 Good evening. This is Stefan Kinsella. I'm speaking from Houston. I'd like to say good evening or good morning to everyone in Moscow at the Adam Smith Forum. And I'd like to thank Andre Shalnev, the head of the steering committee for this invitation to speak remotely. I am sorry I cannot be there in person, but I hope that you will find this video presentation and speech of interest. My name is Stefan Kinsella. I'm a patent attorney and a libertarian writer in Houston, Texas in the United States. And I'm a senior fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and the editor of the journal Libertarian Papers. Now I've been a practicing patent attorney since 1994 and I've been writing in opposition to patent and copyright law since about 1985. And the topic of my speech today is why intellectual property is not genuine property. Now I'd like to emphasize that intellectual property has been viewed as a type of property right for over a century now as part of the western or capitalist free market system. Now I did mention I'm a libertarian and in particular I'm a Rothbardian, Austrian economist following libertarian and an anarcho-capitalist. And as a libertarian and an Austrian, I am in favor of property rights and in free markets and in capitalism if it's rightly understood. Now I will say I'm not in favor of capitalism in the sense of corporatism or the type of cozying up between western big corporations and the state as we see here in the United States and the west nowadays. That's sort of a corruption of the ideal form of the free market economy or capitalism. But I am in favor of property rights so the first question might be why would someone who's in favor of free markets and property rights and the patent attorney himself, which is me, oppose patent and copyright law, so-called intellectual property law. So in this talk I'd like to explain why I believe that intellectual property, primarily patent and copyright law, are not genuine property rights. And why these laws actually should be abolished and why they should, the western style, the American type of patent and copyright should not be adopted in China, Russia, India, and other countries. And let me explain quickly one reason why I think this is particularly relevant, this topic of justifying or discussing the legitimacy of intellectual property law to Russia and the Adam Smith Forum itself. So of course these issues are of particular interest to the Adam Smith Forum because the members of the Adam Smith Forum are also advocates like Austrians of free markets and property rights. And also because the western powers, led by the United States, are continually pushing emerging powers in the former socialist countries like Russia to adopt United States or western style IP law, particularly patent and copyright. They've done this through the WIPO, through the WTO, the World Trade Organization, and the UN, and also through recent and continuing copyright and patent treaties and trade agreements like the recently signed ACTA or anti-counterfeiting trade agreement. So let me make it clear, as a libertarian, as a free market and a property rights advocate, we should not make the mistake of believing that equating the American government's laws and policies with a free market order. And therefore we should not believe that just because the American state or government proposes or pushes a given law or policy and tries to urge other countries to adopt it, does not mean that this is actually capitalist or free market or a libertarian property right. In fact, it's a mistake to equate the American state with the American economy. The American economy is at least somewhat free market, even though it's a mixed economy, but the state itself, like all states, is inherently socialistic. And in fact, you can think of many examples of policies and laws that the West has paternalistically pushed on other countries. We've tried to export our own laws and policies to other countries, and we've been somewhat successful in doing this, unfortunately. But these policies would include income tax withholding, which actually was adopted during World War II in the United States at the urging of the free market economist Milton Friedman, which I believe he admitted was a mistake later. The American version of antitrust law, or competition law so-called, anti bribery laws. The American state pushed this law called the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act onto the economy in the 80s, I believe, which prohibited private bribes by American companies to private companies overseas. This is an unlibertarian and illiberal law, but it hurt American businesses compared to their European and other counterparts who are not prohibited from engaging in these customary local bribes. In fact, in some countries you can even deduct that from your taxes as a legitimate business expense. So, instead of withdrawing this harmful law, the United States has twisted the arms of other countries into adopting a worldwide treaty on corruption and bribery to get other countries to impose similar restrictions on their citizens. Also, Central Banking, the American style of Central Banking, the Federal Reserve, it was pushed onto Canada in the 1930s, and even Russia after the fall of the USSR. The United States has exported its policy on how we own natural resources to, say, Iraq. In the domestic United States, private landowners are the owners of the minerals and oil and gas under their land. In most of the rest of the world, and in the federal government's territories in the offshore continental shelf, the federal government, the state assumes ownership of these natural resources and then grants licenses or leases to companies that come in and explore, and the state, of course, takes their cut. And, of course, in the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in the last year, the federal government was the actual landlord, and BP was just a leaseholder or a lessee. But you don't hear that pointed out, you hear BP being blamed. But in any case, after the so-called liberation of Iraq, the Iraqi government assumes ownership of the minerals just like the federal government here does on our offshore continental shelf. Since our drug laws were exported around the world, and we basically have created a horrible situation in Mexico because of this, which is exacerbated immigration problems, there have been tens of thousands of murders, et cetera. If Mexico or some other smaller country were to become, to legalize drugs as they should, then the U.S. would no doubt crack down on them for that. And, of course, there's the idea of managed trade. Instead of just having free trade, we have managed trade through NAFTA and other trade agreements, which perpetuates the idea of mercantilism. Of course, we had the Marshall Plan after World War II, which exported some of our policies and laws onto Europe. And then finally we have the American Ideal of Democracy itself, which is not so good of an idea if you would just read some of the writings of Hans Hermann Hoppe, such as his book Democracy, The God That Failed. So the point here is you cannot assume that just because the supposedly capitalist United States government is advocating a law that it is really compatible with capitalism or private property rights or the free market, including patent and copyright. So if we're going to step back and take another look at patent and copyright, and we should because there are obvious abuses and excesses and outrages that we see on a day-to-day basis. If you just turn on the internet, you'll see Android and Apple smartphone and Microsoft suing each other in patent lawsuits. You'll hear of $100 billion or $100 billion lawsuits because awarded to patent trolls. You'll see people being shut down in their attempts to make new music because of copyright. So there seems to be something wrong and we have to ask are these rights legitimate? And we just need to increase the enforcement mechanisms to make enforcement more efficient, maybe increase penalties, maybe put more people in jail for violating copyright and patent law. Or do we need to reevaluate these policies and maybe tone down their strength or maybe even abolish them altogether? So to do that, what we would need to do, especially as liberal economists and as liberals in favor of free markets, individual rights, due process of law, we need to ask whether patent and copyright are legitimate types of property rights. So to do this we need to understand what is the purpose and function of property rights in general. So we need to understand what patent and copyright are and then what property rights should be. So let's talk briefly about the nature of patent and copyright. Now there are many types of so-called intellectual property in addition to patent and copyright. These are just two types. They're the main two types, the most evil two types, the most costly and harmful two types. And they're the focus of my talk and I believe should be the main focus of libertarian opposition to these types of laws. But there are other types of intellectual property as well. The other two traditional types would be trade secret and trade mark. Now both of those types of laws are more legitimate in different contexts but we don't have time to discuss that today. And there are other newer types such as moral rights or semiconductor mask work rights which protect the way integrated circuits are laid out. There are also some special ones like boat hole designs. Also the entire law of defamation which includes libel and slander basically protects what's called reputation rights. That should also be viewed as a type of intellectual property I believe and it's also illegitimate. But today let me focus on patent and copyright. Patent is a state grant of a monopoly privilege to a patentee, someone who applies for it that covers, gives them exclusive rights in an invention. That's like a useful and new and non-obvious machine or composition of matter or process or method. For example a mouse trap, having a new design, a useful new design or a computer or the functional aspects of software. Think of it on the flow chart level like a method, how you do something with software performs a method, a set of steps or pharmaceuticals which are compositions of matter. So all these things are types of practical devices or processes. And when you apply for this, the government grants you a monopoly privilege. You're the only one who can perform this invention and make you make or use or sell it for about 17 years, roughly 17 years. Now it has to be applied for, you don't get it unless you apply. And it's important to recognize that independent invention is not a defense. What that means is you can be sued for infringing someone's patent even if you didn't copy it from them, even if you didn't learn about it from them, even if you independently invented the idea yourself. So what this patent right does is it gives the patentee the right to go to court to extract money damages, sometimes called royalties from an infringer. Or they can even get the court to issue an injunction forcing the competitor not to make or use a given product or process. So basically it protects a patentee from competition, just a little bit here. It protects the patentee from competition by making it more difficult for others to easily copy its products. And the example I gave earlier is the smartphone wars where Apple and Microsoft are suing a lot of Android makers. And some of these are suing, like Samsung is suing Apple back for infringing its patents with the iPhone. And they're getting various injunctions in Australia and Europe and other countries to try to stop each other from even introducing their own competing product. Now copyright is another state-granted monopoly which is granted to someone and it covers their original expressions or creative works. Like novels or paintings or movies or music or even software code. I mentioned patent covers the functional aspects of software like the block diagram flow chart level. Whereas copyright would cover the written code because that's like writing a novel or a poem. It has an expressive element. Now it lasts nowadays much longer. It used to last only about 14 years which coincidentally was the two times the term of a seven-year apprentice. The idea was that the artisan could be protected for the term of two of his apprentices to train them in making his new ideas and then he would face competition. And that 14 years has been extended gradually over the last 200 years to the point now where it's 70 years after the life of the author. So if you write a novel today then it will last until the end of your death and then 70 years later. So usually they last more than 100 years. So we have an extremely long copyright term. Now unlike patent copyright is automatic. That is you get it just by writing down your idea onto a sheet of paper. The second you do that you have a copyright in that at least in the US system and I believe it is similar in most other systems of the world because of treaties that we've all agreed to that require us to have similar basic provisions that are similar in our patent and copyright laws. Now unlike a contrary to popular assumption you cannot copyright something. That is you can't take an affirmative step to get a copyright. You don't have to apply for it. You do not have to put a copyright notice on your work to have a copyright. You don't have to register the copyright to have a copyright. So it's unlike patent in that way. And when people say well if you're against copyright why did you copyright your article? Well I didn't copyright my article or my book. The government gave me a copyright and there's nothing I can do about it. The patent system is an opt-in system. You only get a patent if you file for a patent application. A copyright is not opt in. It would be better if it was opt in where you had to affirmatively file a registration application to get a copyright. But it's not even opt out. In other words you can't even sign something that gets rid of your copyright. The government will not let you get rid of your copyright. So I'm going to have a copyright in my novel for the remainder of my life no matter what I do. Even if I write on the front of it I hereby get rid of my copyright that's simply not effective. It may serve as permission for others to use it without me suing them but the fact is I still own a copyright. Now what copyright does is like patent it allows someone to be free of certain types of competition. It lets you censor other people or charge them a fee to make songs or movies based upon your novel or a sequence of your novel or a painting based upon your novel and so on. So this is what these laws do. They are grants of monopoly privilege by the state that allows you to petition the state courts to use force against people who are doing things with their property that you don't like. Now let's step back and talk about the purpose of property and rights and laws and even government. Now as an anarchist I think government is inherently illegitimate but even in a private free society with no state you would have laws but only certain legitimate justified laws. And if we have a state then the question is which types of laws promulgated and enforced by the state are legitimate. So let's step back and think about what in the world is it, what about the world is it that gives rise to the need for laws and property rights. So there's something some of you may have heard of is called the land of caucane. This is a sort of mythical land of milk and honey or infinite abundance or plenty theorized by the middle age poets and people like this. It was just an idea of a land where you could have anything you want at any time with no effort, there was no scarcity, no shortages, life is perfect and idyllic and there's infinite abundance and the ability to satisfy any desires at any time. Now we obviously don't live in the land of milk and honey or the land of caucane and that's C-O-C-K-A-I-G-N-E by the way. In our world, in the real world that we all live in, there is scarcity. What this means is you can't just have what you want by wishing for it. It also means that if you obtain one of these scarce resources in the world, a banana, a stick, an apple, a tract of land, a log, a bucket of water, then other people cannot use that item at the same time as you. There is conflict if that would give rise to conflict. My use of a thing, a scarce resource, excludes your use. We also have to recognize, now this is where we get into the Austrian or Misesian, that is Ludwig von Mises' conception of Austrian economics. His view of looking at the basic concept of economics as what he calls praxeology, that's the science and the logic, the study of human action and the implications of human action. So what he does is he just looks at human action in a fundamental way. What does it mean for humans to act in this world of scarcity? It means that we have some dissatisfaction or we expect some dissatisfied state that will come to occur in the future if we don't do something to change it, if we don't interfere with the state of things. So in other words, every human action is an attempt to achieve an end, to achieve greater satisfaction. But the action is the employing or the use of the scarce means to achieve that end. So we have to select a means that will causally achieve our end. So this is exactly why we have to use these scarce means and this is why knowledge is important or science, which is the systematic acquisition and categorization of knowledge. We need to have both property and knowledge to have successful human action. You need property because you have to employ these means and if you're not going to be fighting over the means with some other contestant, some other person who wants the means, the property rules say who gets to use that means so that the means can be used by one person, the owner, productively to achieve their ends. But we also need knowledge to tell us what ends are possible, what things we should strive for, what might make us more satisfied and also to tell us what types of means will achieve our ends. This is knowledge of causal laws, so this is why we need to have causal or scientific knowledge. It informs our actions and we need property rights so that we can use these means that our knowledge is told us we need to use. So the basic view of the libertarian and the free market advocate is that we have to have both science and property. They're both like the twin pillars of human prosperity and civilized peaceful cooperative life. We need property to let resources be used peacefully and productively so we have to assign owners to things. This is the essence of the free market order and we of course need science and the right to learn from each other and to discover new things and to add to our base of knowledge so that we can act efficiently and choose the right means as part of our action. So this is actually the libertarian vision of the free society. It's one where property rights permit men to use resources productively and cooperatively without conflict and where science informs us how to use it. Now let's think about how we acquire knowledge as part of human life because this acquisition of knowledge is crucial. Because we start out more or less with a tabula rasa, with a boiling slate. There are many ways that human beings acquire knowledge, the knowledge that informs our human actions, that guides our human actions. The knowledge that tells us about causality and causal laws. The knowledge that we use to choose what actions to perform, what means to employ to achieve our given ends. From just experience in living, from observation of others, just from being immersed in a culture and learning from what's been developed and what's gone before. There's of course education and teaching informally by parents or even formally by formal education and instruction and by apprenticeships and even by employment we learn from our jobs. And also of course in a systematic way by the scientific method and empirical testing. But the free market is also a source of knowledge. Entrepreneurs are always incentivized and motivated to try to learn better ways to use resources to lower their costs and to have better products and to attract customers to make a profit. And when they do this, the consumers learn from this and benefit from it and their competitors learn too. And the competitors then try to emulate and copy and compete and sometimes improve and then the original innovator has to improve even more. And so everyone is better off and there's an unceasing striving for and ever increasing innovation and improvement in the desire to get profit. But in the face of always lowered profit because of competition, the threat of competition. So a free society, a free market, a private property based order has competition and it has learning and it has emulation and these are good things, not bad things. So now let's return to patent and copyright. The basic problem with patent and copyright as state-granted monopoly privileges, right, they're explicitly designed to protect people and companies from competition. As I mentioned, the holder of the patent or copyright can use state force against potential competitors. It's basically a completely confused notion, which is an outgrowth of the mercantilist ideas which were any competitive of the last several hundred years. It's also based upon the confused idea that it is sometimes wrong to learn or to actually use information in deciding how you want to use your own property. That is your own scarce resources that you have property rights in. That is wrong to copy or to emulate or to compete in some context. Now what it does is it uses the language of property rights in trying to say there's property rights by virtue of these laws in information and patterns and in designs. But remember the entire function of property, the purpose of property is to address the problem of natural scarcity in the real world that we live in. Not the world of cocaine. But ideas and knowledge and recipes and designs are just knowledge that we have. Unlike scarce resources, they are not scarce and they can be used over and over and over again, infinitely, and they can be used at the same time by an infinite number of people without diminishing the other people's ability to do the same. So for example, if I and my neighbor both want to make a chocolate cake, then we cannot use the same mixing bowl and wooden spoon and eggs and flour and ingredients. These are scarce resources and we each need to own our own separate ingredients and capital facilities to make the cake in. But we can both use the exact same recipe at the same time. Even if one of us learned it from observing the other, there is no conflict in the use of knowledge. But patent and copyright try to impose scarcity on things that are non-scars. It tries to make them more scarce. Now this is perverse because the free market is doing the opposite when it comes to actual scarce goods. Things that are in short supply are not sufficiently abundant supply like food and energy and houses and shelter and clothing or in natural short supply or scarce supply. But the free market strives to make them more abundant in the face of scarcity. We're trying to overcome this unfortunate fact of scarcity. But we don't have this problem with knowledge. In fact we have a growing base of knowledge in society and civilization which we can draw on. And in fact it is good that we have this. It's good that we have a growing base of knowledge. So the fundamental problem with IP is that because you really cannot have property rights in non-scars things, they are always actually enforced against scarce things. So IP is just a disguised way of undercutting real property rights. Remember these real property rights were put in place as the civilized mechanism to permit productive, peaceful and fair and just and efficient use of these scarce resources. But when IP rights are introduced it undercuts these rights. What do I mean by that? An IP right really gives a third party who holds the IP the right to control other people's scarce resources. So for example in the recent case the American singer Beyonce has been sued by a Belgian dancer because Beyonce used moves in a music video dance moves that are similar to the ones that were in an earlier video by the Belgian dancer and the Belgian dancers group. Now if she prevails then she will either get a court order telling Beyonce that you cannot use your body in this way or that will take some of the money from Beyonce's bank account which she owns and give it to them. Similarly Apple just the other day got a patent on using a gesture to unlock the iPhone or smartphones. If this patent is upheld and if they are successful in suing someone they can prevent other makers from making their own smartphones with that gesture. So it basically gives Apple a veto over how other people use their own property. Now a veto right is a type of property right. It's called a negative servitude in the civil law. So what this means is that the government by the law has given some third party a property right in someone else's property. That's a redistribution of property rights. Now this is actually the grounds that libertarians usually object to many laws like the minimum wage or drug laws or taxation or conscription or censorship or pornography laws. There we have the government stepping in and telling you that you cannot use your own body or property in certain ways. And we object by saying what business is it of yours how I use my property. You have no right to veto or use of my right of my own property. You have no right to penalize me either monetarily or with a jail fine, a jail sentence for doing something with my property that is not harming anyone else. And yet this is exactly what patent and copyright do. Now patent and copyright also of course undermine science, the very endeavor of science in a lot of ways because it restricts the flow of information. It restricts how people can use information. It distorts the structure of research and development by making companies find it more profitable to engage in research and development dollars in patentable areas as opposed to unpatentable areas like fundamental physics, equations cannot be patented because they're too abstract so you have more research than otherwise would be flowing into practical gizmos and devices. And it also discourages innovation and research in areas that are heavily patented because the newcomer to the market for example is afraid that if he makes a new product in this area like smartphones he will be unable to even sell his smartphone because he will be sued by the dominant patent holding companies so he doesn't even go into that line of business so of course he doesn't invest in research and development in it. So clearly and copyright also leads to distortions of the whole publishing industry, closed business models, difficult to find books and papers online. They're locked up by these publishing houses that rely upon the copyright model. Now none of this should be surprising because the origin of patent and copyright actually lies with mercantilism. Going back to the Statute of Anne in 1710 which was one of the early major modern copyright statutes and the Statute of Monopolies of 1624 both in England which was one of the early patent laws. At the height of mercantilism in the 1500s in England almost every good you could imagine was covered by monopolies that the monarch had granted to different guilds or companies in exchange for favors and maybe helping to collect taxes such as monopolies on playing cards, leather, iron, soap, coal, books and wine. Now these companies did not invent these things they were just granted the privilege to be the only one who could sell these things. They even enlisted the state to do warrantless searches and seizures of their competitors to make sure that they were not violating these monopolies. So in other words along with the state monopolies during the height of mercantilism came a lot of intrusive searches and seizures and the collaboration between the state and the industries that had the monopolies that harmed the consumers and harmed the competitors. France even tortured and executed people they broke them on the wheel who pirated fabric designs that the state had granted monopolies in and the wool exporters had the monopoly on wool exporting in England and they would collect the taxes for the king in exchange for this monopoly. So we clearly see this is not compatible with the free market and with competition and with private property rights and with capitalism. But this is exactly the situation we have now. We have mercantilism under another name, intellectual property. We have the movie industry and the music industry in the United States for example the RIAA and the MPAA demanding warrantless searches to stop DVD and CD counterfeiting or piracy they call it. We have private companies helping the Immigration and Custom Enforcement Agency in the US, the ICE seized domain names accused of squatting. We have ISPs collaborating with the Obama Administration and with content providers to do the same thing. So we have a lot of the same things happening now as a result of copyright and patent. We also have an unholy alliance between say patent holders and copyright monopoly holders and the state. For example Microsoft to take an example is a profitable successful company which has provided valuable services and products to people but its profits are undoubtedly much higher than they would have been in a free market without copyright because of their ability to use copyright to stop competition or pirating or counterfeiting of their operating system. Which has allowed them to charge monopoly prices for this. So Microsoft over the last few decades has accumulated tens or hundreds of billions of dollars of profits that they wouldn't have otherwise had. And then they are able to use these profits to pay politicians in Congress in the form of bribes or campaign contributions or even in the form of collected taxes so the government benefits from this by legal bribes and by taxes. So they grant a monopoly to Microsoft. Microsoft makes extra high profits. Some of that is returned back to the state in these forms. So they all benefit. The consumers don't. The competitors don't. And the free market suffers. And also Microsoft uses these profits to buy patents or to acquire patents which is another form of monopoly. So it uses copyright profits to accumulate a huge patent war chest. And then they use that patent war chest to make even more monopolistic profits by suing competitors like Android smart phone makers for example. They're already extracting several dollars from every sale of an Android competing handset now because of their patent threats. So this system just feeds back on these entrenched oligopolistic industries. The state laws actually create oligopolies because it makes it harder for smaller companies to compete. And then the state perversely comes in and introduces competition law or antitrust law claiming it needs to be our savior to make sure there's competition on the market to prevent monopolies or oligopolies from forming on the free market even though the very reason that these oligopolies form, the very reason that we have a lack of competition on the market is because of monopolies the state gave to these companies in the first place in the form of patent law. So we still have mercantilism. It's just institutionalized and democratized now. And it's not called mercantilism anymore. So let's make it clear. There are some people who oppose IP from the left or from an anti-property point of view. They are buying into the same mistaken package deal or notion that the pro-IP people do. They both accept the idea that intellectual property is a legitimate type of property. Now this is their mistake. They are both wrong. The people that are in favor of patents on capitalist grounds are wrong to think that we should have IP because it's a type of property right. It's not a type of property right. And the people who are opposed to IP because they're opposed to property rights are wrong to oppose property rights. The correct point of view, the libertarian point of view, the free market and Austrian point of view is to favor property rights but to recognize that state-granted monopolies like patent and copyright are not property rights and undercut property rights. Now let me mention quickly where the libertarian landscape is when it comes to this issue. There's always been opposition to these monopolies, of course. In fact, this is one thing that led to the statute of monopolies of 1624 in England. Because of these abuses that I pointed out earlier, the Crown was granting so many patent monopolies to the guilds and to merchants and to supplicants and to court cronies that it just became out of hand. Parliament banned most of these patents with the statute of monopolies. Except they made an exception for patents for novel inventions. And this is why we still have patents today on inventions because Parliament only banned 95% of the monopolies and left one small type in place and unfortunately that's grown into the patent system we have now. But in the modern era, after most of the industrialized world has finally adopted sort of an American style patent system and copyright system, since the early 1800s let's say, we can identify four historical phases of movements to abolish patent and copyright. So the first one we can identify is roughly the second half of the 1800s, like 1850 to 1873. Now, at that point in time, some countries still had not adopted patent systems like Switzerland and there was opposition to this by the free market, by the free trade people. People that were in favor of free markets and free trade saw these things as monopolies and they opposed them. But what happened was in 1873 there was a depression caused by the panic of 1873, a large, I think, global depression. And what this did was it caused an increase in nationalism and a reduced opposition to tariffs and protectionism. That is, free trade became less popular because of the emergency of the Great Depression. And this made the opposition to patents evaporate because it was part of the free trade movement. So in other words, a government-caused recession caused free trade to go out of favor for a while, which caused opposition to patents to evaporate. So the final nations like Netherlands, which had previously abolished patents because of people seeing what a disaster it was, and caved in, and Switzerland, which never had a patent system, and they went ahead and adopted patent systems and the whole world joined on the bandwagon. So the first movement was against, but a depression ended it. And then in the late 1800s after this, there was vigorous debate among the individualist anarchists, like Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker. And Lysander Spooner was in favor of intellectual property, but Benjamin Tucker rejected IP, similar to some of the arguments I've given now. He had a very clear-reaching vision on this, but this was a small group of individuals anarchists, so that opposition didn't go very far. In the meantime, during this debate by the free market economists, the defenders of these patent and copyright laws, such as in France in the late 1700s, right before the turn of the century, started using the language of property rights to describe these monopoly privileges because they knew that the concept of monopoly wasn't popular with economists and even with the public. So they started calling them property as basically a propaganda ploy, even though, of course, they're not property. Anyway, so let's return to the third stage of opposition. We can say roughly from the early 1900s, let's say 1930s to about 1995, the dawn of the internet, there was an increasing amount of skepticism of IP by libertarians and proto-libertarians and free market economists, like Arnold Plant, an economist in 1934, and Fritz Machlup, an Austrian economist in the 1950s, had serious reservations about the empirical claims made for IP that it stimulates innovation or creativity. So there was a lot of skepticism by them, and then the latter half of the 20th century, more of the explicitly libertarian thinkers like Hayek in 1948, Murray Rothbard in the 60s, Leonard Reed, the founder of the Foundation for Economic Education in the U.S., and others like Wendy McElroy and Sam Konkin in the 80s, and Tom Palmer in the 80s, started seriously questioning the compatibility of patent and copyright with libertarian property rights. And they made great arguments, and a lot of their arguments are the type I've repeated today, but they didn't have a certain urgency because this was the pre-internet age. Well, around 1995, when the internet arrived on the scene, a lot of the patent and especially copyright abuses became much more exacerbated and more common, started getting really out of hand, and everyone's more aware of this now because we could see news stories on the internet on a daily basis almost of one crazy patent or copyright. So I'm getting close to my conclusion, so in getting close to that, let me say that we need to not see the solution to this problem as recognizing the patent system or copyright as broken or in need of reform. It's not broken, it's not in need of reform. It's in need of abolition. It's not really broken, it's doing exactly what it is designed to do, it's giving competitive advantages to government-favored applicants and holders. So the problem is not software patents. Getting rid of software patents won't solve the problem. The problem is not big corporations, the problem is not junk patents, the problem is not the copyright term is too long. It is too long, but even if it was 30 years, it would be too long. It would be a problem. We have to recognize as libertarians, as principled advocates of freedom, of science, of human knowledge, of information, of competition on the free market, of justice and private property rights, that patent and copyright are completely 100% antithetical to the purpose of property rights. It undercuts property rights, it impedes science, and it impedes learning and free expression, and both of science and knowledge and property are designed to overcome the problem of scarcity and to permit human prosperity. So to favor something that undercuts these is to oppose human prosperity and human freedom and human learning and ideas. So I would say don't mend it, end it. Thank you very much. Hope you've enjoyed this. Feel free to email me with any questions. And as I said, you can download the slides for this on my website, stefanconcella.com. Thank you and good afternoon.