 Thank you Hans. I'm very glad to be here. Thanks again Hans and Gulchan. This is my 12th time at the PFS, so it gets better every year lately. My talk is there ain't no intellectual property, the personal story of a discovery. I've spoken about IP or intellectual property at the PFS twice before, once in 2010 and another in 2015 on patents. But today I'd like to talk a little bit about how I came to my current views and maybe reiterate and summarize these views for people who haven't heard these or not familiar with them. And also want to talk about how figuring this out required coming to a deeper understanding and more clarity about the foundations and nature of rights and property rights in general. So just to summarize, I came to the conclusion years ago that all IP law, that's patent law, copyright law, trademark and trade secret and other types of IP are completely illegitimate and should all be abolished completely. So that's my view. I'm a patent attorney by the way, so it conflicts a little bit with my career, but oh well. So in the early 90s, I graduated from law school, became an attorney and I started practicing, started publishing articles on various aspects of libertarian theory, like rights theory, punishment theory, inalienability, legislation and contracts and that's what my new book has all that in here. And in 2001, I published an article called Against Intellectual Property in the JLS when Hans was editing it. My original title was the legitimacy of an ultra property, but Hans recommended I change it and I did and just like he picked today's talks title too. And the article was fairly controversial. It was republished as a monograph by Mises Institute in 2008 and gained by Lizzie Fair Books years later and it won an award at Mises and all those for being the best libertarian article of the year. It was pretty controversial because people hadn't talked a lot about intellectual property up until then only a few people, a few academic type people, but since the internet was new in 1995 or so, everyone was starting to wonder about piracy and copying and that's why it became a bigger issue and there was there was debate among libertarians, so many libertarians believed it in an ultra property, mainly because they were influenced by Inrand or they were utilitarians who had long argued for patent and copyright law on utilitarian grounds. So it was fairly controversial and but it was also influential and so I kind of became known in libertarian circles by a lot of people as the IP guy, even though as I said I write on lots of other areas too, but lots of memes have been created like this. Someone made this meme, IP man or IP man. So how I got here, so let me explain how I arrived at these ideas and how my thought progressed over the years. So I was a libertarian in high school influenced by Inrand initially, but one thing I was never satisfied with was her case for patent and copyright because she agreed with the arbitrary numbers, the limits on patent and copyright of like 17 years for patents and 100 years for copyright, even though there's no objective way to figure out what the number was. So I was dissatisfied with it but I forgot about it. Now when I graduated from law school, I started practicing oil and gas law at first in Houston, Texas, but then I decided to switch to patent law for various professional reasons. So I started learning patent law, taking the patent bar and all that and at the same time, I started getting interested again in IP theory as a libertarian. I figured I better figure this out because I'm going to practice in that as a field, as a lawyer, and I want to figure out the moral case for patent and copyright. So I kept reading through the literature, studying and thinking and trying to come up with different arguments for it and I always failed and I finally realized I was trying to justify the unjustifiable and that the reason I was failing and that other arguments were dissatisfying is because they're wrong and patent law and copyright law are incompatible with our legitimate property rights. Now the work I was probably most influenced by was Professor Hoppe's property theory, which emphasizes the role of scarcity and some work on IP by Tom Palmer of Cato at the time and Wendy McElroy and Hans, because he was so steeped in his theory of property and praxeology and the way scarcity works, he was instinctively always against IP without having looked into it very much. So I figured because I understood IP law very well as attorney, I could put it together and against the literature property and I've written many articles since. Now over the years after against IP came out, I kept encountering different objections to my arguments from people that disagreed with me and they were trying to say no patent and copyright law are good things. So I kept developing further arguments to respond to their errors and I summarized all those newer arguments in an article, well in a chapter in this book, it's the one chapter here that wasn't previously published called Against Intellectual Property after 20 years. Sorting out the basic case against IP and responding to various objections required rethinking and clarifying other aspects of libertarian theory, namely the purpose and nature of property rights and contract theory. And so I believe that figuring out IP and finding ways to explain it to people, which I believe I succeeded into a large degree, because lots over the years I can't count how many people have come up to me or written me saying that they agree with me and their eyes were opened on the IP issue and that's pretty gratifying for a libertarian writer to make some progress in the movement. And in fact, if I'm not mistaken, the libertarian party which is now largely dominated by the Mises Caucus members, there's a guy on the platform committee who may introduce an anti IP plank in the US Libertarian Party's platform next year. So that would be good too. But I believe that figuring all this out helped me to improve my understanding of other areas of libertarian theory. So it's sort of mutually reinforcing. You have to really understand libertarian property rights to figure out what's wrong with intellectual property. Now over the years, I came I came across lots of absurd arguments for IP. I'll give some examples. There's a there's a patent shield named Jean Quinn, who said, thank goodness, the Swiss have a did have a patent office. That's where Albert Einstein worked. And during his time as a patent examiner, he came up with this theory of relativity. So, so the patent system is a make work program for for physicists or something, I guess. William Sugar, an alleged free market economist, wrote for wrote for the Independent Institute. It is true that other means exist for creative people to profit from their effort. In the case of copyright, authors can charge fees. Charles Dickens did this, but his heavy schedule of public performances in the US where his works were not protected by copyright, arguably contributed to his untimely death. So in other words, the lack of copyright meant Dickens had to give performances and that they killed him. So copyright killed killed Dickens. One idiot on the internet said, if you're if you're not for IP, you must be a favor of pedophilia. I don't I don't even get that one. There's another idiot on the Mises forums, he said, if you oppose IP, you're advocating slavery. I ran argued the patents or the heart and core of property rights, which is just bizarre. One guy argued that song piracy and foul sharing are the cause of stage collapses at rock concerts. So this is one of the issues of libertarianism, where there are really are no good arguments for IP. Unlike, say, for war or taxation, where some libertarians think that sometimes war is necessary or some taxation is necessary. So there's some debate. But for IP and for the drug war, like there are no good arguments for either one of those. The error stems usually from two types of arguments. One I call libertarian creationism, which is the idea that creation of something is a source of property rights in that thing, which is a mistake, based upon lock, based upon a mistake lock made, which has infected the entire political theory for hundreds of years, or their utilitarians and both of those arguments are flawed. And I've I've talked about those in previous talks here and on my podcast. So I can't get too much into those today. But that those are those are the main ones. So let me summarize then. After all this effort and recasting the arguments coming up new arguments, here's sort of a good way to understand really what is wrong with with intellectual property. So we have to start with the civil fact that humans act, which means that they're aware. They're aware of and they're uneasy about an impending future state of affairs. So every action we take is really an attempt to change the future or to create a new universe in a sense, right? So we sense that something is coming, it makes us uneasy, as music says, and we're aware of this, and we're aware of our, we're also aware of other things. And what I keep saying aware, because it has to do with the knowledge that we have, because knowledge is always present in human action and it guides the action. So we're aware of causal laws, and their ability and the person's ability to use available scarce means, or resources to causally interfere with the course of events to attempt to change some future state of affairs. Okay, so all successful action, and by the way, this is just Robinson Crusoe alone on this island, it doesn't have to be in society, but all successful action requires two main ingredients. The actor has to have available scarce means available at his disposal, something he can use to change the course of events. And he has to have knowledge of the causal laws and technological and other knowledge that guides his action. So those two things are both necessary to any successful action. So that's true, as I said, of in the typical Robinson aid, which is Robinson Crusoe alone on this island. But humans living in society, they benefit from being a society from from trade with other people and the division of labor and things like that. But when other people enter the picture, now there's a danger of conflict over these scarce resources that we need to have successful action. So property rights then emerge as a social institution to permit actors to use scarce resources without conflict. That's what property rights are. It's always about trying to prevent conflict over these scarce means that we use to causally change, to causally interfere with with with events. Okay, so what are the what are the property allocation rules that solve this conflict or permit conflict to be solved? Under the Western private law, and especially as refined by libertarian thinking, the rules are basically this. Each person owns his own body, that's self ownership since he has direct control over it and has a better claim than anyone else. So this is from Professor Hopps theorizing. For other types of resources that we use as scarce means of action, these are external objects external to our body that were previously unowned. And this is important because then they can come to be owned. So they must be able to be used first by someone, which means that property rights have to include original appropriation as the primary property acquisition rule. In other words, the first person who starts using a resource homesteads it and is the owner. Now the second rule would be contract. That means the owner of an already owned resource can transfer ownership to someone else by gift or by sale. And there's a third subsidiary rule, which you can think of as rectification, which means that if you own a resource and you harm someone else by committing aggression or a tort against them, you might have to transfer some of your resources to them to compensate them for the damage that you get to them. So basically, other than our bodies for other resources, we come to own it by first using it if it's unowned or by buying it from someone by contract or someone pays us for damage they did to us. Those are basically it. So what that means is that in any dispute, which is necessarily always a dispute about who is the rightful owner of some resource, these property allocation rules suffice to specify the owner. So self ownership, original appropriation, contractual transfer and rectification. This is basically the heart of all libertarianism and all private law. And you notice there's nothing in there about creation. Creation is not a source of rights. The mistake here is the idea that people conflate wealth with property rights. So for example, if I own some some some some iron ore because I homestead it, I pulled it from the ground and I use my labor and my effort and my ingenuity to transform it into a plow. I have increased my wealth because now the plow is more useful to me or I can sell it for a higher price to someone than I could have sold the ore. So labor and creation are sources of wealth. That's what production is. Production means transforming or rearranging an existing object. But it's not a source of property rights because the reason I own the plow is because I already owned the atoms that went into it. And in fact, if I'm working at a factory making plows for my employer, I am the one creating the plow, but I don't own it because I didn't own the input factors. So creation never was a source of property rights. But because people think it is a source of property rights because they're used to creation being a source of wealth and increasing their wealth, they think, well, if I create a computer and sell it, well, if I create an idea, then I'm the owner of that idea because I created it. So this is the fundamental mistake of the creationist. Now let me summarize another way to look at IP to explain why it's not legitimate. Given this way of looking at property rights, as property rights to scarce resources assigned by the three rules that I just mentioned, contract and original appropriation. The problem with IP is it's basically what we call in the law a negative easement or a negative servitude, which is when you have a piece of property next to someone else's property, you have the right to, by contract, grant a negative easement to your neighbor. And sometimes this is done reciprocally like in a homeowner's association, which means a negative easement gives the other owner a veto right over certain uses you can have over your property. So they can't enter your home and use it, but they can prevent you from painting your house orange, right, if I give them that easement. So there's nothing wrong with this in libertarian theory, as long as it's consented to, it's contractual. The problem with IP is it's a non-consensual negative easement. It's just a triangular intervention by the government using Rothbard's terminology to grant and grant this negative easement to someone else without the owner of the burden of state agreeing to it. So for example the copyright owner can prevent you from printing a book using your own paper ink and printing press. That's a negative servitude. Or the patent owner can prevent a competitor from making certain widgets using their own factory and raw materials. So clearly it violates the property rights. So recall, as I mentioned earlier, that both scarce means and knowledge to guide actions are required for successful human action. But conflict is only possible for the scarce resources part, which is why property rights emerge in response to this problem. But conflict is not possible with respect to knowledge and guides action. Any number of people can use the same recipe or idea at the same time. So property rights in information or knowledge makes no sense and invariably distorts and invades property rights and scarce resources. This is the essence of why IP law is illegitimate. Now one argument I hear a lot, I'll just I'll address one argument that I've heard over the years. So when I point out that IP rights limit or violate property rights the retort is usually well all property rights do that. They'll say all property rights limit other property rights so that doesn't mean it's not a property right just because it limits your property right. But that's actually just a completely a complete confusion. Property rights are not a limit on property rights. Property rights are a limit on action. Okay so the very purpose of property rights is to avoid conflict and all property rights have to be what Hillel Steiner would call composable. Okay so for example your property right in your body is the reason why I can't perform the action of shooting you with a gun. So you see your property right in your body limits what actions I can perform. Namely I can't perform the action of using your body without your permission only you have the right to use your body. So but if I have a gun and I shoot someone but I'm not permitted to do that it doesn't mean that my property rights in the gun is limited. Instead the range of actions I may take is limited. So if the gun was a stolen gun I still can't shoot you. So if this highlights that the property rights are the right to exclude not a right to use. Okay so basically all arguments for IP are confused. Once understood it's easy to see the flaws in the arguments for IP. Like people say things like oh well why would I invent anything. And my response to that is is that supposed to be an argument? It's a question. They say creators deserve to be paid. No they don't deserve to be paid. And even if you make a physical product you don't deserve to be paid. You don't have to deserve to make a profit. Copying is stealing or ripping off or piracy or theft. So they use these euphemisms which is question begging. Because theft implies there is a piece of owned property. You own what you create. Again I've already discussed the problem with creationism. And many others. Okay so what I would say is that there are there's a litany of state policies that all libertarians routinely cite as the worst things the government does. War, taxation, central banking and the inflation and business cycles that come from that. Government education and the propaganda and compulsory schooling that come with that. And the drug war. And say welfare redistribution. So all those things are the big the big bad things. I think we definitely need to add an intellectual property to that list. And unfortunately now we have another one to add to the list of pandemic lockdowns and vaccine mandates. So we need to add those to the list here. Now for those interested in further reading on this. Again my book here has about five chapters on my IP in it. And this year I published on my website two ebooks which are free online. One is called a collection of basically all of my IP writing. It's called you can't own ideas, essays on intellectual property. Although the five in here will suffice. And then I published another one that I edited and I call it the anti IP reader free market critiques of intellectual property. And that's got a whole bunch of articles from lots of authors critiquing IP law from a libertarian or free market perspective. Ironically I couldn't publish that one as a paper book because a lot of the pieces in it are protected by copyright. And I do plan in the next year or two to write a new book a comprehensive start from scratch book on IP incorporating everything so all the other stuff can be will be included in this book and I'm going to call it copy this book the case for abolishing intellectual property. Thank you very much.