 talklive.com and here's Mark. All right and it's another Edgington post interview and today I've got with us well a big name if not in the libertarian movement at least on this show we mentioned him on a reasonably regular basis so I thought you know since he had an article that was coming out it might be a good idea to do this particular interview and I have with me and I'm gonna try to say it right here Stefan Cansella he said it perfectly okay Stefan pretty much every time we say your name on the show we say Stephen that's okay I come whatever you call me okay now you've got a new article out at meces.org and it's called how to improve patent copyright and trademark law and since you're probably the only trade you know IP lawyer in the country that's real libertarian you seem to get saddled with well all the stuff that is IP law as far as you know libertarian thought right that is exactly right and you know I know that you're you're probably a really well rounded libertarian however nobody wants to talk to you about your thoughts on roads and you know courts or law enforcement in a privatized world they want to talk to you about what you think about patents copyrights and trademark yeah that comes up a lot that's right well I'm gonna do that to you again today that's okay so the the article is is great and it came out today at meces.org and I I got a I got an early copy just because I well you know how could I schedule an interview without having an early copy um yeah you're connected now they've got you've you've got a lot of improvements in this article you basically go over the idea of how to improve IP law without short of getting rid of it entirely because for whatever reason that seems to be abhorrent to people and I'm all about believing that there's needs to be some inter you know intermittent steps between you know wherever here is and wherever freedom might end up absolutely end up so tell me about do you want to talk about them individually I patent copyright and trademark or do you want to talk about well let me back up and kind of talk about the like the purpose of this article and how it fits in with the sort of libertarian theory on this um I mean as I've written before I believe that IP law primarily patent and copyright law those are the two big offenders in the system trademark and trade secret law are also types of IP but they're not really as problematic for libertarians in my view um I mean ideally they should be abolished for several reasons which we've talked about before on your show and in other contexts um abolition of course is not on the table you know in my view you know we're often accused of of of favoring things that are not practical and only only taking all or nothing and of course that's not true I think that um any steps towards freedom is an improvement it's just the problem is some things we do are not steps towards freedom like for example you know the voucher system things like that you know when we oppose that we're called idealists or utopians but the problem with the voucher system for example in my view is that it's not a move towards freedom because it expands the welfare state but something that's an unambiguous move towards freedom I think the good thing like if you cut taxes by five percent that's good if you cut taxes by five percent on me and raise them by five percent on someone else it's not unambiguously good right now for patent law there have been a lot of proposals for reform in the last uh 10 15 years it's sort of always hanging out there and it's bubbled to the surface all almost past from of time to time the patent lawyers raise a big stink and they say that they're radical reform they're going to cut patent rights and all this kind of stuff so little gets done and you know I'm a patent attorney I practice I keep up with this stuff and I started a couple years ago cataloging all the changes and I was going to write about them to explain them to libertarians so they would understand the policy changes you know being proposed in congress and what's going on and it's pretty clear that there's almost never a serious change suggested they're all little technical changes and patent lawyers make a big deal about them so that nothing radical will ever get you know passed um and so you know I talked to some friends and they're like well what should we do and I'm like well we should abolish it and they're like well if we can't abolish it what should we do and so I was thinking about it like you think of the legislative toolkit or the patent system what knobs do we have the turn that would really improve things because there's a lot of changes you could make so I wanted to focus on telling people you look if you really want to make serious change okay here's what we should do and so that's why I tried to identify and I focused on patent law in the article although at the end of it I suggested some changes for copyright law and also trademark law but basically I went through a laundry list of changes um for patents and starting with the ones that probably would be the most important that could make the most uh the most um improvement in matters so um do you do you want to go through that list or do you want uh people to read the article that way they'll get a clearer picture let me go through a few of them let me tell you how I came up with the idea I mean so the idea is this the the primary justification that most advocates of intellectual property use is including libertarians uh who favor IP they'll say basically you have to have this as an incentive to produce wealth and innovation basically in terms of artistic creations which is copyright and inventions and scientific and technical things which is patents um and the basically the implicit idea is that um what they say is when you add a patent when you have a patent system it increases overall wealth in society by expanding the amount of innovation that there would be that there otherwise would be and it and I have been on that side of the argument in the past um and I you know essentially after our converse shortly after our conversation I abandon most of that too simply because I believe in intellectual property I just don't believe that the government is the best uh you know organization to protect it I think that it uh it it causes disastrous results when um one uses the government apparatus to protect intellectual property and I and I can see those disastrous results I just think that you I think the two biggest areas that people worry about the most or at least the ones that I did uh were blockbuster movies and drug patents exactly and and that's a consequence with concern which I can understand the respect in which a lot of libertarians have and they they blend that with a principled approach um but focusing on it the way you did I think helps you see the sort of problem with libertarian advocacy of IP and that is that unlike other forms of property like uh you know just property rights and land or uh inheritance rights or roads and things like this you could imagine these things existing in a private court system or a private society without the government but it's really hard to imagine patenting copyright existing without the government supported and if you try to think well it could be created by a private contract raising like for example Robert Hessen has written some interesting stuff a couple decades ago showing that corporations could uh or something like a corporation could exist merely with an assembly of private contracts so if you took away the government limited liability grant and the government incorporation statutes you could still have corporations so you could see how in a private society that thing would still exist but for copyright and patents some people say well it's it's a type of fraud or it's based upon the contract would you stamp on the book all these kind of arguments what they're saying is you could have IP by private contract in a free society but the problem is IP by its nature what we have now affects third parties and you can't do that with copyright so basically unlike other other institutions we have that could survive in some form in a private society patenting copyright cannot so I do think you're right that's one way to see that it could not exist in a private society or in a libertarian private court system well I think it could exist in the sense that it's yours if you can protect it correct so um if for instance I am a large drug manufacturer and I come out with a drug that you know it took a millions and millions of dollars of R&D hundreds of millions of dollars of R&D which by the way those hundreds of millions would still pale in comparison to the the even more hundreds of millions that I would have spent trying to protect that going through the and going through the FDA's system so you know if you one has to figure that in a lot of R&D at this point is going through the governmental systems and the the IP attorneys right and and all that stuff so right and so well so let's let's go back to this utilitarian rationale people you know that they I mean look I think it's a respectable argument to make although I think there are some problems with with the utilitarian approach but if you're serious about this then you would think you would have reasons you would have evidence for this if you say we need a patent system because it creates wealth then you should be able to answer the question well how much wealth does it create in other words there's a cost of the system and allegedly produced benefits and the difference between them is allegedly positive what is it no one can tell you they really have no idea well it's not a serious argument I understand but if the libertarians make the opposite argument that intellectual property stifles the the marketplace once again you cannot quantify especially in that case a negative so you know you've got a you've got an equal and opposite argument on the other side that's true and if we only had utilitarian arguments to make it would it could be a stalemate except for the fact that all of the studies that rely upon sort of standard empirical or utilitarian or wealth maximization by argument they pretty much all conclude that the patent system is either they either conclude that they can't prove that it does anything good or they conclude that it in the sector we looked at it's a it's a it's a harm now you're right you can't always prove it or disprove a negative but the studies the studies lean against what they're trying to show right and I would like to say from a standpoint of somebody who comes from a utilitarian thought process and that's that it that's where I'm coming from I believe from a utilitarian standpoint we should get rid of government sanctioned at IP law because it stifles innovation in the marketplace and I guess the proof was is Mary Ruart writes in in her book healing our world and I think it's the new edition where you know she used to work in the medical field prior to them really pushing the pharmaceutical in the pharmaceutical field prior to them really pushing IP law and really using IP law and she you know said that innovations were bigger than and and and people you know it saved more people more innovations came about that it was bigger than so that cuts out of the two giants inside the IP argument which are drug companies and blockbuster movies it cuts one of them out and my thought process is a utilitarian I love blockbuster movies I really enjoyed avatar but hey you know even if it doesn't work and you know maybe it would right but even if it doesn't work I'm willing to let blockbuster movies go in order to have huge innovations in the area of medicine pharmaceuticals and things like that yeah and I mean in a way that's similar to the the principle argument a lot of libertarians take towards things like I remember when I was sort of learning libertarianism 20 25 years ago you know I was attracted to the argument by a green span at the time and ran about say antitrust law their argument was not primarily a consequentialist it was you know you have the right to sell your products for whatever price you want even if it's bad for consumer welfare according to what some some economists would say so it's first and foremost approach but you know so what I did was I said listen if we want to make some headway let's come up with an argument that that should satisfy even the concerns of you know honest advocates of IP who have utilitarian reasons because they all believe that their the copyright term should not be infinite and it shouldn't be zero they think there's some kind of optimum curve somewhere and the government can find it yeah and they think we're close to it or we're there for some reason and although they can't prove it right so presumably but they keep on changing it I mean the sunny bono law took took what was probably the optimum number there or close to the optimum number for songs and expanded them out to what 99 years and god and god knows when went what they're going to expand it out to after that I mean the person who wrote the the the family of the people who wrote Rudolph the red nose reindeer are never going to work again yeah and it's you know one of the researchers I quoted in the article the guy who talks about uh you know he refers to this as a lapper curve of innovation they think we're on say one side of the peak of that curve you know although they have no reason to think that and not only that like patents for example cover things like plants and regular patents cover pharmaceuticals like you mentioned but also software and uh mechanical inventions electrical inventions and it gives them all the same term basically about seven roughly 17 years well that doesn't make sense how about five years from one seven for the other I mean you would think there'd be optimal curves for each one so the one side fits all situation a problem but it seems to me that if your argument is that um number one you you wouldn't want to you know make it add the death penalty for uh for for patent infringement let's say so that they must think that some some of remedies would be too strenuous that we don't need to go that far or they don't want to make it a 50-year patent term so they obviously think at some point the cost without what are the extra benefits you get well my argument is that if they don't have actual numbers for justifying where we are right now then if I can say listen if I reduce the patent term by 10 years we know that would reduce the cost on the economy significantly so that's definitely a gain and we have no reason to believe that it would be a significant um uh loss of uh incentive effect for innovation there would still be some incentive effect for innovation so to my mind there's there's no basis for an advocate utilitarian advocate of IP to oppose a modest reduction in some of these costs um as unless it's obvious that it would uh you know have a significant reduction in the incentive effects that they favor right and and the thought process there must be for them if we reduce the uh the years that a patent is protected that well at that point that a company has to roll out and very quickly and make its its recoup its r&d money in a in a very short period of time so that'll be better for the marketplace yeah I mean there's there's all kind of compensating costs here and um you know so so let me just mention a few of the top things I I proposed and we can talk about a couple of those the first one will be to reduce the patent term as I mentioned already uh and you already have mainstream advocates like Jeff Bezos the CEO Amazon or the Amazon CEO proposing like a three to five year patent term for software patents anyway um and you know what's the point in anything longer than that I mean are they afraid that somebody's going to steal windows 3.1 and trot that out on the marketplace and steal their uh um you know the Microsoft's position with a 10 year old operating system exactly and you know you can say the same thing for copyright as well I mean even with movies and things like this I mean the bulk of the profits are made in the first several years I mean if you had a 10-year copyright term instead of 120 uh you know you would still have a large incentive to make these movies to recoup the monopoly profits you're able to you know to extract so I mean but it would greatly increase creativity the public comments available for people would free up you know that it would solve so much of these orphan works problems what's an orphan work the orphan works problem is that there are I think millions of works up there that people cannot identify who the owners of copyrighted works are even to contact them to ask permission to copyright and these things are basically out of print they're dead but they're sort of in limbo so they're trapped by the uh the fact that the copyright system is automatic so the copyright unlike patent release where you have to apply for it so it's clear what the patent is on right and who the who the who the owner is for copyright it's just if you find a written work up there uh you may not know who has the right you might not you may not even know who the author is or if you do how to contact them or who has the right yeah so this is a huge problem this orphan works problem this is what amazon is dealing with in part with their attempt to uh to their google books project their google print project um and so I think in a way they're hoping that they're you know they're hoping to be sued in this class action settlement so they can get a judgment from a court saying they're they're free to go forward with this with this scheme otherwise it's in limbo you know um but and so in addition to reducing the term another thing you could do is you could radically cut back the scope of copyright unpatent that means the types of inventions that patents cover they used to cover sort of you know basically methods or technical processes and contraptions inventions apparatuses you know machines or devices and now they cover um software and uh business methods and things like this um you know if we got rid of we rolled it back to the way it was you know 20 years ago there'd be much less scope of patents to cover um copyright i'm sorry uh software which is already covered by copyright and uh business methods and in fact you mentioned the pharmaceutical case this is the case it's mentioned over and over again if if that's really the you know the the example that's given over and over again why don't we just have patents reform suitable then for nothing else right let's it's a great question um you know I think that uh software really should fall into the copyright area because a patent um a patent is on something and I don't I don't have the the verbiage to to properly express this but a patent you can uh you can cross a patent you can get on the wrong side of a patent you can get sued for a patent infringement if you go some if you could invent something accidentally and it's the same whereas a copyright two people can create the same work um you know accidentally and they haven't infringed on each other that's correct yeah copy so copyright basically gives you the right to copy so someone else doesn't copy your work they're not infringing your right if they independently come up with the same solution for a software problem or something like that it's probably because there's only a few types of solutions for that problem and they each came up with it patent cover is functional it covers the way something works or it's configured you don't have to be a copier at all to be liable for patent infringement uh it's just if you're doing what the patent describes you can be liable in fact you you might have independently invented it before the patentee filed his patent yeah it doesn't matter yeah it doesn't matter and so um you know uh so you have these like big chemical companies and people they they have trade secrets they keep their some of their processes secret like they have these novels for mixing chemicals and things like this and they keep them secret for you know 50 years maybe and they they make a great product no one else can quite match the quality of this product and that's perfectly fine that's their right to do that they have that big they they have that big to do about the uh the the old formula for Dr. Pepper I think it was last year or something that came out I don't know if you you heard about it and and then prior to that it was the Kentucky Fried Chicken's original herbs and spices the the the uh grease stained copy of the colonel's original writing uh you know that they had that they were moving under lock and key you know a caravan of 50 uh you know armored trucks driving along moving this very important item that's intellectual property there's no doubt about it but the government isn't doing anything to protect it well and so that is what people the problem is under the current IP regime if you rely upon something like that okay now not so much the KFC case because that's not really a patentable thing so you're not in danger of getting shut down by a patent from someone else usually but but in other cases let's say you have your your your chemical mixing process as a trade secret and you're doing it for a long time some other guy comes along he invents it independently he files a patent on it now he can stop you for making what you've been making for 30 years yeah it's ridiculous it's ridiculous and uh and you know and you ask these advocates of IP well or even like iron ran tried to justify this kind of practice well you had a chance to go to the courthouse and it's like well i didn't want to make it public you know um uh so so and if you think about the pharmaceutical case which we were just talking about um okay if we give them a patent now some people would say well if you give them a five a five year tenure patent well it takes five years to get the FDA approval that's not fair well first of all the patent law has a built in extension it kind of gives you an extension to make up for time you you lose on the government regulatory process but this sort of raises the question why would you trust the government to give you the right incentive to make up for the regulatory delay that they even post on you and to help you have enough profit margins left over after the government has robbed you through taxes and regulations and uh impoverishing society so there's less consumer demand in the first place because they're regulating and taxing them i mean it's just ridiculous how about advocating getting rid of the state regulating and taxing you in the first place how about abolishing the FDA and then we wouldn't have to make up you know give you a monopoly patent grant to sort of make up for the damage we're doing to you for these other programs well that's how the government that's how it constantly works with the government the government creates um you know the government solution creates a government problem so they have to have another government solution which creates another government problem which you know it's just constant controls pre-controls and not only that the government passes antitrust law which says is it legal to abuse a monopoly position or to try to get a monopoly position at the same time they're granting monopolies and so the courts say of course there's a tension in the law there's a tension between the patent law and the antitrust law right they don't say this is stupid they say there's a tension yeah so in other words they say well yeah it looks like you're violating the Sherman antitrust act but on the other hand the government gave you this monopoly so you can use it but you can't abuse it and so then there's all these you know further regulations about what you can do with this antitrust law and this patent law and it's just a big government mess and it's hard to fathom why libertarians of all people would be in favor of this right so now let's go on to copyright and then there's the very few solutions you've got here for a trademark but let's go on to the copyright you suggest in your your first solution there is to radically reduce the term from life plus 70 years for copyright to which means that basically you're you're making it so they're their children their grandchildren maybe even as far as their great grandchildren don't have to work which is ludicrous yes and say 10 years and and on the other side for works that don't have a lot of value they're basically just tied up I mean you tell of this mentality even among scholars and people like this you know I think I I mentioned I talked to some scholar the other day who uh had the book that was published 25 years ago and it's out of print it's hard to find he's not selling any copies making nothing on it but it's sitting there in paper and I asked them well why don't you just you know put a scan copy up on your website it's like oh well I you know I but because that's not fair you know I'm not gonna let people have it for free it's like well that means you want your idea to stay trapped you know trapped in this volume it's this mentality that doesn't help anyone but it's sort of bred into them and and I came across this once too I found a it was a short story and a compilation of liberty it was a liberty short story of science fiction liberty short story so you can see how obscure it is it's it's both liberty oriented and science fiction so it's it's bizarre and I can't remember the name of it off the top of my head but I think it's from visions of liberty by published by Bain publishers or you know I think it was the book before that one in that accomplish anyway it's you know it's it's a few pages long 30 pages long or something and I tried I wanted to read it as a an audiobook for my audience people aren't getting this they're not you know the book has been printed quite some time ago it was sort of out of print if it's sitting on any shelves it's been sitting there it's it's been collecting dust for years there a couple of years there if it was if it was sitting on shelves the author had been dead it was compiled into this book okay and the so I had to call some lawyer in England and then that lawyer called me back gave me the you know some other lawyer in New York I don't remember exactly how it went but basically they told me no you know you can't read this book so I couldn't really do them any good to do that right if there's there's no people aren't the family isn't making money off of this story I'm sorry it's absolutely ludicrous all I was going to do is read it and give it away it is it is ludicrous um um and I think another change we could make that would be a big improvement for copyright would be instead of it it's hard to it's hard to really believe this is the case if it's not pointed out explicitly but under the current regime we have now since the I think since the late 80s um you no longer have to put a copyright notice on a work in fact it doesn't do much good to do it yeah you don't have to register it with the copyright you only have to write it on a piece of paper or fix it in some you know some medium and then you have a copyright yes whether you want it or not and it's almost impossible to get rid of it I mean you can't just put a notice on there saying I don't have a copyright in this because you do yes you do have a copyright and so but a big change in the copyright law in my opinion would be to make it um opt opt in instead of opt out in fact there's not even an opt out right now or at least give you the ability to opt um to opt out if you wish by putting something on there that says that you've opted out that would be a simple change it would be great right now you have the creative commas they've tried to make this thing called CC0 but they're not sure if it'll work in in every country because you know there's no consideration for this contract or it's not really there's no there's no other party you're just putting a notice on there what if you change your mind and you know it's not a fine contract with the reader so these things are have a doubtful validity um so there should be a way to opt out but better yet there should be a way to there should be no copyright unless you request it and apply for it uh so basically they should change it to the more like the way it used to be you should have to have active registration and it should expire like in 10 years unless you renew it and you should have a limited number of times you can renew it right so that would be a big improvement I'd like to point out that there are all kinds of important works of literature out there that people are reading and enjoying that book publishers just publish with you know no rights at all I mean I would you know Robert Louis Stevenson's uh Treasure Island uh Mark Twain's works all these things I saw one recently where somebody wrote um they wrote a book with Tom Sawyer Tom Sawyer and Zombies and it was they they credited Mark Wayne as the author Mark Twain excuse me uh as the author along with the the other author so he sort of you know took chunks of Tom Sawyer and then mixed zombies in or something like that and this is an you know amazing creative bit of work where uh you know the the descendants of Mark Twain are are jilted out of their rightful earnings right because you know with his lifetime plus 70 years well I don't know how close that would put us to today but it seems like he was around the 1850s so if you think about it of course it's obvious that everything we do in life that's technical or creative or innovative or artistic builds upon things we've learned yeah basically human life human society progresses because we have an accumulating body of knowledge right artistic knowledge you know literature fire scientific knowledge and we build on that and thank god that it's not uh that it's not a scarce like property is but thank god it can be transmitted from mind to mind and built upon from generation to generation sure because basically copyright and patent law seek to hamper learning yep and transmission of knowledge that's what it seeks to do absolutely true can you imagine if every electronic device that way I think it shows how ridiculous it is um I don't know if you want to go through a few more of these specific examples um yeah go ahead be still there yeah yeah go ahead yeah what I was going to let me mention that so you mentioned trade secret earlier is a more innocuous practice and I agree it is but even basically the state corrupts everything it touches and I didn't mention trade secret in here because it was mostly about patent and I didn't you know it was getting over long I deal with trade secret and trademark pretty extensively in my longer piece against intellectual property but even trademark and trade secret are corrupted by the state's influence for example the way trade secret works is let's say you and your employees have a contractual agreement to keep something secret and one of your employees uh leaks it to his friend at a cocktail party or to a competitor or to his new employer if he leaves if if the secret is still containable if it hasn't gotten out to the world at large the court can issue an injunction against these third parties and tell them you can't reveal this and if you do you can go to jail for contempt of court so basically the court steps in even there and it enforces these rights against third against third parties but at least there's some basis for these for that idea you know it's based in the original contract yeah although it's extended by the state and trademark law has been corrupted beyond uh its original foundations first of all trademark law for the libertarian ought to be based upon fraud yeah that's where I see it as a fraud issue if somebody the plaintiff is going to be the customer who's defrauded by this guy not but not the other company who's not involved in the transaction well one might think that um that the company which has an interest in protecting its uh its trademark might take up the case in sort of a class action manner for the the the people who are injured for instance if somebody puts out a cola calls that cola delicious coca cola and um then I drink delicious coca cola in it and it in fact tastes like licorice and it I'm horrified by it but it was only 50 cents so I spit it out I throw it on the ground and I walk away I haven't been you know like I I may or may not come after that company and then what what are my damages in a in a world where they give a real and and good you know and fair damages yeah and I agree that I agree I agree with that and you would have to have a more a more a extensively worked out theory of class action that's libertarian compatible to go with that but you could imagine an argument that look in a private society um the the real victim of the crime is the is a defrauded customer but they're not going to pursue this we can presume their consent to grant sort of an implicit uh consent to the uh to the trademark holder to represent them okay you could you could I could see that but in that case the argument would only be for cases of fraud basically which is the case you described but it would not cover all these other cases of knockoff for example the Louis Vuitton or the Rolex watches these people are not defrauded they know that they're buying a knockoff they want to buy a knockoff because it's cheaper in that case you could not use the theory you mentioned to justify the kind of trademark actions we have now and and furthermore trademark law has been extended about 15 20 years ago with something called dilution so now under under normal trademark law you have to show that the consumer is basically there's a there's a likelihood of confusion you know he's basically almost defrauded but under dilution you just have to show that this other company's use of their own mark might dilute the value of your mark punish it or something like that so this is the basis of all these trademark claims you see nowadays and it's completely illegitimate and not grounded in fraud at all make sense to me i mean i i i have to say that it it seems silly to be going after people that are selling you know joker leaves or or whatever knockoff thing now if they're selling it is all the south but i think with the recent one north face south but i don't even i don't i don't even know you know no one no one's going to think that north face is the ones really behind the south but you know it's sort of a play on word it's a joke makes sense so i can mention one more here that i have written down here well first of all we can i think we can all agree all libertarians should agree that we should get rid of the digital millennium copyright act provisions which are sort of part of copyright law now this is basically what they did was they said okay it's illegal to copy something that's protected and it's illegal to to decrypt you know copyright prevention techniques like encrypted works so you can't you can't unencrypted you know an encrypted dvd okay you can see that as an extension of copyright law it's not a good one and then they said well what if someone is selling a device that could be used to do that so now it's basically a criminal or a sense to sell a device that other people could use to decrypt so i guess every computer is theoretically a dangerous weapon now right because they can be programmed to decrypt things there was this at one point this uh playstation 2 device that allowed you to to get cheats and stuff and on games and uh you know probably play games i think they were copied or something like that i don't know if you you know what this device was called but i i don't remember but um it was basically a hacker gamer device and you had to well you actually had to solder the thing in in order to make it work and that thing would be illegal i haven't seen one advertised in a while so it probably did become illegal yeah they call them anti-circumvention technologies so i mean so you see all these it's like you said earlier read controls read controls and to enforce these arbitrary and unjust laws um that are basically artificial schemes of course you have to keep finding well i was telling some friends the other day about one um one of my friends said well um you know i was explaining that um uh it's hard to get protection for um like lego blocks or trivial pursuit cards you know you could sell something like that that works for this game as long as you don't i mean there's no patent on it there's only a trademark issue and as long as you don't pretend like it's authorized by the maker of trivial pursuit of lego you can sell a block that says this block will fit on a lego set it's a true statement and they sell them they do sell them yeah you can do that and um in in the america at least you can have comparative advertising you can actually mention the other competitors trademark as long as you don't do so deceitfully uh so you can say you know coca-cola tastes better than pepsi they can actually say the word pepsi in the ad i think in europe europe you can't do that but what what you'll have people do is like you'll have uh the reason laser cartridges for example are so expensive for for laser printers um and this is how hp and these companies make their monies off the cartridges right just like the razor blades of the safety razors what they do is they will intentionally invent a pretty small or trivial in circuit or invention that they can get a patent on something that you really don't need to do this but they get a patent on some little circuit that measures something and they'll put you know half a circuit in the cartridge and half a circuit in the machine or they'll put all the circuit the machine and you have to have that in there for the machine to work basically they make a product they put a patented item in it on purpose that you have to have for to be compatible with the laser printer so that if anyone sells a cartridge they're infringing a patent right yeah and so what people started doing was they would say well i'll just buy from overseas so congress patches the patent law and adds an importation thing they say okay well i'll make just part of it overseas i'll put it part of it here i'll put it together here so congress passed the law they covered that they covered that loophole so people keep trying to find ways around these these crazy laws and the government keeps trying to chase them it's just like you know people find ways around tax loopholes and the government patches the tax code to catch what they're doing yep that's how it goes the government's always got a new solution for a problem that it created it it's amazing now tell people where they can find this article at mesis.org it was it's at mesis.org and my fcs.org and it's someone one of the mesis daily articles that was published today on the 20th and i always have links to my articles um on my own website which is stephanconcella.com s-t-e-p-h-a-n concella k-i-n-s-e-l-l-a dot com thanks very much stephen and uh i hope to have you on again soon thanks mark i enjoy it yep thank you attention all active duty members and veterans of the u.s military your proud service to your country and titles you with the right to participate in special va loan programs with benefits not available to the general public like the ability to purchase a new home with no down payment or mortgage insurance or refi with cash out up to 100% of your present home equity with less direct credit criteria you are entitled to these benefits review them online at va radio dot com this is tim louis from i freedom 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