 Welcome to the Peter Max show folks. Sorry for just a momentary delay. I'm getting my guests connected with me on Skype I'll be right with you. We're glad you're here. This is the first show of the new year January 4th 2012 See if I can get him at it here Ladies and gentlemen, sorry for the long delay. This is the Peter Max show I took me a while to get the two other parties connected, but we're there now So Stefan you can hear me, right? I can hear you very well Okay, Stefan Kinsella is an attorney actually a patent attorney in the Houston area He is speaks frequently writes frequently on the topic of internet of Intellectual property rights our broad topic tonight and the more focused topic and that is of the stop online Privacy Act which has to do with greatly limiting the internet. So Stefan I just thought what we would do is have you just talk a bit about Intellectual property in general and then and then use that as the the springboard for the discussion of the What's proposed for the internet? Yeah, we're calling it so pa and as you and I were talking about a while ago I just discussed as a step in mulling you earlier and Interestingly you and he both got the acronym wrong which is not surprising these things are complex You call this stop online privacy act Which actually is not a bad Description of it. It's the official name is the stop online piracy act stop online pride part Okay, I do that, but I I'm too flustered. Okay. The name is better actually because You know this is not though the act doesn't stop piracy piracy is when someone on a boat Goes up to another boat and shoots and kills people and breaks and steal things right And you know commit acts of real theft and mayhem and murder whereas the intellectual property advocates and the advocates of copyright in this case Have started to use the word piracy to refer to people who are basically Not really pirates but people that are copying information and using information and learning and emulating other people remixing and competing with other people so Right off the bat. You can get a little bit suspicious about this But let's back up a little bit There is a law pending in the US called stop online piracy act so pa in fact I read today that Spain enacted a version similar to it already. So this this is spreading around the world What's going on is that we have this mistaken? Part of our private property system in the West where we protect regular property like houses and land and cars and people's bodies Which are scarce resources under regular common law principles or under statutes that were based upon those so theft is illegal murders illegal Rape is illegal, etc Well, we have this concept of copyright as well and people have come to refer to it as Intellectual property. It's actually not property. It's not a property right at all It's just a government grant of monopoly privilege to someone which is based upon the Government grants of monopoly privilege in the age of mercantilism in England and Europe 1600 1700s and around that time And it was used originally in the case of copyright for censorship and to stop the spread of ideas that the church or the state Didn't want to be spread And it's morphed into the modern idea which is used for protectionism and for stopping competition and for thought control Because if you have a copyright you can sue someone to stop them from saying what you don't want them to say So the law is horribly unjust statutes. It's a statute law. It's not common law and It has been sold to the people under the idea that it's a type of property rights So when people started resisting this monopoly right the government was granting to some people Because it restricted their freedom of expression and their freedom of press Then the advocates of it started calling it intellectual property so that it sounded like a type of property right and What's happening is in the digital age is getting harder and harder to stop people from copying information because the internet is The world's greatest copying machine and actually copying is good learning is good emulation is good That's what the free market. It's about that's what civilization is about. It's about gradually Continually expanding the bit the body of knowledge and learning from other people and adding to it and changing it up and remixing So the only way to stop it now is to have increasingly draconian measures That basically threatens it ruin people's lives put them in jail killed them cut them off from the internet In an increasing attempt to stop them from doing what is natural It's very similar in this regard to the war against prostitution and the war against drugs where they can't win these wars But they have to escalate the penalties Higher and higher greater and greater to try to stop people from doing what really doesn't hurt anyone else Okay, let me interject here if I may because I think some people who may have not heard you before Stefan Probably have some questions at this point and for example most people know that when somebody writes a book You know certainly one that sells or sells well they it's copyrighted and that means Presumably that no one else can simply Photocopy the pages slap a different cover on it and sell it without their permission That's right. That's right. Okay. You also can't make derivative works with it Which means to make a new creation which is based upon it in a certain way, right? And everybody I mean I think even you and I agree that if somebody writes something in some sense We we we wouldn't copy that and say it's ours Well, that might not be theft in the sense of stealing, you know property that is You know limited nature Like a car or land and that sort of thing it still belongs to somebody So I think it's easy for people to say well somebody wrote a book and it's not proper to Copy an excerpt even from that book without giving proper attribution to the author Then why isn't copyright appropriate? Why isn't it appropriate to say that person wrote that book and no one else can sell it? You know a copy of that book without that person's permission Well, so and here's what the advocates of copyright are very slippery. They give a kind of a Group of defenses of copyright and each one is an incoherent really and when you challenge them a one They slip to the other so they go back and forth for example between plagiarism and Copying now plagiarism and copying are two different things and what you're really talking about here in part is plagiarism plagiarism is just an act of dishonesty it's an act of misrepresenting The person who was an author of an original work of art or authorship And that is nothing to do with copyright really and it's got nothing to do with the law That's handled by social norms and customs for example, if you take a book that or a work that is out of copyright like Plato's Republic or Aristotle one of Aristotle's works and there is nothing in copyright that prohibits you from taking the text of Plato's Republic and Publishing it tomorrow on as an Amazon Kindle book and putting your name on it, right? It's not a copyright violation It's not any kind of violation except it might be defrauding your customer except what customer is going to buy Stephanie can sell us Republic when they start reading it they're going to realize I just slapped my name on it I'm going to look like an idiot, right? So this is a very minor problem. It's not really the real problem and it's self-policing in the culture Already so plagiarism has nothing to do with copyright if I write a book I have there's nothing stopping me from selling it. I can sell it to people So the question is if I put this information out there and I basically reveal this information to other people Can I now complain if they're using it in what they're doing? And the typical copyright case is not an act of plagiarism. It's basically, you know taking the latest John Grisham novel or movie Or the latest the Leonardo DiCaprio movie and copying it Everything even the title of the author in the director You don't actually pretend if the different author otherwise you wouldn't sell any so piracy is Copying everything it's not Dishonest at all. It's actually just giving someone an exact copy of what someone else first presented to the market So the question is do you violate anyone's rights when you do that, right? And my belief is that you do not because the only property rights people have is in the physical integrity of Scourge resources that they own including their own bodies. That's how the Lockheed and Homesteading principle works That's how property rights have always worked. That's the basis of property rights We wouldn't need property rights if we lived in a world where there was no scarcity Where everyone could have everything they wanted at a whim where there was no conflict or violence possible no fighting over Scourge resources were possible Property rights arise to solve that problem and you allocate owners to different things in accordance with a certain rule Right, so there's just no room for allocating property rights to an idea or a pattern of information Right and and and I've been swayed by you, you know in years passed by that very argument But people that are perhaps hearing this the first time would say well if John Grisham wrote a book and he's making money off it and somebody else Photocopies the whole thing lock stock and barrel maybe puts a different cover on there But same titles same author and everything so it's clear that it's John Grisham's work Just you know different cover and makes money off it people will say that's the priving John Grisham of money That he's due for being the author of of those actual ideas or that actual text Right and so the way I would respond to that is Well first there's a subtle question begging there because when you say that the money he's due It's assuming that he's do it which means there's a justice aspect to this and so that sort of presumes your conclusion But it does well the way you worded it does put the focus on the right thing What what the person who's advocating copyright is saying is that if I? Copy or distribute copies of whether for free or for sale John Grisham's novel Then it's going to be more difficult for John Grisham to sell as many copies or at a high price So he's going to get less money. So what you're saying is I'm depriving him of money He otherwise would have been titled to but whose money was that that was money from potential Customers of his book well He doesn't own their money they own their money that they choose not to give it to him He doesn't have a claim on that And I would also say this we have to decide you know if I own a watch and I pass it down I can pass it down for generations to my great-great-great-grandchild. It's in perpetuity or a piece of land or a house So property rights do not expire So the question we have to ask is if copyright if the right in an intellectual work is really property then does it expire At some finite time, which is an arbitrary number like 50 years 20 years 70 years or does it last forever? Now if it lasts forever then I think you can see that we would have a stifled culture because you know Shakespeare himself built his plays upon already existing ideas that were around in the culture The entire history of art and creativity is one of remixing people blend and remix and copy and emulate and improve And recreate and there's really nothing wrong with this But if you start giving everyone a monopoly right that lasts forever and ever then you finally get to a point where we're also ensnared with tangles of These copyrights that will go back for centuries. You could never get enough permission to even act So we would just the human race would die off or at least be very bland and boring Right, so it's just a ridiculous idea, which is why everyone says no. No, we can't make it perpetual We have to make it finite Well, but then is it really a property right and then how do you know what the right length is? Should it be a hundred years 150 years, right? Nobody knows they don't have any evidence So I think this goes to show that there's something wrong with the idea of getting people to write You know, there's a famous anarchist Benjamin Tucker who said that you know if you walk around in public Can you spread your ideas out there? You know be like throwing a bunch of money in a crowd and then complaining that people picked it up If you want to keep your ideas private keep them to yourself But if you want to try to get some kind of benefit out of revealing information you have whether it's fame or just a pleasure of discussing with people or Or trying to make a profit well then you're revealing this information to people you're putting it into their brains And you can't expect them not to use the information that you've taught them right Well, and I just as a quick aside and we're due for a commercial here quickly And then then we'll have the last half to you know fully concentrate on the internet aspect but I am Writing up proofs to a book that I had in graduate school that was frankly very very hard for me And I've thought about this concept of a copyright and as you pointed out the Easily conflated concept of or at least I think easily conflated concept of plagiarism And if you think about a mathematical proof, and I know your background is in engineering, so you've been exposed to some of these It's often hard to tell who it's attributed certain proofs are well known like there's something called from Oz last theorem It's well known Andrew Wiles proved it in 1990s until fourth And so that's sort of a known theorem, but people take theorems and prove them and for example Pythagoras the Pythagorean theorem has something like 50 known different proofs So if somebody comes up with a new proof, it's pretty darn hard to say That it's original It's hard to say if you come up with a proof of anything in mathematics that you didn't in some sense rely on people in the past Oh, absolutely. No one has has not replied on anyone They always rely upon discoveries of others and of course these scientific discoveries and it occurs simultaneously Now this really goes more to patents and copyrights, but that's more about inventions and scientific knowledge type discoveries But I mean in science Unless you make a property right out of it You don't really need to have a rigorous definition of who's the Who's the creator of a given theorem or the discoverer? There are scientific norms that govern that and they don't have to be rigorous because there's not a right or law based upon it So for example, you had Newton and Leibniz, I think invented the calculus around the same time and the scientific community Analyzes what they're doing and they make a decision and they get recognized historically for their contributions, right? Exactly. Well, that's a good stopping out right here folks We have a short break I'm told will be a little shorter because of our my staff through at the beginning so bear with us You're listening to the Peter Maxwell on the micro effect. We'll be back here in just a moment with Stefan Cancella blood pressure This is Ernesto from Illinois. I had my doctor's appointment yesterday, and I got my labs in my HDL is 119 now and my LDL is 37 now my doctor asked what I was doing to lower it so much So I told her about HB extract millions of people like Ernesto are suffering from high blood pressure congestive heart failure Unbalanced cholesterol irregular heartbeat and clog arteries, but now there's an effective natural 100% organic nutritional supplements for a healthy heart and circulation heart and body extract my blood pressure has not gone past 125 over 80 in almost a month experience amazing benefits when your body gets what it needs with the assistance of heart and body extract She did a double take when she looked at my ER labs She couldn't believe it order at HB extract.com or call 866 295 5305 That's HB extract.com or call 866 295 5305 thank you heart and body extract camping hiking backpacking Alice packs military surplus tactical gear The list goes on and on and on you can find it at CJ L Enterprise that's E N C E R P or I z e Com you can call us at 816 359 7945 we are open seven days a week 24 hours a day 365 days a year on the web again, it's CJ L inner E N T E R P R I Z E Com CJ L enterprise dot com you can call us at 8 or six three five nine seven nine or five CJ L Enterprise Welcome back folks, we're glad you're tuned in here We're glad you're patient with me tonight anyway my special guests stephan cancella and we're discussing intellectual property and we're about to launch into Really the more current crisis, I guess and what looms out there for the internet, so why don't we take it from there stephen? yeah, so What you can you could think of it this way until around 1995 when the internet really started to take off Copyright was more of a sort of printers guild type thing It wasn't really that important and plus the law was changing around the 80s and becoming more draconian until the I believe is 82 Until 1982 with the burn convention, which is an international treaty that the US pushed and that we've joined To get a copyright you had to put a copyright notice on your book or your work And you had to register it with the copyright off You had to take a firm of the step to do it almost like the patent system where you have to register your your inventions Now it's automatic You don't have to put the copyright notice and you don't have to do anything other than write something down on paper The second you do that you have a copyright And the terms have been extended partly because of lobbying by Disney and others to keep Mickey Mouse alive So now the term is over a hundred years when it started out at 14 years Okay, by the way 14 was arbitrary 14 years was that was it was the length of two consecutive seven-year apprentice terms I mean, that's just what they picked back then they didn't know what they were doing They had no idea what they were doing But it's more than the task the size like an answer and So It's gotten more and more important and embedded into this entire big Hollywood big media the arch R.I. Double a the NP Double a all these lobbying interests and they depend upon this it for their life But and so that's one reason people are confused when you say let's abolish it because they're used to the system we have or artists go to these publishers or they go to the The big media companies or the movie producing companies and they're they're reliant for their income on that And then they have to back down on Paris and so it's a whole system and of course the free market has adapted or the quasi free market It's adapted to respond to the distortion of the market. Well when the internet in popular and we had mp3 movies digital music digital information email sharing Napster Then people started copying like crazy before that it wasn't so easy to make perfect copies analog tape recorders and things like this So the problem wasn't that widespread Well now we have the internet and we have the burgeoning online business and we have the increasing reliance of these media companies on Copyright even on the online world even though they don't go together So the online world is all about copying and copyright is about stopping cop. They cannot survive together So we're having this clash and so they're not able to stop piracy piracy is rampant people can do with encryption They can use bit torrent etc So there's a lot of piracy going on and let me just I'm sorry But that's an unfortunate as I think you pointed out maybe at the very beginning when I misspoke or about so but that's an unfortunate use of The word piracy then is yes, yes, there's nothing going on What the what they really mean is there's there's theft or piracy of the dollars They could have made but as I mentioned earlier, you don't own money that you could have made In fact, that's the nature of a free market if you think about it Any time you come up with a new business you wanted, you know a new idea for a new business you start making a product Well, if you make a lot of money, you're going to attract competition and you're just not going to be easy To make the same profits for a very long. That's the nature of the market That's the nature of competition and it's to the benefit of the consumers and the economy and Human society in the long term because it induces people to keep improving keep getting more efficient Keep coming up with new ideas. You have to keep innovating to stay ahead of your competitors Right, that's what's going on here It's just a little easier to compete here because you can copy an MP3 file fairly easily Well, in any case copyright laws already crazy. We had the digital Millennium Copyright Act in the 90s Which ratcheted up the penalties for copyright infringement and applied it to the internet They added a safe harbor at the time for online service providers and publishers where as long as you Respond to a takedown notice then you're not going to be liable for what your users did Now I don't think they realized that that safe harbor was going to be the lifeblood of the internet The internet probably wouldn't have flourished like it has if not for that safe harbor because the DMCA would have killed it And that's why we have this practice now these takedown notices because of the DMCA and because the music industry unwittingly agreed to the safe harbor And thank God they did We might not have had Google we've been I'm at a Facebook or YouTube or Twitter and now what's going on is There's rampant piracy the copyright laws already being applied in extremely draconian ways for example people Under the current copyright law an average person like you or I or even someone maybe not even as tech involved as you and I are It's theoretically liable for billions of dollars a year in damages for infringing copyrights and sending emails to people from sending links from copying articles Things like this so it's already terrible and the sofa is Poised to be enacted which would be even worse It would basically create turn the internet into a whitelist You have to be on the government's approved list to have a website and if you get on their blacklist Then an order will go out from the court or from the government to like Google and YouTube and Bing and ISPs telling them they must remove all the information for this particular offending website that has been accused of having pirated information on it and Disappiers it just disappears so basically it is giving in the name of protecting property rights Which is a travesty to call it that in the name of protecting so-called property rights The government is poised to have a tool of censorship over the internet Which is akin to what is done in China and repressive regimes? This is why there's been an uprising on the internet in the last month or two which actually stopped this legislation It probably would have passed about two weeks ago But now it's been table for a few months and there's boycotts of go daddy for example right now because go daddy was in favor of this at first So the the young community the digital community the tech people They are really angry about this now They don't have a solid grounding for opposing the real reason to oppose it is copyright is evil You know if you believe it's copyright you have to believe in trying to enforce it Right so trying to do right at least they see that there's an excess here So Sopa is very very very dangerous It's one of the scariest things I've seen in a long time because in my opinion the internet is one of the greatest hopes of mankind For fighting the state. It's a great way. Absolutely. Absolutely. You have to be unregulated It this is this is censorship. This is scary and we try to stop it and certainly our government even Should be able to recognize it certain things that have been happening, you know recently like the so-called Arab Arab Spring right not have happened without the internet these people find out what's going on in the outside world through the internet And that's if that's all shut down And if the if the so-called freest country in the world shuts that down then that's gonna paralyze any other movements that are You know in some embryonic stage, isn't it? Oh, it's it's well Our government is completely dishonest and hypocritical, of course I mean Hillary Clinton the other day was was Camping me freedom on the internet saying has to be free and and saying how important it is for the Arab Spring type things Meanwhile the very Obama administration that she works for Has been shutting down websites under the current law with this thing called ice the immigration and customs enforcement service You'll go to some websites. It's just shut down on your copyright threats And there's even a guy the other day United an American citizen Sent it to a year in prison for uploading a copy of the Wolverine movie To a to some some illegal site. So maybe you should have done it But going to jail for a year. Are you kidding me in federal prison for uploading a piece of information to the internet? All right, they did this already. It's so it's already horrible There's a brand-new book out by William Patrick a copyright lawyer called how to fix copyright Which has actually I think has a lot of problems because he's not really against copyright He just thinks it's gone too far but he has a good suggestion in there that at the very least we should have a moratorium on any new copyright laws because the Current laws are so screwed up and they're not tailored to the digital age at the very least We should have no more copyright law at all. We shouldn't Obama signed active the other day He signed it without congressional approval. This would be an or can't anything counterfeiting trade agreement. It's an international treaty He signed on his own authority and You know, I said we had to I thought treaties had to be approved by Congress by the Senate. Yeah, they do But he did it under he called it a an executive agreement But under international law it could have the same effect Right, this is why the Bricker amendment was proposed in the in the I think in the 40s to try to stop this dangerous you use of Assigning statements and a executive agreements by the executive to get around The Senate's ability to approve treaties because the treaties on the Constitution or the highest law of the land up there with the Constitution you could theoretically have the president in the stroke of a pen Rewrite the Constitution by just calling it an executive agreement. It's very scary stuff. What they're doing. Oh Well, yeah, I mean I the last couple of shows I've talked about the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012. Yep. That's another very scary one, right? Well, okay on the copyright then let's Everybody knows about copying text and emails and sending links and uploading things to YouTube and copying things probably from YouTube And of course people that put things on YouTube want their things to be copied probably. Yes, but what about code people People you know Microsoft their entire operating system Apple system. These are all fairly Well held tightly held secrets and people would it be under under copyright as you see it Well, there would be no such thing as copyright because people can't you can't own the information which is what a Software program is it's just instructions for a computer well, you know Computer software is a dysfunctional as you say and Originally, it was not covered by copyright because copyright is designed to cover Create acts of creative expression artistic type things Patent is designed to cover inventions or functional Dismos and gadgets and so actually software Is already covered potentially by patent if because a software is nothing but a process and there's you can get a process Patent right on the way you tell a computer how to do something right so so basically software is covered already by By patents and now it's covered for a couple of two three decades now It's covered by software as well because of court decisions saying well, I think we should include it In in copyright because there's an element of art There's an element of creativity in deciding like I guess we're gonna put the period in a code I think it's ridiculous. It shouldn't be covered by I don't think it should be covered by patents or copyrights Well, right. I was just gonna ask it has the same the same flaw as does copyright, right? You're claiming that this this instructions Telling this machine how to operate Is a piece of property like like land or a car or a widget? Yeah. Yeah, now that there's a technique that is used. There's some differences in copyright and patent Patent is better and worse in some ways It's it's it's worse in that you can be accused of infringing a patent even if you Independently invented your own technique. So if company a patents a process that's their software implements and company B independently comes up with software to do something similar on their own platform Which has a similar flow chart let's say they could be accused of patent infringement even if they came up with it on their Own whereas in copyright you if you come up with it on your own then you're okay But you have to be able to prove it It's just very unlikely two people are going to come up with the same thing on their own And in a copyright context so what they do is they have these things called clean rooms Which is not they not the the technical clean rooms where the guys in the suits like at the Intel commercials But it's basically an approach where you have a Chinese wall type thing and you can just prove that the You hired some software programmers They sat in a room with no access to any literature or web sites and they just did it cold So you can prove that they didn't copy it Which of course is an increase is an added burden and an added cost and in efficiency Why shouldn't people follow from each other's good ideas and techniques and continue to improve on them, right? Okay, so with Sopa then Who are the major Proponents of the passage of that and for those of us that understand what you've been talking about on the show tonight What do we do to keep it from getting passed? Well, I've got a lot of links on my my my site I started a center called center for the study of innovative freedom with the website of which is C for the number four sif.org and if you just search for sopa on there, you'll see lots of links to various Things you can set up a petition or whatever like there's a there's a boycott I would say consider boycotting companies that call for this like some of the video game companies like electronic I think ESA or electronic arts, maybe go daddy hasn't backed down completely yet I mean they've lost 80,000 domain or something already by people Away because they're just so angry that this is a tech company that ought to be savvy to the danger the good guys are already in Huffington at the Huffington Post and Sergei Bren and Eric Schmidt at Google and all these tech companies have signed these open letters and law professors have come out good against this Civil Libertarians have been good about this all the people that are in favor of civil liberties or that are really Into freedom of expression and the use of the internet and digital technologies are very wary about this But not necessarily for the same reason For the depth of the reason I guess I would say that you are right well, I mean I think I Think the reason is the same in the sense that I fear what the government is going to do in the name of copyright protection They're going to censor and they're going to hurt and everyone and most people that are opposed to you have that same understanding There they're sort of cognitive differences. Most of them still think we need copyright. So we're sort of saying They're left with saying this is going too far Right, you know, and I don't know I don't know I don't know maybe it's not too far If I you know, maybe we should have the death penalty for it Right, it's really a property for really trust us and maybe you should Samarily execute people right but if you pointed out that that notion of going too far is the same arbitrariness as you know 14 years for a copyright versus a hundred years. I mean where do you stop, you know? Yes, but at least there is things from there Right, I'm not I'm not damning them. I'm just saying they're not they're not as intellectually pure or strong as Your argument against the whole thing called copyright Yeah, but I think even the younger generation a lot of them are starting to see that this copyright ideas is nonsense I mean they they don't they know they might get caught and they might have a penalty if they get caught pirating a movie But I don't think they think it's immoral To do things like right, you know So they're starting to see through the the facade of copyright and see that it's used by a bunch of oligopolies to protect their Protect their market, and it's also used literally for censorship. Sometimes there was a case the other day I've got it on my website where this guy, oh you remember the Forgot the name of the company, but there was this cell phone company that was taking data from your inner and your keystrokes It was kind of a controversy and one guy found out about this and he published on his blog the Manuals with from this company showing the instructions in these cell phones software and people were concerned It was a privacy issue and he was doing fair reporting And he actually the manuals were on their side. They were there were in pds on their site So he wasn't like revealing information. They weren't making public themselves. Well, their general counsel said this guy a letter Saying you got to take this down and apologize or we're going to sue you into the ground because of copyright infringement So this company was trying to stop legitimate You know journalistic criticism of their practices, which the public has an interest in on the basis of copyright Now this guy had some balls and went to the EFF the electronic frontier Foundation He didn't back down and they've made this public what they were doing and there was a groundswell of internet activists just Piling on this company. And so the CEO a couple days later Retracted the the cease and desist letter apologized to the guy let's cooperate with the FF. So it's good that we're Great, but the point is you can use this for censorship and it is used for censorship So we have to choose do you want copyright? You want to protect ideas or do you want to let ideas be free and let people have freedom of expression? You have to choose censorship or free speech and you know Stefan We've lived all our lives with with with copyright of books and so forth and and the argument is well known that I put forth that You know other people have obviously about the the claim that an author would lose potential money Yes, and so forth But we haven't really lived in a society where that hasn't existed So we don't quite know how that'll play out and and I think for example When I you know, I'm a little bit older than you but When photocopying was first starting to be the rage after like The carbon copies and stuff like that Xerox came out and people used the word Xerox Xerox that for me when they met for the copy that so in a way that was actually and Xerox I guess was the first or one of the first to have the machines to do that so that actually was I mean that could be argued that that was actually good for that company that people sort of Made the word Xerox to be you know generically mean photocopy. Well, no, that's that's actually another area of intellectual property That's trademark law. That's okay That's the issue of if you have a mark like coca-cola or Xerox or Kleenex Right, and it starts being used generically We call it that is to refer to the entire class then you might lose your trademark to it like Kleenex right Kleenex was lost So you Kleenex is now used to refer to any type of tissue not just Kleenex brand tissue Right, so that's why you have these companies trying to say please don't say Legos call it Lego brand building blocks or don't call it a toilet or call it a Toyota brand car or whatever You know, so that's a whole different area. There's abuses with trademark as well I okay, but I guess well I that's that's good you pointed out But my my point was that I don't know this and maybe you do that that may have actually helped the Xerox company because they were You've got a plethora of photocopy machines now, but they were the front-runner and maybe there's some There's some advantage even though you got 20 competitors to be the first guy on the block doing it Well, think think about what a miracle the original origin of printing and the printing press was we had First we had writing, you know parchment and then we made it more permanent You'd have to chisel things and rocks finally we started having books on some kind of reasonable paper But you had to have people hand-to-hand, you know scribes and I can't control it And of course then the church could tell all these scribes and and the state And control what ideas are being given to the people then the printing press came out and everyone panic for the church panic the guild panic the State panic and they started they monopolize it They started a stationers company to give a monopoly on what books to be printed so the government Could control what books the people would see because they didn't want them to become Protestant or whatever by the time Finally we broke out of that and we're in the modern age now and yet the remnants of this control over what ideas people print And the internet like I said, it's the greatest publication and expression and duplication and learning connection engine and subversive anti-state engine of all time and Copyright just gums up these works and gives the government and opponents of free space the potential to stop it Wow Okay, so your website is C for si f thought or Okay, let me say that again C for si f and as you said you can go just type in sopa to a Google engine and Another great site is tech dirt tech dirt calm has continual horror stories about proper intellectual property and how it's just harming technology and And this the business world in the economy and the internet and human freedom, right but And you mentioned several of these people you know well-known CEOs and so forth the companies that are opposed to sopa, but And my concern is and maybe this is a concern that should be down the road if we delay it at first is if they don't make a Solid argument against copyright and their argument is more of the of the nature of going too far Then my concern is even if sopa is not passed now It will reemerge in some other form that will satisfy some of these yes But we'll just set us up for this same battle 20 or 30 years down the road So here so actually sir, but is About three years ago. There was a law introduced called coica combating online infringement and counterfeit act and that went down to defeat and then what was called son of coica came up, which is I think it's called pro IPA the pro IPA and then that was replaced by tip-off the protect IPA Which is the counterpart to sopa in the house. So these things are sort of descendants of This legislation trying to survive and I do think the water down and it might pass but there's so much opposition to it now And the one the one silver lining is that there's a damn good argument with several law professors have put forth that Lawrence tribe for example Lawrence tribe has a really good argument that sopa is Unconstitutional because it violates the first amendment and I think it does because there's no due process There's no adversarial proceeding the person whose website is yank down doesn't even get notified They don't get to present their case to the court It's prior restraint. It's almost a blatant violation of the first amendment So even though the Constitution authorizes copyright in the body of the Constitution It also has the first amendment. So those two provisions are in conflict And it seems pretty sure that if they pass anything as extreme as they have up there now It's going to be struck down Whereas if they water it down, it may still be bad, but it may pass muster. I don't know All right But hopefully we can drag it out and we can have a lot of attention to this I think if you go to sleep or SAF and you search for petition like sopa and petition you'll see an online petition you can sign But we just have to be aware of this and we have to just fight censorship, right? By the way, there's an interesting argument Which I've been pushing which I haven't seen anyone else plan on to but if you think about it the Constitution was ratified in 1789 And the bill of rights was ratified two years later in 1791 So in a sense the bill of rights is newer became later than the Constitution And if and to the extent there's a conflict between the first amendment and the copyright clause And I think there is a conflict because copyright Does impede freedom of speech Well, then you would have to say that the newer statute or the newer provision has to prevail Which is the first amendment. So you have a constitutional argument There's not really a balance or a tension between these two In other words, the courts don't have to balance the first amendment against the copyright clause They can say that it actually repealed it or partially repealed it just like the 23rd amendment repealed or whichever one it was repealed prohibition later amendment Well, that was great Stefan. I'm sorry. We got off to a late start there But folks again the website c4sif.org and you can also Google Stefan Kinsella and learn about other writings of his thanks a lot. We'll have you on again I'm sure in the future and we'll do what we can to fight so quick. Thanks Peter. I appreciate it very good. Good night Folks see you next week. Bye. Bye