked if they push it too far or so. I hope they sell everything for a penny. That way they can keep it going on the longest. I never understood their plan for, like, so the US owes them $20 million or $25 million, I don't know if it's per year or total or whatever, but so we owe them something maybe per year because of we're continually hurting them with our gambling restrictions which violate WTO. But anyway, I don't understand how Antigua pirating Hollywood movies is going to get them money. I guess, are they going to sell them at like... Well, my guess is if I had this right, the first thing I would do is I'd take all the pirate copies of movies out. They're all the really good ones. I'd put them on a website and I'd have, you know, a penny per click. You click on this, you download this, you know, direct your computer completely legal. You get a license for it and you get the movie. Yeah, they should sell for the lowest cost because then they can really hurt Hollywood more. Yeah. And that's what they're trying to do. They're just trying to get leverage on Hollywood to get Hollywood people to call congressmen to say, what the hell are you doing? Would you please settle this shit with Antigua? Stop hurting Hollywood. That's what they're trying to do. It's funny, they're bringing in that third party, aren't they? No, they are, but they're bringing in the mafia. I mean, Hollywood is a mafia, in my view. They're horrible. These guys are complete fascist, sensorial bullies. So I have to ask you, since you've been in the actual courtroom situation over some of these cases, I assume, how often do you hear these people suggest that copyright infringement is theft, like it's theft of actual objects and how much of that, you know, how much lip service do they get for that? I mean, all the time. Everyone accepts this idea. It's a complete confusion, but it's... That actually surprises me. I always thought that the law was never written, like the property never showed up in there, that it was all about monopolies, like temporary monopolies. Well, but they tried to color their case so that they're going to win. So they put emotional connotations on, they characterize the bad guy or they're defended. They call him a thief, like kim.com is a thief. And if you say, well, what did he steal? Oh, he stole my ideas. It's like, well, you still have them. So it's still your ideas. What did you give him back? I know, right. This would imagine if a thief came into your house and they went and let's say they used your table saw to cut a couple of pieces of wood. Then after that, they polished it up so it looked totally brand new. And then they left your house. You might be a bit perturbed, they came into your house, but at the same time, it's like, that has to be the nicest thief in the entire world. Yeah, except that going into someone's house without their permission is actually wrong. Yeah, that, yeah. I heard a good example. Someone said like, let's say someone needs, I don't know, a new kidney or a new liver and he can't get one. And he has some machine that can just, he walking down the public street and he sees you and he just kind of aims it at your abdomen and takes a photograph, an internal photograph of your kidney and he just maps what it looks like and then he's got some machine and it will print out a brand new kidney at home that he can put in his body and live for another 30 years. Now, would the guy who was photographed be, did you steal something from him really? Wow, like what you described there is like a dream. Like when I sit and think about that, I'm like, wow, the future would be just tremendously amazing if that happened. But in the mind of the IT proponent, that's like a dystopian future. You know what you're getting into? It's like you can just take a picture of my kidney and I don't have to donate it and I can save your life. You're getting into a whole set of copyright law that really grates against me and that is when you hire a photographer to do things like take pictures of you or your wedding and things like that and then they own all those pictures. You paid them for the explicit purpose of taking pictures for you and then they just give you like a couple of shots of each and they say, oh yeah, it says on the back, they're copyrights. So if you go to Walmart, then I'm gonna sue you for lots of money. If you want more, $500 a piece. Yeah, no, and of course in the free market, you would hire people to perform these services and because they didn't have a copyright royalty stream coming after, they might charge a little bit higher price than they do now, but they wouldn't have this thing to hold over you. It's even worse than that. Let's say you're on vacation and you're in Disneyland and you see a group of cute Japanese girls kind of taking a picture of Mickey Mouse and one of them's taking a picture of her four friends and so what do you do? You say, would you like me to take a picture of you? So she hands you her camera and you take a picture of all five girls so they can be in the same picture together and then she might reciprocate and say, would you like me to take a picture for you? So you've both done each other a little tiny anonymous human favor, right? But you don't actually own the copyright of the picture in your camera now because some anonymous Japanese girl took the picture of it. She's the author. She could, it is an actual possibility. It's really not likely to have it, but she could come after you in court for using a photograph of yourself. Yeah, you could argue you have an implicit oral contractual license to use it and all this kind of crap. Well, once it comes to court, then the punishment has already been exacted. You've been sued, that hurts enough. That's crazy, but the point is, so let's say that she happens to take a great picture of you and your wife or you and your kid or whatever and it's like an amazing picture and you want to have a poster made of it. I mean, and let's say, you know, Apple iTunes or whatever the health service you're using says, well, this is a really, it looks like a professional picture to us. I mean, what's your, who's the copyright owner? Can you prove you own the copyright to this? And they won't print it for you because you actually don't own the copyright to the goddamn thing. I mean, it's like, well, I don't know what to tell you. It was in my camera. I mean, look, honestly, there was one time about 10 years ago or actually established a fake website that said Stephanie can sell a photography so that when I got these bullshit questions from these stupid photography printing companies, like Ophoto, when they said prove you're the whatever, I could say all my photographer, here's my website. I actually did that. I mean, but I mean, how many people can do that? What a waste of time, too, to have to do that. That's crazy. You have to prove that you're the one that held the camera. So how to develop cameras that can actually take a fingerprint of the button that's pushing the shutter release? Oh, well, there was a recent thing about a year ago. Some guy who these bongos or some kind of orangutans or monkeys took his camera from him, some photographer, and they took a bunch of pictures that are kind of cool, like of each other doing crazy monkey shit, right? The monkey's on the copyright. No, so the question is, who owns the copyright? And no one knows, but the answer is probably there is no copyright in it at all because no human would... That's one of the things copyrights are given out automatically. Like, you just get them as soon as you make something. So having something without a copyright is extremely rare. I would assume that the owner of the monkeys would be the owner of the copyright, and if there was no owner of the monkeys and the owner of the land the monkeys are on would be... Oh, my God, we're going down the rabbit hole. It's possible, but it could also be the camera owner because, you know, you could say he set up the situation where he handed the camera to a monkey or he allowed himself to be aggressed against or stolen from by a monkey I mean, it's just so unnatural and unreal, but... And if you're an employer and you're employing a photographer and then that photographer takes your picture it's probably completely different. Like this shows the arbitrary nature of this legal system for IP law. This is suddenly reminding me of some of the arguments that I've had when they're like religious arguments. And it's like, well, what happens if you lost your arm in a car accident and then, you know, like if you died and went to heaven, would your arm be up there waiting for you? Right, right. It's like one of those ridiculous arguments, yeah. I think it's exactly like that, I agree. And we have IP law getting extended to the most ridiculous situations. We have the IP law equivalent of somebody asking you, where can I find hokers? And you say, oh, just go down King Street, you'll find them there, and then the cops come after you and bust you. And we have the IP law exact equivalent of that, which is if you link to a site that contains some sort of copyright material, a tributary infringement or something like that. Yeah, you're in trouble too. Yeah, that's the Richard, I think his name is Richard Dwyer. He was a UK grad student, and he had a website with links to other websites in other countries, which had allegedly copyright infringing material, well, let's say they probably were, but he just had links. And but the linking was actually legal under UK law. So the U.S. is going crazy in trying to get this guy extradited to the U.S. I actually haven't heard the latest on this case, but this poor guy, his probably life has been ruined. I mean, this is what happened to Aaron Swartz. I mean, this guy committed suicide, and he probably had some emotional issues or whatever. He was a special person, right? He dropped out of high school early. He was a genius, and he was very passionate about some things. One of the founders of Reddit. Yeah, I've read it and also the other one. There's, well, there's Demand Progress, and there's one more. RSS, Demand Progress, yeah. He's like a co-founder of like seven things. Just for our listeners' benefit, can you like recap a bit what that case was about? So Aaron Swartz... That was just copying documents from like a couple of public libraries. Yeah, he's sort of a kind of quasi-lefty, techie data liberation guy, and part of his... So the first thing he tried to do related to this was, there's something called PACER, P-A-D-E-R, and all caps, which is this... Library. A database of legal filings in the U.S., and lawyers have to pay to get access to it. But the thing is, they're getting... They're paying to get access to publicly accessible documents, because in the U.S., government documents are not subject to copyright, okay? And they shouldn't be. I mean, nothing should be, but they shouldn't be, of course, because these are the laws and the legal precedents we all have to be bound by. So it would be obscene to protect them by copyright, which other governments do, by the way. Yes, we're here in Canada, so... Yeah, I think Canada's worse on this. One of the things you're worse than us on, in addition to socialized medicine, right? I'm gonna have something to ask you about after you're done with this here. Just to see if it's similar in the U.S. or not, but anyways, go ahead. Sure, so what Schwartz did was first, he hacked into the Pacer database and started publishing all these court cases, decisions. And everyone went crazy, and then they realized that they couldn't sue the guy because these are public domain. Yeah, and also, whether it was hacking, it was in dispute as well. Well, I don't remember the details. Because he automated the process with the script. Yeah, otherwise it would have been fine if he did it all by hand. No, I think that was the JSTOR case. So the first thing was Pacer. So Pacer, he got away with, because they couldn't charge him with anything. Well then, this JSTOR is a private database collection of academic articles, which every professor at universities has access to, but it's very expensive. MIT, for example. Basically all the journals. And think about it. So all these professors who publish, you write these articles, they don't get paid. I mean, I've written a lot of these things myself, these non-fiction academic articles. You don't get paid. You submit them to a journal. Sometimes you have to pay the journal to publish you. So it's this weird thing where there's this walled garden of millions and millions of interesting and useful journals and articles, which only the cloistered professionals have access to. And JSTOR guards it by copyright. I mean, look, honestly, And they didn't even pay for any of that stuff. If you talk to any author of an article, like a typical law professor, they didn't get paid a dime for it. So they're not doing it for money. They're doing it because it's their passion or whatever. I think they would probably rather it be open to the world than cloistered away. But unfortunately, they usually stupidly assign away their copyrights to these journals because of the industrial educational complex kind of system. You know, the whole thing, right? So what Aaron did was he wanted to liberate these articles. So he was visiting an MIT or something, and he had an account and he was entitled to access it. So he started downloading these articles. Well, then the network people noticed it and they stopped them. So he started spoofing his IP address and all this crap and they stopped them again. So he said, I need a hard connection. So he went into a closet at MIT and he just plugged his computer in and let it download data for like two or three days. This guy's awesome. Yeah, he was awesome. So he was ballsy. And so it was downloading millions of articles, and which he never released, by the way, he just downloaded them. And so then they, I think they, from what I've heard, they detected it and they put up a camera and they finally figured out who it was. So they called the guy. Of course. And so then they charged the guy with violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which is a Bill Clinton freaking law. And he was potentially going to go to federal, you know, to sit in a federal cage for 35 to 50 years of his freaking life. Now, everyone says, oh, the prosecutor wasn't really going to do that. Well, they hold this shit out over you. And they say I'm going to ruin your goddamn life. I'm going to kill you unless you agree to a five-year, a two-year or whatever, you know, plea deal. And then you're a federal felon for life. And this, and probably he'd have to agree to give up the internet for some amount of time, which was his life. So the guy killed, he killed himself. And it's, it's anguishing and heart-wrenching. What they did, they killed this guy, this poor guy. I mean, it's, it's murder. My mind is pure murder. That's terrible. Something, well, yeah, not to, not to divert from this topic any further, but because you've given like an absolutely excellent. I've converted it enough. Yeah, I just wanted to kind of go back to something that you said before about how people will kind of mix up copyright and plagiarism. And there's a lot, there's an argument I get a lot when I say that let's get rid of copyright after they're done being aghast that anyone would say such a thing and they've literally never heard it before. Then they'll reply with, but then people will just take my stuff and put their name on it. And they think that's what it's about, which is, is where there's a lot of ignorance just in general about what IP is about. I think that's part, I think that's part of it. I think people are generally jumble, jumble and confused on this whole issue. And, and look, let's, let's go back for a second. Intellectual property is a term that is used by lawyers and government officials to describe a set of different types of legal rights that have to do with the intellect, things that come from the intellect. And the traditional examples are patent, which deal with inventions, you know, like a 17 year, roughly exclusive right to an invention. Copyright, which is about a hundred plus year right to creative works like novels and paintings and movies or whatever. Steamboat Willie. Yes, Steamboat Willie. And well, and that's a combination of trademark and copyright. And then trademark and trade secret. And then also new things like database rights and also defamation law, I would count. So it's like a body of law that deals with these things. I'm curious, when, when people sell Elvis memorabilia, they're giving money to the Elvis estate under like some, what law, which one of those is that covered under? That's probably trademark. Interesting. So because he's got a, there's a trademark in the Elvis name. It could be copyright too. It's not patent for sure. It's not trade secret. It's probably trademark. I was wondering if there was, there was some specific law on likenesses and such. Yeah. Well, there's publicity rights, which is also a kind of an, that's called entertainment law. Okay. And I, I also consider publicity rights to be, look, the traditional IP rights are patent copyright, trademark and trade secret. Those are the big four. And then there's new, there's newer ones that are legislated, like the semiconductor mass court protection act, which governs how you lay out an integrated circuit, which is like copyright sort of. And then there's also database rights in some countries. What's called moral rights in some countries, which has to do with attributing to the, the author of a play or whatever. We've actually covered moral rights on the show. That was, that was the Michael Snow thing, right? Yeah. Yeah. Those geese. Well, why don't you recap that just for a second, Dave? Just go ahead. Oh yeah, there's, there's a horribly ridiculous case where, yeah, I believe it was Michael Snow. He basically was commission artist. Yeah. To build these sculptures of, I think it was geese. I can't remember exactly. Canada geese. That's right. Canada geese, yeah. In one of our shopping malls, we have the In Center, which has a sculpture, which is a bunch of hung, like they're just hanging down on wires. There's some Canada geese. And for Christmas, the Eaton Center decided they put red bows on them to kind of, I guess, dress them up for Christmas. And he sued because that was against his moral rights as an artist. Right. And yeah, in the end, they were forced to take down the bows. I think they may have taken down the geese. I don't remember as well, but. Still up. Yeah. So yeah, that's the first thing I think people need to realize is that the IP is not just one thing. There's actually a multitude of things, like a multitude of different laws. They're completely separate. Yeah, they're separate. There's a reason they're classified by lawyers together. The case you gave, I've never heard of that, but it sounds similar to others I've heard. And usually, I mean, this is one of the cases, the places where the case where the US is not the worst. But like moral rights in other countries are more, what we call like in France and probably Canada, from what you said, they're more inalienable. In other words, you can't even get rid of it. Although in the US and other countries, you can't get a real copyright either. I mean, you have a copyright and something. The moment you, you know, affix some creative original work and the tangible medium of expression. And that's it. You're stuck with it for life. I think that they started doing that around the 1970s, didn't they? Before that, you had to at least put a copyright symbol on the work. Well, it was late, it was late 80s. And before that, you had to actually actively register your copy, right? And put a copyright notice on it. But nowadays, copyright notice is not necessary, nor is registration. So there's actually, they got a ton of like orphan works now. And there's a software author who, for many, many years, not a lot of people would touch his work simply because he absolutely refused to claim copyright or even just claim any sort of license on his work. He released some DNS servers and mail servers because his name was Daniel J. Bernstein. And literally, when people asked him, he's like, I don't care. I don't care. I like it. It's yours. Just use it. Now they have copy lefts. Yeah. Now he's actually claimed specifically that he's put it in the public domains because he's tired of trying to explain to people his position. Even if there's like a 99% chance that he's cool with it, he still would have like the legal ability to sue you. Yeah, the problem is that, I mean, there's so many problems with IP. It's just so contrary to property rights. But one problem is, you really cannot get rid of your property right even if you want to. I mean, you cannot put your stuff in the public domain. I get this argument all the time from people and it's really, really, really annoying from like IP advocates and they say, well, Kinsella, you're a hypocrite because you have your stuff that's copyrighted. I'm like, look, your goddamn state copyrights the shit. And you won't let me get rid of it. How am I a hypocrite? It's sticky. I mean, it's ridiculous. So what about those little notices that they put on saying, now this is public domain. I have granted it to public domain. But it's not. They're wrong. It's not public. Just look, what if you say tomorrow, let's say you're walking in the park and you just announced to the world, I hereby renounce my ability to request social security payments when I'm 70 years old. Does that prevent you from asking for social security when you're 70? No. I mean, you see, it has no legal effect. There's no legal way to do it. Most property rights are dealt with by some private contract which can either be evidenced by an oral agreement where there's testimony from one of the parties as to what they actually said like words that mean something or there's a written agreement which is the more usual case. And so you can actually produce a writing. So let's say I give you an easement over my property and I say, you know what, you're a good neighbor and you need to have a shortcut to the grocery store. So you give me 10,000 bucks and I'll give you an easement for life or for forever, whatever, over the back corner of my property. Well, I'm going to write up a contract and you can produce it if you need to, okay? And the same thing with copyright. Like if I have a novel I've written and you want to make a movie out of it, well, then I'll give you an option or I'll actually write a contract up. The problem with what people try to do is like on their websites, they try to take advantage of creative comments which I admire and like. But the problem is like on my website, for example, the footer of my website, it says everything on this side is hereby published in accordance with the Creative Commons license 3.0 BY which means all you need to do is say I'm the author and you're free to do what you want with it. But the problem is if we had a contract, if I had a contract with a certain person about that and I tried to sue them later for copyright infringement, they would just say, are you out of your mind? And they would produce the contract, right? So what happens if 50 years from now I have some heir who sues someone for including one of my copyrighted works in their play? This very podcast perhaps. Yeah, exactly. How do they prove they had a license? Do they say, well, I think my grandpa said that he remembers looking at your website one day and he thought there was a CC notice on the footer. I mean, that's not legal proof. I mean, so what if I take the footer off tomorrow? And a hundred people have downloaded the stuff and they've used it. And they didn't print it out. They're not freaking lawyers. It sounds like one of the big mistakes here is that there's no form of adverse possession when it comes to copyright. You can't say, well, I used it for 50 years and nobody complained about it. So I'm okay to use it. Well, there might be a version of that with what's called a stopper or latches, like if you don't assert your rights for a long time. But again, that's uncertain and it's not applicable to every case. And you said we're not all lawyers, too. If you're not a lawyer, that makes it a minefield. That makes it so that... I know. Now, any time you ever copy anything from anywhere, it doesn't matter if you are 99.99% sure the guy is perfectly fine with it, you still feel like you're stepping into a minefield. And this was a chilling effect, essentially. The idea of using your creativity and basing it on someone else's is something that's scary now. Yeah, and that should be encouraged, right? I mean, we should all be encouraged to remix and to reuse and to... I mean, look, I try as hard as I can. I talked to my friend, Jeff Tucker. You mentioned him earlier today. We had a conversation earlier about all this. I don't remember where I learned some things or who my influence was. I'm like, yeah, I got that idea, too. I thought I came up with it on my own or maybe I read it in a book when I was 17 and then when I was 28, kind of the remnant idea sort of influenced itself. I mean, people don't keep track of these things and they shouldn't have to. This is what society is. This is the good thing about society that we can learn from each other. This is a very definition of human progress is that we take something from someone else and we build on it. It's like, I think it was Isaac Newton. I think he said, if I've seen further than anyone else, it's because I stood on the shoulder of giants. Of course. Of course. That's one of the most profound things I've ever read because especially given what's happening now, what we have is we, I never answered your original question. You said, what is IP? And IP is basically patent and copyright. Let's focus on that. IP is the modern legislative system of granting basically certain monopolies and it's rooted in the historical practice of the state trying to control thought and trying to grant monopoly privileges to cronies of the crown, basically. So for example, you would have some guy... I mean, literally it was. So you have some guy who would, the king would say, you're the only guy who can make playing cards in this region of England or you're the only guy who can import goods into North America. That's called a patent. Letters patent, they call it. And in copyright, it was, no one has the right to print these books unless they get the governments and the church's approval first. So it's all rooted in censorship and thought control and monopoly privileges and protectionism. That's how this all started. The response to that might be, I don't believe this, but even someone might say, oh, it's not that way anymore. Now it's about protecting creators and artists and such. Yeah. So, well, well, I think the origins, I think that people that advocate it need to be aware of its origins to be a little bit open-eyed about it not be so naive. It has been democratized and institutionalized. That's true. And in the case of copyright, what happened was when the statute of Anne was enacted in 1709, when the stationers guild monopoly was about to expire on who could print things, the authors actually were in favor of this new change in law because they thought, if I'm an author of a book, right, and until now, the government has the right to decide who can print it. Well, if I have the copyright, now I can decide who can print it. So in other words, they were in favor of it because it was a way to escape government censorship. They didn't need the government's approval. Now the authors had the approval, right? In the case of patents, I think it was a fundamental mistake based upon the idea that the government can stimulate innovation in a certain area. I mean, look, it's nothing different than government research on pharmaceuticals or NASA and all these arguments you hear that, you know, we take money from the taxpayer. It's just a different type of incentive. Like we hear often that they'll incentivize like stem cell research or something. They just dump a truckload of money on them. But there's this other kind of incentive where they go, if you do this sort of action, we'll grant you a temporary monopoly. And then you can use that to, rather than just getting money straight from our bank account, you just extort it directly from the public. Cut us out. Yeah. I would always rather a more honest system where we just, and some of the IP guys, even libertarians like Alex Tabarak and these guys, they've said, why don't we like take $200 billion from the taxpayers every year and give it to a government panel and let them award it to the most deserving medical innovation science. They say this. I mean, it's incredible. But it's the ultimate logic of IP and it's actually more honest and probably would cause less problems. You know, the worst part that I find with this sort of thing is since this law applies to everything that each individual makes, it makes them, it requires that person to have a knowledge of what those laws are. And I can tell you, even for very simple things, it is incredibly difficult to actually get a copy of the current law unless it's something that's very popular. Like try and get a copy of your local by-laws. It's a horrible pain. And to expect people to not just go through what is available for copyright law, but to understand all the case law behind it because so much of it is rooted in case law, it's absolutely insane that somebody should have to go through all of that just so they can enjoy their own creative works and enjoy giving them to other people. No, I agree. And so it drives me insane when people say, well, we need patent law to help the small inventor. And I'm thinking like, you guys have no freaking clue about what you're talking about because... Well, sometimes they'll respond to that point with like an anecdote. Like I knew a guy who knew a guy and he was like, I made this thing and then now I saw it on Deal Extreme or some other Chinese site where there's a knockoff version. And I'm really angry now. And that's essentially they just end the conversation, right? Like I've just proved IP is great. Yeah, no, they do that. But I'm thinking like, you know, do you really understand that patents are acquired by these mega companies that acquire oligopolistic, you know, kind of... What they do is like, you'll have Apple and RIM, Samsung, they'll sue each other. But they really don't care who wins because it's just a couple 100 million here and there. Okay. So they're going to come up with some kind of agreement because, you know, Samsung has thousands of patents against Apple and vice versa. So what they do is they sue each other and they come up with a compromise. But the little guy on the outside he can't spend $5 million to defend himself in a lawsuit. And even if he could, he couldn't win because he doesn't have 5,000 patents just to countershoot the other guy. It keeps him out of the game. And I see this in cell phones. The companies you're mentioning make cell phones. And over in this side of the water, you would never imagine a small person in their basement building a custom cell phone that they're going to make a couple of thousand of for their friends and family and to sell and make a little bit of money on it. There was a Kickstarter recently for an inexpensive 3D printer. I don't know if you're familiar with the 3D printers. It's definitely. Yes. Yeah. Well, just for our listeners' sake, essentially, you can actually make three-dimensional objects like out of a little device that sits on your desk. So essentially, yeah, if you need to replace a battery cover on the back of your remote control, you can just download the battery cover and then send it to the printer. And it comes out just like a 2D printer, except it's a three-dimensional object. And typically, they're extremely expensive. And it pretty much boils down to like the legacy of patents that are on them. So there was a Kickstarter. I was talking with my buddy Jeff Tucker again about this recently about the advent of encryption and bit torrenting and digital is really hurting copyright. I mean, they really can't stop it, right? Yeah. They cannot stop it. This is a winning battle for us. I'm going to say that those cell phones that I'm saying people don't build in their basement here because of those rules, over in China, and you're going to find this hard to believe, you're going to have to go on Google and search for it, they actually build their own custom cell phones, some people. Right. And they will sell a few of them. And you know, you might only find a couple of thousand. Why? Because they just buy the various chips. They figure out how to put it together. They make the phone and that's it. Of course, if they did that here, they'd be sued by every single cell phone company and every single electronics manufacturer probably across the planet. I bet you they'd be sued so hard. They would be buddies with the people in the spectrum regulation too and then they would go after them. They'd all like the entire US GDP before the trial was over. Yeah. I just wanted to finish up my story on the 3D printer. I forget the name of them. I include it in the show notes, but they're essentially they're being sued for patent infringement before they've even made a single one. Wow. Well, and I think that so so this is the battle. The battle is the state versus freedom and technology. And so the question is who's going to win? And I think that I mean, look, I think the state made a big mistake with and I'm glad they did, but they made a big mistake with like in the US with the DMCA, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. They made that carve out for companies like Amazon and Google and etc. They didn't know what they were doing, but they luckily they made a big mistake. So now the question is, so I think that encryption and Pirate Bay and torrenting are going to spell the doom of copyright. Just for any listeners not familiar, what is that exception in the DMCA? So the DMCA says that if you have, if you're an ISP or ASP, they caught an internet service provider and you basically own the infrastructure of a website or something like that. And other people are using it and they post or distribute material that is potentially violating the rights of other people under copyright law or under defamation law is so long as you don't control it, and so long as you respond to a takedown notice, then you're not liable. So that's called a carve out. And it's, I actually completely oppose it because I don't think you should be liable in the first place, but at least what it, that's why we had this whole system of takedown notices now and it's abused. I think it should be improved where I think that if you, you know, if you send a unjustified takedown notice, you should be liable for damages. Those takedowns are posted under penalty of perjury aren't they? Yeah, but there's, it's really, I mean, look, again, most people that are the subject of just average people and they don't have the ability to fight it. And there's no, there's no big reward for it. So it's, it's just like the legal system. Like you can sue someone and you can totally fuck them over without being liable for anything. So you can, you can, I mean, they take down millions of these things per month or something. But, but it did give a, I mean, I don't think YouTube would have ever existed, for example, without this. So the state made a mistake. It made a mistake. So the question is, what's going to happen with the physical world, which is patents? In other words, I think that 3D printing has the potential to undermine the entire state apparatus of control in this world. And so there is going to be a coming battle. And so the state is going, and you've already heard the state saying that people printing magazine, you know, gun, gun, gun parts and magazine rifles, magazine parts and things like this with 3D printing, they're going to start using this as an excuse to control 3D printing, just like the state uses pornography, child pornography, and terrorism. And now the thing about that is it's going to be pretty much impossible, except if they essentially institute a complete police state. Like imagine if they tried to control what you print out of your 2D printer. Like can you imagine the level of intrusion that they'd have to have in your life in order to achieve that goal? Right, I think they would have that on police state, but they basically were they were too late to stop the internet. I think you'd be surprised about the 2D printing thing. If you print in color, most printers do print their serial number in the picture in yellow dots. Yes, I don't think that's that's mandated. And also don't don't these printers also have like some kind of something written to the firmware to prevent them from say printing money? Yes, if you if you photocopy money, most photocopiers will lock up on purpose. Yeah, they'll they'll have like a algorithm to detect it. Ooh, that looks like money. I'm just going to shut off. Photoshop will not save any file that includes scan money. They have some kind of money. But as far as practicality goes, this seems like the key to unlock the door to freedom. Like there's there isn't too much that you can do to completely lock down someone's access to some physical object if they can just make one with incredible precision. You should I have like right behind me in the Liberty Beat Studios right here, a wrap wrap machine that that does printing of 3D objects. And it's it's amazing in the future is going to be bright with these things around. I know of at least two cases though where the DMCA has caused huge amounts of damage. I can think of the simple case of where the original Xbox was hacked. The encryption on it was hacked. It was pathetically weak. The encryption used so that people could run their own custom software not even so they could run any sort of pirated software but so they could run their own custom version of Linux or whatever software they'd like to load on there. And of course that was illegal. And we have a Dimitri Skylerov from who managed to crack the encryption on Adobe Acrobat files, which was again incredibly pathetically weak from a cryptography standpoint. It's basically trying to encrypt your stuff by adding another number. He was actually invited into the U.S. under false pretenses so he could be this is one of my techniques that they'll copyright machine code essentially like bits and bytes that the computer uses to perform a task. A number. Yeah. Meanwhile, that's that's nothing like a picture or like or any sort of piece of art. It's more it's closer to a machine. It seems like it'd be something to be covered under patents rather than copyrights. It's functional. We call it functional. Right. Yeah. So you'll have these machines doing this task and then they'll copyright it as if it were like a creative piece of art or something. And now you can't do that task. So essentially they've blocked your ability to perform a function rather than just to duplicate and enjoy something. I believe that was attempted with a true type fonts. Basically any sort of fonts which are based on curves instead of actual dots are able to be copyrighted. However. Yeah. The bitmap representation the these little dots go here and these white dots go there. That is not covered on a copyright law. So people will take the true type fonts blow them up to huge sizes create the bitmap of it and then they'll have a program trace those and remake the curves and then the font is no longer copyright. Hey. I'm curious what you guys think about this. RonPaul.com dispute. So have both of you guys heard about this? Jai and Dave. I've heard a little bit but I can't remember the whole thing about all I know is I was kind of upset with Ron Paul. Now we're actually pretty technical people. So we'll have some insight into how the DNS system works. So essentially just for the listeners benefit here what happened was Ron Paul a politician in the United States and a liberty activist so to speak definitely much better than the alternatives. He was running his campaign and then some of his like most die hard fans set up a site to like raise awareness and collect some funding and stuff like that and they named it RonPaul.com. So that address was available for them to register. Now there's a dispute resolution kind of system in place for someone who thinks that a domain name was registered in order to violate their trademark and Ron Paul has decided to use this framework. He's essentially saying that the trademark of RonPaul.com belongs to me because that's my name. The site's obviously about me. Oh now this is interesting because in Canada in Canada you cannot trademark your full name. Your full name this is actually I remember a case from a long while ago somebody was using their full name on a shirt and somebody else decided to make a shirt with their full name on it which happened to be the exact same name of that other person and there was no the court said there's no recourse because you're allowed to put your name on things. My opinion on this is that like I don't know how to feel about Ron Paul kind of betraying his former biggest fans although when he first made like apparently he negotiated with them first rather than going straight to the whip-o or whatever that this dispute resolution kind of for domain names body instead of going straight to them he said like can I just have this domain and the reply that he got from RonPaul.com owners was you can have RonPaul.org or you can have both RonPaul.org and RonPaul.com if you pay us like 250 grand yeah they want big money big big money there's something called domain squatting but go on why don't you explain what domain squatting is because maybe this qualifies well domain squatting is whenever you buy up a whole bunch of domains you know in the hope that that someone will actually want to use those domains and like the thing is this in order for you to have a website which has a name on it like a domain name like let's say google.com right you have to pay um well you have to pay to get a your domain name registered right so basically you're basically you're paying for a computer to reserve your spot so that whenever someone punches in you know your RonPaul.com and that spot is sort of yours quote unquote like it's like it's a possession of sorts there's a little hack though that people use which is and this has been sort of fixed but basically it's like scalping yeah if you want if I'm all bunch of tickets they're not going to use right if you register a domain and then change your mind within I think it was three days you only have to pay a few pennies so basically what these guys would do is they'd go and register millions of domains all the time constantly and then go and undo them so no one no one thinks that's cool but and essentially they're sort of accusing this RonPaul.com doing the same thing you're trying to cash in on a domain which um if you're looking at it from the perspective of someone browsing the web they type in that domain they're probably looking for the actual RonPaul site not not a fan site yeah so that's that's their position and I don't know if I necessarily disagree with this idea that uh the domain should be handed over to RonPaul and here's my reasoning the domain name system is is uh it may be owned by governments but it's largely privately kind of hell it's not it's not a government institution they have uh they have like bodies set up to deal with those things but you don't actually have to use those domain names you know that that's actually you can if you go into your computer and you tell it I'm not going to use the official domain name system I'm going to use this alternative system that was set up by some guy anyone could set up set one up if they want and now anytime I type a domain name into into my bar it'll go to a site decided on by those people or and they could ask for registrations as well so the domain name system is largely voluntary which is good because um then the uh you don't have to like it doesn't have to be about your you know rights or constitutional rights or natural rights or whatever you want to say when it comes to your domain name it can just be I'm appealing to the organization which has control over this and they may have gotten that control in illegitimate ways like they are no there is one interesting thing there's no reason anybody else can't just go and make their own domain name system if they choose there's nothing that prevents you from just saying I'd like to make my own domain name system with my own rules if if like obviously it would be a pain to do then but if they if they made the wrong decision enough times if they gave away important domains that's exactly what would happen the software is even free and frankly it doesn't even take up that much resources if you want to do it for just you and a few thousand friends I bet you could do it for under two dollars a month so what are your thoughts Stefan? so I don't disagree with that strongly with most of that I think that so I think that what's going on there's an obfuscation here there's there's a clouding of the issue here what's happened is that the government has infiltrated the internet system with ICANN they basically set up a quasi-private corporation called ICANN which controls domain names which basically just says we're going to distribute this internationally recognized list of conversions between an alpha-numeric domain name and an IP address right? and everyone's voluntarily so-called agreed to it because it's the only game in town so I agree with you if they abuse it too much people would go to you know other solutions but imagine you have a phone number like let's say you have a phone number 1-800-Flowers.com like in the U.S. which is a very valuable phone number to have now it's not a property right you don't actually own a piece of property but you have a contract with some kind of service provider that gives you this phone number that's valuable and you build a business model around it right? Now let's say that some guy named John Flowers files a trademark lawsuit in a U.S. court and says that they're violating my trademark because they're their name Flowers and the court issues in order to the phone company and says you have got to transfer your contractual rights over to this John Flowers guy from the original owner of the of the phone number now you're not taking a piece of property but you're basically using government IP law which is status and un-libertarian just to to take property rights and contract rights away from people and I think that's what's going on in this case sort of they do actually tell you up front that you can't register a name that's trademarked to someone else yeah whoa whoa whoa well I agree they tell you up front but they tell you because they had to adopt these U.D. RP rules uniform it's true but I believe that there would be a similar system if it was completely free market where if people if the people at large were going to this domain and not getting what they expected that I think that there would be provisions when you sign up and ask for a domain right right right right we can take it yeah but yeah but you're going to fraud here so you're saying that you're saying that we're not going to be the sort of reputable domain name you know handing out allocation system if we're going to have customers that are defrauding people or being deceitful well it may not it may not just be about fraud it's a customer service thing there's a difference though between and I look at like this there's a difference between say the yellow page is saying they're no longer going to publish your ad for your auto body shop that says oh you also operate a corner store when you don't because it devalues the quality of the phone book versus having the government come in and say I don't like your auto parts and this guy across the street he sells better ones and they're more accurate so yeah that little piece of the phone book is now his sorry yo well let's talk about it in fact I mean I've been around polled.com have you guys been there I mean does it really seem like I checked it out when this news broke did it defraud you did it deceive you no it's not necessarily what I'm talking about though like if it so if it could be just a customer service issue because I'm a user of the domain name system and it's administered by techie people like me and if the users become unhappy with something then like if they feel that when they go there this isn't what I expected then it you have like a an obligation of sorts to service them to say that okay we're gonna take this record in our system that belongs to us and change what it points to because we told them when they signed up that they shouldn't be using it shouldn't be representing to be someone else the whole problem here is simply because the US government really controls the main domain system the one that everyone's using is that they're the ones who are making the decisions and if it was just a private contract that literally you know like with the yellow pages they they decided we don't like you anymore we're not doing business with you we're going to give our business to someone else there wouldn't be any complaints Ron Paul would be completely when there's rights to phone up yellow pages and say this sucks I want it and if yellow pages agreed with him nobody would complain the problem is that he has to go through assuming the contract with the person that originally claimed it allowed for such things of course but yeah although I get what you're saying Stefan that when I when you actually go to this actual site in this specific example I don't think that that anyone who's looking for this type of content and then lands on that site is going to feel like they were tricked into going there so I get your point I mean look it's not only that point the point is what if if if if some company try to set themselves up as the centralized domain name allocating you know system and if they had a rule that said if we don't like what you're doing we're going to take it away from you will they succeed no I think we'd all say no well as long as the way that they use that rule is is reasonable if you look at other sites like google for example they pretty much have a rule just like that they say if we don't like what you have we're literally just going to take it out of our search engine so tough on you if you don't like that and the the reason why it doesn't cost them customers is because they use it very sparingly and they have a market incentive to ensure that they make sure that both sides are happy and this is what this is the problem you have when when it's run by government and not only what Dave said that it's like oh this is public property now we have a a stake in it so they should do what we say versus but there's also the other side of that kind of equation as well well I don't disagree completely I mean I just think that in this case there's so I mean almost everything that the Ron Paul guys are doing could not be justified in a libertarian society I mean you can't I mean I'm not saying they're doing something wrong because you know I'm not going to give advice on to people on how they how you should you know act in an unfree world but the point is should this system exist should you be able to take someone's domain from them should you be able to take someone's street address or their home or their you know or their phone number from them if they violate your trademark rights and I say no because trademark is inherently wrong and Ron Paul's case which by the way I think he will lose I think he's he doesn't have a strong case here but even if he did it doesn't mean it's just I think he's going to lose this case and I think he should lose this case and I think that it's horrible that he's doing it I mean you know if if the government I was talking to a friend the other day and I said suppose you lived in a society like you know pre-Nazi Germany or something like that it's very racist or any Semitic or whatever and the law said if you rent a house from me and if you're a Jew then any Aryan can take it from you by applying to this government Tribunal or whatever okay that'd be horrible and you could imagine some Jews doing what they had to do in that society and they rent a house and they know that at any moment some Aryan might want to take their house from them now if you're an Aryan living in that society should you should you do it of course I say I say no god damn it that sounds a bit yeah I agree okay so I say should not use the law to take people's property when you can the thing that the thing that kind of differentiates this in my mind though is that you don't the even if trademark law never existed this exact scenario could happen but it would be different because the government would not be involved it's the it's having the government do the work that's the problem it could happen that someone could challenge say the domain name system was run completely privately and there was no such thing as trademark laws and no one had ever even heard of it someone could say that oh people are going to this site and it's coming up something that's not right it's coming up something that's not actually official but that's not happening here really right it was sort yeah people are it's not happening here I think it's so no one's going to now here's the thing it would do would be like it would go into the system and I believe that you're right it would be rejected it'd be like this is fine like this is not the same as someone just registering ronpaul.com and just slapping it full of ads and then every time you go there you just see nothing but a page full of ads so you see they would use they would essentially be arbitration by the the body that's in control of domain names I think it's so unfortunate that ronpaul is doing this because there's a few things he's done he claims that he's a libertarian but there's all these little tiny mistakes that he's making along the way partially either for his own gain or to appease the republican party that he's with and people get this kind of messed up notion of what a libertarian really is and it kind of devout he's almost in a way he's kind of devaluing what the notion of a libertarian really is I was saying all along that ronpaul is a politician when he's done campaigning he will be a different man and I was right yeah I totally agree with you Stefan that what he's doing isn't cool I just don't just because I know how these DNS systems work it's essentially just like a phone book and essentially it's a someone's own personal computer or business computer it has a list of responses that it's trained to give when you ask it for a specific string of characters and that's the response that goes back to it and it's up to them to maintain that system in such a way that it pleases the users who are making the queries as well as the registers that who are asking for the domains so it's not like I disagree with you in like principle though I got kind of a completely little separate topic here that I would love to ask you a question about because I don't know there's this one thing that kind of you know it puts off my my smell meter of this might actually be a bit of a a way that the government's abusing copyright themselves and that is the idea that municipalities are going to companies like municipal world I think there's another one municipal code or something like that there's actual companies with these names and they're purchasing the right to use pre-made bylaws and some of them are almost basically setting it up so that the only way you can get a copy of that bylaw is through these companies that wrote it and therefore it seems to maintain its copyright well this is new to me I've never heard of I never heard of this issue I would say that I don't think it's possible to abuse copyright law because it's that's like saying abusing you know your privileges that are not the concentration camp or something I mean like I know my city itself actually almost all of the bylaws come from municipal world which is it's an actual corporation not a government corporation that will sell you pre-made bylaws so you don't have to think you don't even have to think as the person who's running the city you can just be like I thought we'd have a new law about parking let's go through the menu and choose one you know of course they they retain their copyright to the original company and the company just sells a license for the city to use it and publish it within their books that is a new one I mean look I've had hundreds of interviews and talks on IP and you've hit me with a new one I've never heard of this issue there you go you got something to look up Dave this is Dave he's a shit disturber it's what he does it's something worth looking into because it just it sets off my meter of saying this this is something that's not right you know that the city can't even be bothered to make its own laws and decides to get itself into the IP market to purchase that Steph I'm going to try to hit you with a new one too I don't know if I'm going to succeed but here I go there's a game called Dead Space 3 and it was released on console game consoles and it had a system where if you're if you're kind of in a hurry when you're playing the game well first of all you go in and you collect things and then the more you collect the more powerful your dude gets but if you're in like a hurry you can just kind of go to their site and uh oh yeah I remember this you essentially pay like some actual currency and real monies yeah real monies and collect some in-game kind of numbers so your dude just kind of just immediately gets more powerful stuff he improves yeah so you basically just avoid all that work you know to get that stuff you are you're now getting if you can call it work it's a game it's fun but sometimes it can it can get kind of dull if it takes a long time right so some folks found a way in the game due to an oversight by the programmers to collect the same benefit in the game really really fast over and over and over again exactly so they're collecting so what they it's a way to circumvent having to pay for it like instead of having to um to say buy items you can there's like an area in the map where you can go into a room get an item leave the room come back and it will be it will spawn a new item you can grab it and come back and you can just repeat the process over and over again with actually having to pay money to get these items got it got it and naturally people are saying that this is stealing because you're you're getting the benefit that you would have got by paying money and only you didn't pay money stealing stealing right stealing you're stealing right stefan things within the world it within the actual world that that is like it's only it only exists within your own computer too it's like actually and it's the computer is your own property the game is and you bought the game that you made by playing it right at full price yeah that that session is yours so here's here's what Sarah Ludlum from the the BBC said if you go into it's just like some IP layer it's you said if you go into a bakers and buy a bun and they give you the wrong change and you walk away knowing you have been given more change than you handed over in the first place that is theft said well how about this how about this so argue hold on let me just finish the quote you bought a whole world you paid $60 for dead space for you to get it's basically how could the world she said so arguably you go into that that's not theft if the and you go to the baker if you if you go somewhere and complete a transaction and both parties are satisfied with it even if one of the parties completely screwed up and paid you to take it incident it's it's you can't that's not illegal so so Sarah continues it says arguably if you go into the game knowing you are supposed to be paying for these weapons and you notice a glitch that allows you to accumulate them without paying that is theft as well by the way EA has released a statement about this number one they say that the glitch is actually not a glitch that it's intentional and number two they just they say that they do not intend to patch it okay okay so I would say that this is this is what I would be paid for in a real society I mean you know in a free society I mean this is this is the kind of dispute that's interesting so unlike these IP disputes so I don't know that the answer is I mean my inclination is to say that you know caveat in tour you can do whatever you want within the rules of the game that they permit if they screwed up they screwed it up so I my guess is it's not that now here's here's the thing when you get the game you put it in your machine you're taking your property and then getting it to do actions that you told it to do and the individual like bits and bytes of those actions may have been decided upon by someone else but still you're the agent who is who is who's convincing your device to behave in this way and then one of the things that it can do is phone out to the internet and then send them money through your credit card and then get an authorization code back and then verify it and essentially it's the thing you're telling the device to kind of work against your own interest because your most people are just too lazy to hack it and now they found a way that's easier to convince their own device to do the thing that they wanted to do without having to pay so theft I guess well I I do think that let's take a related case let's say that you like the case of identity theft so let's say you figure out someone's social security number their other identity and you walk into the bank and you persuade the bank that you're this person right you lie and you persuade the bank to give you a million dollars out of their bank account now is that an act of theft or not and I think it is and it's because it's not because it's a lie but it's because it was just the means of accessing property that you didn't have the right to yeah right but that's the question here the question is who has what was the understanding between that that seems like fraud to me I don't know what that was well but yeah it is fraud but fraud means but you collect when you're not owed and then you make off right but but but people use fraud to mean deceptiveness or lying right you know what hang on I think I think we're kind of not striking at the root here and that's to say why do we even have banks and money in the first place right well yeah but I mean let's let's imagine a of a house that you own and you you know someone persuades the butler to let you in because they I mean we can make it about real property if we want but okay now well here's the thing that would happen in this case if EA just vaporized off the face of the planet the only option remaining to you would be to do this kind of hack if you wanted to get that the in-game benefits quickly so what essentially what they're doing is just kind of pretending with entirely within their own property just pretending that EA doesn't exist so they find that like it's not like they're phoning EA through the system even and it's not like they're saying to EA they're tricking their far away servers that are in EA headquarters saying hey EA headquarters how about I give you zero dollars and I'm going to trick you by sending this this series of bites and then it's essentially you're hacking it and then it replies back with the code that gives you the the in-game benefits not that everyone agree that's wrong and that could be even considered theft of a kind but what has instead is happening is that they're doing all of this strictly within the bounds of their own property you know this sort of thing has existed especially with computers for way longer than this game I know of another example although I don't know of any legal examples of anyone doing anything wrong with it but IBM used to sell you a server with various parts of it disabled you purchased it and you owned the hardware but IBM disabled parts of it and you could then phone up IBM and say oh I need more CPU power I'd like another CPU and IBM would say okay type these things in and give us you know twenty thousand dollars and then boom that other CPU would turn on and you'd have more power of course if you could magically come up with that code without ever talking to IBM you could go and start unlocking everything and end up with lots of server so if you do that have you stolen from IBM because you owned all of that property to start with it's just that parts of it weren't turned on because the circuits were energized let's say you know I suppose that there is an argument for the side of IBM there that they might say like if there was an explicit contract for example yeah that pretty much tidies it up right there mm-hmm and say you agree not to hack it then done yeah they have a no engineer they have a no reverse engineering clause don't they yeah and then you get into the fun stuff like implicit contracts does Dead Space 3 have an implicit contract to that end contract law I don't know well they always have these end user license agreements that are pretty darn thick contract law has so many weird things about it I'm sure as a lawyer you've seen some crazy stuff one that always sticks in my mind is one of the most ridiculous decisions I've ever seen was Tilden versus Clint Denning where literally he rented a car from Tilden drove around drunk in it crashed it up and of course his contract said that Tilden wasn't liable for him driving drunk in the car so he had to go and buy Tilden a free car and he argued that it was a contract of adhesion because he was in a rush to rent the car and thus the contract didn't apply and he actually won oh my god so by Canadian law basically most of this stuff that you get in a contract when you rent a car is crap that you can just go and argue you didn't agree with even though you got to see it well yeah even contract law has been distorted by the state the contract of adhesion is called a flypaper contract sometimes in law what it means is the idea is that some people are so weak and so dependent and so powerless they're like flies drawn to flypaper and they get stuck to it so if you walk into someone's house and say would you like a taxi to the airport and they say well I don't know you're the only ride I have or whatever so you have bargaining power so it's based on this co-seen idea of bargaining power right like some people have too much bargaining power and if you abuse this bargaining power then the contract is not legitimate because you the other party had no choice right yeah so it's like you know come across someone starving dying of thirst in the desert and you say I have a flask of water $1,000,000 I'll give it to you for a million bucks so you have to agree to that now so the question is should that be a legitimate contract or is it coerced now you could come up with some ideas why that's not legitimate but it's not really coerced yeah because unless you stop that guy in the desert you're not bound to give that to him for any price you want I mean it still winds up being a voluntary the only types of contracts I can see that are truly unfair that are wrong or they're sort of things where if you go in and let's say you have a valet park your car and they hand you a receipt for it and you read on the back of it it says that the valet is not responsible for damage and he's already driving is your car away that should not be a valid contract at no point did you have an opportunity to disagree you couldn't even say right right you know they just present you with some brand new terms after they took the keys and drove away that's also why they have something called a pull down period or a buyer's cool down period I think yes well that's those those are kind of a little bit cheap though I mean basically it lets somebody sit there consider it you know there's some salesman at the door they consider it they they decide they'll buy it and then five days later they're like oh and I didn't really like it you know and then though yeah they can basically get out of the contract and that always seems kind of cheap to me yep guys I gotta go in a second so you guys want to wrap it up oh yeah sure well yeah we're getting pretty close to the the two-hour mark so let's go ahead and close out the show so thanks for listening and having over yes thanks a lot to Steffen and thanks for listening to everyone so if you have any questions or comments visit libertybeat.ca you can get the show archives the live streams and even the latest instructions on how to contact the show you can send drop us a line or even join the show and and talk to us live so thank you and goodbye thank you guys enjoyed it spectacular