 All right, so one of the coolest things about this show is that I'll do a show, I'll do an episode of something, we'll have a great conversation on a topic like in this case, intellectual property. And what that does is it's like a pebble dropped in a pond and it ripples out and new people that I haven't heard it before hear it and object to it and provide me their counter arguments and they give me links to articles, which is one of the things we're gonna be discussing today which is exactly what I ask you guys to do and I love for you to do. I enjoy this intellectual conversation and the clash of ideas and somebody did that for us in the last intellectual property conversation video that we had, someone anonymously, I guess basically linked an article called the economic principles of intellectual property and the fallacies of intellectual communism. And rather than me just rebut that by myself, the article references a man that you guys may know. So rather than just me doing it by myself, I reached out and we have a cool show for you today. Let's get into it. He has a plan, she has a plan, and you get to pay for it, regardless. The best way to get someone motivated is to stand for something strongly, deeply, passionately. Subscribe to Dish and Thrall. Do as you're told. Our special guest today, ladies and gentlemen, is none other than Stefan Kinsella. He is a libertarian writer, a registered patent attorney in Houston. He has spoken, lectured, and published widely on various areas of libertarian legal theory and on legal topics such as intellectual property law and international law. His publications include Law in a Libertarian World, Legal Foundations of a Free Society, Against an Electoral Property, International Investment, Political Risk, and Dispute Resolution of Practitioner's Guide and several others. And he's a multiple time returning guest to the show. Welcome back. Stefan, how are you? Hey, I'm good. Glad to be here on this nice Sunday speaking into my MacBook mic. You sound good, man. You sound good. You sound good. So I guess just to sort of kick this off, what happened was, what had happened was, a couple, like a week or two ago, we had a conversation where somebody was very unconvinced about intellectual property, their income, and much of what they do for a living is all wrapped up in it. And so of course, when you challenge this sort of sacred cow where people derive their paychecks from, their default position is to be against you. And this guy was one of the rare people in the world that are willing to have their ideas challenged. He sort of submitted himself to the panel and we had a great discussion about intellectual property in which we found out afterwards, he messaged us and said that we were convincing. So that was awesome. And then in the comments of that video, somebody that I'm not familiar with linked this article and said that it was basically the definitive, final, most consistent position that an archo-capitalist person would hold on intellectual property. So of course, I clicked, I searched for it immediately and found this article and at the very top, it makes some very strong claims. Let's say your name, sir. So the first thing I did following that was to reach out to you and see if you had already rebutted this article so I could share that and examine it as well. Turns out you hadn't, so I'm lucky and we get to do, you called it a fisking. I had not heard the word fisking before your response in Twitter, but today we are going to give this article a good fisking. F-I-S-K. I hope, I hope, I think I heard Walter. I got thinking Walter Block does this. He'll take an article, he'll just exhaustively go through it. And the problem is, it takes like five times the length of the original article or the time someone would have to read it to really fisk these things that are so confused. It's just usually not even worth it, especially if it's an amateur kind of scattershot, half-ass effort like this is. But yeah, I knew about this article from 10 years ago or 11 years ago now. I don't know who the guy is. He goes by stranger's thoughts. Maybe I do know who he is, but I've forgotten. But yeah, I knew about it, I skimmed it and I thought, you know, it's just, what can you say, it's so confused. It's not worth doing in print. But I figure since someone brought it up, yeah, I could, and there's others, people have done this before. There's a guy named Silas Bartha who's written a rebuttal of me and then there's Greg Perkins. But they're always kind of incoherent and not comprehensive and they always have flaws. So I've never really responded in depth to all of them. But in any case, I thought we could see what we could do today, we can't take seven hours to do it, but we're gonna take whatever time we need to get people to adjust to what's wrong with this critique. Yeah, thank you. And so to that end, I spent some time last night going through it and sort of pre-compiling the most salient points and summarizing a lot of the sections. A lot of it I'm going to read because I just can't formulate whatever he's trying to say in any kind of summary other than his own words. So also it's a big, it's an important thing that I do on this channel. You guys will know that if I have a disagreement with somebody, one of the first things I do is invite them on the show. This person was anonymous, their blog is anonymous, there was no contact form on their WordPress site and their Twitter account that I think I found that was theirs was no longer active. So I was not able to reach out to this guy. If he thinks that he... In his defense, if I wrote something like this, I'd want to be anonymous too. Let the fist king begin. Okay, so I'm gonna read, I guess the intro and then I'm gonna hand it over to you. I think you had some thoughts that you wanted to say at the very beginning. The title of the article. Go ahead. Before you do that, let's explain. So this article is, he has an introduction which you can go into, but then he has 17 fallacies of mine, I guess, or IP opponents that he wants to rebut. So this is what the article is, 17. I don't know if we can even do 17. So we'll see how far we can get through them. But anyway, that's what it is. So we're gonna go through as much of his 17 fallacies as we can, but go ahead and start. Yeah, some of them are not our position so we can skip some of it. So now that, now that Stephen Catella has admitted that intellectual property is a negative servitude, he says, and has a legitimate precedent in property rights, the libertarian debate on intellectual property is all but closed. However, many libertarians continue to desperately cling to their fallacies. And so this document remains to guide them back to reason. And he links an article that I think you published on Mises talking about intellectual property as a negative servitude. Do you wanna say anything on that? Yeah, so first of all, that's how these guys, he's like, you admitted, like, aha, you admitted it. Well, what it is is it took me a long time to come to grips with my position on IP based upon libertarian and classical private law and property rights principles. And as a patent attorney and as a budding legal scholar, I've tried to wrap my head around it and it's not really properly understood and classified in the law, partly because the law is in favor of it and they're in favor of this weird thing that makes no sense. So their classifications make no sense. So it finally, after studying Roman law and civil law and also the common law, I've come to the conclusion that the proper way to understand what these laws are is to classify them as a negative servitude. Now what that means is, or you can call it a negative easement in the common law. In the law, there is a, the ability to divide your property rights up. You can have contracts and you can have divided property rights. So you can have co-owners of property and you can have it co-owned, not just like 50-50, but you can co-own it in a different way. Like one guy can have one right to do something with the property and someone else can have a different right. And we're all familiar with the case of restrictive covenants, which is like a neighborhood homeowner association where everyone in that community has agreed to bind their real estate, the title in such a way that all their neighbors have to consent for you to use your property in certain ways. In other words, you can use your property, but there are certain prohibited uses. Like you can't use your house for commercial purposes. You can't build a pigsty on your home in a nice little neighborhood. You'd have to get the permission of all your neighbors or two thirds of them or whatever the rules say. But basically your neighbors or you have given your neighbors by contract a veto over a certain use of your property. That's called a negative easement or a negative servitude. And there's nothing wrong with it as long as it's consented to by the owner of the estate, which we call the burdened estate. So if I own a home, I can do whatever I want with it. But there's one burden on it, which is I can't use it for certain uses unless I get my neighbor's permission because they have this negative servitude. So if you consent to it, it's perfectly fine. Now, saying I've admitted this like it's a big concession, it would be like saying I've agreed that rape is fine because I've admitted that rape is sex between a man and a woman. It is sex between a man and a woman, but it's not consented to, that's why it's rape. So consensual sex between a man and woman is fine, but not consented to is called rape. And the same thing is the case with servitudes. And actually recognizing that IP is a type of negative servitude helps you understand exactly why it's a property rights violation. Because if I sign on the dotted line and I give you this negative servitude over my property, like in a homeowner's association, that's perfectly legitimate. That's called contract law. But if the government assigns my neighbor this right without my consent, then they've stolen some of my property rights because now they've taken part of my property rights and do something that I want with my property and they've taken it away from me and they've given it to my neighbor. That's the whole problem with IP. So it's not some kind of concession. And if he had actually read it, he might have understood that. So anyway, so that's the first problem with his mentioning that like it's a gotcha. So most of the other stuff in his intro is not say it. I don't wanna insult it, but I don't think it'll make for good discussion. So I'm gonna take a couple more excerpt paragraphs that we can probably address. The first one just kind of sets up the tone and the angle for the entire article. So I'll read it. Intellectual property rights are the foundation of any advanced knowledge economy. They make possible a capitalistic production of knowledge and information under a division of labor. A dangerous faction of intellectual communism, words never seen together in the wild, is spreading amongst libertarians that wants to eliminate the ownership of information and communalize all information. To achieve this, they rely on a large set of fallacies that they invoke in sequence to confuse the issue. So this classing of sort of disbelief or not holding the position of intellectual property as intellectual communism is an interesting take. I had not heard that before classed in those terms, have you? What, communism? Intellectual communism, like making the accusation that if you're not for intellectual property, you are communistic in your ideas. Yeah, now to be fair, I use a similar argument for the self-ownership issue. Some libertarians are uneasy with the idea of self-ownership because they sense that there's some religious or something mystical there. Like they think you're divorcing yourself, which is like your soul from your body. So that's the only way you can own your body because they think there's some contradiction in you owning your own body because you are your body. So if you say self-ownership, you're denying that you're your body, but they're just wrong. Basically, you take the dualistic position of Mises and you understand that we are persons or actors in the teleological realm and our bodies are scarce resources in the material or physical or causal realm and this person can own that body. In other words, the body is a scarce resource and someone has to own it because there can be conflict over its use. So if you oppose self-ownership, that means you favor other ownership. That means you favor slavery. So that's the only alternative. Now these guys try to make a similar argument and they think that, well, if you create an idea or information or knowledge, that's useful and valuable and someone has to own it because it's valuable and because it was created. So if it's not the creator, then someone else owns it and that's communism. Or if you say no one can own it, then they worry about the tragedy of the commons. But the mistake they're making is they assume that everything that you can name with a concept is ownable. That's just not the case. Ownership is a type of property right. Property rights emerge to solve the problem of conflict over the use of scarce resources. That's scarce material things that human beings as actors employ as means of action. And the things that are the type of things that you can have conflict over, we try to come up with rules that assign the owner to that thing so that we can avoid the conflict. It's that simple, really. That's what property rights is about. That's what rights are about. That's what law is all about. Now, when we act, we not only employ these scarce resources which are ownable things and covered by property rights, we also are guided by the knowledge that we possess. In fact, the knowledge part is arguably more important because the knowledge that we have today is what distinguishes us from our ancestors 7,000 years ago and it's why we're richer. Because they had access to the same intelligence, the same bodies, the same scarce resources on the earth, but they didn't know what to do with it. Now we know what to do with it. So the knowledge guides our action and in our action, we employ scarce resources. The scarce resources are subject to conflict, so they're subject to property rights. The knowledge is just information that you possess inside your head and it's the type of thing that is not a scarce resource. It's not a material thing that people have come conflict over. And this is easy to see if you imagine people copying each other's techniques and ideas. Someone starts using a wheel, other people say, oh, that's a good idea. They start building their own wheels or they see a guy using a log cabin instead of living in a cave and they start living in log cabins. So they cook their food with fire, right? Or they use animal skins for clothing. So people see other people doing things and they learn from that and the knowledge accumulates and progresses over the generations. This is a good thing. But if I use the same technique you use to make a wheel or to build a cabin or to cook, to make a recipe or to build a factory or to print a book, I'm not taking anything from you because you still have access to your knowledge. So it's not intellectual communism because property rights simply don't apply. Things that are infinitely abundant don't need property rights. If there was, if we all had magic and we could conjure up bananas whenever we wanted to, you wouldn't have property rights and bananas because no one would care. No one would steal your banana because they could make a banana when they wanted to. And if they did steal your banana you would just make another one. You wouldn't care. The concept of property rights would disappear in a world of super abundance. It only makes sense in a world of normal abundance that is scarcity. But ideas are basically super abundant because they can be copied infinitely without diminishing anyone's possession of them. That's why Thomas Jefferson, the first patent commissioner said, it makes no sense really to have property in ideas because they're just like flames. If I have a candle which is lit and I let you light your candle for my candle now we both have a flame on our candles and you didn't take my flame from me. It was just a copy. So that's the problem with this intellectual communism and actually it's ironic because if you take the classic definition of socialism which is the collective ownership of the means of production and you generalize it which Hans Hermann Hoppe does in his theory of socialism and capitalism to basically identify the essence of it and to distinguish it from capitalism. The essence of capitalism is the private ownership of scarce resources owned in accordance with the homesteading rule that is first use and contract. Like if you own a resource if you were the first one to start using it or if you got it from a previous owner by contract that's it. Nothing to do with creation by the way. That's another fallacy. Creation is not a source of rights. It's a source of wealth. Creation means production which means transforming input factors into a more valuable configuration but you already had to own the factors. So all these people think that creation is a source of rights but it's not as a source of wealth, right? And so socialism would be the institutionalized interference with or aggression against private property. Now that's what intellectual property does because if you understand as I mentioned earlier that it's a negative servitude the state comes in with an institution called the intellectual property system and intellectual property law and they systematically take and invade the property rights of existing natural property owners by granting these negative servitudes by taking people's property away and granting it to copyright and patent holders. That is an invasion and an aggression against private property which is what socialism is. So intellectual property is what is socialistic not the lack of it. So that's another mistake he makes. And one more thing before we go further one criticism I was gonna make of his whole attempt here is that he just has 17 fallacies. So he's trying to poke holes in my argument and other IP opponents arguments. Even if he succeeded it still doesn't prove that IP is a good thing. He just shows that we have bad arguments criticizing. To have a really good critique you need to have a positive theory of rights, right? And you also need to carefully define your terms and you have to understand the legal system that you're critiquing. He does none of these things. I was gonna say he has no positive argument but in the beginning he links to another argument he wrote about a month before this one called the ultimate justification for natural intellectual property. And I read through that thinking, okay maybe he tries, he doesn't. It's flimsy. He has no definitions. He never defines what intellectual property is. He doesn't seem to understand that copyright and patent are different. He only talks about copyright. The reason you need to have a positive perspective to contrast someone you think is an error against is suppose he's a socialist who doesn't believe in private property rights. Well, he might oppose my propraterian position on intellectual property because he's okay with property rights being violated, okay? So I need to know is he coming from a fellow libertarian perspective or not? Now he appears to be a libertarian, maybe an anarchist. So we assume he agrees with us on the necessity of protecting property rights in scarce resources but I've just showed with the negative servitude idea that if you grant property rights in information it necessarily takes away property rights in existing material goods. So he's advocating something that undercuts what he already agrees with, right? So that's the problem. So you need to define what you mean by intellectual property. You need to define what you mean by scarcity. He misuses that. So anyway, the entire positive argument he makes is completely scattershot and confused. So I'm gonna leave that alone and he says you didn't go through it and we don't need to and we have enough to go through here. So you can continue on with your introductory part if you want. You just, I mean, you stole every point I was about to make and did it much better than I probably would have. So I'm gonna move on. The next paragraph I think is worth talking about is just this, it's more of another summary paragraph but he says, it has been a recent fashion by some libertarians to denounce the legitimacy of intellectual property rights on the free market. They believe and promote the idea that all information should be owned in common by all men and that no man should exclusively profit from any information. This makes them by any honest definition of the term intellectual communist. So the immediate thing that I wanna say to that is, and this is the core critique here that he's coming from, I don't think either of us on screen right now are arguing that all information should be owned by in common by all men. We're saying that it's not a valid form of property and there is no ownership in it for anyone in common individual in small groups or otherwise. So that's not the position. Now, in his slightly in his defense, some people that share my view like Jeff Tucker, my good buddy, they have used the term, hey, we're in favor of communism for ideas. But so they're lending ammunition but that's sloppy speak. What they really mean is it's good that they're accessible to everyone in common, right? Which ideas are we? Hyatt calls it the fund of experience, like our current age, our current generation has available to it of a huge trove of knowledge developed over the centuries by past human generations. He calls that the fund of experience. And that informs the knowledge component of action. So successful action requires availability of scarce resources you can use to act and availability of knowledge to guide your action in a more and more efficient way. So that second part has grown exponentially over the centuries, especially in the industrial revolution which is why we're so wealthy. So it's good that we all have access to a huge treasure trove of knowledge which is expanding every day because of human ingenuity and human problem solving. So some people have used that term but it's not quite accurate. So the right way is what you just said, information is simply not ownable. And I mean that literally, I don't mean that it's immoral to own information or the laws are unjustified. I mean that the laws, it's impossible to own information because that's why I classified as a negative servitude. When you have an intellectual property law, it's really a property rule about scarce resources. It says that instead of you owning your printing press, now this other guy has a negative servitude over it. He's a co-owner of it. He can prevent you from using it in a certain way because it's impossible to own knowledge because all rights are enforced by a law and all laws enforceable with physical force. And physical force can only apply to physical things in the causal world, which are the scarce resources that are subject to property rights. So an easy way to see this is that, if I sue you for violating my copyright, I don't own my idea. What I'm using is that law as an excuse to have government force take some of your money. So that's the real goal of it. Or the court might issue an injunction saying, you cannot use your printing press to print this Harry Potter book or this sequel to Catcher and the Rye, right? So this force is being used against your physical body, threatening you with jail time or with financial penalties or using an injunction against your physical property. So all rights are property rights and they all affect scarce resources. So it's literally impossible to own ideas. And I got a shout out Adam Sikosen. He was the only one that caught my joke when I said that Stefan stole my points. All right, so. I missed it too. So the second part of that paragraph that I wanted to address was that he said that we hold that no man should exclusively profit from any information. Again, if you know a secret and you can get some money from somebody in exchange for telling them that secret, I don't think we're standing against that. And the final point that I wanted to make, I think, you know, Stefan already kind of made is that it is much more communistic to attempt to control everyone in the maximal sense all of everyone's property. Like if I drew a picture right now, I did this in my last stream, I drew a picture, I held it up on camera and I said, look, I just drew this picture. I now have a sliver of control over literally everyone's property watching this video right now. And even, well, everyone, I have a sliver of control by the power of intellectual property over everyone's property, everyone's actual property. That's much more communistic than this anti-intellectual property rights thing. That was the one I wanted to make. Well, yeah, me too, so another ironic thing about him calling us intellectual communists. Well, first of all, it's another example of how these people argue, it's very shoddy. They engage in question begging all the time, loaded terms and question begging. Just calling it communism, and we're all against communism, is just presupposing that there are property rights in information, or there should be, which is the question to be debated. So it's just a dishonest, tendentious argument. It's just question begging. But the other ironic thing is, I think in his second paper or in this one somewhere, he admits that he's in favor of the labor theory of property, which is Locke's argument for homesteading. Now, the labor theory of property basically morphed into the labor theory of value of Adam Smith and then Ricardo and then Karl Marx. And he echoes it with his stupid, we believe no one should profit from their information or something like that. Well, basically what he's saying is, you have some kind of right to make a profit, right? If you perform work or effort, you have a right to make a profit. Well, you don't, you don't have a right to make a profit ever. We're pre-fisking now, we'll get to it. We're pre-fisking. By the way, tell me what paragraph you're on. I can't find this paragraph you're on. I just got to fallacy one. I skipped most of the intro because it was just kind of shit talking in nonsense, so I'm going to start with fallacy one right now. Intellectual property is bad due to patents. And I'll just read some, I don't know, I'll read like 30% of this, 40%. This is by far the most common fallacy as espoused by such legal professionals as Steph and Cancella. This argument goes as follows. Because patents are monopolies, all forms of intellectual property must be abolished. Simply put, copyrights originate with a producer while patents originate with the state. One must apply for a patent protection in order to be granted it, but one does not need to apply for copyright protection to receive it. One only needs to seek protection with the state when a copyright is violated, much as is the case when any other form of market creative property is violated. This makes a copyrighted intellectual property a product of the free market. This is insane, okay, let me just finish. As it is created by a producer of information for the benefit of consumers. So I'll stop there for that point, but he's marking a distinction between the government's magic spells on how you get protection for different types of intellectual property like that changes the form of property. Did you have anything you wanted to say on that? Absolutely, so first of all, notice he never defines anything. He never defines intellectual property at all, which by the way is a propaganda term that his side came up with when the systems of intellectual privilege called patent and copyright, which are separate statutory schemes, when they came under attack by free market economists in the 1900s, the defender says, no, they're not artificial monopolies, they're not privileges, they're natural property rights, and everyone said, well, why do they expire then and how come there's no physical manifestation? And they said, well, they're a special type of property, they're an intellectual property. So it was just a propaganda term. They're the ones that lump these different types of laws under the same umbrella, patent, copyright, trademark, trade secret, and a few others, they're the ones who defend them. And so it's not clear. Is he saying that he agrees with me that patents are bad because they're something the government gives you when you apply and the copyrights are good because you produce them and they're automatic? It's not even clear what he's saying. I think it may be the opposite. Let me read the next little section. In the case of patents, the patent is created by the state, you may even say for the state and maybe granted or refused at the will of the state. Additionally, if one were to independently arrive at an idea and apply for a patent for this idea, it may be the case that an existing patent on this idea already exists. Not only does this mean that this active independent production will be refused protection, it will also be banned. And of course, the whole process of searching and checking patents against each other will require that the state consume substantial resources to enforce its patents. And then at the bottom, this is a summary. All forms of intellectual property must thus be judged on their origin, whether they are created by a private producer or whether they're created by a state. Except for patents, all are created by producers and are therefore legitimate on the free market. Right, so he seems to be agreeing with us that patent law should be abolished, so. It sounds like it, yeah. Yeah, but for the weirdest reason, but just for the weirdest reason. Like if I draw a picture, I automatically have the copyright on it and that somehow makes it different than. Yeah, but that wasn't the law until the 80s. Before the 80s, from the beginning of this country until the 80s, to get a copyright, we had to put a copyright notice on it and you had to register it with the copyright office. Now, when we joined the Byrne Convention in 88 or whenever it was, we agreed to abolish formalities, which means it became automatic then. But that's not part of copyright, that's just the current statutory scheme. And if he wants to talk about the origins, patents originated, I guess as he suspects, with the grant of privileges by the Crown, giving just protectionism to court favorites, like saying you're the only guy who could make this product in this region and then give us, you can charge a monopoly price on it, so give us a cut. And copyrights originated when the printing press emerged and it threatened the ability of the government and the church to limit what could be printed and hand-printed by the scribes, which they used before that to control, as law control to prevent what the people could read. But with the printing press threatened that, so they did a monopoly for over a hundred years with the stationers company, and when that guild charter expired, they passed the statute of ban in 1709, which is the modern origin of copyright. So copyright comes from, literally comes from censorship. So yeah, let's look at the fricking origin of it. And you can't mark your distinction based on the government's laws as an anarchist. Like that's an appeal to an authority that you don't believe in. Not only that, if you're an anarchist, if you're an anarchist, you can't favor legislation because you can't have a legislation without the state. So he makes this thing like, oh, we have an automatic property right, and then you just have to go to the government to enforce it because they monopolize enforcement, just like a property dispute. But that's completely false. You wouldn't have an automatic copyright if there weren't a statute in the first place. Like there's no automatic copyright on the common law. He's totally confused. And in the very beginning, he mischaracterizes, he says, Cancella argues, because patents are monopolies, all forms of IP must be abolished. That's not my argument at all. First of all, my argument against patents is not that they're monopolies, it's that they're violations of property rights. They are the ones who admit that they're monopolies. The whole argument for patent and copyright is that it's too easy for a competitor to compete with you for these information-based goods because they can just copy the pattern and very easily come and compete with you and knock you off. So the competition is very easy, unlike brick-and-mortar competition, which means that your competitor has to build a store and hire workers and all that. They can easily compete with you and we don't like easy competition, so we wanna slow it down so that the originator of this idea can recoup his investment in research and development costs by charging a monopoly fucking price. That's the whole purpose of these laws is so you're protected from competition for a window of time after you start selling your informational related good. And you can sell it without competition so you sell it at an above market cost, which is a monopoly price. That's the whole purpose of it, right? And anyway, my argument was against other forms of IP is not because patents are monopolies, it's because they all violate property rights. So everything he says here is wrong. And by the way, in the last paragraph, he says it's for this reason that Rothbard argues patents are illegitimate precisely to the extent they go beyond the copyright. This makes zero sense. Patent and copyright are completely different and Rothbard completely mangles that in his tepid criticism of patents. And then he comes out and he says, but copyright would be justified if you stamp on the good that you owned it and then you reserve the right to copy so that a third party can't copy because he doesn't get the right to copy. It's some kind of confusion like that. But he uses the example of a mousetrap. Now a mousetrap is an invention which is covered by patent law. But he uses the word copyright but he calls it common law copyright which doesn't exist. So he's talking about something he's making up in his mind which never has existed. It makes no sense. Has nothing to do with statutory copyright. And confusingly, there was something on the common law called common law copyright but it was more like trade secret which meant if you are an author of an unpublished manuscript, you have this stack of paper in your desk drawer. No one's ever seen it. You intend to publish it in a couple years or next year or whatever. Someone comes in and they steal it and they publish it. You can go to court and you can get an order telling them they can't publish it. And that's actually perfectly legitimate by the way because they committed an act of theft or contract breach to take your manuscript from you. But it's not, that's got nothing to do with copyright. But that's what common law copyright was. Rothbard makes up something called common law copyright in his mind which never existed and has nothing to do with patents. So he's confused and this guy's confused. Valicy number two. And I'm gonna read most of this one. This is one of the few that I'm gonna read most of the text of because I think this is core to the rest of the article and it's also a very important point for an ultral property. He says, information is not scarce. Ideas can be communicated orally following their formulation in the mind but useful information can only be produced while working with media, can only be inscribed and communicated through media and can only be enjoyed and consumed through media. I stared at that sentence for a while just trying to figure out where he was trying to come from for it. He's marking a difference between communicating orally an idea and useful information recorded on media. I think I know what he's getting. I think I know what he's getting. He's confused because what he's trying to say is and he's correct in this, he's trying to say that information doesn't exist in abstract. And that's correct. But ironically, this undercuts his case. So information is just the impatterning of a carrier or a medium or a substrate because you can't just have letters and numbers floating in the void. But he's confused because he says they can communicate orally but if they're communicated orally that means the information's in your brain and your brain in that case is the media. So it's just the way the neurons in your brain are structured. So information is always the impatterning of an underlying physical thing, right? Like a CD or a magnetic tape or a book with the ink arranged a certain way or a machine having parts arranged in a certain way. It's just the feature or the characteristic of an object. The problem is that object is already a scarce resource which has an owner and the owner owns that resource. And if someone else owns the feature which Roderick Long in one of his articles calls a universal, then you own everyone's. So like if I own a red Camaro, I don't own redness. I own the Camaro which happens to be red. If I owned redness, then I would own your Camaro if it's red too. I would own everything you own that's red, right? So you don't own features of your object that identify the object or make it unique or the characteristics. You only own the object itself and its physical boundaries, right? So if I own a book which is impatterned in a certain way I own the book and the paper and the ink but I don't own the impatterning of that book. Any more than I own its weight or its location or its size or its age. So that's the mistake. So what he's trying to say, I think what he's trying to say is for basically all useful ideas, they're always on a medium but that medium is physical. So you can own ideas because to own ideas means you own physical but he's wrong. The physical thing is already owned and you can't own the ideas in addition because that would end up taking property rights away from everyone else's ownership rights in their physical things. Well, the next part is literally going to disagree with you and try and tell you why it does make sense. Often they must be recorded from the physical world using sophisticated instruments to transform physical patterns from one aspect to another, a recordable one. This physicality makes, this physicality makes information essentially indistinguishable from media. Information can only exist if media takes a specific physical shape. For example, if one wants a recording of actors riding along a mountain range, one must send physical actors to this mountain range and record their physical presence with cameras riding on film or in digital memory. A process that requires a substantial capital investment. The uniqueness of such an event is self-evident and even if another producer of information were to hire the same actors to ride along the same mountain range and film them with the same equipment, the resulting stream of information would be completely different in physical structure. This makes information a good that is inevitably bound to physical structures which are scarce, therefore a tangible good. Any existence of an identical copy of this information stream is physically connected to this original recording through acts of communication with the producer's property and it is impossible for it to be a result of an independent act of creation. He is literally asserting that information streams are physically connected to an original recording and I don't see any evidence of that assertion. No, no. So first of all, a point from the last point which also ties into this one. Remember he said earlier that copyright's okay because you produce it. And he's apparently under the illusion that copyright law only protects what we call literal copying like making an exact duplicate, like of a book. But that's not what copyright covers. Copyright covers making a literal copy, also a substantially similar copy which is why you can be sued, you can be liable for copyright infringement if you make like a summary of something or if you take the basic plot of something or it covers derivative works. Okay, so like if I make a sequel, if I write a sequel to catch you in the rye that's a derivative work. It's not a copy at all, it's just a derivative work but I produced it. The original guy didn't produce it yet he still has a copyright in that. So this guy's just completely wrong about these identical copies. Copyright goes far beyond that. If he's saying he's only in favor of, he's against patents and he's only in favor of copyright to the extent it provides identical, it prevents identical copying. Believe me, every pro IP person on the planet would hate this guy. They would think he's a commie like he thinks I am because he basically is against patents and he's against 99% of copyright law, right? His argument that physicality makes information essentially indistinguishable from media. He's basically some amateur trying to put in the words what Jane Il Shulman already did in his flaw and argument for IP called Logo Rights where he argues that the identity of like a book, let's say you buy Atlas Shrugged, the reason you pay seven bucks for that book instead of like 10 cents for a blank book for a paper of the same size is because the identity of the book is the impatterning of it by these words and that's what makes it, gives us identity. So you're really buying the book considered as an ideal object. So that's the argument Shulman tries to make and that's what this guy is in a ham fist of way trying to argue here. But as I already argued, the physical property of an object is what is owned. It's not the way it's arranged. And by the way, the thing about if you make a photograph or a movie with the same equipment in the same location that's not covered, he's completely wrong. There are cases in copyright law so you can have a copyright in a photograph. So if you take a photograph, there's a copyright in that photograph. There are cases where people have, there's a famous photograph like of the Grand Canyon or some nature scene or whatever. Someone else goes to the exact same location at the same time of year, same time of day and they take a very similar framed photograph and they had been sued successfully for copyright infringement even though it was a separate photograph with different equipment, right? So he's completely wrong. He doesn't even know what he's defending. He's defending a monstrous system because he doesn't understand. It does all the things he thinks it doesn't. A couple more paragraphs from this fallacy and then we'll move on, I think. He says, in fact, one can determine whether or not an intellectual property is legitimate based on the nature of the information when the information is unique and will never reoccur in the lifetime of the universe then it is scarce and comes only from one original source. So he's saying that if the original source to the information is somehow scarce in time space that that somehow carries on that scarcity to the information that is, again, physically linked to that original scarce source. Additionally, just to package it together with this next bit, for information that is unique and specific the scarcity of this information will grant the one who possesses it a productive advantage and many others will attempt to obtain this information because it is unique. The only way to obtain it is by either contracting with the original producer or by violating this producer's physical property. False dichotomy, but go ahead if you had anything to say there. Yeah, I don't know what he's talking about there. I mean, it's true that you get a patent or a copyright, it gives you a productive advantage because you could stop competition, so what? And it's true that, but his fallacy here comes from not defining terms. So he never defined scarcity. It's clear from my writing and from our writing by scarcity, we don't mean lack of abundance, right? We don't mean like the stupid common expression good ideas or scarce, you know? Scarcity is a property of a resource. It means rivalrousness in economics, okay? Ideas are simple, they're the classic example in all of economics of something that's not rivalrous because many people can use the same technique or recipe we call it at the same time with their own property and without conflict. It's not rivalrous at all. So it's not scarce in the sense of property rights. And he also- So just to classify that. So let's talk about it in terms of like a Bitcoin wallet. You have a private key that has some Bitcoin in it that has value, but there's only one person in the world has that, so there's only one of them. So that's the kind of scarcity that he seems to be talking about, but it's not scarce at all in terms of reality of the pattern that is recorded on the property. The pattern is not scarce qua property. I'm trying to mark the distinction by illustrating both sides of it. Yeah, and I've argued, Bitcoins are not ownable either in the property sense because they are just the way we conceptually understand entries on this ledger, the spreadsheet, which is a distributed ledger stored on many people's computers around the world and updated simultaneously every 10 minutes. So the spreadsheet is distributed, there's many copies of it and each one is on someone's computer, which they own. They own the RAM chips and the transistors on their computer and the electrons and the way they're arranged, no one else owns that. And so no one, if you were to own a Bitcoin, it means you own an entry on the ledger, which means you own everyone's computer because you could force them to wind it back if someone say steals your Bitcoin, which you can't do, right? That would be a violation of their property rights. Yeah, so he's talking about uniqueness and another mistake he's making is peppered in here. He thinks, again, he thinks creation, like if you create a unique, the uniqueness has nothing to do with property rights. Property rights has a do with a resource that is scarce, that there can be conflict over and all you have to do is establish an objective link between you and that resource to show that you have a better claim to it. That's what property rights are. And the way libertarians do that is the first person that starts using it or the person who gets it by contract from a previous owner. That's it. It's got nothing to do with creation. So he thinks if you create something, you own it. If it has value, you own it. That's Marxian, you don't have a property right and value. Hans-Hermann Hoppe has explained this. You only have a property right in the physical integrity of your resources. You don't have a property right and the value because value in Austrian terms is subjective. It's what other people think about it. That means their opinion about it, but their opinion is the way their brains are structured. You don't own their brains, they own their brains, right? So you don't have a property right and value, which is what this guy thinks. He thinks property rights arise from something being valuable. He implicitly believes the fallacy. If you can sell something on the market that is in economic terms, then you must own it. That's just not true. I mean, the word sale is just an economic description explaining the motivations of why you do something. And even that you have a property right in the profit of the sale of your property. Yeah, a profit is just the difference between the money you make from a customer and what you spent to produce it. But if you have a right to potential future profits, so sometimes IP defenders will say, I'll say, well, you don't have a right to, if I copy your book, I haven't taken anything from you because you still have your book and you still have your pattern and you can print as many books as you want. They'll say, well, so they'll crawfish and they'll retreat and they'll say, well, you've stolen my profits. Yeah, but profit is like money in the pockets of potential future customers. Do you own, again, do you have a right to a profit? Do you own the money in your potential future customers' hands? If they choose to buy my bootleg book instead of yours, instead of your original book, did they steal their money from you? You see, but they don't wanna argue that explicitly because then they start standing like commies. Okay, so I'm gonna propose that we skip number three because I don't think either of us want to defend what he's attacking and what he's attacking here is basically that there are people out there that claim that all software should be open source and he's attacking that as a communistic idea. I don't think either of us hold that position. So I'd like to move on if that's cool with you. Well, if there was no copyright, you wouldn't, there would be no licensing of software. The only reason we have these open source software licenses is it's basically people trying to get rid of the copyright, the government's automatically pushing on them. I wish it was that simple. These open source groups do attempt to enforce their GPL copyright on people from time to time. Like they do use it. That's why I don't like it. They're not, people call it open source, but it's really got this stupid copy left share alike bullshit in there, which I hate. That's why on my website, all my stuff, I do CC0 or CCBY, attribution only. I hate share alike and the GNU stuff. But anyway, that's a different issue. Yeah, and I don't have a problem with closed source software projects. If you wanna keep your source code secret, I mean, fine, good luck. I don't think you can enforce that though with state guns or anything else. So number four, nothing is taken away by copying. So the parts that I read are gonna start to get more scarce so we can kind of get through this. He says, this is an inflationist argument similar to those who promote inflation as a source of unlimited wealth. As Mises famously argued, money is valuable only to the extent that it is strictly limited in supply. Its scarcity is its tangible value. This goes to what you just said. And producing money that fulfills this role is one of the most fundamentally beneficial economic acts that the capitalist banking system has achieved. And then let me just kind of round this out by saying a counterfeit copy of intellectual property achieves exactly the same results as counterfeiting. He's saying copying IP is the same as counterfeiting. It gives the counterfeiter wealth by multiplying his instances of the scarce information while reducing the wealth of the producer of the information and of those who have entered into contractual relations with him to obtain part of the scarce information. Inflation is promoted, production is punished. Anything else to say on that? Yeah, so a couple of things. So just like the proponents of IP, half of them will admit that it's a monopoly. The Supreme Court says, oh yeah, copyright and patent are monopolies, but they're justified because they encourage, blah, blah, blah. These people are in favor of monopolies and it's basically not denied by the proponents of IP that it sets up what's called an artificial scarcity. Like there's a naturally no scarcity of information because people can copy it, but they don't like that because it doesn't lead to the efficient use of investment into ideas that they think. So they think there's a market failure which government can fix with these little patches, but it's an artificial scarcity. This guy's trying to argue that it's good that it's scarce, but it's not scarce and he wants to make it scarce with these laws, right? So that's the whole point of it. This inflation analogy just backfires on him because the problem with inflation, and by the inflation we mean inflation of the money supply is aggressive because it can only happen when the state uses the force of its guns to monopolize and commandeer and take over the entire banking and finance and monetary sector and have a central bank which forces everyone to use their own currency by legal tender laws and then they inflate it and that impoverishes us by causing price inflation and taking our wealth away. So it's like an implicit theft. The problem with inflation is that it is aggression and that's exactly the problem with IP is it's aggression too because it takes away property rights and people's property. So his analogy is completely wrong. This counterfeiting idea is a trick that a lot of these amateurs and these dishonest arguers do. They conflate everything. They conflate all types of IP which is why they put the word IP over four different things that are separate, trademark, trade secret, patent and copyright and they call them IP. And then they lump, so they lump trademark and copyright and patents all together although this guy seems to oppose patents but then they also throw in terms like counterfeiting and fraud and plagiarism and contract breach which are all separate things and counterfeiting has nothing to do with copying. If I copy your book, I'm not necessarily lying about the fact that I wrote it. I might copy it with your name on it and give it away for free or sell it. If you go to a torrent site to get a copy of the latest Dune movie or whatever it doesn't say it's made by Stefan Cancella even if I put it up. It's gonna say made by the guy that made it or the Blade Runner guy. I'm not sure that I agree that inflation is theft maybe that's our next show that waits. Oh, okay. It's not theft. I said it's the effects of it are similar to theft because it, but I agree it's not technically theft. The aggression is the- Would you consider it an aggression you could use Defensive Force for? Like inflating the US dollar. Is that an aggression? Well, I think the aggression is the law that the aggression is the tax law that takes our money that lets them set up these institutions and pays the salaries of the Federal Reserve employees and the criminal penalties that are threatened against people that wanted to set up their own currency and the physical force behind the tax law which will put you in jail if you don't pay your taxes in what they declare to be legal tender. So all these things are used as a force which are aggression which could be you could use force against to stop it. And if they couldn't do that then they couldn't monopolize the money supply and they couldn't inflate it. I agree, okay. Number five, why admit limited copyrights of some tens of years instead of zero years and arbitrary distinction? He says, the state corrupts property laws and taxes in many ways. For example, requiring property owners to give up a large part of their estate upon death or requiring them to register the ownership of real estate at a municipal office. This violation of the property right by the state does not make the underlying right invalid. Under a pure free market, information producers could determine themselves what the extent of their copyright is going as far as perpetuity. That is their right. That is their right and what is necessary for them to engage in a capital. I knew that this was gonna set you off. So I'm just gonna make you full screen and let you go. Perpetual copyright. Aristotle's works, the 12 Tables, the Ten Commandments, the Bible, Shakespeare's works all would be restricted now. There'd be no public domain. I mean, you know, to his credit, he's taking his idea to the limit, although for some reason he's not favored patents. Although I think he isn't favored patents because he thinks like Rothbard, you can still protect machines with this weird version of copyright to the extent they don't go beyond copyright, whatever that means. No, so some defenders of intellectual property, most of them are in favor of limited terms. That's what the Constitution says, by the way. So I guess he's against the Constitution now. But most defenders of IP, it's sort of like the minimum wage. You take your average dumbass liberal and you say, well, if you're in favor of $15 minimum wage, why not make it 100? Cause, you know, in our minds, like $15 minimum wage is bad. It's gonna cause unemployment and dislocations in the economy, but $100 minimum wage would just devastate the economy. Right? Our view is it's a spectrum, like the more the worse, like the more taxation the worse, the more the penalties for the drug war are the worst. I mean, and the weaker the better. And the liberal will say something like, well, we don't wanna go to extremes. So they want the $15 minimum wage or they don't want $100 minimum wage, right? And these idiots, most patent guys are the same. They'll say, well, 70, you know, life of the author plus 70 years, which is like 130 years or so in most cases for copyright and 20 and 17, 20 years for patents. That's a reasonable amount. We don't wanna go to extremes. Zero is too little and infinity is too long because they implicitly recognize just like the liberals know that $100 minimum wage would kill the economy. These guys recognize that if you had perpetual patent and copyright terms, the human race would fucking die out because we couldn't do anything. Cause we, you couldn't do anything cause everything you would do would be a violation of someone's IP because we're using information from the past and you would just, we strangle to death. So they, they favor just a little strangling of the economy, but this guy, this idiot, at least it's consistent. He wants to take it to the end. There's only a few people that stupid and that's Jane Il Showman and Columbus who wanted infinite copyright terms, but whatever. Okay. I propose we skip number six cause I don't think either of us hold or make this argument that because piracy is not going to because copyright can't prevent all piracy that copyright is bad. I don't think that's a, I don't think we're holding that. Let me say one quick thing about that one. And that is that one argument, one argument copyright defenders make is that without copyright, you would have no artistic creation, which is clearly false because copyright is widely violated today because piracy is rampant and easy because of the internet and torrenting and encryption and file sharing. So in today's world, we have massive, massive, massive violation of copyright. Copyright is almost dead. It's almost impossible to enforce it on a widespread spread scale. And yet we have a flourishing of the arts and books and movies and all that. So it's clearly, their claim is false that you wouldn't have production without copyright because copyright is not enforced now. Number seven. So that's the only thing I'll say. Yeah. A counterfeiter is not breaking. I'm sorry for pushing forward. We're on number seven out of 17. So a counterfeiter is not breaking a contract and is not bound by copyright limitations. One obviously does not need a contractual relation with a property owner in order to be a violator of his property. A thief is not bound by contract to respect the property of the owner of the automobile he is driving away in. He is bound by the law to do so and will be punished for his violation. The role of the contract in intellectual property is precisely the reverse. It grants the right to the consumer to access the property of the producer and thus makes their limited use of the information lawful. Okay. So here's the problem here. The caption is kind of right. First of all, it's not a counterfeiter. If you copy something, you're not a counterfeiter. If you sell a Mousetrap or a new iPhone and I make a similar one, I'm not a counterfeiter. I'm copying you. I'm emulating you. That's not counterfeiting at all. I'm not pretending to be you. Or if I copy your book, I'm not counterfeiting. So counterfeiting is the wrong word but someone who copies you is not breaking a contract. That is true. Really what they mean is we've argued that some people defend IP law by saying you're breaching a contract with the producer. And that could be true between the seller of an ideal good, by ideal I mean a good that has some information or intellectual components. An ingenious design or software or a novel or artistic thing. The buyer could sign a contract promising not to copy it. I think that'd be rare because why would you pay money for something you can't use? But anyway, the argument goes but if I'm bound not to copy the book I bought from you but I do it anyway and I put it on the internet third parties could copy it and they're not in privity of contract with the seller so they're not violating contract. So you can't get intellectual property from contract law, which is correct. I made this argument. Now this guy says a contractual is your property owner you don't need a contract with a property owner. That's true. I don't need a contract with you to be held liable if I trespass against your home. You own your home as an absolute property right. Now in the law that's called an in-rem right it's good against the world. Contract rights are in personum they're good only between the parties. The problem is that's question banking. The whole issue is are there property rights in information and ideas and you can't establish it by just saying it's property which is what he's trying to do here, right? And by the way he realized on Rothbard earlier Rothbard does make this argument. Rothbard argues that if a seller has a contract with a buyer and the buyer is not supposed to copy it then that physical item is somehow missing the right to copy because the right to copy is reserved by the seller. Rothbard is assuming that's an in-rem right but it's not it's a contract between those two. It's in personum right and that cannot buy in third parties. So the third party who sees me using an iPhone if I'm the buyer of this iPhone he sees me using this touchscreen smartphone with rounded corners and I go make one I never had a contract at all. I didn't steal anything. Like I don't need the right to copy to do that. All I need is access to the information that I didn't commit any extra trespass to do. So anyway, that's a problem. So this addresses something. Okay, so I think I'm gonna only do one paragraph out of this. Fallacy number eight intellectual property derives from the labor theory of value and is refuted by marginal value theory. And I think this is the salient paragraph here when a capitalist information industry undertakes to create specific information it must do so with the expectation that it will be able to sell the information at a profit and thus calculate the optimal supply of this information based on marginal revenue from which it must subtract the cost that will be incurred during production. If it should fail, the capitalist will have to exit the information production industry. All of these prices are the result of marginal value and thus marginal value theory is a foundation for intellectual property rights. Well, it'd be better to say subjective value theory but not marginal. Marginal has nothing to do with it. Yeah. So what if they must do something with the expectation? This is what the any entrepreneur in a free market faces. He faces, he has a project in mind. He wants to engage in a project to maximize his profits. He has to project whether he can, what he can sell his product for by forecasting future price of inputs and what consumers are gonna buy for it, how supply and demand is gonna change. That's what entrepreneurship is all about. And part of that calculation is imagining if you're very successful, what kind of competition will you attract and how long can you charge a higher price and how quickly will competitors rush in and undercut your margin? And if you imagine a project that is just not profitable, you should not engage in it. That's the whole point of the price of the profit system. The point of property rights is not to make certain projects feasible, right? Because even with patent and copyright law, giving you a monopoly, the ability to charge a monopoly price for a few decades after you sell a product, there are still some projects that would cost way too much R&D to innovate that you couldn't recoup even with your monopoly price. So you won't engage in those either. So what should the government do? Tax people and give you a prize to encourage even more? I mean, the goal of property rights is not to stimulate innovation. It's to protect property rights and within that free market, within that private property sphere, people can innovate as long as it makes economic sense. I mean, there's a great little slogan on my C4SAF.org site. It's a little banner which says, your failed business model is not my problem. And it's not. People always say, well, can sell it without copyright law. How am I supposed to make a profit selling poetry? I'm like, I don't know, you figure it out. I mean, you can't make, I mean, you can't make a profit selling poetry now with copyright. I mean, so. You can't. I'm just talking about, the capitals will have to exit the information production industry. Well, first of all, it's not like it's either or. I mean, there's always a spectrum. Some types of projects are not going to be profitable. And sometimes you engage in those anyway for most scenario reasons, right? Or for other reasons. In fact, most people produce things not to make profit money off of the idea, but because they find it interesting or it drives them or it's their passion or they need to solve this problem to make their project, their product better than the competitor's product. Or it's a loss leader. Yeah. A loss leader. I mean, yeah. But the point is no one's guaranteed. This is Marxian crap about your entitled to a profit. You're not entitled to a profit. The idea that you're entitled to a profit means that if you work, in physics, work is moving a force through a distance. It's not pushing on a wall that doesn't move, right? And in economics, the subjective marginal theory of value of the Austrians, says that value is subjective. Whereas the Marxian idea is that it's based upon an intrinsic, based upon the labor that the worker put into it. That's why they believe the employment relationship is exploitative because if the employer makes a profit, then there's some leftover that is attributable to the work put into it, the labor put into it by the employer. And so you're stealing the surplus value of his labor. This is Marxism. And this is what this guy basically is endorsing here. Number nine. Copyright prevents the creation of newer derivative information. From the fact that copyright is a market created property right, it is no different from any other property right. One may transform any unowned natural material to create a scarce good, but one may not transform an owned natural material to create a scarce good that one must then appropriate. In fact, if one opts to transform someone else's farm into an arboretum, then the legitimate owner of the farm would have the right to claim full ownership of the arboretum and expel the intruder since it was produced from his property in order to create an own derivatives of any form of property. One must have an agreement with the original appropriator to secure this ownership. So he's just asserting that IP works the same way. That's what that is. Correct. And a lot of the IP defenders do this. They'll say that, well, like Richard Epstein and Adam Mossoff, these guys say that, well, intellectual property works similarly to real property because you can have a lease on it. You can mortgage it. You can sell it. You can abandon it. Yeah. And that was true for slavery too. You could own slaves, you know, you can, by law, you can make some things resemble other types of property, right? But that doesn't mean it's, the question for libertarians is supposed to be justice, not whether we can make fucking analogies, right? And earlier, this guy seemed to think that copyright only covers identical copying, which it does, and now he seems to recognize there's a derivative works thing, which he's too amateur to explain here, but he's talking about the derivative works idea. But the problem is his argument is undercut because so he says that if you transform your form into an arboretum, you own the form because you transformed it. See, that's that creation idea that property rights come from creation. That's completely untrue. If I transform a form that I own into an arboretum, I don't own the arboretum because I transformed it. I own it because I already own the input factors. By the same token, if I go to your form without your permission and I transform into arboretum, I don't own the arboretum just because I created it, right, it's your property, right? So creation and transformation have nothing to do with ownership, which is what the mistake this guy's making because Locke made the mistake in his original labor theory of property that you own labor and therefore you own things you make sure labor with and that led to the labor theory of Marx and Smith. Okay, so it's all confused. So that's the problem there. And moreover, if I were to transform your form into an arboretum, I'm doing it without your permission because I'm trespassing against your physical property. But if you write a novel like Catcher and the Rye, and this is a real, I bring this up because this was a real case, someone wrote a sequel to Catcher and the Rye, the famous novel by Salinger, and his estate sued them for copyright because it was a derivative work and they won and the judge ordered the book not to be published. It's never been published. This is what we call book banning, literally the book banning. You know, I thought we had a First Amendment saying Congress will pass no law infringing on freedom of the press. There is zero doubt that that copyright law infringes on freedom of the press because you have judges telling people they can't publish a fucking book. And the Supreme Court says, well, we admit that there's a tension between copyright and the First Amendment, but we have to balance it. What do you mean balance it? I mean, you can't balance two things that are totally, that's like saying balance, poison and health. And by the way, the copyright law is based upon the 1789 Constitution, which has a copyright authorization clause, but the Bill of Rights was an amendment to the Constitution in 1791, a Congress later, two years later, and it prohibited Congress from passing laws infringing freedom of the press. So the later passed amendment overrides the earlier one. So I believe copyright law is 100% unconstitutional. And apparently this guy does too, because he thinks it should be infinite and copyright term is limited to limited time. So anyway. Number 10, information is property but only if it's self-protected. I don't think we hold this position, but I'll just read the first sentence in case you have anything to say on it, a particularly bizarre form of fallacy. This states that producers of information have the right to deny access to information only as long as they don't release it from their private networks and must ensure the secrecy by hiring sufficient security. Yeah, he's using the word property in a loose layman economic sense. Hey, I think he means control or something, but property is the right to control, a legal protected right to control. And as I said earlier, property rights simply cannot and do not apply to information. I never said that information is property or is owned ever. Even if you're the only one who knows some information that's in your brain, you don't own it. You own your brain. You don't own the information on your brain in addition. Owning your brain and your body gives you the ability to choose whether to reveal the information or not. But if you just take a simple fact, let's suppose I'm some rich actress who is hitting her age all her life because some women don't wanna tell how people are old they are. Let's say she's 62, but people think she might be 55, right? So she's the only one who knows, right? She doesn't own that fact. She just has the ability not to reveal it. You can keep secrets. You don't need those properties to keep secrets. But if someone finds out how old she is, they're not violating her analysis or property, right? Anyway. Yep. Number 11, consumers of information are being ripped off repeatedly. Again, I don't think this one deserves much time, but I'll just read the first little section. This fallacy claims that consumers are unaware that the media they repeatedly purchased at specialty stores is limited in rights despite the declaration of copyright being explicitly inscribed on the product they are purchasing. Do you have any thoughts around that idea that like if you inscribe some kind of contract on the product that anyone taking that product and possessing it agrees to whatever's inscribed on the product? Well, a couple of things. So first of all, even if that kind of notice on an object would constitute the formation of a contract between the buyer or the possessor of the object, it still would not buy in third parties. And so then intellectual property would disappear because let's say I buy a book which has a notice on it and I'm aware that I'm not supposed to copy it. Or let's say I find it on a park bench and I'm aware. And let's say there's somehow a contract formed which I deny by the way. But let's say there is. If I choose to put it on the internet and let's say I strip that notice off. Now other people are copying the pattern of information on other people's servers. They never possessed the physical book. They never violated the original seller's copyrights or contract rights. So it still wouldn't prevent third parties from using it, number one. And number two, no, I don't think a notice is good enough because that's not how contract works. And by the way, this guy earlier argued that it's a property right, not a contract right. Now he's trying to use the copyright, the contract argument to say, oh, it's really based upon an implicit agreement between the owner. The notice on a book is not a contract. It's a notice that the government has granted the guy a copyright. It's just a warning. It's like the FBI warning in the beginning of a videotape. If there was no copyright statute and you simply sold the book and on the front page, you said, the buyer hereby agrees never to copy this book. I don't think it will be binding at all. Just like shrink wrap is not always binding until you open it and you read it, you have to have meeting of the minds, you have to have consideration. There's all kinds of factors in a contract. You can't just have a notice. If that would work, then let's suppose I write a book and on the front page or on page 233, I have a paragraph that says, by possessing this book for 10 seconds, you hereby agree to give me $1,000 a month for the rest of your life. And I leave it on a park bench and I sit there with a camera and I wait for people to pick it up and then I sue them for not paying me $1,000 a month. It's stupid. I mean, this is not how a contract works. You can't bind people, but you notice on things. No, that's completely retarded. Number 12, we cannot know that all instances of media, hold on. What, are you retarded? So he, I know you're not retarded. What, are you down syndrome? Okay. We cannot know that all instances of media have been protected by copyright. Therefore counterfeiters are presumed innocent. Again, I don't think we're gonna have a whole lot to say here. As stated, I'll skip it entirely. I don't think that's good. Number 13, we might miraculously be able to independently produce identical information. Therefore counterfeiters are presumed innocent. This is an argument for miracle. Obviously, I guess the only thing that might be worth talking about here would be the instances that are very real and have happened where two people that do not communicate and aren't related both invent something around the same time. He would call that a miracle. And obviously, go ahead. Now, let me defend him a little bit here. So earlier in his seeming agreement that patents are problematic, he does admit that it could be independent invention. And that is one problem, the patent system. It's extra unjust because of that. And in copyright, I think it's true that for most original works, it's extremely unlikely. It's extremely unlikely anyone else would ever have written great expectations, right? However, that's identical copying. He's already admitted he thinks that derivative work should be protected too. So he's not just for having the copyright system protect only identical copying. And the big problem is he's assuming that if he's saying that, I agree with you guys that patent law is bad because it's unfair to stop someone from independently inventing something just because someone else filed a patent on it. But the presumption there is that if you do independently, I'm sorry, the presumption is if you are the originator of something that's unique and no one else came up with it, then you should have a property right in that. But that's just wrong. I mean, uniqueness has nothing to do with property rights. So it is true that if I write a novel, it's unique and no one would have dreamed it up themselves. But that doesn't mean that they're violating my property rights when they copy it. That's the central fallacy there. Okay, number 14, Third World Countries. Fallacy. Say again? The fallacy of his fallacy, but go ahead. A lot of these aren't fallacies. He just calls them fallacies because people think that means something that's wrong. Fallacy 14, Third World Countries do not enforce IP laws. Whatever, and he says whatever this has to do with the legitimacy and economic benefit IP is unclear. I don't think that's a valid argument, just saying that other countries don't enforce something makes it invalid would not be an argument either. I don't know what, I think he's confused here because I have never heard a single opponent of IP law say that one reason that they're bad is because they're not enforced in Third World Countries. I mean, I don't know what he's talking about. In fact, it's the other way around. You have people like this dude saying that they make the causation correlation fallacy, which is the rich countries of the world, the West, right? Since the Industrial Revolution, Europe and America basically, they started getting really rich around 1800. And lo and behold, that's right around the time. Modern patent and copyright law came into being, so the reason America is rich is because we had a strong patent system. So they are the ones making the correlation to causation fallacy. There's something that's correlated, which is the rise in wealth in the United States, and we also had a patent system. But that doesn't mean the patent system was a cause because the United States has also been having wars about every 10 years and having tariffs our entire existence and having taxation the whole time. You can't argue that wars and tariffs and taxation are the cause of our success, even though they're correlated with it. And likewise, I would argue that we would be even richer if we didn't have patent law. So that's just a dumb argument. He's got it totally backwards. And his argument, which is the real argument is wrong. Okay, so we only have three left, so I think we've caught up, but two out of these three have some meat on them that are probably gonna take a little time. So fallacy 15, property must be rivalrous. This fallacy is behind both intellectual communism and fractional reserve banking. If we admit rivalry as a necessary, yeah, think about that for a second. If we admit rivalry as a necessary condition for property, privacy becomes impossible, and in fact, any exclusion or exclusivity becomes impossible. Based on this notion, fractional reserve bankers lend deposits that they do not own on the pretense that their depositors are not using them. Based on this notion, it is impossible to create a club with limited membership. It suffices to say that there is no history of the principle of rivalry to be found in the literature of classical liberalism on the subject of property. Property is an economic institution whose purpose is to secure goods for the individual. Yeah, there's, I'll read a little bit more, but that's a good, what do you say about his assertion that rivalrousness is not part of the historical literature on property? I mean, this is so incoherent and confused. I don't understand what he's trying to say about private club membership and what fractional reserve banking, which I agree is fraudulent and stupid, economic is stupid. I don't see what in the world that has to do with rivalry or with intellectual property. I mean, rivalry is an age-old classic economic concept. It's well known to be part of the entire theory of property rights. I mean, go look at Hume and look at some of the older guys, but it doesn't matter. I mean, we're Austrians and libertarians. I mean, Hans Hermann Hoppe is one of our greatest theorists. Just read the first two chapters of a theory of socialism and capitalism. The whole thing, his whole property and property rights ethic and his libertarian reasoning and his economic analysis is centered around the whole idea that the very reason the purpose of property rights is to permit people to live in a conflict-free way in a world where conflict is possible. But conflict is possible because we have physical bodies and we all have needs to use scarce resources to achieve our ends. And scarce resources means these physical means of action that we grasp and we employ like tools, food, land, cows, wood, steel, things like this. So the whole reason property rights emerge is because there can be conflict over scarce resources. The whole nature of property is to allow people to live in peace and prosperity and harmony and cooperation with each other by identifying who the owner is of a resource, when it's the type of resource over which there otherwise could be conflict. So of course rivalry is part of the property rights theory. Without rivalry, there would be no need for property rights. We'd all be angels living in the Garden of Eden with magical superpowers and this whole conversation would be moot. If no one ever fought each other over property, there wouldn't be no need for these rules, yeah. But let's, okay, so continuing on, but let's suppose that rivalry is a valid precondition for property rights. Let's just suppose that, okay. Is information non-rivalrous? You can in fact create a copy without consuming someone else's copy. Hence, it seems to be miraculously non-scarce, but consider what the creator and... This is probably the only sentence in his paper that's unambiguously correct. You can in fact create a copy without consuming someone else's copy. Yeah, okay. But consider what the creator intended to create when he invested in his information. It is not an unlimited supply of copies, but the potential distribution of copies that reward his investments. Each information good, whether a movie, a software package, or a book has a potential for distribution. Once a copy has been distributed to someone and he has consumed the information in it, the potential for that distribution is exhausted. Tell us about property rights in distribution. First of all, he doesn't explain what is the relevance that when a creator intended to create when he invested in information, whatever that means, what does it matter what he intended to create? Relevance does that possibly have for libertarian ethics and property rights? Nothing. And not only that, it's just factually false. Most people create something with the intent to, for other people to learn from it and to spread it. I mean, I'd say probably 90% of all information is done that way. It's not done with... So he's crazy. It's just... What was the other part that after the intended to create that we just went over? About property rights. Oh, yeah. So he's basically assuming a right to profit. Can you say, yeah, you can't profit from this if people could copy it? Diminishing someone's potential to profit is theft is kind of the argument here. Yeah. So many things like that you can write to an income stream. You have a right to profit, which means you have a right to the money and potential future customers' hands. But you don't. Let me read the rest. That's not the problem. Yeah, let me read the last three sections on this. Focusing back on intellectual property, he says. We see that when movie bootleggers record and distribute a theater release recorded on handheld cameras, they are distributing a copy of lower value than what the creator intended, producing less enjoyment in the consumer while eliminating the distribution potential for the property that the owner won't get back. By reducing the potential of intellectual properties, pirates reduce investments in the prospecting of new intellectual properties and reek economic growth and rec economic growth and capital accumulation. Thus we see that intellectual property is in fact rivalrous, although the intellectual communists do not understand the capital aspect of it and refuse to consider its existence. Are we refusing to consider the existence? No, he's just the fact that you face competition when you make a good or a service that is heavily, that's easily copyable doesn't mean that it's rivalrous. That just doesn't follow. Rivalrous is an economic property of a good and it doesn't have that. He's already admitted that in the very beginning. People can copy it without diminishing the others. So he basically thinks that if you can't make the right amount of profit, the way you quote, intended or wanted, I mean, you know, the whole purpose of capitalist property rights, libertarian and private property rights is not to give you everything that you intend or want. And it's not the purpose. This is why it's important to have a coherent theory of rights and understanding libertarianism, which he doesn't have. I propose we skip number 16 unless you have anything you want to say about a non-scarce or a post-scarcity society. I don't think we have any positions there. And then number 17 is I guess the last one. Yeah, here it is. I'm gonna, I think this, I'm gonna read the whole thing on this one just to round it out. Number 17, intellectual property relies on state privilege and protection. Intellectual property owners are perfectly capable of seeking out and destroying counterfeit copies of their property much as they can provide for the protection of any of their rights. It is the state that prevents them from doing so and protects pirates. In fact, the economics of intellectual communism makes it impossible for it to exist in an anarcho-capitalist society as dreamed by these very same libertarian intellectual communists. For capitalist courts to provide protection to counterfeiters against intellectual property owners, the value the counterfeiters derive from counterfeiting must be great enough for them to justify purchasing protection in excess of the value intellectual property owners derive from purchasing protection on the exclusivity of their property. Because the acts of counterfeiters demonstrate how little they value the property, they are counterfeiting. They would never actually purchase any protection against intellectual property owners. Intellectual property rights from the fact that they create value would become the law globally. This implies that it is only under the state and more likely an ideologically communist democratic state that counterfeiters can obtain any protection at all in any other, in any other their operations must remain at the margins of obscurity. And before we comment on that, let me just say, last call, we, I have not been taking your questions this whole time because I wanted to make sure we get through the article. Now that we've hit the end of the article, we'll have a brief period that we can take some questions if you have them. So get them in now, I'll be looking for them while we discuss whatever that was. Pressure, we got through them all. Why don't you, what do you think about this one? You wanna take this one first? So he's saying that DROs in a free society would choose to defend intellectual property rights. I mean, he didn't mention DROs specifically, but that would assume that there's a demand for intellectual property, great enough to support sort of a separate side economy of DROs that all can centrally contractually agreed to abide by certain intellectual property rules. I would certainly not be a part of that system of DROs. So I guess there would be some sort of sidecar economy. There would be two economies. There would be an IP respecting DRO network and there would be a non IP respecting DRO network. And if he's trying to make the argument that the pro IP network would be more profitable and would outcompete the others, I don't see the evidence for that just for that argument. He's arguing backwards. He's trying to say that if he could imagine DROs would do something, then that justifies it, which is just not true. I mean, what if you have an assassination market? It doesn't mean that it's just, I thought we were supposed to be libertarians here, right? And again, the distinction I made earlier, these IP guys want to argue that copyright, I guess in this guy's case, it's a type of property right, which is what we call it NREM right, a right good against the world. So like you said earlier, you don't need to have a clear right with trespassers to prevent them from trespassing against your home because that right and that property is good against the world. So let's say there's 10,000 little private property communities in the world, each with their own private laws, but they're all libertarian, which means they all basically respect the basic property rights. They respect the idea that you can own a resource by either homesteading it when it was unowned or buying it by contract from someone else, right? So that's the basic order in the world. So in one of these communities, someone might own a home and if some outsider from another community comes into that village and trespasses against their home, they're violating the property rights of the owner, they're trespassing, right? Even though they don't have a contract, it's got nothing to do with contracts. But in this guy's conception, if there was patent or copyright law, then if the community won, a guy writes a novel and let's say they have some weird contract there, I don't think they could or would, but they have some kind of copyright-like contract among the residents there where everyone's agreed to limit their ability to copy, remember, create from and learn from information, which no one would do because this is suicidal. But okay, let's say this stupid Galambosian stranger community has these rules. For them to have a real property right, then they would have to be able to go into all the other 10,000 communities in the world and prevent these guys from using their own printing presses to copy copies of the book, which would be a violation, to enforce that you'd have to go and invade their houses or their factories or their publishing shops to stop them from doing that. But that would violate the already baseline rules of property rights, which is that I own my printer, right? So he is just, it's just so incoherent, it's hard to even argue against this. Well, let me try, let me try. So like, I commonly say that rights are mutual reciprocal understandings between people. So, and that goes for property rights as well. So you'd have a libertarian society that would reciprocate property rights and they would have DROs that would contractually agree to adjudicate disputes around property rights, with I'm sure some kind of spelled out normative property rights rule set. And I guess this guy is arguing presumptively that there would also be this ubiquitous idea of an actual property and that DROs would also, just like normal property, have a rubric of rules that they would adjudicate disputes around. So why wouldn't there be a potentially a libertarian society that had a system of DROs that reciprocated? Because the people consent, right? The people are consenting to the DROs representation, including that infringement or that reduction in their real property. What's a good word for real property? Because I feel like when I'm talking about intellectual property, I talk about real property versus IP, but calling it real property is kind of begging the question or what was it? Because in the law, real property means immovable, it's like land and improvements on the land, like houses and curbsome property. Normative property, what would you call it? Corporal, material or corporeal, has a body, has a physical substance, corporeal property. I like that. Yeah, so I mean, so you could have a society that chose to reciprocate property rights in a way that included intellectual property. And I think his assertion here is that he's saying that that would out-compete because IP creates value and that value would then allow them to prosecute people. So I don't think it would as a factual matter, but for the same reason that war is expensive, so it's expensive to be an aggressor. And just like if you had a private society, I don't think you would not law drugs, even though you could, because people have to pay to do that, and they're not getting any benefit from it, right? So I don't think it's just on economically viable. Now, some anarchists like David Friedman and others who are pathetically with intellectual property to their discredit, they think that it's unpredictable what private rules are given regime or covenant community would adopt. And that could be an intellectual property, maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't. And like I said earlier, it still wouldn't be an intellectual property because it could not be good against the world unless every community in the world signs some big treaty and they all recognize this, which is logically possible, but that just means it wouldn't be libertarian. I thought we were supposed to be libertarians because the libertarian community is one in which these DROs have courts that decide disputes based upon the core fundamental principles of libertarianism, which is if there's a resource in question, like my factory or my paper or my body or my ink, right, or my money, then when someone else claims the right to control that over the presumptive owner, the natural owner, the possessor, whoever, then we settle that dispute by asking the homesteading question and the contract question. If I can show that I homesteaded the property, then I'm the owner. If I can show that I bought it from a previous owner by contract, then I'm the owner and that settles the question. So the only way you could have the court recognize the right of the claimant to stop me from using my property to make a device, a product, or to print a book, they would have to grant this negative servitude to them, which would violate my existing property rights, which means they wouldn't be libertarian anymore. So I guess it's logically possible, but they wouldn't justify it. It would just be an unjust system. And by the way, there's a reason why we have statutes, that the copyright and patent are statutes originated by the federal government. There's the Patent Act and the Copyright Act. And their origins are the statute of monopolies of 1623 in England for patents and the statute of Anne in 1709 in England. All statutes announced by legislators. So why didn't they arise on the common law by private court decisions the way the common law originated the vast bulk of the private law that we all think is roughly libertarian from the common law and the Roman law? Why didn't they do that? Because these types of legislated artificial schemes cannot emerge organically in a decentralized fashion in any kind of libertarian private property dispute resolution process. Just like- It came out of a King's desire to sort of post facto justify his desire to control the copying of information. Like there were Kings that wanted to control what information could and couldn't be copied on the printers at the time. That's what copyright, the right to copy that was granted by a King. But in a private property libertarian order there are no Kings and there are no legislatures. So you can't have legislative schemes and you can't have law being made by command or decree or dictate of a committee or of an autark. So if you understand anything about the actual historical origin of these laws and their nature and libertarian property rights and the purpose of private dispute resolution, you would understand that you could never have these rights emerge from private arbitral decisions. Just like you couldn't have the Environmental Protection Agency or OSHA or the Center for Disease Control or the IRS or the SEC Securities Exchange Commission or the Food and Drug Administration, none of those things could emerge organically on a private property system. They would have to be created by the decree of a committee of elected bureaucrats, which we call legislators or Congress critters. It's just it's impossible to conceive this happening in a just way, in a real property rights respecting libertarian society. So this guy wants to argue for in kind of an anarchistic world where anything goes and where whatever these committees or these rogue judges in these weird communities decide is just by fact of they're issuing these judgments. I mean, you could have slavery, you could have assassination, you could have women being killed for having sex outside of marriage, which we had in the past because they weren't libertarian societies. So it doesn't prove anything, in my opinion. All right, sir. This was an excellent show. I'm happy that we made it through everything. I appreciate you coming on and joining me for the talk. If you're welcome back anytime for any reason, where can people find your work? Are we not gonna take questions or are you gonna close it? I didn't get any questions. I did get a super chat that I almost forgot to mention. That Moose, thank you for the $20 super chat. He says that was a very good stream since you're profiting from this stream is it is electoral property. Thank you for a good stream, even if it is all intellectual stuff. Thank you that Moose. Remind me over on Discord and I'll give you the supporter role for your donation, I appreciate it. Yeah, we didn't actually get any questions there at the end. I think we fisked the hell out of it. All right, good. No, I have nothing to promote. People can, if they want more information on all this, all this kind of stuff is on my c4sif.org, Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom website. I just did Walter Block's Law and Economics course at your guest lecture for him a week or two ago. On Intellectual Property and I did a pretty systematic overview of the case against it which I touched on in bits and pieces here. So if anyone's interested, just look up my stephenconseller.com and one of my recent podcast is my IP lecture for Walter Block's class, which is a good recent summary of the case against IP. All right, sir, thank you very much and everybody, thanks for watching and participating with us in the comments. It was a good time. Until next time, take it easy.