 If you want a vision of the future, Winston, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, whatever. You want answers? I think I'm entitled. You want answers? I want the truth! You can't handle the truth! Someone is trying to teach me lesson in futility. Why am I the only one who isn't killed? They will run you dizzy. They will pile falsehood on top of falsehood until you can't tell a lie from the truth and you won't even want to. That's how the powerful keep their power, don't you read the papers? I just want to say one word to you. Just one word. Yes, sir. Are you listening? Yes, sir, you. Plastics. I'm going to get your money for you. But if you don't get the President of the United States on that phone, you know what's going to happen to you. What? You're going to have to answer to the Coca-Cola Company. The world is a college of corporations and excerptly determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Biel. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. Welcome to another episode of Our Interesting Times. This is your host, Tim Kelly. Tonight, my guest is Stefan Concella. He is the founder and executive editor of Libertarian Papers, founder and director of the Center for Study of Innovative Freedom. He is a registered patent attorney and a former adjunct professor at the Texas College of Law. Stefan has published numerous articles and books on intellectual property law, international law, and the application of libertarian principles to legal topics. Stefan, how are you doing this evening? I'm doing very well. Thanks for having me on, Tim. Well, thank you for coming on. Well, tonight, I want to discuss your book. I've read it a couple times, Against Intellectual Property. Now, intellectual property, there's a lot of, say, misconceptions and misunderstandings of what it actually is and how it should be applied, its history. We look at intellectual property and copy. This basically is what patents and copyrights. The question is, is it really legitimate in a free society? We have, well, basically, is it necessary for the free market? Is it necessary for capitalism? Or is it an intrusion upon the free market? An unnecessary intrusion actually causes distortions throughout the economy and also results in a lot of injustice and actual violations of real property rights out there. So when you're addressing intellectual property, how would you want to first address the topic? Well, probably first by definitions, right? So the typical person hearing about intellectual property, they think of things like trademarks and copyrights and patents. And they don't know a lot about these things because they're not experts in them, which is understandable. So you have to understand the legal regimes that we're talking about. And then whether or not we should defend them or oppose them or something in between. The idea is whether or not the law, which is what we all have in society, right? The law is the set of institutions that impose legal sanctions for certain behaviors to try to get people to do things or not do things. Whether or not these laws should include so-called intellectual property law and the two primary types, which you mentioned, are patent and copyright. So copyright would be an intellectual right to control the distribution of a motion picture or a novel or a painting, something creative like that. And patent law is the legal mechanism by which you can control the distribution of your ideas that are innovative and technical, right? Like a new mousetrap or a new capacitor or a new car engine, something like that. OK, so the question is, is this part of the free market? Is it good? Is it bad? What should we do about it? And in my opinion, and I am, by the way, a patent attorney. I've been one for over 20 years. I'm an electrical engineer, so I'm skilled in this narrow area of technology. And that's what I specialize in in my legal practice of a patent law. And my view is that patent law and copyright law are completely and utterly incompatible with free markets, competition, the spread of knowledge, and they should be completely and utterly and immediately abolished. Now, the immediate question that arises is something like, well, why would someone write a novel if they don't have a monopoly over it? Or why would someone invent a new mousetrap if they don't get a monopoly over it? So this is the immediate retort that you will always get. Now, these arguments, in my opinion, are completely vacuous and mindless because the purpose of law is not to make sure that we have enough mousetraps or Star Wars sequels or whatever. The purpose of law is to protect rights and to do justice and to protect property rights. So the only question is, is a law that penalizes someone or performing an act basically of copying, is that law justified or not? And for the libertarian, that question comes down to the question of, did the action of the person making the copy, did he invade the property borders of someone else's property or not? And the answer, of course, is no. If you compete with someone in the market, if you learn from someone, if you build on what you've learned, you're not taking from them anything that they own. You're simply competing with them and building upon what they shared with the market. So the ultimate philosophy, philosophical position against IP or intellectual property, is that there's nothing wrong in a free society, in a free market, with people learning, competing, and building upon ideas that they have gotten in the common public markets. Yeah, and also what you're saying is that distinction is that intellectual property isn't tangible, it isn't scarce. So really, two people can entertain the same idea without violating each other's property rights, because there's no scarcity, there's no conflict of claim here. Well, I mean, I'd be happy to get into that. If you'll notice, I actually never exactly said that, because I don't think that is the, I think that that analysis is the basis of the argument against people who argue for IP. But it's not necessary to argue for property rights. Basically, in my view, all human beings that are part of private civil society, we already all agree that we have to have private property rights in the things that we could fight over, that we get a conflict over, that are rivalrous, that are, as some people say, scarce. And that's what property rights are. Property rights basically emerge as a response to the fundamental fact of scarcity. The fundamental fact of scarcity means that people can have conflict over the conflicting use of scarce means of action. So they want to do something, and they basically butt heads with each other. And if they want to have a way to resolve the conflict, then they sit back and they say, OK, there's a resource that we both want to use at the same time. How can we come up with a system where we can use these resources productively and peacefully without fighting with each other? And that's what property rights are. They emerge as the response to the fundamental fact of scarcity or conflict. So it's not that we say that ideas are not the subject of property rights because they're not scarce. It's simply that we recognize what property rights are and why they are awarded in the first place. They are granted and recognized in society as a response to scarcity and the possibility of conflict. But when you recognize this, you realize that any law always has to be enforced by force. I mean, the word force is part of the word enforce. But force is always a physical action that's applied against a physical resource. It's either someone's body or something that they control, which is what are the subjects of property rights or the objects of property rights. Go ahead. Yes, and you make the point that often in enforcing intellectual property, it requires actually the privation or the violation of people's genuine property claims, like preventing someone from fashioning or exporting some resource they own or tools they own because it violates someone else's intellectual property, like their patent on a certain mechanism or something like a mousetrap or something like that. You couldn't apply. So that's actually it's a greater violation on genuine property rights. By protecting intellectual property rights. Yes, and this is what I was kind of getting at with my sort of building up to what property rights are about. The nature of property rights is that we recognize that there are scarce resources in the world that need to be used or that people want to use. And if we want to use them in peace and harmony, then we have to have rules that say who's the owner of these resources. That's what property rights do. That's what they are, okay? And the libertarian view, the natural view is that you assign these property rights according to certain rules, okay? This is the basically the Lockean rule, the rule from John Locke, the rule that the person who uses something that's unowned first has a better claim to it than someone else or if you contractually transfer it to someone else like you give it to someone or you sell it to someone, then now they're the owner. So basically these very simple rules help you determine who the owner of a resource is when there is a dispute, okay? But all these issues relate to things that people could have a dispute about. They're all property rules about things that are the subject of property. So if you just start making up rules like someone has the right to their reputation, let's say, or they have the right to their ideas, the only way to enforce that so-called right in law would be to apply the use of physical force and remember, force is a physical thing against someone else's things that force can be used against, which will be their bodies or the things that they physically possess. So you're always talking about an assignment or a reassignment of property rights in physical scarce resources. My point is this, if I say, yes, I believe in property rights. I believe that you own the products of your work. I believe that you could homestead an unknown resource and I believe that you own a tractor that you buy from a seller and I believe that you own your body. But, however, but, however, but, however, I also believe that you own intangible things that the product of your mental effort. All that can really mean is that you think that the force of the state of the court system should be applied to force some person to hand over some tangible thing they own to you. So you're using this elaborate excuse or scheme or mechanism to steal property from someone else. So as a concrete example, if I sue you for copying my novel, then I sue you and I get $100,000 in damages from you. That means that the court, the government courts will take your property from you and give it to me. So in the end, what the dispute was really about was the dispute over who owns your money or in more stark terms, who owns your property, your land, your house, because I might seize your house as damages. So now I'm saying I have a claim on your house. I'm gonna take your house from you with the help of the courts as payment to me in damages because you copied something that I did. So when I say you copied something I did, that's just the excuse I'm using for the government to help me to steal something that you own. But I masquerade or I color it up in the language of property rights. And I say, well, okay, you invaded my property rights because you stole from me. Because you copied from me. But really you didn't steal from me. You just copied what I did. You acted in a way similar to the way that I'm acting. And I'm using that as an excuse to aid in a bet and collaborate with the state to basically steal your property and transfer it to me. So this is the ultimate fundamental problem of intellectual property. It's as a masked way of stealing property and transferring it from one class of citizens to another. So it's basically mass theft. Yes, interesting. Now, in many of your talks and what you've written, you point out the history of intellectual property, particularly copyrights and patents, particularly copyrights. It was born of sort of a state-imposed privilege and also censorship. So it's, do you wanna get into that a little bit? Sort of the sorted origins of this institution, legal institution? Well, absolutely. I mean, so the origins of property, so as a summary of position, here's what happened. Man finds himself naked and facing nature, right? And we are basically exposed and nature's dangerous and harsh. And what humans do is we use our skills, our bodies, our abilities, and we use our intellects and we try to survive. And we try to do more than that, right? We try to survive and live a good life. So we use our brains and our minds for that. And when we do that, we use our intellect to choose which means are available in the world to help us achieve certain ends. This is what humans do. This is what Ludwig von Mises, the famous Austrian economist, calls human action. This is what human action is. Every minute of our lives, every second, we see a future ahead of us that's uncertain and we see something that makes us uncomfortable. And we decide, I can change that. I can make it be more like what I want. So you have a goal or an end in mind and then you look around you and you see what means do I have to achieve this result and you take an action. And if that action, excuse me, is successful, we call that profit. If you fail, we call that a loss. If it's a monetary action, then we measure the profit and loss in terms of money, but profit and loss don't have to refer only to money, right? So this is the basic fundamental framework of the way humans, okay? But we use knowledge to guide our actions. We all have knowledge that we've accumulated from our experience and our observation of reality and watching other people. And also that we've luckily accumulated from the experience of the human race, right? There's like Hayek called it a fund of knowledge that we all can benefit from. This is exactly why the Industrial Revolution, which happened about 200, 250 years ago in the West, which has benefited the West, right? And the West is unimaginably richer at this point. Than the non-West is. But the other areas are catching up. And the reason is because over time, they can finally mimic and copy and use the knowledge that we innovated, right? Because knowledge can be copied and learned. We can learn from each other. And so over time, the human race will get higher and higher and higher. If we don't destroy ourselves in a nuclear holocaust or a gray goo kind of thing wrong, right? Yeah. So the idea is that knowledge is one really important ingredient of human action, OK? Which is the name of the book, of course. Well, human action. So human action has two fundamentally important ingredients. One is means and one is knowledge. Now means means the scarce resources that we employ to magnify our activities, to have an effect on the world. Like we actually physically interfere with the world to try to change things. Now this could be as simple as if I'm sitting in a room watching television and I feel a little bit warm, I stand up and I adjust the knob on the air conditioning control and I make it a degree colder. That is using a causally efficacious means to achieve a result, which is me getting colder, right? Or more comfortable in the next unforeseen future. So that's one ingredient, but I couldn't do any of that if I didn't have any knowledge, any mentality, any means. So you have to have knowledge about how things work and you have to have the availability of means. Now, the means are scarce because that means only one, like only one person can grab that air conditioning control knob at the same time. So if everyone wants the air conditioning of my house at the same time, we're gonna have a fight. And the only way to settle it is either no one gets to use it or we all fight over it all the time or we come up with a set of rules that says who gets to use the house and the AC mechanism, et cetera. And that's where property rights are. But this solution only arises in response to a problem and the problem is scarcity of the use of means. And so when you have scarcity or rivalrousness or conflict over these things, people that want to collaborate with each other and they want to get along with each other, they will settle on a set of rules or a system or a set of rules, right? That's what property rights are. But information, which is second ingredient of action, so you have to have the availability of things that can help you achieve what you want to achieve, but you also need what Marie Rothbart, the famous Austrian economist, he calls recipes, which is basically knowledge or information. How do you take the things that are available to you and use them in the right way to achieve what you want? That's knowledge. And the good thing about knowledge is that everyone can copy it instantly. If I come up with the right way to do something that is useful, everyone can copy it pretty instantly because you and I can both make a lemon cake with exactly the same recipe at the same time. A million people can do this at the same time without there being any conflict as long as we all use our own skills resources independently, but we can use the same information. So you can see that the entire idea of property rights makes no sense with respect to the recipe or the informational side of human action. So this is my entire view about intellectual property. Intellectual property tries to assign property rights in ideas, in information, in recipes, which is literally impossible. And so what it ends up doing is reassigning property rights and existing things. So as the example I gave earlier, if you have a monopoly over the recipe of a lemon cake, let's say, what that means is you can use the physical force. Again, remember, we go back to physical force. You can use the physical force of the government courts to stop me from using my own pots and pans and dough and flour and sugar and spices. You can physically stop me from using my stuff that I already own in a certain way because it is too similar to the way you think you have a monopoly right over. So this is the ultimate problem with intellectual property is that the only way to enforce intellectual property is to basically physically prohibit someone from using their resources that they own in a way that you don't want them to use, even though, and this is the important part, even though they're not invading your boundaries, they're not trespassing, they're not committing a tort, they're not harming you in an incognizable way. So this is the fundamental problem with intellectual property. Intellectual property has its origins in censorship, in terms of copyright, and in terms of protectionism, in terms of patents. So what would happen was say, three, four, five, 600 years ago, the government, the state would grant a monopoly to someone, you're the only guy that can sell sheepskin. You're the only guy that can sell playing cards in this area, and the crown would protect them. So this is just purely monopolistic protectionism, right? And this was called a patent or a letter patent because a patent means open, it's just like an open declaration that this guy is the only guy that you can buy a sheepskin from, okay? So of course, he can sell it for a higher price and have shitty service because he has no competition because the competition is literally illegal, outlawed. And over time, the kings, the monarchs abused so-called abuses privilege. I would say it's an abuse from the beginning, but it started getting out of hand and the parliament noticed, and so they passed the statute of monopolies in 1623 to try to regulate to some degree how the monarch could give these favoritist protectionist monopoly anti-competitive grants. And that led to what we have now, which is called the patent system, okay? Now, the copyright system arose from the attempt of the church and the state collaborating together to stop the spread of religious ideas that they didn't want spread without their permission. So originally before the Gutenberg printing press, it was very difficult to copy books like the Bible or translations of the Bible and the people that did it were called scribes because they inscribed or they wrote, right? They'd actually physically hand copied these books, but because it was so hard to do and so laborious, they were under the control of the state and the church, right? They were basically monks or something like that. But when the Gutenberg printing press started coming, was developed, then printing became a threat to these interests because they couldn't control which things were published anymore, okay? And so the government basically authorized these, like in England, the authorized, what's called the stationers company, which was like a monopoly, the only company they could print books. And of course they had to have the permission of the church and the state. So if you were an author and you wanted to publish something, you had to publish it through the stationers company and they had to, they would only do it if the government and the church agreed. So the constriction of the right to copy was used to censor, I mean like literally censor free speech and free press, free press. Well, and this basically evolved into what's called the statute of Anne in 1709, which is the modern genesis of copyright. So my point is that what people say now, especially libertarians, which is very disappointing, they will say that the origin of copyright and patent are part of the free market, right? They're private property rights, but copyright originated as part of the attempt of the state to censor ideas and patent originated as the attempt of the state to protect certain industries that were in the crown's favor. These are completely utterly incompatible with the free market. And libertarians that think otherwise have been completely deluded by the modern way of thinking about things. Just because you call something a property right doesn't mean it's a property right. I mean slaves in the original, in the American colonial era were property rights. Human beings were owned, they were property rights. Okay, there was a healthy market and a whole legal industry defining when you could sell a slave, how much they were worth, what would happen to you if someone damaged your slave? And so there was a whole legal industry around this, but that doesn't make it right. Just because the legal system classifies something as a property right doesn't mean that it's legitimate. And I would say exactly the same thing is true with patent and copyright. These are the two systems that are about as contrary to the original libertarian ideas you can get. And yet we've been deluded into thinking that they're part of property rights because the apologists and the special interests that were in favor of these systems in the 1800s in response to criticisms by free market economists started saying, well it's not a monopoly grant, just because it originated in the statute of monopolies of 1623 doesn't mean it's a monopoly. It's really a property right. Yes, it's an intellectual property right. So this was a propaganda campaign, which they have won, but which I still defy. The United States sort of inherited this when they, I think it's Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution grants Congress the power to promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries. So that's from, that this is where our intellectual property derives, patent, copyright, even trademark, I guess you could say. Yeah. Oh, that's actually, okay. So that's not quite right. So I know where you're going. So let me just clarify. Trey Mark has like literally nothing to do with that because those two, the clause you cited and the phrase that you mentioned arguably are a authorization of federal power to enact copyright and patent law. Okay. Okay, because it talks about inventors and writings, which is what the subject matter of patent and copyright law are. Trey Mark law has to do with reputations and commerce and the Congress actually recognized that they don't have authority to regulate this, but in the Lanham Act in the 1950s, L-A-N-H-A-N, the Lanham Act, which is the Federal Trademark Act, they tried to regulate trademark to the extent that it has an interstate commerce effect. So what they did there was they relied upon the interstate commerce clause, which simply says that Congress has the power to regulate commerce between the states. And over time, the federal government had used that clause, the IC clause, the interstate commerce clause, they've used that to basically regulate anything they wanna regulate. There's only been a few limitations like with the Lopez case, the gun case, under Clarence Thomas in the 2000s or something like that. But basically, the federal government has turned the interstate commerce clause into a general grant of power. And I'll just point this out to your listeners who wanna look into this. If the interstate commerce clause was really originally meant to be so broad, why would there even need to be grants of power to the federal government to be able to coin money, let's say, or the few things that there are granted the power to do in the Constitution if it was already implied in interstate commerce clause? Obviously it wasn't. And so basically my point is the trademark law right now is a hybrid mix of state and federal law because the federal government has not succeeded in totally supplanting state law with federal. Now, in the field of copyright and patent, they have made these totally federal or national fields because of this clause. But I would make one point to you of this. The Constitution was drafted in 1787. It was ratified in 1789. And in the 1789 Constitution, there is a clause that authorizes Congress to enact patent and copyright laws if they want to. Doesn't require them, it just authorizes it. Okay, in 1791, two years later, there was a Bill of Rights enacted, the first 10 amendments to the Constitution, right? And the first amendment specifically says, Congress shall enact no law abridging the right to freedom of speech or freedom of religion or freedom of expression, right? Freedom of the press. And the courts have recognized that the copyright law is incompatible, inconsistent in conflict with the first amendment because you have a federal law which basically authorizes federal courts to burn books, burn movies, prevent the distribution of written material or speech, which is facially, you know, on its face would be government regulation of speech, which would violate the first amendment. And the courts actually don't deny this. They recognize this. So what they say is, there's a tension between, this is what the government does when they have fake law they're enforcing, right? They say there's a, this is what these fake judges in black robes that pretend to be real judges do. They say that there's one law that says that you have freedom of speech and freedom of press. And there's another law that says you have the right to have copyright. And they're obviously, quote, intention, unquote, with each other. So what's the job of the courts to balance these things that are in conflict or intention, which is complete bullshit and wrong because what the job of the courts is to do is to enforce the law. And according to statutory and constitutional interpretation if you have an amendment to the constitution this passed later and it conflicts with an earlier provision of constitution, guess which one prevails? I mean, it's like if you have two statutes, one passed in 1800, another statute passed in 1828. If there's a conflict, which one is the law of the land? It's the later one because laws can supersede previous laws. This is just standard canonical statues of interpretation. So the Bill of Rights was enacted in 1791. The first amendment was 1791. And it is definitely in conflict with the Copyright Act of 1789. The courts admit this. So the solution is not to balance them. The solution is to say, okay, well, unfortunately we have two federal laws and they're in conflict intention with each other. And the later law should prevail, which would be the first amendment, the freedom of speech and freedom of the press. So in my opinion, the copyright law is actually unconstitutional because it conflicts with the first amendment. Yeah, and you mentioned burning books or banning books. Chris, I think you've mentioned in some previous talks, the derivative novel from Catcher and the Rye, from G.A.D. Salinger's Catcher and the Rye, the estate of G.A.D. Salinger sued and had that book banned, correct? Yeah. Because it used this name with the title, we refer to the title or something. Well, it's because there was a sequel. Okay, so someone wanted to write a sequel to Catcher and the Rye, and they did so. But under copyright law, so copyright law just doesn't prohibit just copying things. It prohibits what's called making a derivative work, which is something that's based upon some previous work. And the sequel to a novel is usually considered to be a derivative work of the... So like, if you or I wanted to write a sequel to Atlas Shrugged or to Star Wars, even if it was an original sequel that you and I made up, but it was based upon that, that would be a derivative work and that would be under the control of the copyright holder of the original work that you're deriving your work from. So they can literally prohibit you from even selling a book or publishing, distributing a movie based upon the stuff. And this has actually happened before. This happened with Nosferatu, the alleged knockoff of the Dracula novel by Bram Stoker. So, yeah, this happens actually all the time. Actually, J.K. Rowling's publisher of the Harry Potter and Harry Potter novels, they had a, it was like number three or number four. And one of the bookstores in Canada accidentally sold some of the copies early, like a couple of weeks early. And so, of course, the publisher was freaking out about this and they went to court in Canada and using copyright law. They got a court to issue orders to these innists, just human beings who are customers of a bookstore who had bought a copy of a book that was sold to them accidentally too early. The court told them, you may not read this book until, and you can't tell any, if you already read it, you can't tell anyone what you've learned from it. So it was like literal thought control in the name of copyright. And this is what the advocates of copyright, like I can understand people defending copyright and patent because the world is full of statist and fascist and protectionist now, but a libertarian doing it is just obscene, obscene and disgusting. No libertarian should be able to hold his face high in any crowd if they've ever defended copyright or patent. These are like part of the most vile, disgusting, evil things the government does to us. This is why we're libertarians because we hate this kind of stuff. So I can't emphasize enough that this is, patent and copyright are so utterly incompatible. It would be like trying to defend Guantanamo Bay or torturing prisoners of a war, or it would be like trying to defend the drug war. It's like, well, drugs are not good for people. So of course it's okay that people go to prison for their lives or selling marijuana. I mean, you cannot justify this kind of stuff as a true liberal, as a true libertarian. Patent and copyright are completely and utterly incompatible with the free society, with free expression, with competition, with private property rights and with capitalism. And people need to stop, libertarians especially need to stop thinking just because some propagandist calls it intellectual property that it means it's a property right. It's not a property right. The cases you cite, or actually at least in my view, actually, obviously what it says in the constitution is that exclusive rights and writings and descriptories are issued to promote the progress of science and useful arts. However, what we see throughout history is these things actually stifling and preventing the promotion. It actually stifles the arts, the useful arts because it stifles collaborative effort, innovation based on known technology or information or knowledge as you say. In history of all this legislation, Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Stop Online Privacy Act SOPA, then there's PIPA, I think preventing real online pirate or preventing online piracy act or something. And all these terms piracy is very interesting as I think if you mention is that pirates of the old day were given actually exclusive rights by the Queen of England to be privateers. To rob. Yeah, like Francis Drake. Yeah. Right. So it's irony, irony, right? Well, not only that. I mean, a pirate, I mean, in common conception, a pirate is someone who they board your ship, they invade your private property, they kill people, they steal things, they break things. They're basically thieves of things that people own which are scarce resources. So they're nothing more than a type of thief of an owned resource. But what the state does and what the IP advocates do is they use that metaphor, that mental image and they try to color people with that that are basically copying information. If you copy information, you're not boarding someone's ship, you're not stealing anything that they own, you're not physically harming them. So the entire metaphor is completely dishonest and wrong. And then you'll have these libertarian fellow travelers that say to them like, well, the only reason libertarians oppose IP is they want things for free. Well, first of all, that's psychologizing and I don't actually agree with that. That's not the reason. I don't actually pirate things because I'm an IP lawyer and I don't want to take a risk. I don't think there's anything wrong, in my opinion, there's nothing morally wrong with copying information if you have the ability to do so to get away with it but I don't take the risk, okay? But they're basically trying to say that your conclusion is wrong because your reasoning is suspect. You want something for free, therefore you're wrong. Well, first of all, there's nothing wrong with wanting something for free. I mean, that's what economization is all about, trying to reduce the cost of acquiring your end. So what's wrong with that? And if we learn and we benefit from the mass accumulation of information and knowledge and recipes and techniques and scientific and technical knowledge that other people have created recently or in the past, that's a good thing. So let me give an example. Libertarians will say that we need to have, the government needs to have the ability to seize private property for a public function which is called eminent domain or takings, right? Because there are just some things that are essentially public functions and we just need to do these things. And if you don't have the ability to just force these guys to do it, then it won't get done. And they might be what's called a free rider or a holdout. That's what Richard F. Stein calls them, right? And it's a book on takings. Now, let me ask you a question. What in the hell is wrong with being a free rider? I mean, we're all free riders in the sense that we benefit from all kinds of things other people do. I might walk down the street and see a father biking with his son and I get a smile of pleasure out of seeing that great picture. I didn't pay him a royalty for that. Oh, I'm free riding off of him. I might see a sunrise that I didn't pay for. I might see fireworks in the distance from some town that paid for the fireworks. And I get a little bit of amusement or enjoyment from seeing the fireworks. And I, okay, I'm a free rider. This is a good thing about society, not a bad thing. You can't use the stupid Chicago type of economic arguments to limit people's property rights in their freedom. Yeah, that's that. Milton Friedman, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, sort of the most, but I mean. Yeah, yeah, you know. With holding tax. Anyway, yeah, so I mean, it's nothing, yeah, nothing really wrong, inherently wrong. This is an example of sort of the psychological warfare through the manipulation of the language that's used. They manipulate the language to manipulate reality and skew the debate in a certain way. But nevertheless, the claim is that patents and copyrights necessary to spur creativity, to create incentives for people to go write books, be creative, make movies, whatever. But the irony is that, at least for my, when I looked throughout history is that the patents have often stifled the development of technology and held things back. The example is the Bolton-Watt steam engine. It didn't really take off until their patent expired because they spent so much time defending their patent as opposed to actually improving the steam engine. And once the patent was released expired, you can get this collaborative effort and the steam engine took off became much more efficient. I'm also thinking an example of aviation in the United States. I think it was World War I, I might have this wrong, but I think Pratt and Whitney was being sued by the Wright brothers. And what happened was, Woodrow Wilson administration, under the excuse of for the war effort to develop aviation because they didn't have any good planes, suspended the patent or did away with it in order so they could get together and develop the planes. Yeah, I mean the details escape me exactly, but okay. So when you have a case where the government suspends a patent, okay, this is very similar to where the government says they're going to bust a monopoly that they helped to create or where the government, so the government basically issues patent monopoly grants, it's called patents. And this helps to create economic monopolies. And then if someone has a monopoly grant from the government which is called a patent, and if they use it in the wrong way or too much, then they might be the target of a government investigation. So this actually happened about 15 years ago, if you remember, there was a spate of kind of quasi-terrorist people mailing anthrax in envelopes to people around the US. Okay, and so there were some people getting anthrax because they opened an envelope, there's like anthrax dust in it and they get anthrax. Now, one of the treatments is apparently this drug called Cyproflaxen, but it was a patent-protected drug. And so there was a limited supply and the manufacturer wanted to charge outrageous prices to increase the supply to deal with this problem, which they have the right to do under a free market if you have a monopoly, right? So like the logic of the patent system is that there's nothing wrong with charging a lot of money, but the government basically said, well, you're abusing, so we gave you a monopoly right, but you're abusing it. So if you abuse this right too much, we're gonna take it back from you by issuing what's called a compulsory license, which basically means the government takes back some of your monopoly that they gave you earlier. But the critics say, well, the government's threatening property rights. I mean, this reminds me of some of these elections when you have these older citizens they say things like keep your cotton-picking hands off my social security. It's like, well, wait a minute, it's not like you have a private property right in your social security stream of payments that I'm paying for every day. It's just being taken from me and given to you. Do you understand that? So it's not like, so if you're in favor of reducing the social security tax on me today, it's not like I'm taking something from you that you own. I mean, you're gonna be harmed if your social security payments go down, surely, but you're not entitled to them because you don't have a property right in my work, in my labor. So all these things go together. You have to think clearly about what property rights are, what are fundamental human rights, and the role of the government basically is only to steal, destroy, redistribute, and just ruin things and kill. The government never, ever, ever does anything beneficial for humanity, never. Now that's the anarchist perspective, which maybe your viewers don't share, but the government has never done anything for me. When people tell me, aren't you afraid of al-Qaeda and all this suddenly? Yeah, I'm not really fans of them, but you know who's stealing $500,000 a year from me? It's not al-Qaeda, it's the federal government. He created them anyway, but anyway, it's a whole nother story. If they hadn't done that for like five, 10 years, I could be retired already living in Tahiti. So my personal biggest enemy is the federal government, and that's because they do the most damage to me, and I think it's not just me, it's everyone in general. Not to say that if we have a huge war of humanity against humanity, and I have to choose sides between al-Qaeda and the US federal government, I don't want to go on record saying who I'd support. It's obvious I'd support the US, but it's a horrible decision, right? Because they're just a big criminal gang fighting another criminal gang that they helped start. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And as regarding the Social Security, I think there's a quarter order to that effect saying there is no property claim to Social Security payments as a prudential matter for Congress to decide. So it all depends on how many old fogies are out there voting. Absolutely, absolutely. So it's, now a couple of your talks, two matters. You've mentioned, one thing is, is some of the more ridiculous international property claims that have been made, I think they've tried to patent recipes. Yeah, so, yeah. And so, I mean, honestly, I gave up about five years ago collecting all of these examples of utterly outrageous applications of international property because it just, it got to be, I couldn't keep up with it because there's so many every day. So I did for a while, but yeah. So basically patents cover inventions like concrete, like a new mousetrap, a new physical line or new process and copyrights cover certain defined categories like novels and paintings and software programs. But there are areas in between or that are merged that are not quite clearly covered like fashion, like or perfume smells, the way perfume smells. That's why you can go to a drugstore, you can get something, it smells like Chanel number five for like $5, it's not called that, it's called something else, but it smells the same because there's no IP on perfume smells and there's no IP on the way a dress or a shirt looks. And so when these new designers come out with new things, people can compete with them when they see that it's worth competing with them, right? Sign becomes popular or whatever. So there are lots of areas of life that are actually not yet covered by patent and copyright. And one of them would be food recipes and restaurants like the way you make your pizza, things like that. But of course the impulse is always I have an idea, I have a business, I'm making some money, I want more, I want more, I want more. So I know, I'll go to the government and I'll try to get the government to help me stop my competition. If you can get the government to help you stop your competition, you can price your goods at a higher amount, right? You can make a profit even more easily. And so Domino's might have a new rolled crust with something in the crust. And so they might want to get a patent on that. It's hard to get a patent on that, right? It's hard for a new clothing designer to get protection on their new shirt design. It's just a fashion thing. So of course they try to go to Congress and they try to bribe these Congress critters to pass laws to extend copyright or extend patent to cover recipes or beer recipes or pizza recipes or food or sorry, or shirt designs. So there's always an increased agitation for people to try to extend copyright and patent law. But this is nothing more than the attempt to bribe or cajole the government to protect your industry from competitors. So they will always use IP law to try to protect themselves. If it doesn't quite cover them yet, they'll try to expand it and broaden it. In fact, there's right now in the Republican House, there's a law that would expand the scope of patent and copyright. Actually, I think it's a Democratic legislator, a congressman who's proposing it, but I wouldn't be surprised if Trump, so here's an example of Trump. So Trump comes into office and he abolishes the TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which is in its infancy, but he does it for the wrong reasons. Okay, the TPP would have increased American-style patent and copyright around the world, but Trump abolished it because it was pro-free trade. So it's like he abolished, he gets rid of the law for the wrong reasons. He's for American-style IP. He wants to use American-style intellectual imperialism to push patent and copyright American-style on the rest of the globe for the benefit of the pharmaceuticals in America, Hollywood, and the music industry. Yeah. This is the real story of what's going on. The music industry, Hollywood, and the pharmaceutical industry are using the federal government to push their monopolistic, anti-competitive protectionist measures on the rest of the world to their detriment. And they've had success, so. Yeah, it's almost like a new form of imperialism that we've seen with these trade agreements. Where we have, whether it's the NAFTA or something, and they're using an excuse to regulate other cultures, other societies, and introduce these things in other societies, because these societies might be actually, it's a form of competition to the corporate system of the West. Well, yeah, what they say is, it's a type of property right, and you have to subscribe to Western-style property rights. And, you know, in general, I would have no problem with that, but protectionist measures are not property rights, but they call them that, but they're not. We're getting at the language manipulation again here, yeah. Yes, it is. An important point. Yeah. But yet, I mean, but in your argument, what you're saying is you, I mean, obviously the fact that there is a very vibrant, competitive culinary industry food. Yes. Even designing cars, these things, the fact that these things are very vibrant, very competitive, very profitable outside any IP, belies the argument for IP across the board. Well, you know, I would think so, but you could, I mean, the mentality of the people that want to control and nudge society, so their argument, they envision these Gaussian curves, these little bell curves, right, where they see there's an optimum. It's like the Laffer curve, right, where he said that in the 80s under Ronald Reagan, this economist, Art Laffer said, we can reduce the tax rate, the maximum marginal tax rate on income tax, and we can still have a higher revenue because there's a Laffer curve where we're on the right side of the optimum. In other words, if we reduce the amount of income tax, like we go from 80% to 60%, then we will make more money because by reducing that weight on the economy, it will just spring up, and even if we only take 60% or 40%, that 40%, you're taking the 40% of a bigger pie, so your slice is bigger. So that's kind of the utilitarian Chicago-Costeen argument. That's how they look at things. In my view, we should reduce taxes, not only even if it reduces tax revenues for the government, but because, in other words, that's a feature, not a bug. I actually want the government to have less revenues. I don't want them to have more revenues, so if you tell me reducing taxes from 43% to 20% were to reduce the government revenues, I'm totally okay with that. Okay, so with patents, what these guys envision is that there's a Laffer curve innovation, okay, and copyrights too. They imagine that if you have zero intellectual property, you have, they won't quite say zero intellectual creation. They'll say suboptimal. So you have way, way too little innovation because no one's gonna innovate unless you have a monopoly price that you can charge, whatever. Okay, so you don't have enough innovation. There's a way, a social waste, right? But if you have too much patent protection, then you hamper innovation because you make it too hard for people to innovate now because they have to work around existing patents and things like that. So there's a happy medium somewhere in between. So all these like Chicago types, they'll say that, well, we're obviously on the right side of the curve. So what they're saying is we have too much. We have too much patent law, too much copyright law. Copyright law is 170 years plus the birth of the author. That's too long, that's too long. Patent law is 17 years, roughly, that's too long. It should be five years for software. Copyright is way too long. So all they can tell you is they think it's too big, it's too much, it's too long. But they have no, they have no reasons for it. All they say is, well, we're obviously on this side of the Laffer curve of innovation. It's all arbitrary at the end of the day. Well, first of all, yeah, they have no reason for assuming there is a Laffer curve. They have no reason for assuming, for knowing where we are on this curve. And number three, that's not the purpose of law. The purpose of law is to protect rights. It's not to, for the government to come in and maximize innovation. This is not the purpose of society and the law. It's to make sure we have the right amount of rim brands being painted at any time. The right amount of titles being innovated. It's just to protect property rights and let people work within their own spheres and integrate with each other and do what they're gonna do. So, and I can understand the average person or the Chicago person or the government person thinking this way, because they're not principled in the first place. But for libertarians to go there is just horrific. For them to say, for any libertarian to tell me, if I say, well, if they say, well, we need patents, and I say, well, patents violate property rights, which is true and no one can disagree with this. And then they say, well, how would someone have an incentive to write a novel in your world? Now, the premise of that question is that that's the job of, that's my job, I guess. It's the job of the law to make sure that enough bleak houses are getting being written by a dickens or enough. I mean, Shakespeare didn't even have copyright, but let's just forget Shakespeare, the greatest writer in the English language. Okay, but the point is, they're shifting the burden of proof, they're trying to say that unless I can prove that there's gonna be enough, you know, Stephen King's out there incentivized to exactly the right amount by the copyright law, we can't change this law, even though it's based upon Queen Anne's 1709 law, which is based upon the stationers company Monopoly, which was based upon the attempt by the church and the government to prohibit free speech and freedom of the press. Okay, and that's what it does now, because it results in government courts banning books, banning movies, prohibiting sequels, all kinds of distorting culture. So the entire argument is completely illiberal in spirit. The entire argument for patent and copyright is completely illiberal. And when I say illiberal, I mean, not liberal, when I say liberal, I mean it in our way, in the good way, in the libertarian, pro-freedom, pro-individual, pro-property rights way. But you know, you just look at something like music, how the copyright of music, how, I mean just a cursor examination would tell you how that would stifle innovation because with that copyright on music, you'd have so many people doing their covers and interpretations of various artist songs that, I mean, obviously it stifles the arts for the pursuit of maximizing the profits of a few artists and particularly the recording industry, the corporations, not the artists themselves, it's the corporations that profit most from the music industry. And the other ones that are most vigorously going after copyright and going after people. So the artists themselves are, from what I understand, some of them are ambivalent about it. Some of them have been very entrepreneurial in response to technology. They've gone online and these things. But there's ways to make money. I mean, that's, really it's the job of the entrepreneur to figure out how to make money in the free market, not for government to give him a privilege or some special law that maximizes his profits. I mean, would you agree, I mean? I would totally agree. And I would also say, so I would say this, I've been actually impressed with the innovations in, especially the creative arts, like music and painting. Look, the common argument that you're gonna get is this, something like this. Well, without patents, how's the little guy gonna compete with GM? Or how is the small artist gonna compete with Sony Records or whatever without copyright? It's like, well, first of all, most of these guys were already taking advantage. If you go work for a company as an engineer, by virtue of your employment and the common law of the state, and usually by virtue of an employment agreement that you sign, the employer owns all your patent rights and uses your copyrights as well, even if you're not in that area. And in terms of copyright, there's the work for hire doctrine where if you create something for pay, they own that too. So the studios own that, the entire publishing industry, the book publishing industry, the music publishing industry, the studio system, the Hollywood movie system have been all heavily, and also the way that inventions work in terms of industry with IBM and all these companies that get patents and their invention, they all get ownership of these rights that are created by the small guy, okay? And almost always they're paid nothing or it's just part of their salary, right? Like you're a copywriter, you're a DJ for a company, you're a talk show host. Yes, on occasion you have a Bill Cosby, you have a Madonna, you have a megastar, you have Justin Bieber, they make more than average. Yes, that's true, on occasion, okay? Most, I mean I know lots of artists, I'm sure you do, most people do, they never make any money, they're not doing it for the money, okay? They're not the ones being screwed over by copyright law one way or the other. They just find it hard to make money selling things that are easily copyable. Most people that I know that are beginning medium-sized artists like singers or musicians, they would love for people to take a free CD to learn their stuff so that they might become a fan and spread it to other people so they become popular so they can sell concert tickets or whatever. They're not making money off of these CDs and these Apple, they might make 20 bucks a year or something, it's nothing, that's not why they do it. I don't think that's why Bach did it, I don't think that Mozart did it, I don't think that's why Michelangelo did it, none of these people that are real creators do it because they can get a temporary monopoly from a copyright, it's ridiculous. Well, I mean the greatest achievements in literature, music, art, and Western civilization were all achieved prior to any idea of intellectual property. Beethoven had no copy, right? I knew that Bach or Mozart and I don't know. I'd say the Bible itself is supposed to be the most popular book of all time and one of the great works of literature and there is copyright on the translations of the Bible. Well, one thing I thought it was interesting, you made this point in a couple of your talks and also you alluded to it in our discussion tonight is, well, the effect of the Gutenberg Bible, how that is when it became a practical, when common publishing became practical so the state had to clamp down on it. We've seen a similar tension with the internet, how with the digital age, that's when IP has become to started this thing again because it just wasn't practical to copy music, these things, so now they've tried to crack down because the technology is allowing this file sharing and this explosion of information sharing and knowledge and once again you have the state, the corporate state using coercive power to stifle innovation, complete opposite of what the Constitution says that these things exist to do. Well, so I imagine that in the founding of the country in 1776, 1789 around that time, I don't think that your average yeoman farmer and your intelligent citizen and even the other people, I don't think they really had any clue about the copyright clause of the Constitution and they didn't depend on their livelihoods for it or anything like that. I think it was inserted because it was at that point a tradition in English law and because the people that wrote the Constitution were the types of people that served to benefit from patent and copyright law. You had inventors like Ben Franklin and Jefferson and you had writers, all these guys were writers. So the people that could benefit from a legal monopoly over your writings and your inventions were the people that ratified the Constitution. Now to their credit, a lot of them never took advantage of it like Jefferson and Franklin and these guys but the point is these were not provisions in there as some result of natural law thinking or what everyone at the time was thinking. These guys were farmers and they were trying to establish their freedom and independence. They were not worried about charging them a royalty for a Justin Bieber song, 240 years from now, right? So I think it was a mistake and my view is this is too much to go into here but people who are interested can just Google my name and John Locke, L-O-C-K-E in the labor theory of property. I think the mistake was made by John Locke who's sort of our intellectual progenitor when he was trying to come up with an argument to defend the right of free men to own things absent the consent of the crown basically. What he was trying to do was say, we have a natural right that precedes and is outside the government. He was trying to basically limit what the government could do and he was trying to rebut the arguments of defenders of the crown who would say things like, God gave the earth to Adam and Eve because that's in the Bible and Adam and Eve gave the earth to their descendants who are the kings and queens that we have now. So all the kings and queens have a divine right to rule the earth. That's what Locke was trying to say, okay, really, God gave it to us in common and then everyone can go out and find whatever they want that's not being used yet and homestead it. So he had to do it in that language of religion because the world was religious then and it's still religious now to a degree, unfortunately. So he was just trying to come up with a reason where you could not have to rely upon the previous dogma that entrenched the state and the crown and the kings and the queens. So he was dangerous to them. So what he said was, listen, God made us, he made the world, he made you and God owned you. Now, between me and you, I'd rather God owned me than Queen Nefertiti or whatever, okay, fine, because you have this perfect absolute guy who's eternally just, okay, fine, he can be my slave owner instead of you, that's fine. But he set me free to ramp, to ramp around this world he created, which is mostly unused and anything I come across that no one else is using, I can homestead it. So that's the libertarian idea, but Locke mixed it in with these kind of religious ideas because that's what he was responding to. And what he said was, God gave you yourself, whatever that means, which means your body. And so you own yourself, okay, fine, John, and you own your things that you do with your labor because you own your labor. So that's where he started getting his labor theory of property, which by the way resulted in the labor theory of value, which resulted in communism and Karl Marx. So there are dangers, I don't think he meant it this way, but there are dangers to this labor theory conception of value and property, which was inherent in the way Locke was trying to just justify the right of man to live on this earth free of the tyranny of governments. But he couched it in a language aimed at religious, the religious mentality of the divine right of kings. Do you follow what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, sure, yeah. And as far as the constitution goes, I'm sure it entered in just to inertia and maybe a bit of cultural class bias, where the inventors, just how it's done. It's a traditional belief. It's kind of like a lot of the English law came over, I mean, was passed on after that. Yeah, and parts of the constitution are totally utilitarian in the sense that they were trying to come up with a practical system that they thought would work. And they also knew that their new land were part of, I think they, of course, since they were at the beginning of the industrial revolution, right? They were at the beginning of this great leap forward in mankind that they could see the importance of innovation and technology and science and ideas and engineering. And of course they're right. But to their mentality, they just wanna foster that. It's almost like the infant industry argument that we still have now. Like if you have an infant industry, a new industry, you need to protect it for a while, I don't know, two, three, four, 10 decades from competition, from outside competition. Cause you need to get this native industry going. You gotta get it going. So it's almost like a protection, it's a way of running the economy from, it's a centralized view of the economy. Like the government needs to sit there with this gazing eye, like the pyramid, right, on the dollar bill and look at the economy and decide which industry should we support? Which should we not support? Which do we need to give a little bit extra help to? And which not? And that was what patent copyright were. They said, we need to give a little bit extra help to artists and novelists and innovators. And we're gonna give them a little monopoly. It's okay, it's only for 10, 20 years. Only for 10, 20 years. Not a big deal, just a little bit of help. Doesn't violate people's rights too much. But they sensed, they knew that it violates the free market. They knew that it was anti-competitive. That's why they limited it to, they said for a limited term. And the constitution says the Congress can grant these rights for a limited term. So they knew that you can do it for a little while. It's like to support an infant industry, but not for too long. Because it basically harms, and is contrary to the free market. Now, before I let you go tonight, I just want one of the points you bring out also is patents. You're a patent attorney. And the vast majority of patents are defensive. Meaning that they only exist because we have patent law. That also is a case against patents in general too. Would you agree that the fact that most are forced to have this huge legal infrastructure, this bureaucratic cost, administrative cost, just to file so someone doesn't come along and prevent you from utilizing something you have invented or fashioned? Well, this is one of these issues that it's really hard to get into in detail without getting into the details of the way patent law works. I don't know if I would agree that that in and of itself is an argument against patent law. It's an argument for a cost of patent law. Is it argument that patent law imposes a cost which is usually not conspicuous? It's a hidden cost. And so most people that argue in favor of patent law, they have an implicit utilitarian argument behind their advocacy of the system. What they're saying is we need patent law because it does some good, and the good is worth more than the cost of the system. I mean, you have to basically argue that if you're gonna argue for laws in that way, which is by the way, not the way you or not the way I would argue, I argue for laws with the principle and right, wrong. I don't argue in the Chicago, I kind of a utilitarian utility maximizing way that people do because I don't think that's a coherent way of arguing in the first place. But if you're gonna argue that way, you need to know what you're talking about. You need to have data. And as far as I can tell, as a patent lawyer, as someone as a libertarian, as someone experienced in this industry, as a scholar who's read the literature, there is no reason whatsoever to believe that there is any benefit whatsoever to a patent system, okay, to the economy or to innovation. And even if there is some benefit, we would have to subtract that, we would have to subtract from that the cost of the system, which is huge, which is what you were just getting at when you asked me this question. Okay, so the cost of the system is undeniably huge. The cost of innovating or not innovating, the cost of filing for patents when you don't really need to, but just because you have to do it to protect yourself. Hiring patent lawyers like me, defending against lawsuits, even changing your business strategy because, hey, we've got 17 patents in this area, instead of two in this area, so let's move our product portfolio in this direction because we can defend this way from other people's threats because we can use a patent system. I mean, that is not necessarily the way a free market would lead you to innovate absent patents. So it heavily distorts technology and innovation. Let me give you just a side example. Everyone's used at this point to laser printers, okay? Laser printers are an amazing technology, but the cartridges are extremely expensive as everyone knows. And that is actually how the laser printer companies make their money, HP and the others, they make their money, not off the laser printer, but off the cartridges, right? So if they sell you a printer for a cheap cost, they want to make a lot of money off of you as a repeat customer buying their laser cartridges, right? Same thing with razors, by the way, if you buy a razor from some, it's the same thing, all these special chic razors. So the problem they face is that someone, a generic company, someone from China, Korea, whatever, they could make a cheap knockoff cartridge that could compete with you. And that's gonna undercut their margin, right? On the excess price they're charging for the laser printer cartridges. So they want to stop competition. So what do they do? They turn to an ultra property. They turn to it in terms of the trademark. So they prevent you from saying it's even compatible with a brother or a Canon or an HP printer. So you can't even say that without getting into trouble. Okay, so that's trademark law. And then there's really nothing innovative about a lot of these things, but what they do is they make up a circuit. They just make up a circuit that does something complicated but inessential, and they put half of the circuit in the printer and half on the cartridge. And they have to mate with each other to work. So they basically disable, they make it where you have to make a cartridge with half of a circuit on it for it to work with your printer. And they file a patent on that circuit. Even though it's really not that useful, it's basically a way of disabling their technology. And they enable it and they don't let competitors enable it because they file a lawsuit using patent law against them for that. So there's all this completely insane very creative. I'll give them that creative use of patent law, copyright law, trade secret law and trademark law in an attempt to protect these markets. And so you can't expect people not to use these things. Just like if you have a welfare system, you can't expect people not to apply for and receive welfare. The problem with the welfare system is not welfare mothers who use the system. If you put a pig trough out with free slop in it, pigs will come and slop on the slop. I mean, it's gonna happen. The problem is taking money from me to fill the pig trough and putting it out there. That's the problem, right? The problem with the patent system is similar. It's granting these monopolies which people will use to their advantage. Same with copyright. So then today, it is an unwarranted interference by the government and the rights of individuals to purchase goods and services in the free market. In my opinion, it actually stifles innovation and just retards economic growth. And I think as you've laid out very clearly that a copyright or patent is not a genuine property right. In fact, the law treats it differently because there's a limit on it. It doesn't exist in perpetuity. It expires. So when people make the claim that I have a right to my ideas, a right to the fruits of my labor, my intellectual work, it's not that, the law itself doesn't acknowledge the fact that it is indeed a genuine property claim. It's something completely different and that's why there's expiration dates on it and things like that. So, I mean, in summation. That's a good summation, I like it. Yeah, and intellectual, what's the property of theft? I guess the intellectual property of theft, I guess you can say. In his theft, I actually think it's theft. Well, you know, so Pierre Proudhon, the French kind of quasi, he said property is theft and a lot of libertarians get upset about that because technically speaking, you know, you and I believe property is the opposite. Like theft is the taking of property rights. So it doesn't make any sense to say property theft, but I think what he meant was that the government coming in and giving land property titles to people that had some kind of property right in the land, but maybe not full property rights. Yeah, so you had a property right in your land, but other people had some rights on it too, like say farmers, people hunting, they had the hunting rights that were long established or people traversing over the land, which we call easements or userfrucks now. So people had certain rights that were traditional and low and respected. And from a libertarian point of view, you could just look at rights as a bundle of rights where it was distributed a certain kind of way among different groups and different people. If the government comes in and just says, no, you are now the owner of this castle in all of its lands, 100%, you could put a fence up around it and close it and stop people from crossing it that used to have this right, which would be called a right of passage, which is a real right, a property right in the past, that you could see that the assignment by the state of property rights could be theft of real property rights, just like the government calling something an intellectual property right is effectively a type of theft. So just because the government calls something property doesn't mean it's not an invasion of property rights, is what I would say. Yeah, and poverty society just has the enclosure movement, but you can say they created paparism, which then led to, I guess, the colonization of Australia. But yeah, I mean, yeah, it's again, it's a grant of a certain privilege called property. Again, getting back to that language, misuse the language, psychological warfare with misplaced language, and that's what you have to look for. Well, Stefan, I want to thank you. You spent a lot of time with me than I explained this. I think we had a good talk. The conversation went where I wanted it to go, and so I want to thank you for the time you gave me tonight. I enjoyed it. Thank you very much. Follow your work, Steffen Concella. You have a website? Yeah, just go to steffenconcella.com. Okay, and just follow your work there. You can follow it there. I have a site that's devoted towards intellectual property matters called C4sif.org, Center for the Study of Intellectual Freedom. But it's linked from my other site. So yeah, just Google steffenconcella.com. You'll find everything. And of course, against intellectual property is that short book that you wrote a few years ago that I strongly recommend everyone to read. It's a very short read, but it makes a very convincing case against intellectual property. The assumptions most people have about it, that being property and these things, the origins of it, most people are completely, I guess, ill-informed or have a misconception of its origins and what its true meaning is. So just go to, yeah, read that. You can get a PDF against intellectual property. Go to the Mises Institute's website, has it. So you can download it and read it at your leisure. And I really recommend people read that. Because that's one of the things, one of the pillars, intellectual property is one of the pillars of the current establishment, legal establishment that we live under today. And it really is, it really is. It's causing a lot of problems out there. And it has a potential to cause a lot more problems because they're looking to expand these things, these laws, as an excuse for the surveillance state as we've seen with the crackdown, like on the guy, kim.com or something, the police state measures that are being used. The death of Aaron Schwartz can be traced to intellectual property. That's all correct, you've done your homework. So, I mean, and so, he's alleged suicide. So, okay, well, I'm gonna let you go. I want to thank you. So that's stefanconcel.com. I will bid you a good night and I will continue to follow your work. Thanks, Tim. So long then, bye-bye.