 and that, you know, you can say whatever you want. Right. I'm just here to record. Is that OK? Yeah, well, whatever you want to start it. But yeah, I don't know if that actually is your position or not. Yeah, we can get into it. Yeah, but whether or not that's what the government should do. So it's basically, I guess, it's intellectual property, slander def, slander libel. I'm not sure there's anything else. You know, he probably wants me to pester you about Bitcoin, too. Now, well, he didn't mention anything about Bitcoin because that's not really about free market. I mean, you can ask me about it. I mean, I guess you like you. I mean, you like Bitcoin as well. Well, yeah, but I'm not like I'm just an investor in it. I'm not really I can't say I'm a promoter because I don't know enough about. Yeah, I mean, I just don't think it qualifies as money. I mean, it doesn't qualify as money in practical terms because nobody uses it as money. And I don't think it meets the criteria of money, you know. And people think it can be a store value, but I don't know what value you're storing. You know, I mean, I don't know what value Bitcoin has to offer that you're storing. I don't see how society is any better off because we now have 19 million Bitcoin than before we had any Bitcoin. I don't know what, you know, what new what what we can do now that we couldn't do before. Yeah, I think the idea is that it's like it's definitely not money yet. But it's like it's like the the same purpose goal would serve except that it's got some advantages over gold because it's yeah, but except that gold's value comes from the fact that it's a metal that has all sorts of valuable properties that we need. You can't skip over that. You can't just say, oh, we're going to be a store value even though we don't have any value to store. Like we're just going to be we're just going to be like gold because I've said that's like saying I have a digital house and it's got all the properties of a regular house. I mean, you don't even have any maintenance. It's so much better than a regular house because I don't have to maintain it. Nothing ever breaks. And it's like, yeah, but you can't live in it. It doesn't provide any shelter. Just because it's a digital representation of a house doesn't mean it's better than a house. It's like I can't I can't actually. Strangely, there are some people who I just came across some guy who's got this virtual world and he kind of lives in it. So he actually he kind of lives in it, not physically, but he does lots of things in it. It's weird, but. Yeah, but I mean, anybody can he can copy that digital world and give it to as many people as he wants. I guess the argument would be that, you know, gold holds value when it's being used as a store value and quasi monetized or when it used to be fully monetized that most of its value is not because of its industrial and jewelry uses anyway. So it's got this 90% value that's because of its use as a network effect of money. And Bitcoin could have that, too, because I don't. Yeah, that's what people that's what people claim. They think, well, most of the value is from the fact that it's money. But I don't know how you can make that conclusion. The only reason it is money is because of those other properties. And it's not like gold is not being used, right? It's not like, OK, gold is $1,800 an ounce. And so there's no gold being used in jewelry. Jewelers are still willing to pay $1,800 an ounce to make gold jewelry. Computer chip manufacturers are still willing to pay $1,800. If basically there was nobody using gold for anything, if nobody was willing to pay this price and the only thing you were using it for is money, then you might make that argument. But the fact that you actually have a market at this price means that it's worth it. But so let's imagine you had like $10 million of your wealth in gold. And then and then all of a sudden it stopped being used completely as some kind of store value. So you would lose 90%. It's not going to be stopped using as a store of value unless it's stopped being used as a commodity. Because let's say you actually need a store of value. What are you going to use? I mean, what? Bitcoin. No, no, but I'm saying you can't use Bitcoin because Bitcoin has no use. So you can store corn because people will eat it in the future. You can store wheat. You can store oil. You can store all sorts of things that people are going to need in the future. But there's a huge cost of storing those things. And over time, they may lose value and not be worth as much in the future as they are right now. So storing value is simply a concept of prices are going up. The prices of goods and services are going up. So I'm just going to buy goods and services today that I'm going to need in the future. Well, the ones that you can buy and not use them right away, that's what gold is great for. I can take gold and I don't have to use it. I can just store it in a coin or a bar or even in a piece of jewelry. And in the future, it can be melted down and used as a metal. So that's what your store. You don't want paper currency because it's losing value. So you have to actually buy something real. But I mean, Bitcoin will only be valuable if speculators decide they want to own it. But how do you know what speculators are going to want in the future? I mean, it's just a pure speculation. For me to say that gold is going to continue to be valued in industry and in jewelry, that's not a stretch. I mean, they've been using it for thousands of years. So why would they suddenly stop? I don't know. But Bitcoin has only been valued now $35,000. No, but Bitcoin has only been valued for a few years. And how do you know it's going to be valued in a few more? I mean, people like Bitcoin because it's got up. They're not going to like it so much after it goes way down. And there's nothing to stop it from going way down. Do you think that something could change your mind? Like let's say 20 years from now, it's been steadily increasing. And it's $1 million a coin then. And do you think you would finally at some point say, well, I guess empirically it is being used as a store of value that's reliable and it's even displaced gold. Do you think anything could happen that would make you re-evaluate your take on it? Yeah, people ask me that a lot. And I mean, I always turn it around and I say, well, you're just making it about price. So if that's the case, is there a price to which Bitcoin could fall where you would admit that you're wrong and that it's, and usually they'll say, no, I'll just buy it no matter how cheap it gets. So even if Bitcoin went to 1,000 or 100, they would just buy more. And I'm like, all right, so, but yeah, price is not what I'm looking for. What I'm looking for is Bitcoin. But what if it's steady and not bought? It has to be, all right. If it's going to replace gold, it can't just replace gold as a store of value. It has to replace gold as money, right? So if in the future, Bitcoin is a legitimate medium of exchange. So if you go into a store or online and you see goods and services priced in satoshis, this is a thousand satoshis. If you see, if people go to get jobs and they say we're looking for a new executive vice president, the salary is a half a Bitcoin a year or whatever, or whatever it is, or this is, there's an active bond market for Bitcoins. People are financing, they're borrowing Bitcoins and repaying Bitcoins. People are buying life insurance policies where they pay the premium in Bitcoin and the death benefit is in Bitcoin, where it's actually a medium of exchange, prices, contracts, bonds, all this stuff. So that Bitcoin, because people say to me, well, but no one's doing that with gold. Not now, they were. All of that was in gold before we started pricing it in fiat. So if Bitcoin can achieve that type of success where people are confident enough in its future value to loan out money for 30 years or to buy a life insurance policy where the death benefit is gonna be Bitcoin, where people, where landlords will sign rents, long-term rental contracts, right? Where the rent is in Bitcoin, right? I mean, right now there are a few people that say, oh, we pay, I pay my employees in Bitcoin. Well, their salary isn't in Bitcoin. They just do a conversion. Let's say I'm hiring somebody and they're making $1,000 a week and I pay them every two weeks. So now I owe them $2,000. I just figure out how much Bitcoin I can buy for 2,000 and that's not really being paid in Bitcoin. Being paid in Bitcoin is you're gonna get the same quantity. And I don't see, you know, if all that actually happens, well then, yeah, I guess, you know, you can say, I guess it works. But if all people do with Bitcoin is hold onto it to speculate on appreciation, if that's all it's used for, then if the bubble ends up getting that big, you know, I'm not going to admit that I'm wrong, I will be surprised if Bitcoin got to a million. Look, you know, we have an example of what just happened and, you know, with stocks like GameStop, where GameStop went from, you know, 10 bucks to 500, whatever it was, you know, as we're recording this, it's back to around 100. So I don't know if the bubble is completely popped for good. It kind of looks like it has and it's probably gonna make the round trip. But there are a lot of people who are arguing, well, why can't GameStop just go up indefinitely? And, you know, so this was a compressed version of Bitcoin because, you know, with GameStop, it was easier for people to say, well, but the company can't possibly be worth this. They can't possibly make enough money to ever justify this valuation. But, you know, in the short run, people will ignore valuation and just focus on price. Hey, the price is going up and I want to buy it because somebody else is going to pay a higher price. That is what's going on with Bitcoin. You know, you have to ignore the fundamentals and just focus on, hey, Bitcoin is the best performing asset over the last 10 years. Yes, I'm not arguing about that. Yes, but that doesn't mean that it's gonna be the best performing asset over the next 10 years. That doesn't mean that it has any real value. Simply means that people have been willing to buy it and pay much higher prices. But I also don't know how much manipulation is going in behind the scenes. There's a lot of accusations of a lot of fraud going on. I know that once people have a stake in Bitcoin, they have a powerful incentive to pump it up, just like the people who bought into GameStop real cheap had an incentive to pump it up so they can dump it. Because the dynamic of Bitcoin is the same as any Ponzi or Pyramid or Chainletter. It all depends on new money coming in. You need a constant supply of new people who decide to buy. That's the only way the price is gonna go up. And a lot of people- Do you think that's why Michael Saylor is having that conference tomorrow that's open to the world on Zoom where he's trying to tell other CEOs why they can put their cash into Bitcoin instead of Treasury so that the price goes up and his previous bet does better? Well, absolutely. The more CEOs he can sucker into Bitcoin to the extent that it pushes up the price of Bitcoin, then it pushes up the value of their company. Because now a lot of their earnings are gonna be derived from the rising price of Bitcoin because they're sitting on so many Bitcoin. And his stock now is almost a proxy for Bitcoin. It's becoming a Bitcoin ETF other than a software company. And I think what he's basically trying to say to corporate CEOs is, hey, this is a way to cheat. Because if you just buy this, it's gonna go up as other people buy it. And your earnings are gonna be inflated because you put a bunch of cash because his thesis that corporations should convert their cash to Bitcoin as a hedge against inflation because there's a potential for a 2% a year inflation or 3%. That is nonsense. Bitcoin is so much riskier than any fiat currency. I mean, it can easily drop by 50%. How can you buy that as a hedge when you can easily buy gold? I mean, if you don't like dollars, you can buy Swiss francs, you can buy other currencies. But if you don't want any fiat currencies, you can easily own gold as currency. And, or if you don't have a productive use for your cash, pay it out to your shareholders and dividends and let them decide what they're gonna do with it. But if you just have all this cash, you don't have anything to do with it. I mean, putting it into Bitcoin is complete nonsense. But, you know, he did it and now he has to make sure that other people do it. But I don't think a lot of corporate CEOs are actually gonna bite on this. I mean, it's a very small number of institutions that are actually doing this. But of course the media is playing it up and acting as if there's this whole movement of institutions and companies into Bitcoin when it's just not happening. You know, in fact, I think fewer merchants are working with Bitcoin now than a few years ago. I mean, they tried it and they quickly phased it out. So it never really grew. And then all the Bitcoin proponents, you know, just kind of like, okay, forget about that. Yeah, it's never gonna be used as money. It doesn't work as a media. But it's gonna be digital gold. Well, it's not digital gold because it doesn't do anything that real gold does. I mean, it's just all a made up narrative to try to pretend that gold is worthless. That's what these Bitcoin guys think. They think gold has no value, that it's all because people just believe it has value and that people will stop believing and gold's just gonna be a worthless rock. That you're gonna see gold on the ground and you'll just kick it because it's so worthless. They think gold has no value whatsoever and it's all in our minds. And therefore Bitcoin is superior in every way to gold. I mean, it's completely laughable. The things that people have to believe in order to accept the Bitcoin narrative. Did I lose you? I saw the, oh, I'm here. Can you hear me? Yeah. Can you hear me? Now I can, yeah. Yeah, I think your test makes sense. If it starts being used as a unit of account and like it's a closed system where you don't have to transfer back to dollars and all that, then that would be, you might have to reevaluate. Who knows, that could happen in the next 10 years or 15 years. That's what a lot of these true believers think is gonna happen. Because if it doesn't happen, you have all these people that have Bitcoin, right? And let's say you've been hodling it for years and years and you have this huge on paper wealth in Bitcoin, right? But you haven't actually bought anything. You're still driving the same old car. You're living in the same old apartment. You haven't updated your wardrobe. You haven't taken a vacation because you didn't want to sell any of your Bitcoin because they were gonna go up so much. But let's say Bitcoin finally reaches a level where you're kind of satisfied where, okay, this is kind of the peak. This is where it's gonna level out. It's plateaued, yeah. Now I want to start buying stuff. I'm a millionaire now. I want to start living like one. I want a nice car. I want a new house. Well, you and a lot of other people are gonna kind of come to the same conclusion at the same time. We all want this stuff. Well, if you want to buy a house and the guy who's selling it doesn't want Bitcoin, he want to buy a new car, but the car dealership doesn't want Bitcoin. The car dealership wants dollars. So does the seller of your house. And in fact, when you sell your Bitcoin, the US government wants to be paid taxes on the gains. And they don't want Bitcoin either. They want US dollars. So all of a sudden, all the people that have Bitcoin need US dollars to buy all the things they want and to pay all the taxes on their gains. Who is going to buy all those Bitcoin from them? That's the problem. So... Well, I guess the idea is that if it plateaus at a million bucks or whatever, by that point, it's in such wide use that people would want the Bitcoins instead of the dollars. No, no, no. And I guess the... It doesn't have to be in any wider use than it is now. Look, Bitcoin went from pennies of Bitcoin to 30,000 and no one's using it for anything. So it could go to a million under the same circumstances. Nobody actually has to use it. And it doesn't have to be any more widely adopted than it is now. It's just if everybody who owns their Bitcoin today just decides they're not going to sell any, right? It just takes a tiny transaction to print a million, right? As long as all the sellers say, we won't sell unless it's a million. And then one guy's like, okay, I'll sell my Bitcoin for a million. Now all of a sudden they're all worth a million, even though just one traded there, right? That's the only... Right, right. It doesn't matter how many people. My point is I don't think it's ever gonna grow to the point where you'll be able to buy all the things you want with your Bitcoin from sellers who will be content to accept your Bitcoin. I think in order to actually tap into your Bitcoin wealth, you're gonna have to sell the Bitcoin and find a new buyer. And my point is there won't be any new buyers. The market will implode. Yeah, I know, but you... And the government thing is a problem, but that's not an economic argument against it. I mean, the government can hamper it with their tax regime and with their monopoly over the Fed. But... Oh yeah, I'm not in favor. Yeah, I'm not in favor of the income tax or the capital gains tax. In fact, I live in Puerto Rico. So to the extent that I actually owned any Bitcoin, which I don't, I could sell mine tax-free. So I wouldn't have that impediment. But the majority of people who own Bitcoin are going to be in a situation where they have a tax liability if they sell it a profit and they're gonna need dollars or euros or whatever currency they're taxed in. I mean, that's one of the reasons that fiat currency works. Because yes, the US dollar is intrinsically worthless, just like Bitcoin. It's not gold. But what gives it value other than confidence that people have in it is the fact that the US government requires every American citizen to remit their tax payments in dollars. And so everybody needs dollars in order to stay out of jail. So there's always gonna be a demand for dollars because you always have to pay your taxes. Unless you live in Puerto Rico. But even here we have some. But the point is that that creates some demand. Like if the US government said, you know what? From now on, we're gonna accept our tax payments in peach pits, right? That's what we want. We're only gonna take peach pits. Well, then everybody would have to start accumulating peach pits because that's what the government claims they want for their taxes. So once the government says it, so if the government were to say, look, we only want Bitcoin, that's you gotta pay your taxes in Bitcoin. Well, now I would actually need some Bitcoin. Right now, nobody needs Bitcoin. People need gold. Jewelers need gold. Computer chip manufacturers need gold. The aerospace industry needs gold. Denys need gold. So there's always people who need gold and will buy it regardless of the price. Nobody needs Bitcoin. People will buy it if they think the price is gonna go up, but they don't need it. And I don't need it to pay taxes. By the way, I know some libertarian friends who've been moving to Saipan, kind of doing your Puerto Rico thing, but in Saipan, because there's a great tax deal there too. The Northern Mariana Islands and the person. I think it's a, like it's a negotiated, I don't know, maybe they have, maybe they've passed something recently that's kind of like what Puerto Rico did. Because I was familiar with the law that they had in the US Virgin Islands. And there, each person that moved there negotiated their own tax deal independently. This is like, you move there and you just declare your residency and you get the IRS to approve it and you have to be there more than 50% of the time over a three-year period. And then you, so then you're subject to Saipan taxes and not US taxes. Exactly, yeah, that's the same in Puerto Rico. But then they give you up to a 90% rebate on what you pay if you're an American citizen. On what you pay where? To Saipan. Oh, you pay the, so what is the regular, what is the regular Saipan tax? I don't, I think it's comparable to the US tax, maybe a little bit less, but let's say you pay 40% here, you pay 40% in Saipan, but then you get 90% of that back as a refund in Saipan. Right, so then you get, yeah, that will, so in Puerto Rico. You're paying 10% of what you pay here basically. Yeah, Puerto Rico is actually still better because my tax in Puerto Rico on the income that I earn from operating my business is 4%. So that's pretty much, you know, like 10% of what I would pay in the US, right? 10% tax versus four. And it's actually lower because you know, you have state taxes that get added on depending on where you live. I was in Connecticut, but my capital gains tax rate is zero. So that's 100% rebate. Same for Saipan, I believe. Oh, so it sounds like you're not subject to US capital gains. Yeah, but that sounds like it's about the same then. 90% rebate on your income probably gets you into about a 4% tax bracket. So, but I don't know if it's- Okay, well, you wanna- Yeah, I mean, obviously I could look into that if Puerto Rico becomes a state, but I don't know if it's as nice a place to live for, you know, for the family, for my kids. You know, I've never been there. It's apparently a pretty island with a, it's got like 50,000 people. It's close to China and Korea and all that. So I don't know much about it. Yeah, but it's a lot further away from here, you know, from the US, the mainland. True. Well, do you wanna talk about the other stuff? I mean- Yeah, yeah, well, that's why I'm here. I mean, let's do it. I'm kind of impressed by you as a dad because I have a precocious 17 year old who is libertarian, but he doesn't agree with me on everything. Yeah, yeah, Spencer has gone, you know, way over to the anarcho-capitalist side of it, kind of like, you know, anarchy, no government at all. Yeah, and that's what I am, but I, so I have a position on IP, intellectual property. You and I talked about it before privately, but I guess he wanted me to try to chat with you and explain my case to you, see if I can just make sure you understand it and then see if you poke any holes in it, but so my case against IP is not, and defamation law too, by the way, which is related, is not based upon, you don't have to be an anarchist. It's basically, it's based upon in understanding what property rights are and what free markets are. And I think you and I agreed on that. I mean, your favorite private property rights and free markets and minimal government or something like that, right? So we're on the same page with that. Yeah, I mean, that's the main reason that I want government. And again, I think like, you know, in some type of idealistic world, maybe you could have no government at all, but I just don't think that that's practical because I do think that, you know, having no government at all is kind of like a vacuum and it's gonna be filled with something. And so kind of like preemptively to prevent a worse government from forming, let's preemptively create one and make sure that it's very limited in its power. And the main purpose of government is to protect private property, which would include your life, your liberty and things like that. But that's why we institute government and we basically, instead of each one of us acting as our own policemen, we collectively come together and we give the government some of our power to use force in a defensive manner to a central government that is charged with that responsibility. But we're supposed to be freer because we have government because the government is protecting our property so that we don't have to do it ourselves. And now we can operate under the assumption that these laws are protecting us. Right. But the case against defamation law and intellectual property, it's not based upon anarchy. So if you're basically in favor of private property rights and innovation and prosperity and freedom and capitalism and the free market, that's enough to explain why IP law is incompatible with those things, I believe. Yeah, and you think IP would include any kind of patent or copyright or anything that you invent is pretty much fair game. You don't own, you don't have any kind of proprietary interest in anything that you create. Well, let me just explain. So I'm a patent lawyer too, by the way, so I understand the system well. I've gotten lots of patents for lots of companies. There are kind of two types of arguments for these things. One is sort of the consequentialist or empirical or utilitarian argument like, oh, we need to incentivize inventors and artists. And then there's the more natural rights or property type argument that, oh, you created that so you have a property right in it. And both of those arguments are flawed, but they have to be responded to differently. So the empirical argument requires studies and all that, which we can't get into. I have studies on my website and we could talk about it a little bit, but I don't know what your case is. Is it more practical like you need this, the government needs to come in and give temporary monopolies to incentivize people or is it a rights argument in your point of view? Well, I mean, first of all, in the United States, it's one of the few things that the federal government is authorized to do. You go back to the Constitution and the US government is authorized to issue. It's definitely, well, patents are definitely constitutional. I would argue copyright is unconstitutional because the Constitution authorized patent and copyright in the 1789 constitution, but the Bill of Rights was enacted two years later in 1791 and the First Amendment is clearly incompatible with copyright because freedom of the press is guaranteed by the First Amendment. So Congress cannot restrict freedom of the press, but copyright law prevents you from publishing books, which is a restriction on freedom of the press. Yeah, I mean, I would not make that argument because again, I mean, the example of look, I have freedom of speech, but I can't yell fire in a crowded room. So I mean, I don't think your freedom of speech is absolute in the sense that you have the right to slander me or, you know, things like that, or it's not an absolute. I mean, what I do think is an abridgment of the freedom of speech, as I think, or the freedom of the press, is the fact that there's sales taxes on books and newspapers. I think those taxes are unconstitutional, but they actually abridge freedom of the press and freedom of speech because they... Well, Peter, copyright restricts that kind of freedom way worse than the sales tax does. I well know, because again... The Supreme Court has recognized this, but they even say that the Supreme Court says that there's a tension in the law between copyright and the First Amendment. But what they do is they try to balance it because they think that they're both in the Constitution, so they have to reconcile these irreconcilable provisions. But my argument is that the First Amendment came two years later and it therefore repealed the copyright clause. No, I think if it was their intention to do that, then that's what they would have done. I don't think that was the case. And clearly, if you go back to the time of the framers and the people who were around, I'm sure there might have been... I mean, there were patents or copyrights that were issued while all the people who wrote that amendment were still alive. And so, if they had meant to exclude that, they would have done something. Well, we also had official state religions in Massachusetts and other states in 1791 and now people think that the First Amendment prohibits that, which I don't agree with. Yeah, well, again, people are now changing the meaning of the Constitution under the guise of interpreting it and that's a whole different discussion. They applied it to the states with the 14th Amendment, which I think is erroneous. But anyway, the point is just because patent and copyright are authorized by the Constitution doesn't mean that they're justified by libertarian principles. Right, but let's say, let's go back to... So I've authored several books, right? Yeah. And so, if I'm gonna write a book... Yeah. And I'm gonna spend a lot of time writing it. Yeah. And the way I'm going to be repaid for writing the book is by selling the finished product, right? I mean, that's what you want to do. That's what you want to do. Well, right, that's what I'm gonna do. But if I don't have some exclusive right for some period of time to sell what I've written, the minute I write something, anybody is free to just say, oh, Peter just wrote a new book. Let's copy the whole thing. And we didn't spend any time. We don't have any fixed costs. We can sell the book exactly the same, even cheaper. Right. And then that's not fair to just sit back and just wait for somebody else to do all the hard work. Why? And now you're gonna sell the book. So your argument... You don't have a principled argument. Your argument's empirical. So it's a consequence. No, no, but it's all principled that I have a right to the fruits of my labor and my investment and my sacrifice that I have created this original work of fiction or nonfiction, whatever it is. But it didn't exist. I created it myself. And I should have some right to my intellectual property that I created and be able to get a return. And yes, I mean, because I think if you don't have that right, then yes, you won't have the incentive to invent things and create things. If other people can just post whatever you've done and they have as much right to profit from it as you do and they did none of the work, made none of the investments. But so you're mixing the arguments together then. So you're saying it's a right because you created it. So let's just focus on that for a second. I mean, how would you distinguish that from just normal free market competition? Well, what do you mean? So I come up with, so let's say that, well, let's say that there's no such thing as a, there's pizza shops, but there's no such thing as home delivery. And so Domino's, I don't remember who was first. Pizza Hut says, we're gonna start delivering pizza to people's houses. It's a new business model and it's very popular. So they can charge a lot of money for it at first. But all of a sudden, Domino's is gonna say, hey, I can get it on this game too. So Domino's sees what other people did. They learn from your example. They emulate what you did and all of a sudden. But you know, as a patent lawyer, there's no way you're gonna be able to patent, we're gonna deliver the pizza. I mean, there's no invention there. That's just a different way of serving. Actually, business methods have been patented, but then my point is that- You're not gonna get a patent on, okay, let's say I just decide that I'm gonna have home delivery of a different product, not pizzas, whatever. I got a new business and my model is to deliver it. Just like all these companies that started selling stuff on the internet. Like when Amazon said, hey, we're gonna sell books on the internet, they couldn't get a patent on selling books on the internet. They couldn't stop anybody else from selling their books online. Amazon got a patent on purchasing a book with one click. I mean, but that's the point- Well, I don't know what technology they had to invent to enable that, but it would have been a patent on the programming or what they did. No, it's not wrong. Well, there's so many other booksellers, no way. But there are plenty of people selling books online. Not just, that was a lot. Well, the patent's only last 17 years, so finally people could compete, but- Well, I think I remember buying stuff from Barnes and Noble online and other stores- Not with one click. There was about a five-year period. You couldn't do it with one click because Amazon had the exclusive right to do it. Well, there must have been something unique about the software that they developed that did- No, the patent office isn't competent and the standards are vague and arbitrary. But my point is, if you do something new, people will learn from it and they will emulate that and they will compete with you and they start competing. They will lower the price you can charge initially because you're the first mover. You agree with that, right? Just a little remark in general. Look, if I just come up with a different way of doing something where I haven't had to invent a new product, a new thing, that now somebody else would have to utilize that invention, then there's no patent there. But look, go back to my example because it's very easy of the book that I wrote. I organize these words in a particular manner and now I'm publishing my book, right? Why does somebody else have a right to copy word-for-word everything that I wrote and then sell that book without having to go through my publisher- Because you made the information public and you took the risk that people will compete with what you did. But I made it public to people who bought it for the excuse for their exclusive use. That's not how information works. The people that you sold it to, you could have a contract with them and you can say, I'm selling you this book and you have to sign an agreement with me that you can't copy it. That's fine. You can have a contract. Well, they can't sell it. But that's not what copyright is. People, there's copyrights on every book. It says that. I mean, look, it's like the thing, when you go to watch a video at home and the first thing it says is copying this video, it's punishable, this is under patent, it's all, you know, they don't care if you copy it for yourself. They don't want other people selling it for money and eating into their market that way. They don't really, I mean, they're not gonna go after somebody who just makes their own copy for private non-commercial use, even though, I mean, technically, maybe that is a violation. But it's there. I mean, all the books, this is copyright material. So that contract is there. You're buying my book and you're agreeing that you bought this copy of my book. You didn't buy it so that you can just make hundreds and hundreds of copies and then go sell them. So do you think you should be able to copy the Bible or? Well, the Bible is out of, look, copyrights don't last forever. The Bible is very, very old. But if it's a property right, if it's a property right, why should it expire? I mean, property rights last forever. Well, because, you know, the author is not gonna be around forever. But, you know, I mean, you could say, well, it goes to their children and it does for a certain amount of time. But look, it's like, there is a reasonable period of time that I guess government, we can establish as society where you have a reasonable amount of time for you to recoup your investment and profit from your labor and what you've done. Versus, you know, opening an up to society. They've never in these days, Peter. It's just arbitrary. I mean, you know, I agree that it's arbitrary. And now it's like a, I agree that it's an arbitrary number. And maybe you can argue as to what is the proper number of years that it should apply. I do, it should be zero. It should be zero. But again, if you're making it zero, I don't think that that's gonna lead to a more vibrant free market. If you're gonna tell somebody that their intellectual property has no value. But that's not a natural, okay, but that's not a natural right. Sorry, but now you're saying what it will lead to. I mean, listen, I think the mistake you and others make, you're kind of like a re-Indian and you have this Lockean idea that if you create something, you should own it. And I think that's the fundamental mistake. Creation is not supposed to be perfect. Well, that you're saying that anything I create should be all social, should be distributed equally. So you wanna redistribute my creative efforts to the public in general. No, I'm saying that the purpose of property rights is that we live in a world of scarcity, right? And there are certain things that are limited supply and only one person can use these things. And so we have property rights to allow people to live without conflict, right? So your car, your land, your body, all these things can only be used by one person at a time. And so property rights say who owns it. And according to the Western tradition that you and I agree with, the rights are determined in accordance with two very simple rules. The first person who started using this thing in the state of nature, like the homesteader, or the person who got it by contract from a previous owner, that's it. Creation has nothing to do with it. So creation or productivity just means rearranging the things that you own already, the factors of production, right? So like if you own some metal and you reshape it into a plow, now you increased your wealth, right? By using your knowledge and your effort and your labor, you've made yourself more wealthy. You have a more valuable thing, but you don't own something new. You own the plow because you own the metal that went into it, right? Yeah, I understand the distinction that you're making between a physical piece of property that only one person can own at a time versus an idea that can be shared or just a formula for making something or a design. Yeah. Because I have a book, yes, those words can be reproduced millions of times over. And I haven't lost, I get that, but what I have lost is my right to profit. But you don't have a right. Well, but if I... You don't have a right to... Well, who says I don't? I lost. But they... Can you hear me now? Yeah, but I think society, what you're saying is government, we've taken government and we said, okay, we're going to protect the rights of inventors and authors to what they invent. We're gonna incentivize them with these laws to protect that property. I mean, if you wanna say, hey, let's not recognize this right. If we as a society want to decide, okay, there's no private property. I mean, there's no intellectual property. And those are the rules of the game. Then we can see what happens. Because I don't think, because if somebody has already invested all this money based on the rules of, hey, you're gonna get protected. You do have property rights in your intellectual property. And they've already made the investment. If you're gonna change that, that's like you're taking property without compensation. But I think if you wanna go like going forward, hey, anything you do going forward, you can't patent, you can't copy, right? And we all agree that those are the rules. And therefore, society may invent other ways of trying to get around that. But there's no way that companies are gonna invest in coming up with a new drug. If there's no way they're gonna be able to profit from all the money they have to spend on researching and developing it, you know? Okay, but you're not a pure Democrat or populist or legal positivist. I mean, we're arguing about what the law should be. I mean, I assume you're against the social security system, right? Even though some people are counting on it right now. Well, A- You and I think the social security system shouldn't exist, right? It's unjust. It's not constitutional. And it's organized as a Ponzi scheme. I mean, why, you know, for the government to force people into a Ponzi scheme, obviously it's immoral as well as illegal. And it's bad, it's bad policy. It's bad, you know, it encourages all the wrong things. But aside from all that, it's, no. But it's got nothing to do with what? But aside from all that, the fundamental problem with it, it's theft. It is right. Yes. Because social security is a theft of property from me to old people right now. We agree with that, all right? I'm just saying that there is theft of intellectual property. You're just coming from a perspective that I can't own. And also, and again, you don't think there's any value to goodwill or reputation. That's why you think that- There's value, there's value, but you can't own everything that has a value. Just because something is valued doesn't mean it's property. Well, it is property on a balance sheet. I mean, when you're looking at corporation and there's a value assigned to goodwill. That's fine. That's fine. Reputation is valuable. Reputation is valuable. Right, and that's what it comes down to. Value of my wife, my child. I'm losing you. It's love to be right in it. Let me take this headphone off, hold on. But what your position is, is that my business competitors should be allowed to deliberately put out false information to malign my reputation and hurt my business and I would have no recourse against- Well, that's the defamation argument. Hold on, that's, I mean- Yeah, no, but I thought that's kind of the similar. Don't you make that same argument that I don't own my reputation, therefore I have, anybody can destroy it if they want to by lying, because it's freedom of speech. This is a well-known, I mean, I don't know if you've read Rothbard and Walter Block. I mean, this is a well-known argument. Libertarians almost universally agree that defamation law is totally unjustified. You can't own your reputation because you don't own what other people think about you because they're not your slaves. That's true. But if, well, do you believe that fraud should be a crime or should fraud be legal as freedom of speech? Fraud is a type of theft by trick. So yes. Right, and so if I am in competition with you and I defraud your customers by putting out false information to scare them away from doing business with you, right? That's not defrauding- Lying is not defrauding, so if- Well, sure it is. No, if I defraud your customers, I have to take something from them of value. No, no, no, if I say something that's not true, deliberately, because I know that it's going to alter your behavior and it's going to get you to do something that you otherwise would not do if you do the truth- That's perfectly legitimate because people have the right to rely upon whatever information they want. Yeah, and then that means, yeah, and you think, I guess right now they're talking about the big pump and dump scheme. So you would think that that should be legal too. You should be able to- Well, I think even Ponzi scheme should be legal. Yeah, I'm against insider trading laws and all that. Of course, I'm a libertarian. Well, the insider trading laws I'm against for different reasons than that, but that's not fraud. I mean, I actually think we'd be better off without insider trading laws, but as far as deliberate fraud, I mean, what you're saying is it's fine for somebody on a car dealership to roll back the odometer and tell somebody, yeah, this car has only got 5,000 miles on it when it's got 100,000 miles on it. No, that would be illegal, but- Well, why is that illegal? Well, hold on a second. The point is- You just said lying is okay. Lying per se is okay. Lying per se is not sufficient to have a cause of action, but if you use it to obtain a property by deceit, then- Well, that's what a lot of defamation or slander libel is all about. No, because if that was the case, you could just rely upon fraud law. In other words, if we already have fraud law and contract law, which we do, why do you need an extra law called defamation or trademark or patent or copyright? They have to add something extra in addition to- I don't know. I mean, if they just want to incorporate it into the general laws against fraud, I mean, they're just kind of making them more specific. But you have- Trust me, everyone that favors defamation law would oppose what you're saying because they know it would end defamation law. When you accuse someone of defamation, you do not have to prove fraud. You only have to prove that you said something false that harms someone's reputation. That's not fraudulent. No, no, I'm not talking about that. No, you have to prove that they knew it was false. There's malice involved. Like you- Yeah, but it's still not fraud. Just because you know you're saying something false does not mean that it's a fraud. Well, no, if you know it's false and you say it anyway, and if you hide information that if you disclosed, then the people would have a different opinion. So if you deliberately slant a story in a way that you create a false impression knowingly, and you're just doing that just because either you're trying to damage a competitor or just because you're trying to sell more newspapers or get more views. And so you're saying stuff that you think, oh, we're gonna be able to generate a lot of views if we lie about this business or this person. And in so doing, you damage their reputation or damage their business. But so who are you, are you saying you're defrauding your competitor or are you defrauding customers? Well, you're defrauding the potential customers of that business or you're defrauding- What are you taking from the customer? Their reputation. But what are you taking from the customer? You may be impeding their ability to do business because you are falsely maligning their reputation. I mean, there's a lot of damage that you could do. Look, if what you're saying is true, fine, okay. Or like I agree, I don't think blackmail should be a crime, right? I mean, is there- Well, then what defamation is just- But extortion should be a crime. If I say, but if I have pictures of you and another woman and I say, hey, I got these pictures, give me $10,000 or I'm gonna put them on the internet, that should be legal because you have a choice. Now, if I take your $10,000 and you put them on the internet anyway, well, then that's a crime. No, it's not a crime. It's not a crime. It's a contract breach. It's not a crime. Yeah, well, I mean, not a crime, but you violated a contract. But- Yeah. Well, that's the same thing. Defamation is not a crime. Is we're not talking about a criminal offense. We're not talking about somebody going to jail. We're just talking about holding somebody responsible for the damages that they caused. That's all we're talking about. We're not talking about putting people in jail. We're talking about financial liability here. Copyright infringement actually is a criminal offense. Really? Yeah, don't you ever heard of- Don't you remember Aaron Schwartz, the guy that committed suicide because he was facing 35 years in federal prison for downloading some academic articles from JSTOR? Well, I did not think that it is a crime. And I don't think it should be a crime because I think the damages are monetary. We're talking about a financial loss. But you don't even have to prove that, but there's statutory damages. It says if you copy someone's work, then there's $75,000 or whatever per offense. That's it. Yeah, although, you know, I mean, again, I mean, individuals can't prosecute other individuals for crimes only for torts, right? Only for civil damages. Only the government can say you've committed a crime. Yeah, they do. They put people who've gone to prison for copying books and movies and things like that. Yeah, well, I mean, I guess like if a government, look, I mean, yeah, the government, you know, can prosecute somebody for a shoplifting too. So, I mean, that you're taking something that's not yours. Yeah, but what are you taking that's not yours if you copy a book? Well, you're basically taking away my intellectual property and you're infringing on, you know, my ability to profit. But I, you know, I agree that it's, I wouldn't look at it as the same thing as, you know, you breaking into my house and, you know, and taking my television set and stealing it. Except if I take your television, you don't have it anymore. I understand. If I copy your book, you still have your book. Right, that's why that might be a crime, breaking and entering and grand theft or whatever the television is worth. Maybe it's not grand theft anymore. Television is so, so cheap. But, but I think the copyright violations and the defamation and these things should be civil. I'm not arguing that these, that these should be crimes. But they are. But, you know, but I do, I do think that the people should be liable because, you know, and it, let's try the word I'm looking for. But, I mean, I know the argument of the free market is, you know, oh, well, let people just go out there and say whatever they want. And, you know, people will know that since there's no liable laws, well, people are, you know, likely to lie because they know there's no consequence. So nobody believes anything that anybody says. Exactly. You know, I don't know. I mean, and there might be ways to judge the credibility of these guys, you know, lied before. But the bigger issue, look, so remember when the iPhone came out, remember blackberries were the popular thing before that, right? And there was really no such thing as a smartphone before that. Yeah, I used to have a blackberry and now I have an iPhone. Yes, so Steve Jobs, they came out with the iPhone, which was no keys, a touchscreen, connected the internet, you could have apps. And so the smartphone was invented. And Apple had patents on even the shape of it, like having rounded corners and all that stuff. So for years, they stopped competitors and they still keep stopped competitors because the big guys can fight with each other with their arsenals of patents, but now little guys couldn't make a similar device because they would be sued into oblivion by these patents. So the patents basically restrict competition, cause oligopolies and cartels, reduce innovation, harm consumers, raise prices. I mean, there's literally nothing good about it. Why shouldn't people be able to compete and say, hey, Apple made a rectangular touchscreen smartphone. I'm going to make one too. What's wrong with that? Well, I don't know that they had a patent on the shape of a rectangle. They did, they did. They had a design patent on a touchscreen. But there must have been more to the patent than just the shape. No, there's not. This is the problem with it. It was a design patent on the way it looked, rounded corners, that's it. If you want to get into arguing as to whether or not they are too liberal in what they will allow you to patent, I might not have an argument with you there. To say that we're going to have a patent on this thing being a rectangle, they didn't invent a rectangle and they didn't invent a cell phone. So I don't think that is unique enough. I don't think that is something that should be patentable. You know, it's, so yeah, there's certainly an argument about the degree and we might have a lot of agreement. But it's not just that. I mean, so here's the problem. When you have an empirical argument, so then I respond with empirical examples and every example I give to someone like you who's in favor of IP, they always crawfish and they say, oh, I'm not in favor of patent term or copyright that lasts 150 years. Oh, I'm not in favor of people going to jail for it. Oh, I'm not in favor of a patent that's silly like, so they basically every example you give, that's the real world example of how the system works, they back off on it and that you end up with saying, well, what in the hell are you in favor of? And they're like, well, I don't know. I'm not an expert. So what do you do? Well, the governments obviously can be abusing this or companies, but look, I haven't seen this study and I don't know, I mean, if there exists one that says that we would have a more vibrant economy with more innovation, more investment in things if nobody could patent anything. Here's what Peter, here's what the studies show. I'll tell you and I can send you a link and you can look at it. Fritz, you know Fritz Maklip, right? Kind of a quasi Austrian guy, big shot in the 50s. Congressman Fritz Maklip, he's sort of like Hebbeler and anyway, if you look up his name, you'll probably remember him, but he did a big study for the Congress in the 50s and with Edith Penrose and lots of other studies have been done since then. What they conclude every time is that, look, we've looked at the evidence and as far as we can tell, there is no conclusive evidence that patents do anything positive to the economy and it looks like they probably distort research and impede innovation. So, in other words- But how do they conclude that? I mean, do they have areas of the world where there are no patents, there are no copyrights? Yeah, I mean, if you look at the book Against Intellectual Monopoly by Bolger and Levine to economists written about 10 years ago and they started out researching this issue trying to find evidence for copyright and patent, by the end of their book and their research, they concluded that they should all be abolished. So for example, in the 1900s, for about 50 or 60 years, Switzerland and Italy had no patents for pharmaceuticals and of course, Italy and Switzerland were two of the biggest pharmaceutical manufacturers in the world. So you can give all kinds of examples of counter examples to the standard argument that they're necessary for innovation. In fact, if you look at all the inventions that won Nobel Prizes and things like that, the overwhelming majority didn't benefit from patents, physics innovations, mathematical innovations, things like that. There's overwhelming evidence throughout history that people innovate, not because of patents. And in fact, the patent system prevents innovation clearly because if I can't sell a smartphone like Apple's, I'm not going to waste time trying to research- Right, but if I, I mean, obviously, people can still improve an existing patent and they can work with a holder and license it and- Yeah, yeah, but you can't, why would you bother improving coming up with iPhone number two if you can't sell it? You're not gonna bother- No, no, I could sell it. If I came up with something truly unique, I could go to Apple and license them the improvement to their patent and say, hey, I found a better, I found something that's really great that's gonna improve your phones. It's possible in some cases, it's possible in some cases, but it's certainly an impediment to innovation because, to R&D in the first place, because that's a hurdle, that's a cost. And Apple's sitting pretty, Apple's one of the richest companies in the world. Why are they gonna pay attention to Joe Blow coming off the street saying, hey, I've got an improvement on your iPhone, I want you to give me permission to make it and I'll give you permission to add my improvement to your iPhone. They might just say, go pound sand. And everyone knows of that risk so they're not gonna invest in the first place. So innovation gets... Well, but what about the fact that even smaller people, you have all these big companies and if I'm gonna invest money in coming up with something and a big company like Apple could just steal my patent and just mass produce it and not have to pay me a nickel. I mean, what kind of barrier to innovation is that? Because then the little guy has no power when some big company can just, oh, that's a great idea. We already have the economies of scale. We have the distribution. We don't have to pay this guy anything to adopt this thing that he will just do it and he's got nothing. So, you know. Well, first of all, maybe Apple wouldn't be so big in the first place and such a threat to these guys if they didn't have patents to rest on in the first place. I mean, these oligopolies, these cartels, these quasi monopolies emerge because the patent system is a monopoly grant. It's not a surprise that monopolies get created when the government grant gives people monopolies. Yeah, I mean, that's the only way. Look, I agree. That's the only way you have a lot of people that are worried about monopolies. Look, I want to get rid of all antitrust laws. I don't think we should have any of that. I don't think the government should be trying to break up companies that they think are too big or they think are monopolized. And by the way, the courts, when they say that copyright is intentioned with the First Amendment, they also say that antitrust law is intentioned with the patent law because the antitrust law tries to prohibit monopolies and yet the government is granting monopolies. So what they say is, well, we're going to give you a monopoly but you can't abuse it. What the hell does that mean? So you can use it to charge a monopoly price but don't take it too far. Well, they're giving you a monopoly on your invention or something like that, but you don't have a monopoly on... You know, you can charge monopoly prices with... Well, look at these drugs. How can you charge $10,000 a year for a prescription that takes... Well, I understand, but the problem... It's a monopoly price. Right, but the problem is that, and this is unique to the United States or United States situation, but I would like to get rid of the FDA and let companies develop drugs without having to spend the hundreds and hundreds of millions or billions of dollars that are required for government. So if we didn't have all this government... Yes. Then, you know, we would have a lot more innovation. I agree. Prices would be a lot lower. But not only that, Peter, but people that argue for patents, like the pharmaceuticals say, well, the clearest case you need patents for is pharmaceuticals because it's so easy to knock it off and the cost is so high. Well, the cost is high because of the FDA and not only that, the FDA process takes so long and the people that submit these drugs for approval, they're required to publicize all of their details. So by the time they get their FDA approval, all their competitors know how to make it because they were forced to reveal their secret. Yeah, exactly. But my point is that if you leave that in place and then you tell the drug companies, oh, you've got to spend all this money complying with all these rules and you're not going to have any period of time where you can recoup your investment, they won't spend a nickel. Yeah. So basically the argument is that the government has fucked up everything with the FDA so we need to fuck up innovation by adding a patent system on top of it. It doesn't screw up the innovation because you have the FDA. So get rid of the FDA first and then talk to me about removing patents. I mean, you know that people have literally died because of patents, like there are companies that make these drugs that certain people with rare diseases need and the drugs are in short supply because only one company can make it, right? I mean, there are records for it. Well, generally you can find it outside the United States somewhere, right? This is just not the case all the time. A lot of times these companies, they will sell the products outside the United States at a much lower price because they're recouping their investment inside the United States. But look, I agree, but the problem isn't the patent. The problem is the FDA that ran up the cost of producing the drug. Yeah, but the argument is that the argument is because the government imposes FDA cost on us, we need the government to impose a monopoly patent system to help people recoup the cost that the government has imposed on them in the first place. So the answer of the libertarian and the free market guy is let's get rid of both government regimes. Let's get rid of the government FDA system and the patent system. Yeah, well, the FDA is the bigger target, but if there is, let's say there's a very rare disease that not that many people suffer from, right? Why are you going to- Fabric disease is a good example. Right, so why are you going to try to develop a cure for that when there's such a small market unless you can charge a higher price for the drug because you don't have a big market to sell it into? As opposed to people looking to cure baldness when you got everybody going bald, oh, shoot, if I could find a cure for that, yeah, I'll sell it to all these guys. But if you're trying to find some obscure little disease that hardly affects anybody, obviously the price is gonna have to be higher to incentivize you to try to come up with a cure. But you're kind of ad hoc because earlier you kind of implied that if we get rid of the FDA system, then we can maybe tone the patent system down. But now you're saying, well, we need the patent system anyway. No, no, I'm saying that the reason that drugs are so expensive is because of the FDA. If we had no FDA, the cost of drugs for a disease that hardly anybody gets are gonna be more expensive, but not nearly as expensive as they are now because companies won't have to invest all that money in getting them approved. And not only that, not only that, you'd be the first to market so you could charge the higher than average price for a while because you wouldn't have revealed your secrets to all the competitors. So they wouldn't be able to have knockoff drugs right away. Yeah, I mean, obviously they'd have, yeah, if they'd have to reverse engineer and try to figure out what's in there and how to make it. And obviously too, there is a value of your brand. So if I'm a company that people trust, oh, how are you gonna trust this guy's drugs? I mean, how do you know what's in there? You trust my- Well, I mean, I don't know about you, but I buy Tylenol from the store even though it's two or three times as expensive as acetaminophen generic brand or sitting right next to it on the shelf. People will pay more for reputation. Yeah, which you just said had no value. Now some of it starts coming up. No, you said you can't own it. You said you can't own your reputation. Yeah, it has value. Certainly it has value. Goodwill has value on the balance sheet, but that's an economic and finance concept. It's not a property rights concept. Yeah. Well, so you just don't think you have, even though you devote resources and time to building your brand and building that reputation, that you don't have any ownership of it. Well, I mean, I think if you, you know, this is capitalism. If you put a lot of time and effort into a business that fails, you're not entitled to a profit, right? I mean, you're not entitled to a profit. No, I didn't say I'm entitled to a profit, but if somebody lies in order to purposely diminish the value of my property or my asset and they're doing it to enrich themselves at my expense and they're doing it fraudulently. Yeah, but it's not the time to copyright it. Again, they don't require showing a fraud. It's got nothing. I mean, if I copy your book and sell it, I'm not defrauding anyone. No, you're not defrauding, that would not be, because that's not defamation. That's just a case of you're copying my, you know, intellectual property and selling it and not compensating me. I mean, I get people all the time, you know, they wanna reproduce my books, they wanna reproduce them in another country and they'll say, hey, can I buy the rights to put your book, you know, they contact you and they know you, okay, sure, what are you gonna do? All right, you know, and you sell the right and somebody's able to do it. And now they're doing it legally. But, you know, to say that anything that you create is just public property, the minute you make it available to one person, the minute you sell it to one person. Well, when you say anything, see this word thing is kind of a vague word. I don't think anything that you can conceptually name is an ownable type of thing in the world. I mean, property rights apply to material resources that are scarce, right? That people can have conflict with them. Well, good ideas are scarce. I mean, there's not a, you know, books are scarce. I mean, it's scarce in the sense that, you can reproduce, all right, so if everybody, not everybody is a talented author, not everybody, we wouldn't have these authors that make so much money. I mean, if anybody could just come up with a book and write it, I mean, fine, but there is not an unlimited amount of creativity and, you know, when people produce something. No, no, but for a given time, but for a given pattern of information, that pattern of information, that knowledge can be shared and spread and copied infinitely without diminishing anyone else's ability to employ that same pattern. It's basically an economic term, it's a recipe, right? It's just what guides your action. It's not the scarce resources that you employ to achieve things. Right, but, you know, if somebody spends their time building a thing, right? I devote, you know, my time and I'm building something with my hands and I've created something. You're saying, okay, that's property that you own and nobody could take it because there's only one of them. But if, on the other hand, if I devote my time to creating something intellectual, I spend my mental energy, you know, thinking and writing and creating something, that somehow I don't own that. That that's, you know, that's fair being for the world. Because your first example, look, I mean, you do see the similarities between your argument and say Marxism because Marx says it's labor theory of value, right? The more, when the workers put their labor into building a car on the assembly line and when Ford sells it at a profit, he's exploiting them by taking it. No, that's got nothing to do with it. I mean, what you're saying is more Marxist. You're saying that things that are created should be owned collectively by society at large. That when anything that one person develops should be shared equally with everybody, that the person who invented it or created it has no more rights to it than anybody else. That's what you're saying. Well, do you have the right to keep information secret and then people can't use it, but if you make it. But yeah, but what good is if I write a book and keep it secret and nobody can read it, then what's the point of writing it if nobody can read it? People write books all the time for lots of reasons. No, but they write books so that they'll be read, not to hide them in secret. Yeah, and most people don't write books to make money anyway. Oh, sure they do. You think most authors don't want to get paid? How do they eat? Yes, I don't think most authors make any money at all. Well, people write songs, they write screenplays. I mean, there's all sorts of people. There are professional writers. How much did Aristotle make for writing his books? How much did he do? Well, I mean, they got the favor of the king or whatever. I don't know what the systems were. Well, I mean, are you being paid for this podcast right now? It's the same. I mean, when you write a blog post, do you get paid for it? Well, no, but I also don't care if people copy it either. But I mean, most people don't care. Most people want to be not obscure. They want people to read their stuff. But that's the right of the author. Look, if I want to put something into the public domain and just let anybody copy it, that's my right. But if I want to sell it and I want to restrict the rights of other people to sell what I just created, I should be able to do that. Because I'm the one that created it. You want to write. Look, I'm not limiting your ability. Anybody can write a book. Just don't write my book. So if I write a book and you want to sell books, fine. Write one. Sell it. I'm not stopping you. You're limiting what they can do with their own property. Like, if I own a book, you can write whatever you can think of. You can come up with whatever you want. I'm not stopping you. I can't write a sequel to Raiders of the Lost Dark right now and publish it. I can't write a book. Well, not if you want to use those character's names. Why not? If you want to. What's wrong? Because they're all come up with your own. Come up with your own characters. Don't use somebody else's. What if I don't want to write a sequel to Catcher and the Rye or a sequel to Atlas Strong? I'm not sure how long ago that one was written. But I mean, look, obviously, though, you can write, don't try to profit off of somebody else's work. Come up with your own book. Come up with your own character. That's like saying McDonald's comes up with a fast food restaurant for hamburgers. And Burger King does it. And you say, look, don't eat into my business. Why don't you come up with a different restaurant? No, McDonald's was not able to patent the concept of a fast food. But I'm making a general principle point. That's not enough of a difference. You can't patent that. Enough, enough. So you're going to trust these incompetent government bureaucrats to make a nuanced decision on what's enough. I don't know. I have no idea. Would I be willing to concede that it is possible that we would actually be better off without these rules? I mean, is it possible? Maybe. I don't know. Intuitively, it isn't obvious that we would be better. But if you want to look at all of the excess government that we have that is so obviously destructive to individual liberty and our collective prosperity, there are so many things that are higher up on that totem pole than IP and defamation and stuff like that. And I think that when you start to argue about getting rid of that stuff, now you start losing the argument about all the other stuff that we should get rid of first. That is so much worse. That's like when people are looking for anarchy. When you're trying to go to somebody who believes in big government and you come to them and say, I want no government at all. I want anarchy. You try to get somebody from here to here. It's very hard. So if you just say, look, I don't want to get rid of all government. I just want to get rid of most of it. And here are the things that government doesn't need to do. OK, but hear me out for a second. I would agree with you on defamation law. It's not that huge of a problem. Although it is the reason for the CDA and the Section 230 exemption, which are threatening to take away from companies now to restrict these liberal tech companies. So it's threatening internet freedom, which is a bad thing. But I would argue that the patent system itself is a much bigger problem than you think it is. And I would put it up near the top of all the evil things the government does up there with war and the drug war and the tax system and the Federal Reserve. I would put it maybe near the top. As a patent lawyer, I mean, you clearly are in a position to be more familiar with that than I am. And I would concede right off the bat that there could be a lot of abuses to that system. And there may be a lot of things that are being granted patents that really should not be patentable. That they are not a significant enough innovation that it would warrant exclusion and some kind of monopoly interest. So the primary argument is this, that maybe you would see my way on this. Why are we wealthier now than we were 500 years ago? Is it because the earth, we found more value? No, it's because of innovation and capital investment and free markets and the way we were able to improve our productivity. And now we can produce a lot more stuff than we could in the past. And we don't have to work as hard to produce it. So what's key to human progress and development and prosperity is the ever-growing accumulation of intellectual capital. It's the knowledge that we develop over the ages. It's learning more and more and more and more about how the world works, causal laws. And you and I and everyone living today benefits from all the knowledge that we are standing on the shoulders of people from past generations. Anything that impedes that accumulation of technological knowledge is dangerous to human life. Literally kills people and prevents people from machines and designs and productivity gains in food and agriculture and pharmaceuticals that they otherwise would have. So if we got the balance wrong and the patent system does impede innovation, which I believe it certainly does, then it is costing us untold prosperity in human life. And we should do everything we can to unleash the innovative spirit and to let people innovate, tinker, compete, learn from each other and build on other people's ideas. Right, but you're talking about if that is the case. And again, I haven't even seen the evidence that would suggest to me that a patent, a system of patents recognizing somebody's ownership interest in their innovation, what they've created, that that is somehow, because remember the economic purpose of it, other than saying that intellectual property is property, is that it is incentivizing people to devote resources to developing new innovations because they are protected for a limited time to be able to recoup both the costs of the time and the money they put into the development process and to be sufficiently rewarded for taking the risk because I can spend a lot of time trying to come up with a new invention and it doesn't work. Nobody likes it, it doesn't do it. I thought it was gonna do and I get nothing. So there is a lot of risk to devoting your resources to trying to come up with something and you have no idea if it's gonna work or not. In fact, when you talk about drugs, far more drugs never get approved than do get approved. And so the ones that get approved, the drug companies have to make enough money to cover all the costs of the ones that went nowhere where they spent all sorts of money and they didn't work. And so the argument is that these protections are actually encouraging and enabling innovation. And in fact, one of the things that happens, when people are looking for investors in a new process, I mean, I don't know if you ever watched Shark Tank, but what are the first things they ever ask the guys that have some because what patents you got? I mean, before they want to invest in it, they want to know if this is patented because if it's not, they don't want to risk money. That you can't raise money unless you can prove that you've got some kind of proprietary deal there. Well, Peter, I help people obtain patents because that's the system we have. And given that we have the system, you need to do it. You need to play the game. And investors are going to want to know that you have all your IT taken advantage of too. So, but that doesn't justify the system existing in the first place. That just means you have to make, I mean, listen. Well, my point is it might be harder to get investors to fund your research if they're not confident that they're going to be able to recoup their investment because if you end up with this new product, that you're going to have some type of ability to exclude your competitors from knocking you off. Otherwise, how am I going to get my money back if all these big companies can just immediately knock off exactly what you've made. And they've spent no money on research and development, but they already have all the distribution. And they could just start producing it and we're not going to get a return on our investment. So why should we give you the money to fund your development? Everything you're saying applies to entrepreneurship in general. If you come up with a new venture, you're taking a risk that it might not succeed and you might have competition that might make it hard to make a profit, et cetera. People always take risks when they come up with a new venture. But I mean, you realize that you can't say, I don't know what the studies have proved, but this is definitely an intrusion to the free market. It's a limited monopoly that is a deviation from the free market. It seems like the burden of proof would be on you guys to show that it does improve innovation and welfare. And I'm telling you, I will send you the studies. There have never been a single empirical careful study done. For some reason, the framers of the Constitution thought that it helped. No, but do you think they did an empirical study, improved it? Well, they based it on something. Okay, well, I'll tell you what they based it on. They based it upon the statute of monopolies in 1623 in England, which was the attempt of the parliament to rein in the abuses of the monarch, granting monopolies to their cronies. And they said, this is getting out of hand. You're giving a monopolies left and right to all your court favorites who help you collect taxes. Like this guy can sell sheepskin in this town. This guy can sell playing cards in this town. You know, all these monopolies, which are definitely mercantilist and anti-free market. And the parliament got fed up with it. And they said, we're gonna stop all this, but you can still keep doing it for inventions. And so when the Congress in the US, when the constitution was ratified, they said, well, let's keep alive the ability to grant these patents. And they picked 17 years, well, 14 years for the copyright and 14, 17 years for the patent. The reason they picked that number was because they figured, well, when you have an apprentice studying under you, they usually do two seven year terms, 14 years. So you need to have a monopoly for 14 years on your copyright and your patents to protect you from competition by your apprentices when they leave your employment. It was totally protectionist and arbitrary. And then they've expanded the copyright number over the years up to 150 years or something now. It's insane. Yeah, well, I think it's the life of the author plus- Yeah, which works out to about 120, 30 years in most cases. Yeah, look, I mean, look, I would say that they don't have to be that long. It doesn't take that long to let somebody recoup the cost involved in writing something. So there could be a disagreement over how long those protections should be there. Well, let me ask you one more question. If you're a constitutionalist, the copyright clause says that Congress can pass these limited monopolies for limited times to protect the writings of authors. Now, that's been expanded to cover software and movies and audio recordings. Yeah, well, that's because I think, well, look, that stuff didn't exist at the time. Yeah, that's cool. And so I think you can, when you try to, I mean, obviously, I mean, I'm an original intent guy. I don't want to ignore the constitution. So look, the US government has the authority to have a Navy and an army. They didn't mention the Air Force. Well, of course, because there were no planes. So you have to think, well, given the fact that they allowed the government to have a Navy and an army, had airplanes existed back then, would they have set an Air Force? And you'd say, sure, that makes sense because they're trying to enable the best defense possible. And that was what was available at the time. Well, the constitution could be amended to Peter. But for that, I don't think you have to amend it because I think you're just dealing with what were they trying to do. And I think, look, they didn't have movies. They didn't have software. They didn't have radio recordings. They didn't have none of that existed, but they were protecting what existed at the time. They had boat hull designs. And that's in the copyright law now. And boat hulls were around in 1789. But the design of a hull? Well, I don't think, well, they didn't specify. They, you know, what was specifically? But a boat hull design is not a writing. I mean, a writing is something you write down. It's words on paper. Well, it was on paper back then. Now it doesn't have to be on paper. It can be on software. You know? But a movie and an audio recording and soft, they're not writings. But, yes. There were paintings. Paintings weren't covered. Paintings are not writings. What were it? Paintings. There were paintings in 1789. Yes, I know that. They were not covered by the original Copyright Act. And they were not contemplated by writings. I mean, the point is. Yeah, but yeah, so what you're saying is somebody could paint somebody else's painting. Yeah. Yeah, but then it's not going to be identical because you're not, you're just, you're also having to paint it yourself. You're having to do it. Yeah, but the copyright law, you don't have to be identical to violate copyright law. It could be substantially similar or it could be a derivative work. So you can't make a painting by hand even now of someone else's painting. That's a copyright violation. But they didn't consider it a copyright violation. No, it was maps, charts, and books. So when, well, when did they change it? Later, decades later, maybe a century later. I mean, this stuff started getting worse with the Byrne Convention in the 1900s. It's just, at least we could go back to what Tom Bell calls the Founders Copyright. Let's go back to 14 year terms, renewable once, and you have to register it. It's not automatic like it is now. Yeah, I mean, I would definitely agree with you that a simpler system that didn't apply as broadly as it does to the things that clearly are benefiting. Because look, if I'm a famous painter and people want my paintings, right, that doesn't necessarily mean that they're gonna want somebody else who happened to paint something that looks similar to my painting if I didn't paint it myself. Now, what should be illegal, and would you agree with this? Let's say I am an artist and somebody else copies my painting and forges my signature on the bottom and sells it and represents it as if I did it. And says, this is a Peter Schiff original painting and assuming I was a talented painter that had a clientele, if somebody is going to make a painting and pretend that I painted it and try to sell it to somebody as if it was one of mine, do you think that should be illegal? I think, theoretically, potentially that's a case of fraud on the consumer and that's already covered. But it's also fraud on me because they're- No, it's not, no, it's not. But I own the market in Peter Schiff originals. No, you don't. You don't own a market. This is this whole- In my original work I do, how could you say that I don't own a market on my original- What does that mean to own a market? That's a metaphorical, that's not what I'm talking about. Well look, if somebody is gonna say, yes, this is an original work created by Peter Schiff, that's not only I can do that. If you want to say, look, Peter Schiff made a painting and I painted something that looks very similar to it and it's by me, that's one thing. But- Let me give you two examples of that case. So let's suppose I want to impress my friends by saying I have a Picasso. So I hire an artist to- I hire an artist with a fake Picasso for me. Yeah, I see what you're saying, look- If I buy a fake on purpose, I'm not frauded. Like if I buy a fake Rolex for $20 in New York, there's no fraud. No, no, right, because you know it's not a real Rolex. But I would also say though, that copying the design of a Rolex, if you make a watch that looks like a Rolex. But if you actually write the word Rolex in it and you spell it correctly and you do it for the purpose of deceiving somebody, then that should be a violation. But if you just make the same style, you make it look the same, but of course it's not gonna be the same, it's not gonna break after a couple of weeks. That's the problem with those fake Rolexes. So I would say that if you make, let's say you make a $10,000 fake Rolex and it's really good and it's a copy that almost no one can tell the difference. As long as you don't deceive the customer, I think that should be legal. Well, and as long as you don't, it shouldn't have the Rolex, you know, cop patented logo on it. I have no problem with it. I think you can have the Rolex logo on it if you want to. As long as you don't lie to your customer, then you're not committing fraud on that customer. I know, but I think that, so you're saying that nobody even has a right to their own trademark. That's just like, it's like a right to a reputation. You don't have a right to a reputation. See, I would disagree because I do think, look, if I can create a brand where there is some status surrounding my brand. I agree, it has value economically. I agree. And so not everybody can just take a Nike swoosh and put it on their tennis sneakers. I disagree. You can put something on your tennis sneakers. It can't be exactly what Nike has patented. I think it can be. Because what you're trying to do is you're trying to profit off of the marketing efforts of somebody else. But in your example of the painting, if I am going to buy a painting just to pretend that it's a Picasso, that's different than the guy actually selling it and saying, yeah, this is a Picasso. I'm gonna sell it to you cheap. That should be prohibited. I agree with you. You agree on that. But that's pure fraud. And that's a fraud on the customer, not on someone else, not on third party. But it's a fraud on, well, obviously Picasso was dead. So it's, and nobody owns the right. But obviously, other people, I guess, own legitimate Picasso's. But yeah, I mean, there are gonna be authentic people that, I mean, at that point, you're just gonna try to sell your Picasso and you're gonna find out you bought a fraud because somebody's gonna try to verify it. See, and Peter, this is why we need Bitcoin because you can put the proof in the blockchain. What is Bitcoin at the do with it? I'm joking that, you know, people say that you could put information in the blockchain to prove your authorship. And so it's a joke. I mean, I don't agree with that. Yeah, all right. But anyway, look, I get your points and you know, I'm not even saying that, you know, it would be impossible for you to convince me. Although I don't know, maybe if we talk long enough, I might get you to see the perspective of patents, but you've obviously thought a lot about it being the fact that that's what you do for a living. And you've experienced it in real time and you've seen a lot of the negatives of it. I mean, maybe you've seen some of the positives. I don't know. I mean, it can't be all one-sided. I have never seen a single positive from it ever in my whole career. Well, who are you representing in your practice? Are you representing the companies that are defending their patents or are you representing the guys that are trying to get patents? So I don't do a lot of litigation. So I help them obtain patents and primarily they obtain the patents to have them in their war chest for defensive reasons. So like a large tech company or a mid-sized tech company has patents, they don't usually use them. They just sit there and they serve as a warning to other competitors not to sue them because if you sue me, I'll counter sue you back. So it's like an insurance policy. It's like it's a defensive measure. So it's, but it's a waste because if there weren't patents in the first place, they wouldn't need this defense. So it's like my salary and all these patent lawyers, it's just a dead weight on the economy. It's like a tax. It's a tax on, and the price, it makes prices go up and it reduces innovation. I know, look, we had a very vibrant economy in the United States, you know, in the latter part of the 19th century and even the early part of the 20th century. I mean, we had a booming economy and we had patent laws and copyright laws. You know, we had the industrial revolution. We had tremendous innovation and invention that was going on in 1880s, 1890s, 1900, 1910, right? And we had patents. We had, so it didn't inhibit the whole industrial revolution. It did inhibit it. Are you saying that it would have been even bigger without them? Yes. I mean, but is there a way to prove that? No. Because it was tremendous. I mean, remember, who was the famous head of the patent that was like, oh, there's so many patents now that I can't imagine anything else being invented. Like everything that could possibly be invented has been invented. Because that's how many patents there were. Ironically, Thomas Jefferson was the first commissioner in the patent office and Thomas Jefferson himself wrote a lot of things against the patent system. He said like, you know, if I have a candle or a taper, he called it, and you liked your taper off of mine, now we both have the flame. So you don't diminish my light by lighting your candle off of my candle. And he was using that to say that there shouldn't be property rights and ideas because they're like the flame. But then he was the first commissioner of the patent office because he was such an innovator himself, Congress didn't knew who to appoint to it. Yeah, look, I think there's arguments on both sides as to which, you know, and again, the compromise is to have limited life for how long you grant it and to have a more strict determination as to what actually would constitute something that was innovative enough and new enough that it was warranted of a patent. Well, there are lots of people that grant the theoretical case for patents like you but even they can see that, listen, in the real world, our only choice is to have a very clunky, inefficient patent system or to have no patent system. And between those two alternatives, no patents is better than what we have because the ideal one that they dream up in their heads is impossible. But could it be like, let's say, listen. Well, that's, I mean, look, I don't know. Maybe you're, maybe that's correct. Again, I haven't seen the data, but then, you know, you have two separate things that we're considering. One is what is best for society as far as what will lead to the greatest amount of innovation and economic growth and shared prosperity, right? What is good economics? And then just the moral case of what is private property. You know, even if having no patents turns out to be better economically than having patents, does that make it right morally? To say that somebody who creates something does not own their creation. They don't own, you know, and so that's a different argument. I would say that if you take as a baseline a private property system with competition and with freedom to copy and emulate people, if you want to deviate from that and introduce this temporary limited restriction on the free market, then the burden of proof is on you to come up with a study showing that it does improve everyone's welfare and no one has done that. They haven't been able to do it. They didn't even try for like 70 years. But it's not really, is it really a infringement on the free market, getting back to the case of a writer and, you know, I'm writing a book. And I don't prohibit anybody else from writing anything. I mean, anybody in the world is free to write a book. I can't stop anybody from writing a book. I'm just saying that if I develop my own book and my own characters, right, my own, I create the characters, I create this fictional world that you just can't write the same characters or, you know, you can't just copy the same book or just take my characters that I develop and incorporate them into whatever you're doing, that you have to come up with something on your own to compete with me. You can't, you just can't take what I've developed and compete, you gotta come up with your own creation and then compete against me with that. Tell people, hey, I've got a better story. I've got better characters, it's more interesting. But again, that's like saying, I have a hamburger restaurant, you need to come up with something different than a hamburger restaurant. I mean, put it this way, put it this way. If you don't think it's an infringement or an impingement on the free market, why do you want to limit it to limited, why doesn't it last forever? Why don't you have copyright last forever? Why do you want to cut it off after a certain point in time? If you don't think it at some point infringes on the free market and people's freedom. Yeah, well, I mean, the question is after a certain amount of time, and you would think, you know, that something has been in the public domain for a certain amount of time that, you know, that you no longer need that as to say, well. But that's not your moral, moral thing. I get what you're saying. I mean, you're saying that, well, if, I mean, if I own a chair, I own that chair forever. And if I leave it to my, if I will it to my kid and he wills it to his kid, it can stay in our family for time immemorial. And you're saying, why should I make a distinction between that type of property and an intellectual property? Like, yeah, I get what you're saying. You recognize that it is a deviation from the free market and you don't want it to go too far or too long, but you're willing to put up with it for a while. So it is a deviation from the free market. It's not a natural right. It's definitely not. The found lock didn't think it was a natural right. Jefferson and the founders did not think it was a natural right. They thought it was a limited. But they wrote it into the constitution. Well, there were lots of things in the constitution that are not natural rights. Well, they didn't give, I mean, they didn't give the federal government very many powers, right, the fact the constitution enumerates, you know, very few powers to the federal government. And one of those few powers that is enumerated is issuing patents. So it's one of the few things that they actually wanted the federal government to do. Well, Peter. They didn't want the federal government to do very much. Who wrote the constitution? It was the guys that were the writers. Well, Madison is the father of it. But I mean. Yeah, but these are the writers. These are guys that wrote books. These are the guys that did inventions like Jefferson. Of course they're gonna put in something that's gonna benefit them. Well, Ben Franklin was there too, right, so. Of course he was another prolific inventor. But I mean, so of course they're gonna put that provision in there, but they didn't know. Listen, let me just suggest one thing. I'm gonna send you a link. The one thing you should read on this, if you're interested, I'll give you some snapshot studies, but really the best book on this from your point of view is the book Against Intellectual Monopoly by Bolger and Levine. It's a free, they're free market economists. They studied it, both copyright and patent from almost every angle. And it's just unbelievable what they, how they debunk all these myths about pharmaceuticals and the light bulb and copyright and everything. So there is a good empirical case for deep, deep skepticism about copyright and patent doing anything positive on net for society. And I would be willing to concede that based on the way the system has evolved or maybe devolved depending on your perspective over the years that we've gone to the point where it could have gone from doing good to doing harm. And that is generally the case with a lot of government intervention that it can initially do some good, but then after time, it ends up doing a lot of harm. And that may be the case. I mean, you're trying to argue that it never did good, that even from the very beginning, it was a negative. It's just that it's now an even bigger negative. And I don't know, I mean, maybe you're right on that or maybe it's just gone from being a good thing to a bad thing because of the way the system has been abused by government and the people who are rent seeking from government. I mean, clearly I can see companies, yes, every company wants to be a monopoly. I mean, people want to charge higher prices. Nobody wants competition. And to the extent that government can protect you from competition and grant you monopoly pricing, everybody's gonna want that. Except, you know, one exception to that, like Tesla about seven, eight years ago, Elon Musk announced that all their patents, they're licensing to the whole world. And anyone's free to use them. Now he wanted that because he wanted competition because he wanted the electric car industry to mature. So he would be, you know, a big slice of a huge pond rather than a huge slice of a tiny pond, right? So sometimes people invite competition because they want their market to become dominant. Well, that should be their choice, right? I mean, you invent something you can choose to give away your invention or you can choose to keep it for yourself and sell it, right? I mean, that's part of your own property and you decide how best you want it used. Well, I would say that by selling something in the market it reveals your design, you're giving it away. It's like Benjamin Tucker, you know, the famous classical liberal anarchist from the 1800 seat. He said, like, if you want to keep your invention to yourself, keep it to yourself. So, if you reveal, if you reveal knowledge to the world you can't complain if other people compete with you. I mean, trade secret law was what people relied upon before the modern patent system. Like, do you want to keep it? Well, you know, here's the thing. If those, I would agree with you, if there is no patent law, if there is no trade secrets or any of that copyright and then people want to invent something and share it with people, then they know the deal. They know going in, I can invent something, but you know, there's no way I'm, I know that I'm going to profit from it. I mean, if you want, they want to do that but you can't change the rules of the game, you know, in the middle of the game. We could change them at some point. We're not stuck with a bad system for it. No, no, no, you can change them proactively. You could say going forward, right? You could say going forward, there's no more patents. I'd be fine with that. So anything that you invent. I would, I'd be fine with that. Let's list all patents that exist now. They can, they can terminate in 17 years. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But keep forward. We're going to have free market, finally. Otherwise you're depriving somebody of property without due process, without compensation. But if you want to run an experiment, because that's an easy experiment to run, just get rid of patents. Let's go without any new patents for the next 10 years, 15 years. And then we can see how we did. Well, you know, we're running these. Cause then we can always put them back. If, if innovation collapses and nobody is willing to do anything. Well, we're running the experiment with copyrights right now. Because you, I mean, I'm sure you're aware that copyright doesn't work anymore. There's the internet and there's encryption. Yeah, I know. Like, and look, you know, the copyright laws, you know, are they in effect in China? No, I mean, I'm, you know, I mean, you know, you get all kinds of stuff. They're not in effect here. Dude, I can get, I can get all your books right now for free from b-ok.cc right now. Yeah. Now, and the thing is for me, I'm fine with that. I barely made any money, you know, off my book set. But my point is- You know, they were New York Times best sellers. But my point is right now we live in a world where there's effectively no copyright enforcement. And we still have a proliferation of artistic and creative works. I mean, do we have a shortage of books right now in the face of rampant piracy? Do you think we have a shortage of books? There's like 10 million books. Right, but you're, but, but, but at least there's some protection. I mean, you're saying that if we had none whatsoever, I think it would be just as vibrant. We have no protection right now. We, I mean, there's piracy is rampant. Movies are still made, music is still made, and books are still written, even though people around the world copy them by the billions. So we're doing the experiment already. And my hope is that we will do the experiment with patents when 3D printing becomes mature. And, and just like the internet is helping people to evade copyright law, 3D printing will allow people to evade patent law because you can just make whatever you want without permission in your race. Yeah, I did. Was it, were you the guy that told me that one of the reasons that the movie industry was developing out in California was because they wanted to avoid Edison's patents. And so they wouldn't know what was going on 3,000 miles away. Yeah, well, because the court system was different back then. So yeah, they were doing it partly to evade copyright or patent lawsuits. Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy what patents have done to the world. But anyway, I'll let you go. I appreciate your time. Unless you have more questions. Hopefully my son doesn't still think I'm a socialist just because I harbored some of these rules, old fashioned thinking of patents and copyrights. And defamation is particularly close to my heart having just recently been defamed so badly by the Australian media. And all the problems that that has caused me has caused me a lot of problems, a lot of financial losses. Well, let me ask you this. On the defamation front, I mean, you realize that defamation law is much harder to defamation suits are much harder to prove in the US because of our strong First Amendment as opposed to like- Yeah, I definitely have a very good case in Australia and I would probably win. And I'm still trying to consider whether or not I want to bring it. The problem is the cost of bringing it is extremely high and I have to cover their law legal bills as well as my own in real time. So I have to- But my question is, would you want the US defamation law to be liberalized to be more like it is in the UK and Australia? So it's easier to bring a defamation suit at the expense of First Amendment rights. Would you want our system to be easier? Look, I think if the difference here, it's supposedly malice. I mean, did you have a reasonable basis to believe something was true? And if you had some basis for it, you know. No, it's like the burden of proof is easier for the plaintiffs in non-US. In the US, it's really difficult to win a defamation lawsuit, which it should be, I believe, because it's a bad law and it does conflict with the First Amendment, freedom of speech. Well, I think I know there's a higher standard for a public figure than for just a run-of-the-mill individual as far as malice is concerned. But would you want to strengthen defamation law in the US to make it more like that? I don't know enough about the defamation statutes to really know whether or not I think our laws are better. I know that in Australia, they're thinking about liberalizing there so that they have fewer lawsuits. I mean, that's something that they're talking about. Right. But even then, even with the fact that it's easier, I still have to come up front and pay all the costs of their legal bills and my own legal bills. And then the damage awards that I can get are still very limited to what are the economic damages that you could actually prove. And I have to prove that the damages relate specifically to what they said. And so it's still not that easy. It's like, okay, you lied about me and you said things that weren't true and now I have some damages. Well, can I actually prove that but for those lies, I wouldn't have these damages and was there any truth to those lies that they could say, well, it wasn't the lie that caused the damage. It was this one little piece of thing. It's the one thing that we got right that caused the damages, not the 10 things we got wrong. I don't know. So it's not an open and shut slam dunk. I mean, these are still difficult cases to win and they're very expensive. And in the meantime, what they threatened to do is, oh, well, if you're gonna sue us, then we're gonna put out more defamatory information about you and we're really gonna turn up the heat on you over the next two years while this lawsuit is going through the court system. And so then they threatened to make it even worse for you when it's like, hey, if you just let it slide, we'll be quiet and we won't, we hope maybe the damage will go away, right? We'll shut up. So it's still, it's not a slam dunk even in cases where it's easier on the plaintiff. All right, well, I'll let you go. Thanks for your time. And I don't think you're a socialist. You have your, you're aiming in the right direction. I just think you don't, you don't understand the horrible damage that patent system does, but... Yeah, and as I said, maybe at this stage, it's doing more harm than good. I mean, I'm always open to that idea and that's just government. I mean, government corrupts everything it gets involved in. And so maybe the case against patents is, they're granted by government and since we can't trust government to do anything right over time, that maybe it's better not to even have it rather than turn it over to the government, but, you know. All right. Well, have a good one in Puerto Rico and talk to you later. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.