 Okay. Hey, this is Stefan Kinsella. I'm talking to you from Houston, Texas, where I live. I'm a patent attorney by profession and a libertarian writer and speaker, and I've been a libertarian since high school and from Louisiana originally. And I would consider myself to be the type of libertarian, an anarchist libertarian, influenced heavily by the Austrian School of Economics and Murray Rothbard and other thinkers such as Ein Rand, who was not an anarchist, and Mises, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe and many others. So that's basically where I'm coming from in my life and approach to political philosophy. So how did you become a libertarian? What would that have been? What year would that have been? Probably 82 when I was like 81 or 82 when I was a sophomore or a junior in high school. And I was sort of apolitical, didn't know anything about it, was just interested in science and philosophy and all that stuff. And a librarian recommended that I read The Fountainhead by Ein Rand. So I read it and that got me down the Ein Rand path at first. But then that finally led to Austrian economics and anarcho-capitalism. So that was pretty early on. Did you, so that would have been before, I know a lot of people recently have been brought into it by Ron Paul or had their attention drawn to it by other sources? No, no, I was way before Ron Paul. I've always liked Ron Paul, but I've never really learned anything from him. I think he's just someone who has adhered to certain ideas. I was at, I went to Louisiana State University, LSU, and I was there from 83 to 80, like, to 1991, eight years. And when I was there, Ron Paul actually ran for president in I think 88 it was. And I was a libertarian, but I was still skeptical of liberty. I was, I was Randian. I was, you know, so I was, their politics is libertarian, but they, she hated libertarians. So I thought she was right in condemning them. I thought there was something wrong with them, right? That they were not identical to us. But I kept seeing their pamphlets around school and listening to, and everything they said sounded similar to Ayn Rand's politics. What did Ayn Rand hate about libertarians? Well, I think it was, it was number one, it was competition. And number two, they didn't buy her whole philosophy. They was just like her political, the wing, the political aspect of her philosophy. So she has an ethics and a metaphysics and a epistemology and a moral theory and an aesthetic theory. And they just took the politics part, right? And she thought it had to be an integrated whole. And she also thought they plagiarized her and ripped her off, which is ridiculous. If you're a thinker, you want to influence people to adopt your ideas. And when they do, then you attack them for it is strange. And plus a lot of them were, were anarchists and she hated anarchists. Do you think they took her, I guess her philosophy too far or her ideas too far? So she had a long, I mean, they still reject libertarianism. But I think that's basically the reasons. But I thought she was right at first, until I kept seeing, you know, evidence to the contrary. Yeah, that is interesting. I have heard, I did hear Walter Block say something similar about if you would disagree with her with something, she would basically kick you out and wouldn't have anything to do with you anymore, would cut off all contacts, so to speak. Yeah, you had to buy her whole philosophy. And that she thinks so she thinks libertarians have no, I mean, it's almost like the thick or religious perspective on liberty, where you anchor your political views in a broader philosophy, you know, that encompasses like a worldview or everything. Yeah, so like that, like some, some religious people would say you can't really have a solid political philosophy or ethics, if it's not grounded in a deeper moral law, that kind of thing. And Rand had a similar view, but it was more secular, you know. So she thought the foundations were shaky and that they were arbitrary, like if you just happened to like liberty for no articulable reason, then you weren't really a reliable ally and all that. So it was sort of that kind of view. So how did you go from there to being more libertarian and then into the anarchy side of things? What were some, were there certain people you encountered or arguments that clinched it for you? Well, I guess, you know, I bought into her, you know, she has, I think the two fundamental flaws that she made were on intellectual property, because she bases her whole philosophy of property rights on this idea that things you create a value or things you have property rights in. And that works to a degree when you talk about land and other resources, but it also- Things can hold in your hand. Yeah, but then she thought it meant, well, if you create an idea, like then you also own that. So that was the root of her whole philosophy. And I think that's wrong as we can get into. And then her other is, you know, the idea that you need, government is usually bad if it's too big, but you need limited government because without, without government, there's anarchy and anarchy. Anarchy is necessarily lawlessness because you could have competing governments, basically, or agencies that could have wars with each other. But of course, she herself did not favor one world government, which she rationed, she logically should have, following her own reasoning, right? Because we have 200 governments, nation state governments in the world today. And unless you have one supreme government overall to ensure uniformity of laws and to ensure that they don't fight each other, then we still have anarchy with respect to each other. So logically, the objectivists should want there to be a one-world state. And some of them admit that that ideally that is the ideal solution, but that in today's world, it would be too, it would be too problematic. So they sort of hedged their bets on that. Yeah. What's that meme that's going around where, you know, we can't have anarchy, wouldn't warlords take over? And then it has a picture of different United States presidents and Vladimir Putin and all these different people. Yeah. Yeah. So I would say it was, it was, it was a long time. I think there was probably the key book that made me start thinking hard about it was The Tannahills. Morrison, Linda Tannahill wrote a classic book in the 70s, I think, called The Market for Liberty, which lays out the extensive sort of the Randian menarchists' views to an anarchist. Of course, Rothbard and David Friedman, people like that. But it was really The Tannahills, I think, that made me finally admit that you just can't, once you believe in individual rights like Rand did, and that it's always wrong to initiate force against people, then you have to say, well, you can't tax them and you can't, you can't use force against them to prevent them from using their own security providers as long as they're not committing aggression. And that's what the government has to do. The state has to do one of those two things to exist. It has to either tax or it has to outlaw competition. And both of those actions require the use of force against innocent people who have not committed aggression, which is what's prohibited by the nonaggression principle that's key to Ein Rand's political philosophy and libertarianism. So it's just by logic, the state is inherently criminal or aggressive and therefore it's unjust. That's the basic argument for anarchy. So did you become a patent attorney while you were still Randian? It seems very interesting that a patent attorney would write a book on, against intellectual property. I don't know if you can elaborate on that. In a way, it's a coincidence because the one thing in college and in law school that always bothered me was Ein Rand's argument for patent and copyright because it's unlike her other arguments. She comes up with this artificial argument for why it makes sense to have these so-called natural property rights that expire after a certain finite time, like copyrights expire after roughly 100 or so years and patents expire after about 17 years, whereas other property rights never expire. So if they're a natural property right, why did they expire and why was Ein Rand in favor of that? And the argument just seemed arbitrary and also the number of years seemed arbitrary. What's the right number of years? Why not just 16 years instead of 17 or whatever? At least with property taxes, it's dependent on your ability to continue paying. Yeah, there's some articulable principle, but for patents, there's no principle whatsoever. It's just totally arbitrary and that didn't seem right. So I always thought that there was some better argument for patent and copyright. I assumed they were in intellectual property because it's called that and I assumed it's part of capitalism in the free market because it's in the US Constitution, which is I think that's why Ein Rand believed in it because she moved here from Russia and she worshipped the US because it was so much better than Russia in communism. So she assumed that everything in the Constitution was basically capitalist, right? But I think she was just wrong. So she came up with a sort of tortured argument trying to justify it, but she never succeeded. So I always thought there was something wrong with the argument and I started writing more and more on libertarian theory myself like on rights theory and then later on different things, some legal theory. And in my law practice, I first did oil and gas law, but then I decided to switch to patent law right around 1993 or 94. And at the same time, I started turning my attention towards trying to come up with an argument, a better argument that Ein Rand and others had given for patent law and copyright law. And since I knew more and more about the law itself as I was practicing, I started reading, you know, all my reading on the area helped me study it. But finally, I gave up trying to prove it because I realized I was failing because I was trying to do the impossible. I was trying to justify something that's unjustifiable. So as part of my attempt to justify it, I realized that it's unjustifiable and that it's totally contrary to property rights and to the free market and capitalism. Is that the topic that you find you get the most resonance with? I know that's most of your talks at least at Mises Yu are on intellectual property. Um, yeah, at Mises, you know, in the beginning days, I started going right after I met Rothbard once in October, November of 94, right before he died in two months later. And then I started attending the Austrian scholars conferences and I would give talks on a variety of topics, rights theory, contract theory, causation, legislation, and then intellectual property. So it was just like one subset of what I would speak on. And it wasn't my main interest and it's still not really. But because I'm sort of one of the few people who really understands the law and Austrian economics and libertarian theory. You're more of a much more of an authority on it. They're just hardly anyone else. And so I wrote on it because I thought I had to kind of get out of my system and put the issue to bed. And then I was going to move on to other things that I have. But yeah, most people know me for that because that idea kind of arose at the right time. Well, it's really the other way around. I mean, one reason I turned my attention to it, in part, my own personal timing in my life, like practicing law and becoming a budding libertarian scholar. But also that was around right around the time, you know, 94, 95, that's when the internet basically started. And at that point in time, all the problems caused by copyright and patent in the previous centuries were mostly unseen by the average person. They were always there and they plagued businesses and they slowed down innovation and they distorted free speech. But it wasn't so obvious until the digital revolution in the internet, right? When then you started having piracy and then you started having copyright crackdowns. So that's when libertarians started having sort of a cognitive dissonance because most of them were in favor of IP, but they saw being so-called abused by copyright holders and by the state and restricting internet freedom. And so now it's affecting your daily person's life. So people started turning their, yeah, so they started turning their attention to it and trying to wonder about it. Like, is it really good idea? And then the people that were defending it started doubling down their defenses and being on the rear guard, like putting put on the defensive. And so in the middle of all this, I kind of came up with like, I'll say definitive, but like an authoritative approach grounded in solid libertarian principles, but also with total awareness of the way the law works. So like a lot of people that write on IP or like political philosophers or philosophers or economists and they don't really understand the actual patent and copyright law itself. Like they have a general understanding, but it's so arcane that, you know, I'll read it and I cringe sometimes because they'll confuse trademark and copyright or patent and trademark or trade secret in this or they'll confuse plagiarism with copyright or they'll call it fraud or contract breach. They just get all these things all tangled up. So you have to kind of go back to basics in your libertarian and economics to kind of to revisit like, why do we believe in rights and what are rights? What are property rights and how does economics interrelate to it? You have to kind of sort those things out in a more clear fashion to kind of solve the IP puzzle. So the IP puzzle is pretty easy once you see everything in a clear way, but you have to first see everything in a clear way to, you know, to get there. Right. Well, I was watching, I guess there's a mini documentary about the invention of the, of the screw and like Phillips versus the flathead and Allen keys and all that stuff. The guy that invented the Phillips, he had a patent on it. And the only reason it's so ubiquitous is I think it was either a car manufacturer, it was Henry Ford or somebody like that offered to buy him out of the patent and all these things. And it was like the only reason that that took off is because it became standardized was because somebody bought the patent for it, but then a whole bunch of people started infringing on it and just adopting it faster than anybody could catch or something like that. And so it was like eventually it would expire eventually anyway, but it, but if it takes 17 years, it could slow things down. I mean, right, you know, like the US in World War one, when it started our airplane industry, even though the airplane really started here in the US, our industry had been slowed down and plagued by patent wars between people claiming various patents on it. So when World War one started, we were rarely underdeveloped in the airplane industry. So I think we had all the countries had to go to France and things like that. So, you know, it retarded the development of the airline industry. There's lots of, we're so used to these systems that we take it for granted, like the copyright system, we take it for granted that you can't sing happy birthday in a restaurant without permission. That finally expired, but yeah. Well, now it didn't expire, but there was a lawsuit that finally showed that it was public domain all along. But of course, for 40 years or something, someone had been collecting millions of dollars of royalties from everyone. And it's too late to get that back, you know, so it did its damage. But the point is patent and copyright heavily distort culture and industry. And we don't even notice it. So it leads to artificial, like all kinds of artificial things that we take for granted now. Like, for example, like all the laser printers you buy, they're not compatible with each other, which is kind of stupid, right? Because most things you want to make them compatible so that you can have competition. Consumers prefer compatibility, but they all have these patents on these circuits. They just make these circuits like a mating circuit they make. So like half the circuit is in the printer and half's in the cartridge. So they have to each have the circuit to work so that if anyone makes a generic cartridge, they have to put that circuit in there. And that's infringing on a patent on the circuit, which is useless. But it's just, I mean, all kinds of things like that, right? So yeah, people frown on things like I know in the camera world, Sony has their own proprietary memory card called a memory stick. And it only works in Sony things because Sony is trying to get adoption because they're the only people that make that style of memory card and they don't license it to anybody. But in the technology world, because things move so fast and there's so many different ways to make a memory card, you know, it's the ones that have basically become open source and most widely used that become adopted. Not, you know, SD cards are definitely the standard. And it's because they tried to work and be compatible with everything. That was interesting to watch. I remember I had Sony, I think they call it magic, magic stick or something like that. And it was a little mp3 type system. But it was heavily copy protected. I think you had to have the CD in your computer to play a song. I mean, it was so ridiculous, you know. And then Apple came out and they and Steve Jobs, I think made these deals with iTunes and the music industry to start having just mp3 files, which are which are have no DRM. Right. And so that changed the industry and Sony lost out when they remember they used to be the leaders with Walkmans and they could have had this digital Walkman, but they insisted on copy protection, probably to satisfy the content providers that really can't even blame them. But you can see how these things lead to distortion. I mean, you have people self censoring all the time, like when you post a YouTube video, you got to be careful not to sing a song or have it in the background because you'll get struck down. Because of the because of the because of the digital millennium copyright system, which forces YouTube to do that to avoid liability under copyright law. So our entire society is heavily distorted because of all this. And I have heard and you can correct me if this is wrong. I have heard that there were more music sales when things like Napster and other different pirating so called avenues started to come up with the increase of music piracy and copyright piracy. The sales will actually go up because now people are being introduced to more things and then they decide to buy the full quality copy or a CD or an album. Is that true? Do you know anything about that? I think there's something to that at least in certain phases of where we are in the cycle. I think it's true with books, too. Like there's so many there's so much creative work now in the world, which is another argument against copyright. They say it's necessary for creativity. And yet copyright law is largely unenforceable now because of encryption and torrenting and the internet and digital stuff. So basically copyright is a dead letter now for most people. And yet they're still an outpouring of creative music. So the danger most creators, artists or novelists or whatever, or musicians, the danger they face is obscurity, right? So they want to get their notice so they can sell tickets to their movies or to their concerts or whatever. I do think that the age of sales it may be over, but it's not because of copyright or piracy. It's just because technology permits streaming now and people just prefer streaming and the royalties on streaming are a lot lower, partly because piracy is out there. But also just they have people have so many options of different artists with all unique songs, but now you only have so much time in the day to listen to different artists. Well, yeah, if you remember, yeah, so now curation is the service people really want. They want someone to just pick it for them. And there was a brief period of time where people that sold vinyl records could make a lot of money. And then for a while it was audio tapes and things like that. And then it was CD, the CD generation, what maybe 30 years it lasted. People like Madonna and people like that making tens of millions of dollars. And those days are pretty much gone except for the hyper hyper superstars and even they don't sell. And then you had people ripping. Remember if you used to rip things and they would have these little they would trade these thumb drives or these hard drives full of music and movies to no one. I don't think many people do that anymore, maybe in the third world they do, but it's just too much. There's too much stuff coming out. Your little collection is going to be outdated. You don't have to manage that. So then people started buying music from iTunes, but they didn't really buy it. They just had a license. And now they didn't even do that anymore. They just constrain, which is the nicest solution. But those do make it harder to make money using the old business models, but that's just because technology has made the industry change. And when the industry changes, you have to adapt your business models to make money. Just like when the automobile came about, it put the buggy whip manufacturers out of business and the candle makers suffered when the light bulb came about. Things change when technology and business models change. Yeah, I don't hear anybody be moaning the loss of the blubber industry and whaling. Right. Well, and it's the same sort of thing with the film industry with copyright. You originally just had, it was a theatrical release. There wasn't a home video. There was no television. There was nothing. It was just a film. And so that's where you made money on making a film and showing a film and then some of the concessions. And now there's basically no money in any of that anymore, except for some of the huge blockbusters. And now, like you said, it's in curation. So you've got Netflix and all these different services, which tell it what movies you like. And it will try to guess what other movies that you would like to watch, just because there's so much to go through. You don't have time. The way I think about it, I think COVID, COVID, of course, distorted everything, but in non-COVID times, I still think going to the movie theater is going to be popular. So if you think about it, yeah, in the old days, big blockbusters and movies on large scales, given, you know, taking inflation into account, they were possible based purely on ticket sales at the box office. Right. And then after that, they're all these secondary and tertiary income streams got added on, like going to cable, like HBO and then movie hotel rooms and then airplanes and then rebroadcasting on television networks later. And then later video, video sales, video rentals and video sales on VHS tapes. And by the way, that was almost killed by a Supreme Court decision, the Sony case in the 80s, I believe it was, where there was a question about whether when consumers use their own video recorders or VHS recorders to record like a television show that was broadcast on the airwaves, whether they were violating copyright. Okay. And that case was decided five to four. So by one vote, the whole videotaping industry was rescued. It could have been lost because of copyright. And the movie industry, of course, fought it. But of course, they were benefited from it because it opened up this whole, you know, blockbuster rentals and all this, and they could sell movies and then DVDs later and Blu-rays and all that. So it basically helped them. So quite often they fight things that would help them. But that's just, that's the way it goes with the interest and people with no, they have no incentive to be creative in their thinking because they can rest on their easy monopoly to make, to rake money in it. They don't want to have to adapt. They want, in another sense, they want to have their cake and eat it too. If copyright really existed and they were so concerned with people stealing things from them, why wouldn't, why would they ever sell things on home video? Why not just go to the, just do theater and where you can monitor and make sure that people aren't recording and making second-hand copies? Because they want the secondary income streams. They want the extra income streams, but they don't want the benefits that people get. So it's like, you know, pick one. Well, and this is the, this is kind of the principle, the simple argument against IP is that there's a distinction and this is what people have a hard time wrapping their heads around this because they're used to the idea of this. And, but this is where I bring Austrian economics into it. But, you know, there's a simple concept that sounds complicated because the word is praxeology. It's this kind of crazy Latin term or Greek term that Mises came up with. It just means the logic of human action. It just means how we analyze what it means for us to do things in the world to act. And, and it's a simple thing that we human beings see the future coming. We have an idea of what it is and we don't like something about it. So we want to change it. So we look around us in the world and we use some tools or means to change things, right? So all human action is always an attempt to achieve some different state of the world in the future by interfering in the course of events. That's what human action is. So it's the use of a means or a scarce resource or a tool it's the use of something your body or the dirt or, you know, a future outcome. And, and, but it's guided by knowledge. So you can't do anything if you don't know anything. You have to know something about the way calls and effect work. You have to know that to catch a fish I can put a line in the water with a hook on it and I can cook it over a fire and eat it and it will give me nursery. You have to know these things and you have to have the availability. You have to have arms that work and you have to have a tool. You have to have a string and a rod, you know, and you have a fish and a stream nearby you have to have these. So you have to have knowledge to guide your action and the action has to use scarce means. So both these things are critical to any human action and the things that we use they're the type of things people can have a fight over or conflict because only one person can use this fish at a time or this or this or this fishing pole at a time or my body. So we have property rights to specify who gets to use these things. That's the whole point of property rights is to solve conflicts among things that you can have a conflict though. But it does not apply to knowledge because knowledge can be spread freely like when someone learns a better way to plant crops or a better way to build a house like using log cabins logs instead of mud or maybe you know building a log building a log house instead of living in a cave. When people learn or using fire to cook things or putting animal skin on you for clothing or using a wheel on a cart to help it roll instead of dragging it. You know when people come up with these ways of doing things that makes their action more efficient other people learn that's how society progresses. So the body of knowledge that we can use dip into to to decide what to do in the world always expands. This is why we're richer than the past generations because the body of knowledge keeps getting bigger and bigger. But property rights never apply to knowledge because it's not a scarce thing. You can have conflict over it. Like you and I can't use the same tractor at the same time. But we can both rely on two plus two equals four at the same time. Yeah and we can both use the same tilling method or the same farm planting technique or the same way of rationing fertilizer on the crops. We can all do the same or we can all use the same recipe to bake a cake in our own homes using our own ingredients in our own bowls in our own ovens. But we can't use the same bowls and ovens. So property rights apply to one but not the other. It's very simple. And it's actually a healthy thing when people start to copy each other. I was talking about somebody who was in trailer manufacturing and all the trailer manufacturers buy each other's trailers and they copy what works and it's just all freely exchanged information. There's no patents on how to weld things together. It's of course the best way to do it. And we all benefit from it and that's why that's how society advances and that's how technology advances. That's what learning is really and that's what free market competition is by the way. When you see someone who comes up with a new business idea that succeeds what it means to succeed is they make a lot of money. They make a lot of money by selling a lot of services or products to consumers by satisfying the consumers. They saw a demand that no one was meeting and they satisfied it with a new idea. But when you do that you make a profit which is a very high profit at first because you don't have any competition. So other people notice first innovation. Of course and it's first competition on the free market. So people see someone making a profit delivering pizza. Right. Oh this guy you don't have to go to the pizza store. You can have home delivery. So I don't know who was the first one who started it. Domino's or Pizza Hut or whoever or fast food. Someone's making fast food hamburgers. So now you have burger king and Wendy's competing with McDonald's and you have Papa John's and pizza in all competing with Pizza Hut or whatever. However it works. So when you have competitors start doing what you're doing they steal some of your customers but you don't really own your customers. That's just a word we use. But it reduces your profits because now you have competition and that makes everyone better off except for the first guy who has to keep innovating and pleasing the consumers. That's why the free market works. So the patent and copyright system basically give someone who comes up with an idea first. They give him a monopoly over it. So what I was going to get with your analogy is the simple idea of against IP is that if you want the benefits of giving information out to the public then one of the costs of that is that you're giving information out to the public. So if you have a secret technique for making candles better you can do that in your own factory and you maybe can make them at a better price because you have this better technique and if you keep it secret you can use that forever. That's called a trade secret. But if you sell a product where there's an improved design and it's going to become apparent to people but you have to tell the secret to sell it like if you have a better mousetrap you're going to tell people hey buy my mousetrap because it's better because it has these features. So you're going to publicize the improvement that you came up with but you have to publicize it to sell them. But that means you're going to tell people how to do it and soon you're going to draw competition. That's just the balance that is faced by any entrepreneur. You have to know that if you succeed you're going to face competition. People are going to emulate what you do in better or worse ways or similar ways and you're going to have to come up with a business model that lets you make a profit even though you're facing competition. The KFC way of doing things where you have a secret recipe and that's what you sell people on you don't have to tell them what's in it and if they knew the secret recipe they could make chicken just like KFC does but they've just decided never to sell that. Yeah and the same thing with Coca-Cola although people say that the secret is really out there and it's you know even if you knew exactly Coca-Cola's formula you know it's going to be hard to replicate it with a big factory and to compete with their name and all this so it's not so easy to just jump in and compete with people. I mean the pharmaceutical industry says that they spend so much money billions of dollars developing a drug so they need a monopoly on it for 17 years with a patent to stop competition so they can sell it at a monopoly price to recoup their cost of investment right that's the argument but first of all the cost of development is so high because of the FDA like so the government imposes all these regulations that you have to jump through to sell a drug on the market and that makes the cost really high and then they complain about the cost and so the government has to rely on copyright so then the government gives him a patent like so the government the government FDA system requires the government to come up with the patent system so why don't we just get rid of both and just let the free market operate you know in the first place. An interesting related part to that and I'm not sure it's probably not any different but the way that people will put research into the like the genetics of apple trees because apples are so heterozygous if you plan a seed from a gala apple tree it won't the apples won't be anything like a gala apple and so what they've done every tree that produces gala apples or red delicious or whatever your favorite kind is for example those are all literally the same living organism that they've cut and like replanted right and so they can say that oh the reason that you can't take one of our plants and start making your own selling your own apples from it is because we developed we did all the genetic research to put that now that actually has some merit to it because now you're talking about somebody who bred a certain type of tree and they're not willing to sell any part of that tree to somebody else so the only way you got it was if you stole it from them now we're talking about a physical item. Yeah except uh except they often do get patents on it and in the patent they have to reveal how they did it so theoretically someone could read it and reduplicate their effort after at least the patent is expired but what what typically happens in those cases you have a patent on on the seeds or even on on the genetically modified seed or something like that and so you'll have one farmer buys these expensive seeds they're expensive because there's a monopoly price on them because only the original guy can sell the seeds plant his crops with it and then the wind will carry some of them to a neighbor's crop so then they start growing on this guy's crop now and so then the Monsanto or whoever they'll bust in with the government and they'll raid his farm and they'll take his crops from him because he's growing patented crops. Is this true? Is this really happening? Oh yeah yeah I can send you some links this is it's insane and everyone says oh so if if you point this stuff out to a defender of patents they'll either say well you're exaggerating which I'm not I can send you some links or they'll say well that's an anomaly which is not or they'll say that well that's just an abuse of the system and we don't support that and of course this happens all the time I can I can I can just there's thousands and thousands of obvious I wouldn't call them an abuse because they're all using law as the law's intended I would call them examples of outrageous consequences right but the law they're outrageous and obviously unjust consequences because the law itself is unjust and unnatural when you have an unnatural unjust law you're going to have unnatural consequences so for example if you oppose the welfare system because it tends to steal well it steals money from people that earned it so it's theft and it also encourages bad habits in the people that you're subsidizing right but now we start criticizing people that that take welfare because they're lazy or whatever well they're not really lazy they're responding to natural incentives if you pay someone for nothing you're going to do nothing if you put a trough out with free food the pigs are going to come eat at the trough I mean you can't put a trough with free food out and complain that the pigs come to eat at it I mean that's the goal of that's the goal of it so that's what businesses have is their goal how do I make the most money with the least effort yeah so if you see people using welfare and if you criticize them for abusing the system they're not they're doing exactly what the system wanted if if you could have a welfare system and no one ever took a dime of it then we wouldn't complain about the welfare system because it wouldn't have any effect but of course we complain about these laws because they're real laws and they have a real effect so the problem with patent and copyright law is not that there's abuses it's that there are natural consequences that were intended by the system they're just unjust and the examples to enable lawful behavior yeah yeah and so people say things like well the problem with patents is that there's bad patent quality because the examiners aren't paid enough and they don't do a good search or that patent trolls that don't even make the product they sue you and they that shouldn't be or that the award was by the jury in this case was just too high so that every time you point an obviously unjust result they will say well that's not the system that I'm defending but basically there's nothing left after you point to all these abuses and you say well well everything I point out about the system the way it works you agree with me that you're not in favor of that like libertarians at least they'll say well I'm in favor of the patent system but no I'm not in favor of that I'm not in favor of that I'm not in favor of that and then you say well what are you in favor of and they say well I'm not an expert I'm not a patent lawyer how would I know it's like so and not to get not to get religious but this is you know I am not religious and so this is one of my this is one of my frustrations with some religious people they argue for God but they won't define it or they define it differently than other theists and so you can't it's like nailing jello to the wall you and then they won't accept any of the the crusades or or whatever bad fruit you want to point to yeah if you say well I don't believe that a guy with a big white beard up in the sky they say well we don't believe in that it's like well what do you believe what what God's undefinable it's like well then what am I supposed to you know you know and in fact I came to my religious views similar to the way I came about patent use I was a young catholic very hardcore but I was dissatisfied with some of the arguments so I tried to come up with my own and I finally was unable to do it so I concluded that yeah there's a reason I'm unable to prove this too not that you're religious on you but no this is a religious podcast so that's I think yeah I know people enjoy talking about that not to offend your audience I should say that no it's fine I had Walter Block on and he was a very polite very very fun to talk to moving on a little bit well I guess I did want to touch on this one thing it's and I'm not still not even sure the implications of it but I did find a bible verse actually that I feel would preclude the existence of intellectual property it talks about for every breach of trust whether it's for an ox donkey sheep cloak or for any kind of lost thing of which one says this is it or here it is the case of both parties shall come before God the one who God condemned shall pay double to his neighbor so it seems like that verse would kind of preclude the existence of immaterial property or being able to sue somebody for theft for something that you can't like literally hold in your hand and say look here it is or this is it well that's interesting I'll have to look that up I think I've heard of some other verses in the bible some people have told me it's or similar but I've forgotten what they were by the way there was crude forms of intellectual property even before the bible like I think as far back as 500 bc or so in the greek city state of ciberus there was a culinary competition so they would have a competition to see who came up with the best dish that year and whoever won whatever the the equivalent of the king was would in that city state would give the winner the exclusive right to make that district year so this this way of thinking has been around for a long time the idea that if you know you'll hear little girls do this too or or young people like uh one girl will wear her hair in a certain way to school one day and other if it's popular other girls start copying her she says they stole my haircut or something you know it's just it's childish right it literally is childish but that's infected even what the way adults think about about ideas now so you mentioned that uh you're sort of you were sort of begrudgingly dubbed the austrian expert in terms of intellectual property is that what what other subjects have you moved on to or you find more interesting um I wouldn't say begrudgingly I don't I don't mind at all um I I I'm a libertarian and I like to make it wasn't it wouldn't have been your first choice in other words well it's not my main interest my uh my main interest even still to a degree is rights theory like trying to explain what right rights are and and how to justify our rights and how to justify the libertarian conception of rights and the non-aggression principle um but the more I thought about the ip issue I realized that that's so strongly tied up with property like with property rights because all so all rights are human rights like rocks don't have rights and mosquitoes don't have rights um and all human rights are property rights because rights are the exclusive right to control a scarce means of action or scarce resource and you can see this if you think about the the concept of rights is bound up with enforceability like a rightist thought of as being enforceable but the word force right there is a physical thing right physical force means how we apply physical control over what physical things I mean you can't use force on an idea right so all rights are enforceable and they're all applicable to the scarce resources that we can as human actors that we can control so um and I've written a lot on contract theory which I think is uh related to property theory um and on various legal topics that are sort of consequences or applications of that um like legislation and and how legislation is not law um where law is really sort of a concrete principle that's developed over time in an attempt to find a just result in a case of a conflict over a scarce resource um and uh causality too like causation theory like how do you know who's responsible for a harm is it just the person or what about collective action like two or more people acting in concert perform to perform harm or or a boss compared to an underling like there's always the issue of you know um assuming that the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima were basically unlibertarian unjust war crimes um who's responsible is it the guy that built the bomb is it the guy that flew the plane is it the bomber who opened the hatch or is it Truman who ordered the ordered it to be dropped some libertarians have this sort of um rationalistic legalistic view which I think is not contextual which says that basically Truman is not responsible but unless he's coercing someone to do it I think Walter Block has this view and he and I have disagreed on this debated on this I think it's a more contextual holistic thing I think of course Truman is guilty and so is the bomber and I think Truman is actually more guilty right I think it's a it's a hierarchical system that has an effect in the real world um I mean there's a there's a joke among some libertarians it's like um uh uh Hitler was put on trial after World War II for the for the war crimes and the prosecutor said you know you you've called you've caused the deaths of millions of people and all this destruction and human death and misery and suffering what do you have to say for yourself and he says I don't I just gave orders you know but of course that's a joke because we see that as absurd but that would be the implication of some of these libertarian views that like only the direct actor is liable I think that they think that because they have a mistaken understanding of the concept of joint and several liability because they're not lawyers and they don't understand uh creative ways that the law has handled situations like that so I think that they're afraid that if like the mafia boss who gives an order to a hit man to kill someone if the boss is held responsible for giving an order then there's like 100 responsibility and you're allocating it to him and there's none left over for the hit man so they're worried that like if you if you hold the the boss who gives an order responsible that you can't hold the the guy lower down the pole responsible but of course the answers they're both responsible you can have joint and several liability just like if two guys beat you up they're both 100 percent responsible for all the damage that you suffered if two people two people collaborate to blow up a building and kill a bunch of people they're both 100 liable each for the murder for the murders of those people this is easily handled in the law by this concept of concept of joint and several liability so I've written on things like that and in fact I have a book coming out soon called law in the libertarian world which collects a lot of my edited essays and articles on intellectual property and these topics so IP will just be like one and one tenth of kind of the scope of the things that I've covered in my in my writing well and it also seems like just in terms of the way that the economics work out any if let's say well like the consequences of you know exterminating six million people sort of falls back onto the entire german people or the entire german nation you have the loss of all of those lives now you've got this many less workers and that's going to have economic and monetary penalties and now you're not going to now things goods or certain goods are going to cost more based on how many of those people were farmers and it just ripples out into the entire economy affects the price and ease of doing anything and everything yeah there's consequential damages I mean in an IP this comes up when people say well how can you say that there's no property right and ideas because ideas make things more valuable so for example if I have a blank sheet of paper and someone a blank a blank notebook and someone steals it it doesn't harm me as much as if they steal my notebook with my novel on it which is unpublished let's say so they say well that proves because the one with the words on it is more valuable that proves that the words have value and therefore you have a property right now see that's sort of their argument but again this can be handled simply with with just well developed established principles of law which is that when you commit a tort which is an offense or trespass that's the crime but then you measure the amount of damages that is done by the consequences to the person so if I steal your Rembrandt painting it hurts you more than if I steal your poster even though they're both materially you know piece of paper with with ink on them right that's just common sense you know if I if I steal your grandfather's watch from World War One it's worse than if I steal a watch that you just bought for the same price would that bleed over into things like wireless frequencies for TV bands like if somebody's making money off of subscribers that depend on clear airwaves and then somebody comes along and disrupts that and somebody knows exactly who they did and they had to pay so much in damages to angry customers and things like that how would that relate I think you've hit on so you've hit on one of the few difficult areas of libertarianism that I would say is not yet settled I think the IP issue is settled in other words it's such a clear case like to my mind of all the issues of libertarianism the drug war and intellectual property are the two easiest it may be hard to see the IP but once you see it it's just there is no good argument for IP and there's no good argument for the drug war you could have an argument for taxation or for war even right I don't agree with them but you can understand the arguments for them this not those are not as easy or even for public schooling or even for a central bank but there's just no argument for drug war or IP now as far as what you're talking about is spectrum right so the question there is how do we apply standard private law principles of original appropriation or homesteading is what we call it which obviously and easily applies to tangible material things like land or your own body or things like that how do we apply it to to airwaves basically or the spectrum the electromagnetic spectrum because on the one hand you could make an argument that like intellectual property it's immaterial and so there's no property right in it but you could make the other argument which I think you're getting at I lean towards and I've written on this in a tentative way I lean towards the idea that you can homestead a radio spectrum analogously to the way that you can homestead shipping lanes on the ocean or airways in the sky like if you have an airline that regularly flies over an area you've homesteaded certain things about that like you can keep flying over there and if someone like if you have an airport someone builds near you then they can't complain that the noise from the airplane is taking off and the risk is a nuisance because you were already there you're coming you're making money and serving customers you're coming to the nuisance which is another way of saying that by building there and by doing this activity first they've sort of homesteaded a property right which is not a it's not a the standard type of property right like in land which you could think of as full or a low deal property you can think of it as an easement it's a right of way anyway so property can be complex and the law can handle it the more esoteric it gets the more difficult it is and it takes longer for the legal system to develop and find solutions but eventually we do so I think that in the case of radio waves you can look at it as so for example if I'm broadcasting a signal I what I'm doing is I'm perturbing the electromagnetic spectrum for an infinite distance around but it peters out exponentially over time but you know I'm perturbing the EM spectrum so in a in a sense you could argue in a trivial way I'm committing trespassing against everyone because like I'm shaking the electrons in your body when I do that but we would say it's not trespass because it's not interfering with your ability to control your body right whereas harm or damages of any kind well but if I shoot a laser into your body I am right but if it's just a radio signal it's it passes through people harmlessly so that's not a trespass on the other hand if you're to set up a receiver in your house and receive these radios like let's suppose I'm using a walkie talk and I'm sending a signal what I want it to be a private communication to you but it passes through my neighbor's property and he picks up an antenna and he picks it up under copyright ideas that's a violation of my copyright because I own that information something so I think we can abolish copyright say that's not the issue so I don't think that receiving a signal someone sends is a violation of their rights however if I broadcast a competing signal on the same wave wave band which which impedes their ability to transmit this signal so let's say I'm sending a I have a radio station on I don't know I forgot the for the wavelength the wave bands are for am I have to listen so long like 1980 megahertz or whatever it is and that that narrow wave band and I'm sending that for 10 miles around and everyone's listening you could view that as analogous to the shipping lanes or the way airplanes go and I've homesteaded that right to to use this empty sort of air air wave space to send signals people could listen in if they want I can't blame them for that but if they generate their own signal on the same one it interferes with mine you could say that's a type of trespass I don't think that's 100 percent settled that's the way I would lead that's the way the common law was going before the the federal government interfered and shortcut it with the FCC in the 1930s so they they they they short circuited the the natural development of the common law to apply to this new new situation and I think it would have developed along those lines there are a couple of IP pests that argue that if you accept that you could have a right to broadcast over a spectrum this also implies in ultra property rights I don't think they're correct I think you can have one without the other but even if they're correct all that means is you can have spectrum rights because IP is clearly wrong it seems like it would be an analogy and I've heard people talk about this before in like different talks I've heard about how to do interpersonal arbitration between neighbors about noise levels and things like that I think I would handle I think I would handle the nuisance case but I don't know how easy it would be to handle the the right to broadcast on a frequency for a long space to serve customers or listeners right yeah because in the example that I'm thinking of it was about a dog barking and it was like oh well it's it's bothering me uh so I guess and let's say you had somebody who was listening to a local broadcast but then you had somebody move in and start broadcasting and now all of a sudden vital information that was valued to both of this person is now being lost by somebody that comes in afterwards or maybe they were both there all along and then this person just decides to start using it but yeah I was I'll have to think about that in terms of dog barking in your case I would tend to think that that uh it's the right of the transmitter or the broadcaster that's being infringed not the right of the listener the listener has no right to receive anything um it's it's just really the right of the broadcaster which is almost same what they were paying to for a certain service like paying for satellite radio and then somebody else comes in and I'm uh satellite radio might not be a great example no I still think for some other kind of radio service and then well yeah you could you could you could have it encrypted a digitally encrypted uh television signal let's say um and you can receive that signal and then they give you the key to unlock it so you can watch it and you're paying a fee for that but still I think that that that fee you're paying is just a private contract between you and the broadcaster um the broadcaster himself is the one that has the right to the to the airway because he's the one using it by transmitting over he's the one actively using it well I'm saying what if then somebody comes in and starts interfering so I guess their offense would be more against the the person broadcasting than the receiver yeah I think that's how I would look at it okay well that that uh that time went by pretty quick we're over an hour already so if you want to um plug your stuff what's your website and you have a podcast as well where can people go to read your books or listen to more um my libertarian stuff is at stephandconcella.com and my I have all my ip related stuff on c4sif.org which is center the letter for c4sif.org which stands for center for the study of innovative freedom and my podcast is really just a collection of when I do other people's podcasts like this one so it's just this is a fee to assemble all those that's mostly what it is but that's on my website stephandconcella.com and how could people how could somebody reach out to you uh there I'm on twitter and facebook at nsconcella nsconcella is my handle on twitter and facebook all right thank you so much uh stephen and uh or steven and uh let's do it again sometime be happy to thanks adam all right thank you