 Now, we have to bring on our next guest, Stefan Kinselli is a registered patent attorney, Libertarian theorist and a lecturer, director of the Center for Study of Innovative Freedom and Executive Director of Libertarian Papers. He's published numerous articles and books on IP law, international law and the application of libertarian principles to legal topics, received an LLM, I don't know exactly what that is, but I think it's a legal note of recognition, an international business law from Kings College, London, a JAD from Paul M. Herbert Law Center at LSU, I guess if it was an LSU, it was probably a Bayer Law Center, and BSE and MSCE degrees from LSU. He has a book that's going to be coming out soon titled Law in a Libertarian World, Legal Foundations of Free Society, and it's going to be published by liberty.me next year, so it's going to be coming out probably after the first year. Stefan, welcome to the show. Yeah, is he there? Is his microphone muted? Chuck, he should be connected to us here. It shows up on my screen. Yeah, we're maybe had to go to the bathroom or something. Okay. I had to do that one night, I remember. Well, he's in the chat. Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now? Okay, sorry, it's a microphone problem. I just took my microphone out. I'm glad to be here, Chuck. Thank you very much. Yes, I'm leaving. I'm going to have to put a headphone to something. I'm just getting the nap call off. Yeah, give me a second. While you're doing that, I'm going to Stefan probably has his console running on UCY. Oh, let me see. Maybe. I'm hearing myself. Anyway, I first came across Stephen, when he delivered a speech at a Mises Institute gathering about about really thinking intellectual properties. And it was it literally changed the way I thought about intellectual property. And I guess we just had on Richard von Sternberg from the founder of the American Star Company. Immediately, I thought of him when I saw when I watched Stefan's speech, this is this is exactly what happened to Richard. And so he's he's been somebody that's been on my kind of on my screen. I always wanted to read anything he wrote. Can you hear me now, Chuck? Perfect now. Perfect. Good. I think I had a bit of like that. Yes. So anyway, it's been about it's been about seven years since that speech, I think. So I've had many, many a debate with people who would debate the things that I used to believe to me. And I would I found myself defending all the things I'd learned from you and kind of attacking their positions, because I thought they're just fundamentally wrong. And it was this very difficult process. But I was able to at least convince a large majority of the people I did talk with that the intellectual property laws weren't working the way they're supposed to be working. And so I think that'd be a good place to start is maybe talk about some of the abuses of the system. And maybe actually, we should probably go back a little bit and kind of explain how the patent is and copyright system is intended to work. And then we can go into why it doesn't work. Well, so the way it's intended to work, you can talk about the way it's sold right down and the way it's stated by legislators when it's enacted, or you can talk about the real sort of the real purpose behind it. I don't think the stated intent of patent and copyright law is really what is the real intent behind it. The stated intent is to encourage and promote innovation and artistic creativity by providing you some kind of financial incentive to be compensated for producing innovations and inventions, artistic works, things like that. This is the common argument given for these laws, copyright and patent primarily. Other types of laws that are similar are trademark and trade secret, but we don't really, unless you want to, we need to go into both. The two big ones are trademark, I'm sorry, patent and copyright. I think that would be enough. We're just trying to, I think that we're trying to see how they've been kind of taken over and controlled by other parties that we're supposed to be protected from. For a short history, we haven't had free markets forever. In fact, we don't have free markets now, perfectly. There's always been use by people in power of their ability to control things for their own benefit. Back in the days of mercantilism, say several hundred years ago in Europe, the kings would grant favors to people. So they would say, I will give you the monopoly on the right to sell soap, or you're the only person who can trade sheepskin in this area. That's called the patent or a monopoly. In exchange, the guy would help the king collect taxes or he would get his loyalty. So it was basically an exchange. So the crown used their political power to grant a monopoly to protect someone from competition or to give them a monopoly over a given area in exchange or some kind of favor or some kind of service. I have an interesting story that just popped in my head from my days in the jewelry business. The first person had discovered how to make porcelain china. He took it to the king to show him what he had done. The king immediately had him locked up and he was then, from that point on, only to make china for the king. And that was how they protected that intellectual property. The innovation of the person that had the brilliance to figure that out, he was in a prisoner. He was well fed and well clothed and everything. But he was the prisoner nonetheless for the rest of his life. The king did not want anyone else to have the sacred. It was how he became rich. And that was one of the things that enriched that bloodline of people throughout Europe was the wedgewood china company was founded from the descendants of that king. Well, and this gets to the modern confusion over the justification for patent and copyright. So patent, which people now say is used to stimulate innovation and invention was really originated in the grant of monopoly privileges and anti competitive, you know, control of the market by the crown. Copyright was originated in the government and the church's fear of the printing press because they didn't want ideas to get circulated widely that they didn't approve of. They didn't want the average person to be able to see. So they instituted these guild like structures that controlled which books could be printed. And so one example would be the stationers company in the 1500s in England. This culminated in the statute of Anne of 1709. And by the way, the patent statutes culminated in the statute of monopolies is 1623. So they were actually called it was called the statute of monopolies. There was no bones about it. Nowadays we call it intellectual property as sort of a cover for what it really is. But originally the government was pretty plain about the nature of what they were doing. But the interesting thing in your your story reminds me of this is that the authors of books who were controlled by this guild, the stationers company and later by the crowns copyright type regulations. What they wanted was the ability to publish their own books without permission of anyone else. This is why they were in favor of copyright because the copyright statute the statute of Anne appeared to give the right back to the authors because it said now the authors have the right to control who can publish their works. They weren't seeking this right so they could extort, you know, royalties from people and keep people from copying their works. They were doing it so that they wouldn't be prohibited from doing it. But very soon after the publishing industry stepped right back into the role it had had before because you had to have a publisher to publish your book. And so you had to assign your copyright back to the publishing industry. So this has led to the situation we have now where most authors even today have sold their life's work to some publishing industry company. And even if they wanted to publish a sequel or to authorize a foreign translation of their own book, they can't do it. And if they don't have a big bestseller, the publisher might forget about it. It goes into oblivion. It goes into this black hole of unpublished works which no one else can authorize even the author can't authorize it. So you have this mythological idea that the patent system is for the little guy, the little inventor and the copyright system protects authors and musicians. When in reality the copyright system has propped up the publishing and the music industry and forced these creators to sell their souls to these large companies. And the patent system basically benefits large companies like Apple and Samsung and even Google but almost never the small inventor. Yeah, I actually think that Microsoft the last or the next innovation that they come up with might be their first. I think they exist solely on just buying up other companies, taking all their patents and going out going to court and seeing how many royalties they can harvest and finds and things they can collect. It's turning into kind of a joke. It's not even close to the stated purpose of the patent. What a copyright. Yeah, not only that, I mean the so-called stated purpose in the Constitution is that Congress is authorized and this is the Constitution enacted in 1789, authorized Congress to protect the works of authors and inventors for limited times to promote the progress of science and the arts. And by the way, science in those days meant what we would call the arts now and the arts meant what we would call science now sort of backwards because arts meant like the work of artisans like people that make inventions or innovations or horseshoes or whatever and science meant just the general knowledges, the knowledge sciences, literature, etc. But it only authorized Congress to protect these for limited times. And originally the copyright law protected works for 14 years, extendable by application of the holder for another 14 years, 28 years maximum. And by the way, 14 years was there because it was a term of two consecutive apprenticeship terms. The idea was, let's give this guy a monopoly privilege over his inventions or his copyrighted works that last for about the length of two apprentice terms because by that time he can train them and use their services and then maybe they can compete with them after that, but he's got enough breathing room to compete with his own apprentice. Something weird like that. Well, now copyrighted lasts for the life of the author in America plus 70 years. So that's well over 100 years in most cases. Yes. And not only that, but companies like Disney have copyrighted Snow White, which they didn't even write. Yeah. Well, they copyrighted their version of it. So that would be a derivative work, but the original work was public domain. So they didn't need permission of any copyright holder, but so they came up with the derivative of it, which was itself original. So it was covered by copyright. And you have right now, I mean, this is being negotiated as we speak the Trans Pacific Partnership, which is a huge treaty, which is being negotiated by America and Western and Asian countries that represent about 40% of the world's GDP. It's been negotiated for a couple of years in secret. It holds itself out as being for a pro free trade agreement. But as released like yesterday or today on WikiLeaks, there's a huge IP section, which seeks to force the other nations to adopt America's copyright terms. So most countries of the world have signed on to the burn convention, which America forced them to sign 20, 30 years ago, which is, which says a copyright term has to be life of the author plus 50 years. America added tack 20 years on to it when Mickey Mouse's copyright is going to expire courtesy of Sonny Bono of Sonny and Sharefane, you know, the congressman who ran for the tree when he was he into a tree. Yes. Exactly. And by the way, we're all over this Trans Pacific Partnership agreement. We've been posting it in our Facebook page all the news, as much news as we can find about it for about a month. Yeah, it's horrible. It's not, it's not pre trade. It's not, it's called free trade. It's only free trade for a few select insiders. It's kind of free trade inside a vacuum bell. Everybody else right outside. We don't have free trade, but those people inside that that bell, the bell shaped vacuum thing, they've got free trade. Yeah, it's managed trade and but the worst thing is it's not only managed trade and it extends IP law. It's trying to extend draconian US style IP law, which is the worst in the world, basically, to other countries to make them extend their burn prevention copyright coverage by 20 years and other provisions as well. Thank God that this thing was leaked, although I don't know if it's going to stop it. You know, we defeated SOPA and PIPPA, the Stop Online Empiracy Act and the another counterfeiting act and the anti-counterfeiting trade agreement, the ACTA, has been ratified by a few countries now and also a lot of the provisions of both of those laws are in the TPP. So these guys don't give up. Even if the internet rises up and stops one of these laws, these lobbyists just work behind the scenes and they just, they put it into another bill or another treaty or another trade agreement and they just, they keep going. The forces are inevitable. Yes. Well, let's, I want to just kind of take a small detour. This is kind of still in the same vein. In the speech you've given there, there were some real hilarious things you were showing about the, some cases that actually came out were patents or went to trial because patents had supposedly been violated. The one that made me laugh the hardest was the one that Amazon brought against a book company. You're talking about the one-click patent they brought against the Barnes and Noble right before Christmas is about six or seven years ago. Yeah. Because it was, they owned, they had patented the one-click. They patented a method for like completing an online transaction by having a shopping cart representation and allowing the sale to be completed by making one click instead of two or three. So really it wasn't technological. It was just kind of the business idea. And by the way, Jeff Bezos, who I think was the actual inventor on that patent, who's the CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos has come out in the meantime. He says, he thinks that software patents, the term should be reduced from about 17 years, which is the typical patent term now, to about three years. He really thinks software patents are harmful. Of course, that's a little self-serving because Amazon hasn't used that since and it helped them demolish their competitor for one Christmas season and probably made several million dollars off of it. So they've already gotten the return on their $10,000 patent. And they're going to change the rules again. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And that, there was another one in that presentation you showed, so your PowerPoint, there was a sculpture of a hand making a one-finger salute. That's a copyrighted design or is it a design patent or I don't know. Yeah, that was a, I've got the, if your listeners want to see that, I've got a speech I gave at the Mises Institute. It was the Rothbard Memorial Lecture. If you just go to stephandconcello.com or go to my media page, you can find it. And if you click on that link, I've got these slides I used and some examples of absurd patents. And that one was probably a design patent. I think it was the, it was the shape of a hand giving someone the finger flipping the bird used on an ornament or a trailer hitch or something like that. I forgot exactly where it was. But yeah, that was a design patent, which is a type of patent. And that was, that somebody would, would actually be allowed to have a design patent on that was, to me, was kind of absurd. That's probably been, what do you say, that only got a three or four thousand year old symbol? Well, but actually, to be honest, design patents. So there are several types of patents. There's plant patents, which has to do with asexually reproduced plants, plants. There's design patents, which are sort of like copyrights or the way things ornamentally look. And then there's utility patents, which is the patent we all think of. It's a patent on a useful or something that has utility as a useful machine or process. As silly as the design patents are, they're not that harmful in practice. The most harmful ones are the utility patents. And not only that, as much as we hear about junk patents and patents that shouldn't have been granted, because they're obvious, you know, the invention uncovered is obvious. Or as much as we hear about patent trolls, people that sue people, even though they never made the product that is covered by their own patent. These are the least harmful applications of patent law. The most harmful is the utility patent that is not a junk patent and that is not asserted by a troll. That is a patent that is a high quality patent. That is a patent that should have been granted according to the patent rules. A patent that covers the invention that is unique and is not obvious and is useful and is covers a product made by the person asserting it. Because those are the types of patents that are used to hamper competition. The entire purpose of a free market and property rights or one of its characterizing features is that we ought to have free competition. And if you see someone doing something that is successful and pleases customers, you can enter the field and compete with them. That's what competition is all about. The entire purpose of the patent system is to stop that. It's to say that you cannot compete with someone for some silly reason, but you can't do it. They can use this patent to prevent you from doing something too similar to what they're doing. And if you step back and think about it, there's nothing wrong with emulating or even copying what other people have done as long as you use your own resources and you sell to your own customers. There's just nothing wrong whatsoever with that. And for the law to stop it is market list and protectionist. And it's anti-free market. It's anti-free property. That's exactly what I believe. During that speech, someone made a question from the audience, and I couldn't quite hear the question, but she were talking about the... Once they grant a patent, there's like an 18-month waiting period before they even publish it, so nobody else even knows what its contents of the patent are for 18 months. Well, this is a relatively... Yeah, so this is about... Did I understand that correct? Yeah, that's correct. Until the law was changed in the 1990s, patent applications were kept secret until the patent issued, which could be 10, 20, 30 years. That gave rise to what's called submarine patents. That is, so someone would file something, and in the meantime, and they would keep refiling it in secret and changing it a little bit. In the meantime, someone else would independently invent something covered by the patent, and the whole industry would arise to be covered by it, like say windshield wipers, intermittent windshield wipers, something like that. And then the patent owner would let the patent emerge like a submarine emerging from the sea. That's why they call them submarine patents, and sue everyone based upon the current market size. Well, in the 1990s, the law was changed pursuant to the gadgetry, the general agreement on terrorist and trade, and the trips agreement, the trade related IP aspects of the trade agreement. It was changed so that you had what's called a provisional patent. You could file it a year ahead of time to get a placeholder, and the patent term has changed at that time from 17 years from the date of issuance to 20 years from the date of filing. They did that partly to counter the submarine patent problem, and what they said was, if you want to take advantage of this new system, now we're going to publish your patent application at 18 months. So at 18 months after you file it, all patent applications now become public unless you file a disclaimer at the beginning saying, I promise you, I won't file for international trademark of patent protection. So in most cases, you don't want to do that. You want to keep open the option of filing an international patent on your patent. And so in that case, your patent is published at 18 months. So that's still, you have, if you're in a state of the art type of innovation, there's a lot of people trying to create this next, let's say like in cell phone technology or something. And you come across this great idea, and you're the first one, you get your thing in there. It's going to be secret for 18 months, and someone else might come up with something else and start building a similar product, maybe based on that same idea, one would violate your patent, but then they are then liable for something they didn't need, they couldn't possibly even know about. Well, so, so, well, that is potentially correct. So, but how would they know about it? I guess if you're selling the product all right, so you're selling a product, and you have a patent pending that is secret, you're supposed to mark your product patent pending, and then patented once it's patented, you don't have to. And by the way, Obama changed the law a couple of years ago, so that the penalties for failing to mark your product patent pending or patented have almost disappeared. Under the old law that is two years ago before two years ago, if you fail to mark your product patented, then you're really at a disadvantage when trying to sue people later because the idea is, well, you had the chance to put them on notice and you didn't, so it's not fair to extort them from money now. Well, now the penalties for failing to mark are almost non-existent, so they basically got rid of the marketing requirement, so it's even worse in a way that it used to be. Well, it's, I think it's really slowed down the innovation process across the board. I mean, America used to be the place where everything was invented and not so much anymore. You said in your speech that that one, I'm referring to that same talk again. That's the one that first grabbed my attention. I've always used these examples when I debate with people. They're the ones that are easy to remember. But you said something, I think it was Switzerland and another country in Europe that abolished their patent laws and changed them so that they could be more competitive, more competition in the marketplace. And they found out that innovation didn't get worse. It got better. Yeah. And if you look in, I've got a blog post about this, but there's also, if you go to my website, c4sif.org, Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom, to go to my resources page, I linked to a book by some friends of mine called the McKelley and Boldren and David Levine called Against Intellectual Monopoly. My work has been mostly sort of property rights and libertarian based. Theirs is more empirical and utilitarian and they examine the empirical case. And in chapter nine of their book Against Intellectual Monopoly, they examine the entire case for pharmaceutical patents, which is usually held up as the obvious case for patents. Like we have to have it for drugs or pharmaceuticals. And they look into this and they show that there have been long stretches in modern history, like 20, 30, 50 years at a time. I think Switzerland was one. I think Italy was another, well, they just simply didn't have a patent system that covered pharmaceuticals. And yet they were among the top pharmaceutical producers in the world for a while. There's lots of empirical studies like this that show, I would say counterintuitive, it's just, it's against the contrary, the received wisdom, but they show that innovation is perfectly possible and very prevalent in the absence of patent and even copyright systems. Yeah. And I think that that's, to me, is perfectly reasonable because I think there's a lot of people now that their resources that they have are being put into, they've been put into the things like staff, attorneys on staff to protect the patents. They're trying, when they do develop something, they're going to go on and cover as much of the market as they can to make sure that they aren't violating the patents. So they're spending a lot of time and energy on things that aren't producing any products and not producing any more innovations. They're just trying to cover their rear end and possibly keep them from getting, especially the smaller companies, because we saw beforehand what happened to my friend Richard in the diamond industry. He was just squashed like a bug by big, big money that copyrighted a trademark that made it impossible for him to talk about the superior nature of the product that he was producing. So he couldn't, he had to, well, go ahead. I was going to say these laws, the common perception of these laws is helping the little guy is just completely wrong. What happens in reality, especially nowadays, it's gotten worse in the last 20 years or so. Think of the smartphone wars. Right now there are literally dozens of patent lawsuits going on around the world in different countries between dozens of country companies like Amazon, I'm going to start Apple and Samsung and various other players in the smartphone areas. And sometimes Apple or the other guys will be on the receiving side. Sometimes we'll be on the on the aggressive side. And what this does is they're, I mean, literally spending tens or hundreds of millions of dollars per year on legal fees alone, just funneling this to patent litigators like people like me to litigate these battles. Now, what this does is it, it, it, it means that only companies with the large patent arsenal, which also takes millions of dollars to obtain in the first place can even engage in this only large established companies, the big players can afford to pay these lawyers to be on the defense or the offense. So what it, what it does is it basically shuts out the smaller players, they can't even afford to enter the field. So it erects barriers to entry, it creates an oligopolized industry, which means an industry with one or two or three or very small number of very large players. So these laws, which the state grants monopoly power to companies, not surprisingly results in monopolistic behavior. So it actually hurts the small companies because they believe me, if you're a small company trying to go public or you're just small, trying to eke by on your meager, you know, angel funds or your friends and family funds or your very small profits, if you get sued by a big, a big competitor or you get a big demand letter saying you have to stop or we're going to hit you with a patent lawsuit and it's going to take you $5 million to defend yourself, you have to cave in or, or even better, you just don't enter a field in the first place because you know that it's impossible. So patent law actually staples, you know, individual entrepreneurship and innovation. It doesn't help it at all. Yes. Yes. And when they, when the small guys, even though there, there might be like a little mouse compared to an elephant in terms of the size of their competition, that still is, it forces the big guys to produce new products that they don't get, they don't lose their market share of these little startup companies. And so when they don't have to worry about those guys' market because they can crush them legally, they don't have to worry about innovation so much anymore because they've got the market, this is what we're going to produce and you're going to buy it. Yeah, I think that, well, and not only that, if you have a patent on a product that's popular, then you have less incentive to innovate because you don't need to in the free market. Oh yeah, that'd be cutting out your cash flow because that product seems to be sold if something new came along. Well, yeah, and not only that, I mean, people talk about the pharmaceutical case is the paradigm, the paradigm, paradigmatic case, you know, the standard case that argues for patents, but, and I'm not denying the benefit of some modern wonder drugs, although if you look at the modern wonder drugs that we've had in the last 50 years, almost none of them have been patented. All the great drugs of history that have cured millions of diseases, they've pretty much been not patented. But the point is, if you're a pharmaceutical company and you can come up with some drug that cures some problem and you can get a patent on it, which one are you going to promote? That one or some homeopathic natural remedy that no one has a patent on? I mean, there may be in some cases, I mean, I'm not a big homeopathic natural path type, but the point is, in some cases, I think that those remedies are as good or even better for some types of afflictions or maladies or conditions. Yeah, there's actually, seven, that's something I've spent a lot of time on because I had a really bad hypertension issue and medicine that they were putting me under control. It was making me feel horrible. And the doctor just told, well, I'm just going to have to live with it. So it's how you're going to be the rest of your life. And I just refused to believe that. So I went started reading and I found that actually if you eat the right foods, your body will repair itself and your blood pressure will return to normal. And there's some lifestyle changes you might want to, you know, think out to change and things like that. So in my case, I was able to get off seven different pills and I have normal blood pressure now and a lot of other chronic symptoms that I had of other things to come, maybe down the road like diabetes and things like that have all disappeared. Just just because I eliminated a few problem foods from my diet and I started eating more nutritious food. So there's a lot to be said for some of these things is just getting the essential new minerals that you need to have healthy organ function. It's really important. But the point is the big pharmaceutical companies are not going to be promoting this because it's not in their interest. And I don't blame them for not supporting it. But the point is they're of course going to support the patent system because that allows them to patent some new fangled remedy, which they can charge a monopoly price for for 17 years or something like that. They're even trying to get a monopoly patent status on some designer vitamins that are basically there are synthetic vitamins that only have better vitamins that occur naturally that work better in your body. But they patent these and then they can get doctor to prescribe them. They can make a lot of money. So I think we can talk a lot about how the system is broken for probably another couple of hours because there's a lot of examples. I think everybody gets the idea here that it's not there's something wrong. So what kinds of you had some great ideas on things that could improve the situation and and make make the system work closer to how it was intended and then you could go over some of those. Well, honestly, I think the best solution would be to abolish patent and copyright. I think they are both contrary to the free market and private property. So the easiest the best solution would be to get rid of them. And by the way, I also believe there's a good argument that patent and copyright are unconstitutional because they were both authorized in the 1789 Constitution. But in 1791, two years later, the Bill of Rights was ratified and the Bill of Rights has many provisions which are contrary to patent and especially copyright. So for example, the First Amendment says that the government shouldn't regulate freedom of speech or freedom of the press. Well, there's no doubt that granting a copyright, which allows someone to go to court to get government force to stop someone from printing a book is a regulation of freedom of the press. So if you were a strict First Amendment First, you know, freedom of press, freedom of speech rights type person, you would see the conflict between freedom of the press and copyright clause. And so there's a conflict in the courts to see this, but they try to balance it. But they shouldn't try to balance it because the First Amendment came after. So it should repeal the copyright clause. So I would say, and there are other other arguments you could make for other, you could argue that the Eighth Amendment on the ban on cruel and unusual punishment applies to these crazy statutory fines, statutory penalties for copyright violations. The Fourth Amendment, the search and seizure is violated all the time in enforcing copyright law. The Fifth Amendment due process is violated by assuming someone's guilty just by showing that their IP address was used to download a movie, even though you don't show that they did it. So there's lots of arguments in the Bill of Rights that are in conflict with the copyright and even the patent clause because the patent law also results in censorship in some cases and other and other things. So if you stop short of this crazy kind of radical abolitionist approach, if you wanted to get closer to what the Constitution says, then first of all, the Constitution says the purpose of Congress being granted this power is to promote the progress of science and the arts. So I would say first, do no harm. Congress should only issue copyright monopolies and patent monopolies when there's a reasonable basis to believe that it promotes progress of science and the arts, which means they should have a study. Now at the beginning, 1789, they didn't have time to do studies. Okay, fine. It's been 230-something years. They've had time to do studies and there's been dozens or hundreds of studies done and guess what? None of them prove that these laws actually promote the progress of science and the useful arts. So until they can come up with reliable studies that it does, I think the laws should sunset or should be abolished. But short of that, if you wanted to improve things, you could at least go back to the original systems. The proposal and the copyright realm is called the Founder's Copyright. Let's go back, let's go from life of the author plus 70 years back to 14 years. Let's require registration of copyrights instead of having it be granted automatically. Just a couple of changes like that would radically improve the process. In the patent field, if you could simply get rid of injunctions and say you can get a royalty from someone who's using your idea but you can't stop them with a court injunction, that would radically improve it. If you would shorten the term from 17 years to say five years or three years, that would radically improve matters. So there are several practical things that could be done except that some of these things would violate treaties that we have insisted be forced upon the world. So the Berne Convention arguably prevents us from getting rid of the automatic registration of copyrights and requiring active registration like we used to have before 1982 because we have Berne and now Berne obligates us to adhere to Berne standards. So we have conveniently Hollywood and the movie industry and the software industry has in the pharmaceutical industry have conveniently forced Congress to enact a treaty that we forced other countries to agree to that ties our hands and now if we say well we should relax our copyright standards and move backwards a little bit, they say well we can't, we have Berne, we have to live up to, we have to live up to our international obligations don't we? So it's, it's like when you impose this on us in the first place, we need to exit Berne, we need to exit these international treaties and we need to radically scale back patent and copyright law. Yeah, that's, it's basically, I think the introduction you gave on the history of this where they used to call it like it is, it's a, it's a permission to have a monopoly. Right. That's, that's exactly what it is and all my whole life I've learned is one simple fact that monopolies are impossible without the force of government and it's nowhere more apparent than in the patent and copyright laws. Yeah, I agree. Look, I understand people want to be in favor of innovation and creativity and ideas and I am too. I'm a patent lawyer and I'm a libertarian and I'm an, you know, I believe in the intellect and creativity but we have been sold a bill of goods. These, these laws are special interest laws which benefit very narrow sectors of the economy and they do not result in anything good whatsoever except for an excuse for tyranny. I mean the internet is one of the most important tools for freedom that's ever emerged and we cannot let the government regulate it and control what can be set on it or how it can be used and yet copyright law and other government laws like child pornography, terrorism, money laundering, gambling, you know, these kinds of things, drug laws, there, the government uses these laws as an excuse to regulate the internet. If nothing else, the threat that copyright poses towards internet freedom is enough to make you want to kill it because the internet is too important. If someone, there was a, I don't, I did not read this firsthand so I got this from somebody else but apparently just like a year or two ago, Sky News which is the equivalent of Fox News in this country in England sues Suin Skype because they use Skype in the Skype name and they thought it was an infringement in their copyright. So this is, this is how it can be perverted and misused and used to take one person and even if they win a case they have to pay for the court costs and the person's retention from progressing and innovating and everything else that, yes, it's very disruptive to society and maybe just to individuals that, that who are those guys are true innovators. I mean they, they just get off our first gas Richard told this great story about the, you know, how much, how much of, I would say there's probably 20 years to develop this eight-star diamond from the beginning to the end and it had a lot of dead ends and they had to go back and start over and they went through literally tens of millions of dollars to do this and he has the rights to North America to cut these diamonds and to sell them there and someone thinks of a way they can screw them in court using IP laws so that he's out of business. Yeah, I agree. One of the reforms I proposed is for patent law and even copyright law is called the losing plaintiff pays rule. Now, you've probably heard, you probably heard a lot and you've probably heard of the idea of the loser pays rule, which actually don't agree with the loser pays rule. The loser pays rule means that whoever loses the lawsuit should have to pay the other side's fees. All that does is magnify the potential losses of a small victim of a copyright or a patent suit, but if you adopted the rule that the losing patent plaintiff pays, so that means that the only, the only one who suffers from this rule is the potential aggressor. If you have a patent, let's say, and you decide to assert it against someone and if you lose, in my view, you should have to pay the fees of the person that you're attacking, but I don't agree that it should be symmetrical. I don't agree that the person that you sue should have to pay your fees if you succeed. I mean, it's bad enough that you win under these laws, but you shouldn't be able to magnify the threat because that's just going to make them cave in even more easily. But I do think that a losing patent plaintiff rules, and by the way, something similar was proposed in what the Electronic Frontier Foundation has put forward in some reforms to the copyright, to the patent laws, sorry, in response to the patent troll problem. Their reforms don't go far enough, but at least there would be some improvement. So they want to say that if you're a patent troll, then there are a lot of limitations on how you can exercise patent rights and whether you would have to pay the cost of of your victim if you lose the suit. Okay. Well, to me, it all makes a lot of sense and just from my experience in just the world of business, I'll use my co-host and good friend Drew as an example here. He's quite an innovator in his field, which he's due to, that would be a long story to tell you all the reasons, but he's built a farm inside a warehouse and uses some natural sunlight and some artificial light and uses aquaponics systemary as fish that create the nutrients for the plants that create the food for the fish. And he brings in some black soldier flies and uses the garbage that he gets donated for free from restaurants and feeds those larvae to the fish. And anyway, he's got worms that go through the stuff that the black soldier fly can't do it and uses that for his plants. And he has really good high-quality food which he sells to restaurants and he's starting to do pretty well on it. And he's innovated quite a few systems here, but if he had to stop and file patents on every time he has an idea, he'd be out of business. His innovations are kind of protected because he has witnessed the fact that he did this on this date or pretty close to this date. So if someone else comes up with it and they make him cease insist he could still say he had prior, thought of it prior to that. Am I understanding the law correctly? Well, yes. I mean, you're a small businessman and you sort of face a choice right now, right? You have to either spend a lot of money to apply for patents, which is a waste of money and resources and time. And it could divert you too. It could get you locked into, well, I've got to keep doing this kind of business technique or this kind of method because I've got a patent on this, just like the drug companies are going to try to sell the patented drugs or you remain defenseless and you have nothing to use if someone comes after you or someone wants to patent your own idea out from underneath you. So it's a horrible choice that small businessmen face now because of the patent system. And I think for Drew, I think his probably is his best, the best outcome that he could hope for is to become known as the person who did this innovation and this, have his name on some of these innovations, whether he gets the royalty form or not, but then it'll give him great speaking appearance fees and he could maybe author books and he could do other things in the future based on the verification he builds from all the, I mean, he's really, he's really an innovator. I'm so impressed with the stuff he's comes up with. He's a great thinker. But anyway, to me, that would be the way to go and if you can find ways to give people those recognitions, you can give them the status of being an innovator, not going to be somebody that everybody respects and looks to for advice and he suddenly has a reputation for that kind of ability, then he's going to get his rewards in a different way, not by going to court and forcing other people to give them royalties. Well, let me just say something a little bit optimistic, a little bit subversive maybe. Instead of begging the government to change its fascist and horrible laws, which we've been doing for 200 years now, and they're not about to do and they won't do it anytime soon and they'll go kicking and screaming because they have the big money corporatist interest in their pockets. Think of the analogy of the gold community. I mean, we advocates of sound money and free market money have been opposed to the government Federal Reserve system for a while. They're not going to change it. We can beg the government or the Fed to change their policies and it readopt gold, but they're not going to. So what did the community do? We've adopted Bitcoin. We've done an in run around the government. We've adopted our own money. So I think something like that can be done in copyright and patent instead of asking the government to drop its laws or to to reduce them in the copyright field. People can just get around the government by using torrenting and encryption and in the in the in the in the field of inventions, 3D printing is coming, my friend. And 3D printing is going to become a huge way people can get around the government's monopolization of physical objects through the patent law. People just print what they want and they can get an encrypted file with the design of it using a bit torrent or something like that. They don't need they don't need government permission or approval. Okay, well, Stephen, that's our our bumper music. We're all done for tonight. Thank you so much. This has been one of the best shows we've ever had. And I really appreciate you're being a part of it.