 All right, thanks for the introduction Barry. Yeah, I'm glad to be here. I've known Barry for quite a while Quick show of hands how many people here or say would say you're very familiar with Austrian economics and Rothbard that kind of thinking Okay, so I'm gonna I'm gonna redraw How many people are familiar with iron Rand? Well, I'm not gonna draw an iron Rand so that doesn't help so I'm gonna draw mostly on Austrian economics and a rock party in type property thinking so what I'll do is I'll try to explain as I go along if I'm to patronizing stop me if I say something that is What I'll do is I'll probably talk for 20 or 30 minutes And if we want to have Q&A we can do that But I don't mind if anyone we have a small group here if anyone wants to interrupt me in the middle if I use some Term that is going over people's heads, and I'm assuming too much feel free to just interrupt me because I don't mind at all I Don't have a handout, but I just have notes if anyone wants these notes later. I'll be happy that you emailed me to you okay, so My topic is probably a little less practical and it's a little more abstract than you usually would hear I assume from the talks Barry has told me that you normally have but It's on property which is suitable for the property rights Association. Okay, so I am an attorney I'm a patent attorney Intellectual property attorney. I've done it for over 20 24 years now And I am also a Rothbardian What you might call an anarchist libertarian Austrian economics influence to have been for over 20 years as well So that's my background. That's my theory. That's where I come from I Have a feeling most people here will disagree with it with what I'm going to say in the end But I want to talk about intellectual property But to do that we need to talk about property because I find this whole area is very confusing to most people They don't really understand it. The arguments are all over the map. People are confused and the only way to get a clear understanding of How we should think about IP which we call it intellectual property is to understand property itself, right? And then we can figure out where IP what IP is and how it should fit into the legal system of our of a Free society or whether it should at all Okay, so I'm going to start off with a quote It's maybe a little bit of an inside joke, but a great Austrian thinker now the Austrians You know, there was a lot of intellects that came from Austria in the 1920s or so tons of influential Philosophers and thinkers and a lot of the Austrian school of economics came from there to Mises Hayek Bumbabur Carl Manger visa these guys so There's a and then the modern Austrian school is Rothbard and other thinkers like that who draw upon the works of the Austrians so There was a great Austrian thinker who was asked What is best in life and his answer was to crush your enemies to see them driven before you and to hear the Lamentations of their women Now it's a little bit of a joke because that's that's cone in the Barbarian, you know Arnold Schwarzenegger an Austrian but not really an Austrian economist, but But the relevance of this is that there is a grain of wisdom in there, right that quote that quote The answer by Conan recognizes Conflict in life, right? You have these people that want to win their battle They want just they want to win, but why do they have a battle? They have a battle because in this world that we live in There are scarce resources if we didn't live in a world like this There would be no such thing as battles no such thing as violence clashing or conflicts The reason we have battles and conflicts like that is because there's only so much of certain things in the world to go around and People fight over those things because they both want to control these things, right? So this is the background of Why there's such a thing as conflict why there's fighting why there's violence There couldn't be violence without the material world around us and without things that we use in our daily lives And then we the only one person can use at a time and so then you have the possibility of conflict or disagreement over that Okay, so we don't live in a world of what economists call super abundance Super abundance means everything is so plentiful. It's like the Garden of Eden And we're basically all magical beings that can conjure up things in the blink of an eye And there could be no possibility of theft or violence or clashing That's not the world we live in right we live in a world where conflict is possible. So you have to keep that in mind Okay So another way to put it is we live in a world of scarce resources which some economists call rivalrous I don't know if you've ever heard the term rivalry in economics And so a rivalrous resource is a resource that can only be used by one person at a time whose use excludes other people's use rivalry as in Fighting right or conflict people would have to fight over this thing only one person can use it as a time Okay Now let me turn to the ideas of another great Austrian thinker or truly great Austrian thinker Ludwig von Mises who in my mind is the one of the greatest geniuses of the 20th century in the the greatest Austrian thinker of all time Mises and I'm not going to go too much in his economics, but Mises analyzed all of economics In terms of what he called human action So he developed a structure of human action and he analyzed the logical implications of that action And I'm not going to go that's what economics is it's the analysis of the consequences of human action given what human action is For today, I'm just going to talk about what human action is the structure of it And this is very common sense by the way But when you when you put it down in a precise way and think about it coherently it helps you solve these IP riddles and things like that. Okay So he called his logic of human action praxeology, which means the logic of acting, okay? And the human action is the following We live in time, right? We move through time. We have a vision about what the future might be that's coming always We never know for sure the features uncertain but not radically uncertain and we have an idea about what is coming And sometimes that upsets us sometimes we're discomfort. We're uncomfortable with that, right? We had discomfort because I imagine that hey, I'm feeling a little hungry. I'm going to be hungrier in an hour So you envision I need to take some action to stop that from happening. I need to get some food so human action in general is just the use of knowledge about the way the world works to employ scarce resources to Achieve something in the end to change the future basically. That's what human action is So just keep that in mind every action you can think of everything every human ever does is the employment of a scarce means or a scarce resource To try to change the course of events so that something in the future happens that otherwise wouldn't happen This is what we all do on a daily basis and every second of our lives Okay, so the key thing to keep in mind here is that two ingredients of action or knowledge and scarce resources or sometimes called scarce means you have to have both to have successful action Successful action is the achievement of a profit, but it doesn't have to be monetary. It could be psychic profit It just means you have an idea in mind. This is what the future is going to hold This is what I want it to do. I'm going to take some steps to achieve that end You know if I want to eat I want to eat a cake I need to either make a cake or purchase a cake or steal a cake or something But I need to take some action to get a cake and then that would be my end. Okay, so this is This is the way humans act. I'm setting the stage for why property rights emerge and then how we can think about intellectual property Okay So now what I just described is true of any man has nothing to do with society This is true of all intelligent human actors even Robinson Crusoe alone on his desert island The only person in the world with no society no community no humans around him. Even he has to act He uses means and by the way So the means for example would be his body and also tools like a he might make a net or he might make a Knife or he might build a tent he might make a net to catch fish because he wants food So Robinson Crusoe possesses scarce resources in addition to his body and uses those Using his knowledge of what's possible if he didn't know that that fish were a source of nutrition He wouldn't try to catch a fish So he has to have knowledge that fish are or nutritious If he didn't know it was possible to catch a fish or by building a net to make it more efficient to catch a fish He wouldn't know how to build a net to do it So you see the more knowledge you have the more rich Set of recipes and ideas you can draw on to make your action more efficient You know which ends to pursue you know which tools to try to use But the point is if he catches this fish he did it because he had Accurate knowledge about the way the world works and he had available means to use to catch the fish So he's using the pole. He's using the fence. He's using A knife to cut the fish you might use a fire to cook the fish etc, right? So not a successful action is always the combination of knowledge or Information or recipes you can call it whatever you want and scarce resources or scarce means okay now We don't live on islands usually by ourselves. We live in among other humans in society. You can call a society And there's advantages to living with other people, right? We get companionship We can trade with people. We can cooperate. We can help each other out. There's a division of labor. There's a specialization of labor We can have families makes life meaningful, etc So there's reasons to live in society, but as long as there's one other person in the world other than yourself What do we have? We have the code in situation. We have the possibility of conflict We still need to use our knowledge to decide what to do and we need to employ scarce resources in the world To achieve our ends, but now this scarce resource might be something someone else wants So there's a scarce resource I want to use a well a piece of land a cow a spear a chair My own body other people might want that too some man might want a woman to be his slave some one might want My piece of land to grow to grow their cows on and if we don't agree on what to do The only solution can be violence and clashing Okay, but there's another way to solve that problem in a society when people tend to have empathy for each other because of the way we've evolved and because of the benefits of having Cooperative relationships with other humans rather than Eternal fighting there's a different way to handle the problem of scarce resources now The problem again of scarce resources is that there's only so much to go around and the only way to solve the problem is either fighting or something else and the something else is We so socially agree on a set of rules that specify Look if there's a resource out there that more than one person wants We're gonna have a rule that says who owns that resource and the person that's the owner of that resource gets to use it Okay, and then boundaries just set up around things So this is how property emerges the institution of property So the entire purpose of property is to set rules on who gets to use things that otherwise people would have to physically violently clash over to use Okay, so this is what property rights are now we When you when you start using tools we are intelligent humans We don't live naked in the world using our claws and our mouths and our fists for everything, right? We have clothing we have accommodations we have Weapons we have other tools that we use and those become associated with us Right, they become so-called an extension of yourself because you use it so much to achieve things in the world If I want to achieve a result I need to use my body, but I need to use all these other tools So we start thinking of these things as part of ourselves as part of our identity as an extension of ourselves, right? You could call it a feature of myself like it if I'm a guy that walks around with a knife all the time and or a hatchet I'm really good at using it. That's an aspect of my identity. It's a feature of myself a characteristic or what you might call It's a property of myself. It's one of my properties Okay, so my gun my knife a fishing net how I used how I how I there how I control the world, okay? So I rely on them just like I rely on my hands So what we could refer to these things that are owned objects, right? Are objects that are used to achieve ends we can refer to them as a Property of the owner now. I don't mean it's a piece of property like this computer is a piece of property I mean it's a feature of this person. It's a it's a property of the person, okay? So we say words like the owner of a resource has a proprietary interest in the resource Which is why we have the word like a sole proprietor or the proprietor of a of an end, right? See how the word property is built into a proprietor the controller the one who has who it is proper That has the control over it, okay? Now what happens is? Over time people start using the word property to refer to the object that's owned so technically speaking I would say This is a scarce resource this computer I control it to achieve ends And in society I don't want anyone else to take it from me. I want to be the one to use it Okay, so the legal rules say that I am the owner of this computer or you could say I have a property right in the computer But what the common parlance people say this is my property now they don't mean it's a property of me They mean it's a piece of property so they start using the word property to as a synonym for the object So I own that object. I own that property. That's really a little bit of a distortion about how the concept of property arose It's not too harmful except when it muddies the water with regard to intellectual property, which I'll get to in a minute I mean it would be odd right to say This this this is my feature who would call this my feature so you some say well, that's your property They would say well, that's your feature. It's just as odd to the ear, but it's really the same thing, right? Oh, that's your that's your characteristic. This is my aspect. It just doesn't make any sense, right? So just be careful when you think about the word property When you refer to an object like a car as a piece of property What you're really saying is that is a scarce resource and the owner of it is the guy that has the property right in it That's really the right way to think about these things, okay? So what does a system of property rights do or law? So that's what law is all law uses force to Determine to settle a dispute and all disputes are always over scarce resources and only scarce resources get to be things That can be fought over right if things were infinitely abundant that could be no fights So all law is just a property rights system and the purpose of the property rights system is simply to answer a question When there's a dispute between two or more people about who owns some identifiable thing The the legal system answers the question who owns it. That's it Everything in society every part of the legal system can ultimately be boiled down to that is there's the legal system will generate Some answer to the question who owns that resource, okay? And quoting Bastiat which you mentioned him earlier as one of my influences Frederick Bastiat was a great French economist and political theorist in the in the 1800s He has a quote which I like property does not exist because there are laws, but laws exist because there is property Now what he's getting it. He's he's fighting off the socialists here who think that property rights In their view is a is an artificial institution generated by the state and yeah, sir. Go ahead Right and this this is he yes So there's a statement and prude on I think was one of the ones who was famous for popularizing the expression property is theft now This is a little bit of an aside. I think there is a sense in which That statement is accurate in the sense that if the state comes in and Assigns property rights in a way that effectively takes property from existing owners and gives it to someone else Then you can see that the roots of the property of these people that were favored by the state They do lie in a type of theft and I think one of the things that the the leftist Were upset about in the beginning was the enclosure movement like in Britain So you're in Italy and countries like this So you have these natural rights that arise over time where people can hunt on the common lands They can travel across and the government comes in and starts giving these richer guys The right to put up a fence and stop these people from using it Right and so the idea is that when you do that you're taking away So what you could say is that before that happened the right to this land was sort of distributed Some people had an easement right over it a partial right to go across it to get from here to there Over a long-used path or to hunt And the guy that had the the house or the castle there had the right to live on it But he had to tolerate these uses so it's sort of a mixed use But if the government comes in and gives all the rights to one guy Then it's taking the rights away from the people that had somewhat of a right before So there's an there's an aspect to the complaint that property is theft But of course now it's used by the leftists to just they hate the whole idea of property rights. Yes Yes Yes, that often happens too and that happens even today, right? In a sense, that's the that's the result of the Entire idea of property taxes. I mean none of us really own our property We just lease it from the government and if we don't pay our rent They'll take the property from us. So the government acts like the landlord now. Yeah. Hey, David. Go ahead Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes Absolutely, and I totally agree with that and the other you know, the other problem is a lot of the leftists They oppose the idea of ownership of land in general So even if there's a virgin territory and I just you know, take a few acres and turn turn it into a farm They would say that I still don't own it I have like some kind of user fruct over it and you know The georgias come in with their kind of quasi leftist notions and they say that you didn't create the land So you don't own it and therefore you have to pay a rent to the community Which is basically like a property tax. So yeah, and I would reject all that. I think that there's nothing wrong with owning land I'm just saying that in some cases in the past the actions of the state have resulted in basically what's expropriation And the only reason you can oppose expropriation is if you support property rights in the first place So to oppose theft, you do have to favor property rights in general. Yeah, go ahead Yeah Yeah, it could be Well, yeah, corporations are often in bed with the state, of course I mean, I've heard like walmart for example Walmarts in favor of the minimum wage increase But it's only because they pay more than the minimum wage and it wouldn't hurt them But it would hurt their competitors So a lot of times big big corporations are in bed with big government I mean, we can be capitalist and pro-free enterprise, but we don't have to assume that these corporations are lily white. Yes I think that's a that's a that's a more of a classification question in the sense that For example, some some political theorists say that the modern state didn't emerge until about 300 years ago So they wouldn't call the early roman empire a state So this is it depends on how you want to classify things, but from a libertarian point of view You know, we just have more simplistic and clean concepts for saying listen when you have organized force in any kind of institutionalized way That's effectively a state or a government. So of course there were states before that and likewise Just because the the native americans didn't they were nomadic, right? They were more nomadic They didn't stay on landed any time I wouldn't say I would say they don't they didn't have a full blown theory of property like we have now And they didn't use it as we use it now because they didn't need to they wandered around But of course to the extent they were they were the first to use a resource And were there for a while on it I would say that they had a property right in that at least temporarily But if they didn't want to keep it if they wanted to move on they've basically abandoned where they were before Something like that. So I would say they had property rights. I would just say they didn't have a full blown institutionalized system of property rights like we do now Right, yeah Two comments. I I read that the colombian the Indians along the colombian river And allocated fishing rights and they actually had places where they could fish from the fish Right off the edge. Yeah, it was there And I had to think that the Indians who lived along the coast did not move away. They actually had access to a plane No Yeah That's possible. I'm so I'm sure there were some maybe crude reform There was a form of property rights. I think property rights have emerged ever since there's been society ever Ever since there's been a normative aspect to human action like when people will look and say you shouldn't do that Or let's decide what you should have done or what we should do Uh, then property rights emerge almost naturally because we have to Uh, I think I heard an expression one time even even a dog knows if you whether you kick it or trip over it They know the difference, right? Um It's people know what Control of our resources and who's it is, you know um But let me get a little more into the details here of The way we use the word property now Like we would say we're for private property rights and those damn socialists are not Technically everyone is for property rights every legal system in the world has a set of property rights because they always provide an answer to the to the question Who owns that resource? So in communist russia, there was an answer to the question who owns that house It was the government. Okay, but there was an answer So there was some identifiable owner or controller What makes libertarians? I don't know if you're all libertarians But what the free market people believe in private property free enterprise free markets limited government Capitalism or what I would call libertarianism What distinguishes us from what I would say is every other Political or legal system in the world is our property allocation rules It's not that we believe in property and they don't Is that our property allocation rules are different from theirs Basically, our property allocation rules are the ones that are simple and emerge from the natural order And theirs are the ones that invade that and end up End up basically committing theft or slavery. So What what are our rules that we believe in? Well, ours are the natural rules that are common sense and that would basically Apply to crucible on his island But extended to a social setting so crucible on his island He doesn't need anyone's permission to do anything, right? He has full control over his body and he has full control over whatever resources he can possess and dominate and control Right and he uses those to his advantage when society comes into place To the extent you don't want violence to be the way that we solve disputes You want there to be rules we have to decide what those rules are going to be So when we have this dispute we go to a A judge or we go to the community and we say listen a and b both want this sheep We have to decide who's it is So they have to come up with a rule that settles this dispute and it can't just be arbitrary if it's arbitrary Everyone's just going to go back to fighting the rule has to make sense and have a reason So there's several things that come into play here, right? We say well Look, we're having a discussion. I'm controlling my body. You're controlling your body We're trying to decide what to do. We all want to live and let live and live in peace together There's an assumption there that we each own ourselves, right? So that's self ownership So the the first natural assumption is everyone owns themselves or their bodies to be more precise Okay, so that's self ownership. So that's the first basic rule of the libertarian vision of private property And then when the question is not about your body Right, but it's about other things like this chair or a computer or a piece of land or an animal Then the question is there's an external resource there who owns that and there are three basic rules That have always been part of the natural order and the western system from time immemorial They are basically Original appropriation which some people call homesteading. This is Locke's idea right that basically if there's something that's unowned And you're the first one to get there and use it Then you have a better claim than anyone else and how could it be anything? How could it be otherwise if we're going to have a property system where property rights persist over time and you can be you can Count on the property right you can't have a rule that the second person that gets there gets it Because then he would just take it from the first and then why not the third? So the first guy has to have priority In fact, if the first guy didn't have the right to own it Nothing would ever be used because you know something that's unowned has to be used for the first time for it ever to be put into use So the natural rule is the first guy that Takes a piece of property and starts putting it to productive use Is the owner that's the first rule of ownership Uh the second one is consensual transfer what some people might call contract right? um, so basically if you own something Even if you didn't Homestead it you didn't find it first if you got it from a previous owner by contract voluntarily Then you're the owner right so someone gives me a gift or they leave me something in their will of a quest Or if they sell it to me in a contract Then now i'm the owner and I have a better claim than anyone in the world Even better than the original owner because he gave it to me. Okay, so that's the second thing In fact, you could just think of those two, but the third one Uh is what we call rectification or restitution if I commit a crime against you or a tort I damage you in some kind of way such that I owe you compensation, right? I have to pay you back Well, then you get you have a property you have an interest in some of my property Which you need for me to to compensate you for the damage i've done so those three things are the only Rules that we need to look to to determine who the owner of anything is in the world Anytime there's a dispute between two people we come together and we say, okay What are you fighting over so just by the fact that they're fighting over something Concrete we know what the thing is so we identify the thing that's uh, that's in dispute And then we then we just go through these three questions. Well, did you find it? Did you buy it from someone who owned it or did this guy hurt you so that you owe it to him to pay him back And you just ask those questions you get facts and then you make your answer, right? This is how the property system works now This is basically the the part of the civil law in europe the common law in in england and america has been there for hundreds of years Not perfectly there have been exceptions Mostly because the state comes in and taxes you which violates these principles Now libertarians are just people that have thought about these things more carefully and apply them more consistently So even your average person who's not a libertarian they believe in these principles They don't think you should hurt people they think people own themselves They think that if you have something first you get it they think if you buy a car you own it, you know They believe in this intuitively they make exceptions because they're not extremely economically literate and they don't really Care too much about being perfectly consistent libertarians have an obsession with being 100 perfectly consistent, right? Yeah, exactly, right We have to weed out deviationists, right? okay So if you think about it any legal system like socialism or the welfare state or even any tax system All these rules basically come in and they undercut and undermine um Those those property allocation rules i'm talking about so for example Uh, if the government takes taxes me they're taking property from me Now why does the government have a right to that property they didn't They didn't find it they didn't get it by contract and I didn't do anything to harm them So they have no reason to take it from me. So it's just a pure act of outright theft, okay Um, or if the government says i'm going to put you in jail if you smoke marijuana or if you don't go fight in this war or if you don't pay taxes They're enslaving me in effect that if they remain the cage they're treating me like a slave They're they're pretending to be the owner of my body But they're not the owner of my body. I'm the owner of my body So you see all these deviations all these socialistic rules And by the way, I use the word socialistic in a general sense like hoppa does hansurman hoppa another austrian economist To hoppa socialism is the institutionalized aggression against private property So in his sense every state in the world is to some extent Socialistic they just have different flavors. There's socialism russian style socialism conservative style socialism social democratic style Etc. Okay Now before we go on now, i'm going to turn to ip intellectual property Anyone have any questions right now? Okay, so intellectual property First of all, it's a it's a made-up name that that the defenders of of these legal systems came up with to defend it from attacks By free market economists in the 1800s The state a quick quick quick quick history In the in the middle part of the say the 1600s there was a practice of The the crown granting monopolies to favored court cronies, right? You're the only guy that can sell sheepskin here You're the only guy who could sell playing cards here In exchange of them helping collect taxes and things like that. So the government Granted these monopoly rights they call them letters patent quite often. That's where the word patent patent means open So, you know, uh, sir francis drake was given a letter patent to pirate people on the high seas Um things like that It got to be abusive and so the parliament in england enacted the statute of monopolies in something 1623 To limit this abuse, but it maintained the right of the government to grant monopolies for inventions Okay, so that's where patents come from patents or a government granted right to be the only one who can practice an invention And copyright originated in in the practice of the government and the church combining together to censor free speech Uh and the printing press primarily when the printing press came out It started threatening the monopoly hold that the church had had using scribes Over what thought could get published and given to the masses which they didn't like So they they gave a monopoly to the uh, the stationers company And that finally expired and that morphed into the statute of an in 1709, which was the first modern copyright law The statute of an queen an 1709 1710 Uh, and then in the us So the us of course came from this tradition and in 1789 when the constitution was enacted Our brilliant founders decided to put Into the constitution A clause giving congress to enact laws similar to these systems that they had been used to by this point And the article one section eight of the constitution says congress can To promote the progress of science and the useful arts By securing for limited times to authors and inventors of the exclusive right to the respective writings and discoveries And then soon after the congress enacted a patent statute and the copyright statute based upon this grant of authority Okay, so that's where it came from But the question is is this a legitimate type of property? Is it a real property right? Is it a legitimate right? Is it compatible with The basic property rights that I identified before right the test of identifying who gets to use this resource Right, so the way some people frame this question is they'll say Cancel us as Cancel us as intellectual property is not property. That's not the argument And remember I said earlier that you can get into trouble I wouldn't say this the the question is not If we have a dispute over this computer is the question is this property? That's not the question The question is we have a dispute over this thing. Who gets to use it? Who's who has a property right in it? Who is the owner is the question question is not is this property? So the problem with patent and copyright laws is not that ideas aren't property Okay Because this is not property. This is just an object that someone has a property right in Okay, so that's the that's the question So let's look at what copyright and patent really do Let me take another example that most of you are probably familiar with The the practice of having a homeowners associations with restrictive covenants everyone's aware of that right So you live in a neighborhood and there's some kind of restrictive covenant that says This is a curve. This is not a commercial neighborhood. This is for residential purposes And you can't paint your house some kind of color outside of a certain normal realm Or you can't paint it bright purple, you know purple and gold I'm from lsu so I'd want to do purple and gold, but that'd probably be prohibited in my neighborhood now That is not a violation of property rights because uh, it was agreed to by the original owner of that land Which was the developer right and then then I step into his shoes when I buy it So a restrictive covenant is perfectly legitimate if it's voluntarily agreed to Basically, and this is called in the law a negative servitude or a negative easement So for example, my neighbor in effect is a co-owner of my house But he can't use it. He can't go into my house with my permission I use it for everything I want except there are certain things I can't do unless I get my neighbor's permission So this arrangement is a contractual property arrangement where all my neighbors have a veto right Over certain uses of my property. They don't have the right to use it They have the right to stop me from using it in a certain way and I have rights over them So you have that You have a contract with what's called a dominant estate and a subservient estate, right? So the whoever's living in this house has the right to prevent me from using my property in a certain way This is what restrictive covenants are based upon This is what negative servitudes and negative easements are and there's nothing whatsoever wrong with that People can contractually agree to whatever they want to but Contrast that to zoning The zoning is people own their property outright or what we might call allodially, right? That means outright without any government restrictions and the government comes in and says You cannot use that property for this use. That's exactly like a negative servitude But the the problem is no one agreed to it. The owner didn't agree to it So it's not consensual. It's not contractual. So it's it's like the difference between Me selling you a tennis ball and you taking my tennis ball without my permission There's if you take the ball for me after having paid me for it It's not theft. If you take the ball for me when I say no, it is theft. So the yeah, go ahead And Well, I hope so but Well, that's an example so these are Zoning is very similar to taxation because it's a type of taking of property rights Murray Rothbard has an has an interesting Taxonomy of interventionism and he says that you can classify the way the state intervenes in human life According to three three categories one's autistic Like autistic means it's between you and the state and the state's just like saying you can't do drugs So they're they're just controlling you in some non-commercial exchange Exchange and the other is binary. It's between you and the state, but it's got to do with the commercial It's a forced transaction That's an example would be taxes the government's just taking your property from you making you give them their property And the third is is triangular where the government compels some kind of trade between two citizens, okay now For example, the government doesn't allow an employer to Pay an employee less than minimum wage or something like that Now I believe that intellectual property ought to be viewed as And here I'm talking about patent and copyright primarily we can talk about trade secret and trademark if we have time if anyone's interested but Patent and trademark are the two worst They should be viewed in my view as a as a as a non-consensual negative servitude And as a triangular intervention by the state because what happens is let's take the case of patent I Invent a new mousetrap And I get a patent on it from the government the government grants me this letters patent this monopoly For 17 years on the on the only one that has the right to make this kind of Device and I started selling it on the market now on the free market What normally happens if you have a new product and you sell it and it's popular you get competition, right? Usually libertarians are supposed to be for competition but The guy that has the patent can prevent people from competing with him. That's the whole purpose of it. It's the stop competition. So basically What the patent grants to the patent holder is a negative servitude over everyone else's factories So he basically has gained a negative servitude. He can veto. He can say you can't use your factory to make this kind of mousetrap Now that's very similar to the restrictive covenant except the factory owner didn't ever contractually grant that And he didn't commit a tort against the the guy. So this is the problem with it the same with copyright if if If you had the idea for a sequel to atlas drugged and you wanted to publish that tomorrow You would be sued by the estate of iron rand or Leonard peacock probably or Leonard peacock's daughter Under using copyright law and the court would give an injunction saying you can't publish that book So effectively what's happened is the government has granted to Peek off a negative servitude over my printing press In my body even he's and he can he can use government power to issue an order to me to tell me You can't use your printing press that way. Now remember if we go back to standard free market principles If peek off doesn't want me to use my printing press to print a book And I do want to use it then we have a dispute over who gets to use that printing press Now if we have a dispute we go to a court The libertarian answer would be well, who owns it? Who owns the printing press? Who found it who bought it? Right And I did Leonard peacock didn't all Leonard peacock did was inherit the copyright to a book that someone else wrote So this is ultimately the problem with a copyright and patent is that they they end up Taking property rights away from legitimate property owners Um now notice and this is the that's the conclusion of the argument Nowhere did I talk about incentives to create or utilitarian considerations Uh because you don't need to go there that the normal the normal argument you'll hear is Well without copyright no one to write books without patents. No one would invent anything Which is a utilitarian argument But and the argument is false by the way But it's got it's not even a libertarian argument because the question of law is not How do we make sure people are inventing enough the question of law is how do we protect property rights and do justice? Right and the way you protect property rights and do justice is You protect property rights and things people have acquired legitimately and you let them use it as however They want as long as they do not trespass on other people's property. It's that simple Okay, so I'll conclude here and if there's any questions we can talk further further Yeah, well, I have a copyright and I I mean a copyright registration and that's the way it should be looked at I've registered a copyright I could register my car or vote or anything else. That's a claim that I have that it's my property Okay, but it's not that you know Kind of twisted to me what you're talking about the government doing this because all the government Is doing or all they're supposed to be doing they may be overstepping their bounds in some cases But that's a different issue what they're supposed to be doing is registering my claim to that That I was the first one to do this which is as you say, you know Who's first so I was the first one to do this so then I have primary rights over You know, whatever this is that I did so the copyright is it somebody else can not use exactly what I did But they can unfortunately they copy my idea and they did but anyway the The point is is that if if I find somebody in violation or I consider that they're the government doesn't go out and say Oh, you you violated Wayne's copyright I have to see that they violated them And then I have to go sue them and then I can use in court The fact that I have registered this copyright and that proves that I had it in 1992 So if they can show that they had it in 1976 well then my copyright would just be erased That's all done in court. It isn't a government thing And to me it's it's it's the right way to do it because we should be doing this in civil action In a court rather than a government having an agency telling somebody what to do Okay, this is quite a bit different from zoning. I would say where this where the government Is telling me what I can and can't do with my property Well, I predicted You would disagree so people would disagree with me. Um, I totally disagree with what you just said Um There's there's no problem with registering a copyright. The problem is when it gets enforced Okay, when you enforce a copyright you're using government force against look There's a guy in jail For uploading a copy of the wolverine movie. He went to jail for a year. He's in federal prison for that You know, what? Uploaded a copy of the wolverine movie I mean there's all kind of crazy Uh Things the yeah, sorry go ahead Yes Say again, you're right. What? A poem It's really hard to do once you make it public if you keep it secret, of course Or if it's private, you know, if you I would say you never own the poem you own the piece of paper you wrote it on You and you and the information is Well under today's legal system you do Under today's legal system you do because there's copyright. I'm saying copyright and patent should be abolished You're the owner of your body to be precise But you're not this is the mistake. This is the mistake Okay, so yeah There's a it's commonly said and lock said this too. I think he was mistaken as well You own yourself, which he should have said you own your body You own yourself. Therefore you own your labor, which is not true. You don't own your labor labor just an action It's it's strange to say I own my actions Your actions are what you do with your body you own your body, but your action is just what you do with it It doesn't make any sense to say you own your actions That's just like a process Okay, and so then he said you own your actions. You're on your labor and therefore you own things you mix your labor with Okay, that's how he got that's how he justified locky and homesteading But then people Extraplay from that and they say well, that means you own what you create Which is what you just said, which is a very common argument. You don't know what you create you only own what you Appropriate in the world that was not owned or what you acquire from someone by contract We do not own what we create That's just there's no reason to say that Yeah, go ahead. This is going a little bit farther. You provided a lot of insight that I found really interesting Some years ago. I read into what has been going on legally in where the copyrights for example, they are extending the lifetime And it's getting to the point to where it's really getting long And I think it was in a recent TPP the trans-pacific partnership. They threw another international Law enforcing it. This is and in my opinion, this is getting to the point to where They're going to shut down libraries. It's not well, you know, okay first of all well It's not just that that was part of I think that was the whole purpose of the TPP was to extend america's IP system at the behest of our pharmaceutical companies and publishing industry in hollywood To other countries and the original copyright system was 14 years Extendable up to 14 more years if the author was still alive. Does anyone know why? The original and it's way beyond now. It's life plus 90 Well life plus 90 is roughly depends. Okay. Okay. So people people just They're trying to go farther But does anyone know why the copyright term and the patent term was 14 years to they were both 14 years it's because A typical apprentice would serve for seven years So the idea was you train an apprentice And you don't want your apprentice to learn what you're doing and go out and compete with you So you need to have at least two apprentice lifetime or you know Seven-year terms of monopoly protection Before they your apprentice is to run out and start competing with you So they just doubled that and then then they doubled they've extended it over the years It was extended in the 80s under the sunny bono Act remember the guy the the republican the hit ran into a tree and snow skiing Yeah, yeah, go ahead david under today's legal system you do I believe trademark law is completely Unlibertarian it should be abolished. Yeah, because trademark law People say that it's justified because uh, you have to stop fraud Well, we have something for that. We it's called fraud law We already have fraud law and we already have contract law Those two things alone are all you need to stop fraud So trademark law adds something else and what trademark law is very similar to defamation law It basically sets up a reputation, right? What trademark law really tries to do is give companies and A property right in their reputation which is exactly what libel law does right when you sue someone for slandering your reputation And most libertarians are against libel law because they understand that for me to have a property right in my reputation Means I have to own your head Your brain because I can control what you think about me But They're what? They're not only superfluous They're harmful because they're used by large companies to to to bully and to stop To stop competition Well, what about the super bowl? We do the super bowl. We have to call it a big game because you'll get sued by the super It's ridiculous by the nfl Uh, yeah, go ahead lewis Copyright law. Yeah, you're right Yes, because No, but notice what you said you you you hit that right on you said they stole the money. They should have received Okay, now, you know, if I have a pizza joint and then a competing pizza joint opens up across street and they steal my customers I mean, I didn't really own those customers, right? The competition with me did reduce the amount of money I could have made But I didn't have a property right in that money because that money is owned by potential future customers Same with this this musical production You say the money they should have made But the money was owned by the people that attended the the musical No one has a property right in that money except for the owners Yes, yes 100% No one deserves anything. I agree with that. No one deserves to make a profit running a pizza joint either I don't know. I figured Yes, sir I've got a whole bunch of blog posts about it there. Well, first of all, uh, erin schwarz the guy that uh, He committed suicide because he was going to federal prison For copying scholarly articles, um Uh, this guy, I think he's out of jail and who went to jail for a year. It was, uh, Wolverine. There's a guy named Wayne, something Dwyer, DWYER. He was a British grad student Who published a website which had hyperlinks to someone else's website Which had pirated movies or something on it And the United States ruined his graduates. They were trying to extradite the guy to face federal prison here in the U.S. He had to fight off the federal government of the U.S. for years Um, kim.com was raided by the FBI and three other government agencies in new zealand Because of mega mega calm or whatever it's called the mega upload Service that he had these are all for copyright copyrights is a criminal A big time criminal problem I have a feeling I mean you're covering a lot of stuff here. I mean somebody's using it and you know I mean there are other things like you talk about mail fraud or You know violation of computer rules things like that. I mean, I don't really what you're talking about because I don't see any law that says that if you Violate somebody violates my copyright. They don't go to jail for it. I sue them for it That's there's civil but there's criminal actions too. It can be prosecuted both ways If I went and I I went to court and I got an injunction against them from using it and violated the injunction No, there's a there's a criminal action that can be taken. It's a criminal It's a criminal offense. So then I think you should be arguing against that not arguing against copyright in general Why should why should I not be able to sue somebody if they violated? If they expropriated what I you know what I wrote you should be able to sue them. You just shouldn't be able to win Because they didn't you say you use the word expropriate which is question begging The expropriation is a type of theft if it's theft it implies you owned it So that's the whole argument is that I don't think you own listen remember earlier I tried to distinguish successful action is the combination of using knowledge and using scarce resources So scarce resources are the things people can fight over and that's why property rights arise In those things knowledge is not that kind of thing A million people at once can use the same idea. It's not a scarce resource Yes Yes I believe the copyright system should be abolished and then people can use information freely I don't think it's a crime or it's a wrong to use knowledge If someone releases information into the world somehow and it gets out there others should be free to use it That's fine But it's going you know in the nature of information is that someone just needs to make a copy and put it on the internet And then billions of people have access to it But you don't own your creativity Yes, that's my opinion Second Yes Correct That's the Protestant idea right the the more you work the more you should make I mean, there's no right to money There's no right to an income. There's no right to get rewarded for your labor Wait, yeah one two you go ahead Yes Yes No No objection whatsoever all my work is cc zero, which means I don't even require attribution You can change the name. I don't care property land property people said it's federal land And the family said our families have been using the land for very long times And now the government wants to sell the land to another company and to sell it you got to leave the land And it's it's been going on since the creation of the country And again, we're getting down to original owners and the short story they were expanding They went to oregon and were helping those people, you know with the same legal problems and then the Bureau of Land Management sent the cops in ambushed the family And killed him on the spot You know and solved that problem But anyway, the dispute was over the land and this guy was very constitutionally literate and he was you know backing everything he did And so they shut him up really good. You're familiar with the case. No. Oh, no, I'm sorry man You don't want to go against the government but I I mean The bottom line, you know in in in England with the feudal system the way it works is the king is the overlord Okay, literally he's the the overlord and then it filters down to the the landholders Which are mere tenants, right? And in the u.s. When we broke off from britain Some of the states there's I've got a blog post on this. There's a guy named Cornelius Moynihan wrote he's got an interesting book on on this some of the states specifically Past statutes putting the state government in the place of the king So now they're technically the overlord and the other states they declared the property to be allodial However, even that's uh, that's not really true because all these states have property tax And they can take your property through imminent domain So in every state in the u.s. And every state in the world the government is the real overlord of all property No one owns their property at low. You don't even own your body a little lately because the government can put you in jail For not paying taxes or not showing up for war or for For smoking the wrong kind of drugs, right? So yeah, there's a gentleman who invented a cancer treatment Stan I forgot his name Excuse me And he has been taken to court about a dozen plus times And finally they solved the case the u.s. Government patented his work Have you heard about that? No, I haven't heard of it. Yeah, I couldn't u.s. Patent shut up now They're not doing anything to him, but they just don't want this idea to go well. What's interesting is the u.s. government has Some marijuana medical marijuana patents So they actually have a patent they issued to themselves Basically validating how useful medical marijuana is while they're criminalizing it at the same time You can't use it Plus it's illegal This guy's cures, which are very successful right and because the government doesn't want you to it's very freaky Yeah Most yeah most states have a form of yeah, right Well, you have to have that because People abandon things sometimes without giving a declaration. They just disappear and at a certain time At a certain point in time the law has to decide what's going to happen with this property so it it tends to have these statutes of Limitations or a quiz of the prescription we call it in civil law Where over a certain amount of time if the owner never tried to kick them off or policed his property We assume he's gone or didn't care. Yep This brings up my earlier story about Texas claiming the unused bank accounts This is an abandoned property The state steps in and claims it for itself. Yeah, the case of land Is father's rights a private property Exactly sit on land I don't know the exact law on that but I think it's similar I think at a certain point in time if no one comes forward to claim it then whoever found it That might be treated like what's called a cheat in in in and wills in a state's law right if you If you don't have a will it goes to your kids if you don't have kids it goes to your parents If you don't have parents and then if there's no one left that you can presume it goes to the state That's called a cheat Well, I don't know say that's the government I'm not surprised The what sorry Right Finds Yeah, that's a I mean my view on that I believe that you know I think you should people should have the right to have a will which specifies what's going to happen The problem is in some cases someone doesn't have a will or you can't find it or someone's got to make a decision right now And they don't know so the law has to have default rules that specify If we just don't know what's the presumption going to be now what the presumption should be I don't know I I have never met a person Very rarely met a person who would who would not want their Organs to go to help someone if they had to I mean some people don't put it on their car But most people are not against it Um So I would think that if you have to make a judgment this guy is dead We we don't know what his identity is. We don't know who to call He doesn't have a will on him if we don't use his heart now someone else is going to die What would this guy have what would this guy have wanted? It might be reasonable for the for the courts or for the for the law to say the presumption is He's consented and then they take it now. Let's so let's say we have that rule and people don't like it They think that's horrible. One of my neighbors died and they took his heart So people are just going to start having wills they're going to start Well, I better go do a will to change that presumption So the the benefit of presumptions is that you can at least overcome them But the law has to have some presumptions I I don't know if there's a An a priori answer to the right presumption My presumption would be since the government's involved I would probably say you have to leave it alone and respect it respect his body and assume that he hasn't given permission Right and if he had wanted to get permission he could warm one of those little bracelets or something like that, right? But if the presumption goes the other way then I would just contract around it with my own Methods if I had to Yeah Works the more you should get paid Well, there's a parable Matthew 20 where the Owner went out at 10 o'clock 8 o'clock 10 o'clock 2 o'clock to 4 o'clock something like that hired laborers At 5 o'clock when he went home, he paid all the laborers the same thing He said it's up to the the person who's paying to what they're going to pay So so that's a little bit different concept. Well, I mean, you know in physics if you push against the wall You're not doing work because you're not moving an object through a distance, right? But you're straining and all this I just people don't deserve deserve a return on their labor Actually, it's more of a Marxist if you think about it the idea that you deserve a reward for your labor is It's very close to Marxism the Marxist idea of the labor theory of value That you know, they don't like the free market Which basically puts a value on things of whatever the buyer is willing to pay, right? They think that the value of an item is based upon the amount of labor hours put into it Now so if I spent a lot of time building building some device that's That's that's junk and no one wants to buy it Then they have to modify their theory to come up with an excuse for that But the idea that the value of an object is based upon the amount of labor put into it is Marxian and wrong And that's what's the essence behind this idea that people deserve a reward for their labor They don't deserve anything This much but I do remember one thing and told me in economics About certain items are commodities Like for instance, they use the example of eggs. You can go to the eggs You can find a dozen eggs at Kroger and ATV or at Wal-Mart Dozen eggs are going to be the same price. It's the same price. The reason they're the same price Is because they're such a wide use of it. They have to compete and narrow the gap Otherwise the guy with the lowest price gets all the business Yep, that's true. So Well Economy scale, yeah Let me ask you about international business law I talked earlier about Yeah, a little bit. I'm Louisiana and there's a lot of admiralty cases there admiralty law is not the same as international law Uh, it's the law of the sea basically how we control vessels And trade over the ocean. So there's international aspects to it, but it's it's a specialized subset Of international business law, I'd say But I have heard these kind of kooky conspiracy theories that We're under admiralty jurisdiction because if you go into a federal courtroom, there's a gold fringe on the flag It's just some common law in that I don't know. I don't know, but I've heard that that means we're under admiralty jurisdiction, whatever that means Which I don't what's what is that historical district? Oh zoning The idea I guess is that we all have it's all part of our common heritage So we get to control what the property owners inside of this we can do they can't all of them very much Well, the the I think the libertarian position is pretty unconscious pretty Universal on this it's libertarians are almost Universally opposed any form of zoning whatsoever. We have zoning in houston. We just don't call it zoning It's a softer form of zoning, right? There's a network of regulations and permissions you have to go through It's not quite the same as simple as you can limit how you use your property We actually have some zoning behind the gallery or the TIRS It's actually from a real investment zone. They got zoning before we prohibited zoning back in 1993 So they got zoning there and there's something like zoning around the airports The federal government said you're rigged and we go people to live Close the airport. So you need to restrict development. There's a few are not disturbed. Yep Yes Bricks up what I was talking about my other cousin who ran for Congress and saying that libertarians don't want to win I'm looking at you and you're saying well, we're disagreeing and yet if yet if we were to look at almost any law That's been around In the in our lifetimes, for instance, I would guess that we would be on the same side on every case I mean I would I mean this idea of the extension from 58 years or whatever to You know, and especially when it's corporations and not individuals, you know, if we could scale back to something on the on the You know, I mean you're saying do away with it all that would do away Would say a hundred percent of it if we could do away with what's been added in the last hundred years We'd probably be getting doing away with 60 percent of it. I think that would be an easier sell You know Well, you know, we did the libertarians and the the civil libertarians and the tech libertarians did have some success And defeating sopa if you remember the stop online piracy act, which is about five years ago Sopa stop online piracy act There was there was an attempt to get this uh, uh, this this federal law enacted Which would have radically restricted our internet usage rights in the name of stopping copyright piracy And the internet had an uprising There's all these websites that had stopped sopa and they weren't their websites went down for a day and congress backed off Although they tried to put a version of that into the tpp. It would have been in there and it's going to come eventually but This is basically look I'm a patent lawyer copyright lawyer. I've done this for a living, right The reason I came to these views is because I was I never could find a good argument for this stuff when I was becoming a libertarian And I kept thinking about it in law school. Then I started practicing this So I kept thinking about it like this argument doesn't work like this argument is wrong this Every argument for an illegal property and finally I realized why it's because it's And it's not just a small thing to my mind It's like one of the top six worst things the government does to us It's up there with war the drug war taxation public schools and the federal reserve. I mean it is bad Patent law my my my guess is patent law probably costs the economy a trillion dollars a year and lost wealth Because of the reduction of innovation. It is serious Copy ralla doesn't hurt us that much But it severely distorts the economy and it limits the spread of knowledge and it's threatening internet freedom And internet freedom is one of the most important things we have to fight the government And if the government's going to start using copyright as an excuse to limit our internet freedom Then it's a huge strike against liberty It's very so copyright law is Worse even I think than patent I was going to say more importantly the book you wrote that you copyrighted You would not have been able to have written the book and copyrighted it because someone else already had those thoughts for you So you're saying you're trying to protect your book And yeah, it's like I'm saying you would have never had the book people people to get in the paradise shut the gates behind them Right they People want to be free to use all the the wealth of ideas the fund of ideas that we've inherited from human civilization, right? That you want to build on so it's like this huge mountain of ideas And you want to stay right on top and then stop anyone going forward from using your stuff without your permission Yeah, yeah, go ahead But that's actually not not what you just said is factually untrue Um, it is not true that people write books because there's a copyright system It's not true that people come up with innovations because there's a patent system It's just empirically not true It actually there's studies of I can give you links to tons of studies and research on this Yeah One Yeah plagiarism has literally nothing to do with Copyright or with patent infringement people all often use that argument just like Like they'll use the fraud argument to justify trademark law They'll say well if you get rid of we need trademark because we have fraud is bad And then if you point out but there's already fraud law So so that argument doesn't work. And so people say well, uh, like your your comment about taking my book and putting your name on it That's plagiarism. Okay. Now plagiarism is not illegal Uh, for example, if you take the bible or if you take uh, Shakespeare's works and you put your name on it You're that doesn't violate copyright law because it's public domain You're totally free to go on to amazon And try to sell The bible with your name on it. You're gonna look like an idiot But no and you know and right now this is legal. Have you ever seen Someone try to publish Shakespeare's works or Plato's works or the bible under their own name. Does it ever happen? It's not even a real problem plagiarism is just A contractual issue between a student and his university usually It's a it's a rule of conduct that says if you do research You need to give attribution and don't pretend like it's that you came up with it on your own Don't have long quotations without quotation marks and a footnote It has literally nothing to do with copyright infringement you can have uh and in fact Plagiarism or lack of attribution is not the problem that most advocates of copyright have with copyright piracy Like it's not like harry potter. It's not like uh, george lucas. Let's say or disney disney owns the star wars movies, right? It's not like disney would say Look is long if you want to copy the star wars uh blu-ray for the latest star wars movie As long as you keep my name on there. You don't pretend like you wrote it. It's okay with me They don't want you to copy it at all Right. They don't want you to copy it verbatim So the problem with copyright from their point of view. It's not Plagiarism is not lack of attribution is not Fraud it's just copying their stuff without their permission Yeah, well, they or they think they think so Right And that's a trademark issue by the way, but yes, of course Well, that's that's a good perfect example So in the case where there's a knockoff chanel bag Let's say or a knockoff Rolex and I buy it for $20 from a guy on the dog in turkey or something, right? I know that it's a fake. I know i'm not getting a $3,000 chanel purse for $20. I know that so i'm the customer I'm not being defrauded whatsoever So you can't even say that there's fraud in that case So you can see that the trademark enforcement has nothing to do with with with fraud It's got to do with reputation rights chanel wants to be the only one that can In fact, there's a there's a trademark right called anti-dilution With tarnishment. They say that if you sell a shoddier version of mine It's going to make mine look worse and hurt the value of mine. So you see they think there's property rights in value They believe they have a property right and some kind of value the goodwill with their customers Whatever it's not a coherent authoritarian framework because Property rights are always the right to control some physical resource You can't have a property right in value value is just a subjective phenomenon. It's the way people analyze it Yeah, I have no no problem with that whatsoever. That's that's competition. That's a free market And this is the problem with trademark and patent law is it prevents competition It prevents better innovations from coming around because people are dissuaded I mean nowadays with copyright law and with patent law The only pirates you're going to get or or like shoddy type low low rent people They're not going to really come up with new improvements. They're just going to try to make a quick buck But if it was totally legal, you'd have big competitors gearing up and doing something they might do a better job Yeah, the most absurd Trademark thing I can think of is a few years ago. Maybe you heard about this somebody the girl scouts who were Relatively unsuccessful selling one of their kinds of cookies So somebody brought bought, you know, 10,000 boxes of them or whatever and put them up on the internet and the girl scouts Got him shut down for reselling cookies that were properly made properly You know the gs on it and stuff and just because he was selling them and he wasn't a girl scout somehow Yeah, there's some kind of violation There's some kind of there's some kind of obscure trademark, right? I think it's called reverse palming off That might be a case of that it's bizarre. I mean yeah But you see but that's this is not a case of protecting anyone from fraud It's simply the girl scouts trying to use a legal basically a monopoly right the government's done to To reduce competition so they can sell at a higher price. It's always about that I've got a question about youtube If you go to youtube and look for movies off the side you'll find movies Which are reversed everything is written is actually written backwards. Yeah, I've seen that What is all that about because well, so youtube YouTube faced liability Under copyright law for all the videos that its users would put this is in the beginning of youtube, right? They faced liability under what's called vicarious infringement or contributory negligence So they try to take advantage of this thing in the dmca the digital millennium copyright act Which was I think under clinton 1988 which says that it provided a safe harbor as long as you have a takedown provision Then you won't be liable for the infringing acts of your users So therefore youtube adopted this takedown system Which says that is if they get a notice from someone claiming to have a copyright in a video They will take it down right away with any any questions asked and of course the rights holders abuse that all the time Even in cases where there's fair use though. So youtube adopted this system And they had so they have like a million. I think they have over a million Automatic takedowns come in a day because these big media companies hire They have robots little they crawl the web and they look for snippets of data songs or images or movies That look the same as what their what their algorithms say and they automatically send a takedown to youtube So some of these guys they'll take their video and they'll flip it so that it doesn't match The algorithm of the robots But of course the robots are going to adapt Right Before too long and then they'll have to go to something else. Maybe make it upside down and I'm curious when they kind of log in and suit I I I'm primarily I I help uh, I help companies obtain patents. I'm a I I was called patent prosecution I'm not really more on the litigation side right now, but I help companies obtain patents But if you disagree with the idea Well, I don't I don't disagree that people companies in today's system They need to obtain patents for defensive purposes because if you don't have any patents Then if you get sued by a competitor For infringing their patents then you have no defense But if if you have your own arsenal of patents then you can counter sue them and then they might leave you alone It's it's a huge waste. So you have these companies developing these stockpiles of nuclear patents, right? It's like it's like mutually shared destruction almost It's a waste if you got rid of the patent system They wouldn't need to spend 50 or 100 million dollars a year on patent attorney salaries and fees They could just use that money for r&d Yeah, what do you think about the idea about Bothers me a lot. I mean the idea of a patent should be that somebody invents a weed eater or something They can sell it and make the profit off of that. That makes a certain amount of sense to me But suppose they decide oh, we'd rather not tell the weed eater We'd like we make more money on the lawnmowers. So we're just going to keep that patent on the weed eater Nobody else can make them and and we'll sell on lawnmower So it's it's not protecting them from from making a profit on something that they weren't going to sell anyway That one really doesn't make any sense. I mean, I think once you once you grant a property right once the government grants a property right Then you can't expect people not to use it So a property right, you know, if you have a if you have a house you have the right to have no one live in it Right if you have a house you have the right to Uh, invite never invite anyone over to the house It's the same idea or you have the right to lease it to someone or license it like this whole patent troll idea Or if like someone licenses their their patent to a big company And they never make it The guy that sells the patent. I mean, it's a property right with a value And if if you believe the idea behind patents, which is that we need patents to incentivize people to create Then the patent right that you obtain is more valuable if you have the right to use it as you see fit If you have the right to sell it to someone else or to even sit on it Well, the other the other side of the coin and this is sort of an answer as I would see the purest Form of a copyright law or something would be that somebody I consider them to have violated my copyright And so I sue them. Okay. So what do I sue them for? What do you have to sue for? You have to sue for damages, okay? Yeah, but there's that there's statutory damages You weren't doing anything with it. Anyway, how will you damage you weren't going to sell it? So we sold it, you know Except copyright law has statutory damages. So there's you can sue for actual damages Or statutory. Okay. Well, that's not in the constitution. I mean, you know, so so this is part of what I'm saying for you there I mean, why not why not go back to why not get rid of the statutory damages instead of there? There is a there's a proposal by one of these law professors who's He's not as radical as I am. He wants to they want to radically reduce patent copyright law They don't want to get rid of it. But I think it's called the founder's copyright So they want to go back to the way the system was at the beginning Now of course in the beginning of the country copyright didn't apply to software Because there was no software it didn't apply even to I think it didn't even apply to paintings and things like that Or even maps It was only a narrow set of things that applied to and the term was much shorter There is there is a feature in some patent systems around the world. It's called a It's a Working requirement what that means is you have to if you don't actually make the product covered by the patent After a certain amount of time it just evaporates. So that that would be closer to what you're talking about I proposed that before I think that would be an improvement in the patent system that you have to actually be making a product Covered by your patent It's the same thing in like in Louisiana and oil and gas law if you don't if you don't use your your your oil and gas lease for more than 10 15 years then then your is it 10? Yeah, so the the the lease or the user fork just Expires 10 years non-use or something like that Exactly reverts So you could have something like that and now what I would prefer would be like in copyright law The problem is in 82. I think under the wipo treaty another way the treaties come into this The the old copyright system you had to actively you had to put a copyright notice on there and you had to register With the copyright office. Those are called formalities Um, the good thing about that was if you didn't actively apply for a copyright You just didn't have one or if you didn't renew it you didn't have one, right? And then your name had to be on there with copyright So you could at least track down who the owner was if you wanted to get permission now after after the It was burn convention not wipo under the burn convention A copyright formalities were abolished So right now if you write a poem right now on a piece of paper you own the copyright as soon as you do that You don't have to file a notice A copyright registry. You don't have to put a copyright notice. You don't have to do anything. It's automatic And this gives rise to the orphan works problem, right? Which is there's millions of works out there and no one knows how to find the owner Because they might have died. You don't know who their kids are So you have all these books and no one everyone's afraid to republish them because they might get sued by someone coming out of the woodwork so if you would get rid of the burn treaty and Reimplement formalities and make people actively renew the copyright every 10 years like you do for trademark You have to renew it every so often that would do a lot of good to reducing the problem It would kind of cut out the Burn convention. I think it's burn convention I think it was uh, I think us joined in 80. Do you want to say 82? On the thing you're bringing up Corporations, you know, someone will invent something corporations go. Oh my god. That's going to lessen the value of my product I'll buy that happen and bury it You know, I've seen that happen Any example then Is the carburetor That gave Engines high mileage And it was patented and when it was introduced back in the 20s the stock market saw this and and uh, the oil stocks dropped severely And the oil companies realized that this is a story. I don't know if it's true This is one that I read that the oil companies actually bought the uh copyrights up And you've never heard of that carburetor before Yeah, I've heard I don't know if that story is apocryphal or true. I I'm suspicious of it because The one thing about patents is they're public So you can buy it up but it's to prove to prove this conspiracy All anyone has to do is go down of the patent office and find that patent and produce it Well, yeah, I've never seen I've so like I say it but yeah, it's pot. That's that's legal, but I've yeah Microsoft was involved. What happened was I was selling real world software Real world softwares having a difficulty. They got purchased by great players Then microsoft purchased great planes to bury all of it. They never produced the song I believe that But there's people out there who are also thinking about the same kind of technical problem And they come up with their own solution. You know, one idea doesn't necessarily get suppressed forever But it's not the idea suppressed. It's just it's just taking the competition Glad to do it. Thank you