 Welcome to the inaugural edition, the very first episode of the Lions of Liberty podcast. I am your host, your guide, your shining beacon of Liberty, Mark Clare. Now if you're listening to this podcast, there's a pretty good chance that you're already familiar with myself or with the website that I serve as editor-in-chief for, LionsofLiberty.com, where our mission, along with a few colleagues of mine, good friends of mine, where our mission is to advance the ideas of Liberty Daily. And if you're not familiar with our website, and of course as soon as you're done listening to this podcast, I highly recommend you check it out. If you like what you hear here, maybe even if you don't, maybe I come across better on the internet than I do speaking. We'll find out soon. This is my first go at it. But you can find us at LionsofLiberty.com on Twitter, we're active on Twitter, at Lions of Liberty, Facebook, Facebook.com, Slash Lions of Liberty. We are everywhere. We got a Google Plus page out there. You can find, I cannot give you the URL because it's a series of letters and numbers, and I'm confident that if you've come this far, you can find it. We even have a Tumblr account. I'm sure we're on some other websites that I don't even know of. But our mission here at the Lions of Liberty podcast is the same as it is on the website. It's to advance the ideas of Liberty. We're here to discuss ideas, we're here to discuss current events, philosophy, and to do all of that within this libertarian framework. And if you just stumble upon this thing out of the blue somewhere, you might be wondering to yourself, what is the deal? What is the deal with all this Liberty stuff? And that's okay too, because I'd like to make this something for everybody, you know, whether you're completely new and unfamiliar with the ideas of Liberty. Maybe you're just a friend of mine doing me a favor and telling me you listen to my podcast and you just don't want me to stump you when I ask you what I talked about. Or whether you're a more hardcore libertarian, you're someone who's kind of on the internet reading every day, really, really passionate about it. We want this to be for all of you. You know, I've been tossing this idea of translating what we've been doing on the website into a podcast for quite a while, and I recently got the impetus to do so when I contacted today's guest with a question about intellectual property. Not exactly the most, how do you say, out there issue for libertarians? You know, you more hear libertarians kind of talking about non-intervention, you know, no military intervention overseas. You hear us talking about the war on drugs. It's really only in these little inner libertarian circles where we argue amongst ourselves for a lot of the part where we discuss kind of these other issues. But it is a very important issue, the issue of intellectual property. And I contacted my guest here, Stefan Kinsella, today, with a few questions on the subject as he is an expert, and he suggested that we have a conversation because it's something that's not really easy to address with a couple sentences in an email. And he suggested we record it, and that little light bulb went off in my head. I said record it, I shall. And just like that, we have the first episode of the Lions of Liberty podcast. Now as I stated in my little intro there, my opening rant, we are here to discuss ideas through the libertarian framework. And my guest here in the Lions' Den, we'll see if that one sticks, is going to help us do just that. So without further delay, I'd like to welcome in my guest, Stefan Kinsella. He is the author of Against Intellectual Property, what many would call the definitive work on intellectual property or against intellectual property against the concept for libertarians. He's also a patent attorney and a self-described, I believe you describe yourself as an Austro-libertarian, is that correct? I think that's a good description, yeah, sure. Great. And how would you use that term Austro-libertarian? How would you distinguish that from, say, other terms libertarians out there are using? Because there's people new to the libertarian movement, they're kind of tossed all these different terms. They hear Austro-libertarian, they hear Austrian economics, they hear anarcho-capitalism, they hear voluntarious, which to me I think it's just like a made up word. So what exactly, why do you use that specific designation? How did you come to that? Well, I mean, I think you have to distinguish there are conceptual things, there are strategical things. So people come up with labels and words for different reasons, okay? Some are descriptive, some are, they're trying to advance a goal or whatever. I think that we should try to be honest and understand where we are coming from and honestly describe what we are in favor of and what we believe in. And we have to use words to do that, we have to communicate with language. The word libertarian has emerged as probably the best, most descriptive term that describes a group of beliefs or a group of people that have a certain set of beliefs, clustered around the idea of liberty, individualism, private property, free markets, that kind of stuff. So you can define all these things a little bit more precisely if you want, but in my experience and I think in the experience of most people who are interested in the liberty movement, it's rare to find someone who is seriously interested in this movement or educated about it who doesn't have a certain degree of economic literacy. That means you have to understand basic economics. And most of us, like have read Henry Haslitz's economics in one lesson or we veer on to Austrian economics. So I believe Austrian economics is the most sound type of economics. So if you're going to be economically literate, you're going to be basically an Austrian. That just means you're from Austria. It means that you adhere to the economic philosophy expounded by the group of philosophers, economists who came from Vienna, Mises, Manger, Bombaverk, Hayek, etc., primarily Mises in my opinion. So you don't have to be an economist or an Austrian to be a libertarian, but I do think it complements it because you really need to have some economic literacy and I do think the most sound economics is Austrian. So among libertarians, there would be different types. There would be menarchist, which is believing in a very small government and anarchist who believe in that the state should be basically zero. So that's how the kind of taxonomy works out. That's how the conceptual terminology works out. And I, just to be upfront about it ahead of time when I talk to people, I admit I'm an Austro-anarchist, which means I am an adherent of the Austrian economic free market school of economics and the anarchist wing of libertarian philosophy. Do you think there are certain terms that, it's kind of like anarchist or capitalist that people from maybe that aren't familiar with libertarianism, they hear that keyword and they suddenly get scared. So do you shy away from any terms like that? I mean you just said Austro-anarchist, so obviously not too much, but do you think that that is an issue where people get confused or get immediately scared? Like some words have been kind of destroyed for us that we kind of have to avoid for that reason? Well, there are different schools of thought on this. And I mean, look, if someone asks me a question, I'll answer it. And so that's my, that's my modus operandi. And you had just asked me a question, so I answered it. And you're not the, you're not the typical man on the street. So I answered your question. Of course, everyone tends to modify their mode of speaking in different audiences. And according to what the person you're speaking with can understand or is used to. But yeah, I mean, I go back and forth. There's something called the libertarian macho flash. There's a guy named Michael Cloud from the 1970s and libertarianism. And he sort of criticized the idea of the libertarian macho flash, which is the tendency of libertarians like at a dinner party among regular people to just, you know, when he's asked a regular question to just blurt out the whole thing and just try to shock people. You know, it's like, it's like the George Bush shock and all kind of Iraq campaign equivalent in political theory, just to say, yes, like, do you think we should reduce the penalties on marijuana crimes? And the answer would be, yes, we should have complete anarchy and the government should be disbanded, right? You just explode their brain immediately. You just go right to the complete end of what anyone could imagine, you know, think. So, you know, that's one approach. And that's a tactical or strategical thing. Of course, I modulate the way I talk to people. I talk to regular people. I talk to my family members and co-workers and people you meet on the street. And of course, you just, you have to modulate your message. But so it depends upon the context heavily. Yeah, I think you hit on something important there that a lot of people in this libertarian movement can probably work on more myself. Definitely being one of them is really understanding your audience and knowing your audience and catering a message towards that audience. If I just have a conversation with Stephen Cansella, it might be completely different than if I'm having a conversation with, I don't know, my girlfriend's parents about something or something like that. So, you know, we kind of have to know where our audience is coming from and kind of then use the terms that way. As you explained earlier, if someone's like me, I know what you're saying when you say Osher libertarian. But I can't just flirt that out at the dinner table and expect people to have half a clue what I'm talking about. Yeah, when people do that, I think sometimes they're often trying to baffle with bullshit. They're trying, you know, they're really trying to just overwhelm you with terms they know that you don't understand so that you can't really question them. So to me, that's a little smarter. And yeah, that's a sign of weakness and a sign of smugness. And look, if you're really confident in your positions, you can explain them in regular terms or at least explain them in the terms that you're, you know, your co-interlocutor is conversant and you can have a real conversation and you can get to the nub of your disagreement or whatever. So I think that's a sign of strength that you actually can simplify and discuss on terms that the other person. So you don't try to retreat to terminology. You don't try to baffle with bullshit. Gotcha. Well, discussing terms, I think this is a pretty good transition into what I originally wanted to discuss with you is this obviously you're most known for your work on intellectual property. And I think even what I just said right there, I think you agree with me is a problem where just even using that term as I did in an email with you is begging the question. It's assuming that we agree it's property already. So I think that's, would you agree that's one of the biggest problems with that entire discussion? Honestly, I don't think that's a big problem with it. I could be wrong. Maybe I'm wrong about strategy or tactics, but people use terms. And yeah, they're loaded. They're loaded. And the term intellectual property is a loaded term because it has the word property in it. And it usually is used to defend primarily patent and copyright, which are distinct legal regimes created by statute by the federal government in the United States. And they weren't originally called property. They were assumed to be monopoly privileges granted by the state for a certain strategical purpose. I mean, there was no bones about it. They admitted this. But when they started getting criticized by, you know, free market advocates and people wondering, hey, wait a second, there's something wrong with the idea of the state granting monopoly privileges. So they started calling it a property right in intellectual products or ideas as a cover to defend this idea. And the people that were benefiting from it bought into this. So I mean, you have to refer to it as intellectual property if you want to discuss it, because that's the common terminology used nowadays. But I suppose if we still had shadow slavery and African-Americans were slaves, and the common term today was property, and you didn't want to refer to fellow human beings as property because you're buying into the classification of them as property of other people, I suppose you could have a big fight about the right way to describe them. But to me, the essence is on the substance, the debate is on the substance, whether we should have these laws or not, whether they're legitimate property rights or not, not the terminology used to describe them. But ultimately, no, I don't think it's a legitimate type of property right. And I think it's a false classification. And I think that term you used monopoly is definitely a useful one, because when you refer to something as a monopoly, that is kind of a dirty word to a lot of people. That's the word that kind of springs forward and gives people a negative connotation in a lot of ways. So I mean, calling it a monopoly definitely makes more sense to me. I mean, in that regard, but I agree, this is what it's called. The state calls it intellectual property. So if we're discussing it in this modern context, then sure, I guess that's what we refer to. Well, if we don't want to get into economics and have a discussion about whether or not it is a monopoly or whatever, look, these grants of rights, legal rights, were called privileges. They were never regarded as natural rights or as any kind of property right. It's a privilege. So the government just says, we're going to grant you the exclusive right to be the only guy who can sell this product in this area for a certain area. And we have a reason for doing it. We want to get a favor from you or we want to encourage trade in this area or whatever. They have a reason for it, but they never deny that they're granting a privilege. And the privilege is something that you don't have a right to. So a privilege is something that you don't have a natural right to. So there's no doubt that the origination of patent and copyright were in privileges. And the motivation for them by the state was, number one, protectionism and mercantilism in the form of trade. Like you would give one guy the right to sell playing cards or candles or sheepskin or whatever. And of course, he would owe tribute to the king or to the king's minions or whatever. Or in the field of ideas, it was copyright, which was the right to give print books, which had ideas. So the origin of copyright and patent is in the control of commerce and trade and in the spread of ideas. So it's bizarre. It is completely bizarre that the so-called advocates of liberty and free markets and private property and human liberty today try to integrate these bizarre fascist ideas into the libertarian framework by buying into the government propaganda, calling them property rights. They're not property rights. They're the exact opposite of property rights. Patent and copyright restrict what people can do with their legitimately owned resources. So it's the exact opposite of property rights. And it's kind of a travesty that it'd be better if you just defend it in the name of fascism or mercantilism or whatever you want to call it, instead of defending it in the name of free markets and private property and capitalism. I think that's one of the biggest points that I got from reading your book. Again, the book is Against Intellectual Property by Stefan Kinsella, and really is getting to the idea of how our property rights are assigned, how are they achieved. And I think one of the biggest points you hit on is that everyone always kind of, when we're talking about intellectual property, people always say, you know, this guy created this and therefore it's his property. And you kind of destroy that notion by saying it's not about creation. It's not about first creation. It's more about the first occupier. And that's how a property is initially achieved in the kind of the homesteading sense. Can you kind of describe that a little more, just for kind of my readers out there that it might not be familiar with that? Well, yeah, people don't think too closely about this when they come up with these justifications and they just repeat what they've heard. They repeat the idea that, you know, if you create something, you own it. Okay, but they don't think carefully about what that means. Here's what really happens in the world. You know, we're born into the world. We have a body. I mean, this is not really metaphysical, fantastical stuff. This is very common sense. Everyone deals with it from the moment they're born. You know, every human being is an actor with a body, a physical, tangible, material body that moves around in the world. We have parents and we have a community. We have society and we have a world that we live in and maneuver around. And there are resources in this world that we can employ to try to achieve things that we want to achieve. And the purpose of social norms and property rights is to assign an exclusive control over a thing that otherwise could be contested. That is only one person can use at a time. If everyone could use everything at the same time and have magic wands and achieve all their wishes, we would have no possibility of conflict. We would have no need for property rights. The reason we have property rights is to try to, is because there's a possibility of conflict. That's why there's no conflict over, say, air. You know, there's no, nobody argues over property rights of air because we have, it's in super abundance that we all have it. Yeah, super abundance sort of means it's so abundant that we don't need to have allocation rights over it, that there's no possibility of conflict over it. In some situations you could have that, but in our current situation you don't. But for the things that we recognize that are scarce resources like land or our bodies or the fruit of trees or, you know, physical material that we extract from the earth and use, these are all scarce resources and every society recognizes that human beings, if we're going to live in society with each other, need to employ the resources and they need to have rules that specify who gets to use this thing. Otherwise there's just going to be a continual fight over it and it can't be used peacefully or productively. There's going to be continual warring and fighting over it. So people that are interested in cooperation and peace and prosperity, they tend to be in favor of adopting some rules of assigning allocation or ownership or use rights to these resources and they tend to be the common sense ones, like whoever used it first gets to keep using it until he abandons it or if he transfers it by contract to another person, then that person is now the owner. I mean it's very simple actually, so it's not very complicated to understand. But what happens is people start confusing, so let's say I have a natural resource, like I take a hunk of marble out of the ground. Let's take a better example. I take a hunk of iron ore out of the ground. So now I'm the owner of this hunk of iron ore. It's not really worth that much, but if I expend my labor on it and I turn it into a sword or maybe a plow, then I have transformed this resource that I own into a more valuable resource. Now, I have increased, what have I done? I've increased my wealth. Have I created a new thing? I don't know, maybe in a metaphorical sense. I've created something out of something. I have transformed one object into another, so I've made it more valuable to me and maybe to other people that I can sell it to. So I've increased wealth, but I already owned the raw materials that I transformed into the more useful shape. That's why I was able to do it because I owned it. So my active so-called creation or transformation or production does not result in new property rights. It only results in a rearrangement of matter that was already owned. It results in increased wealth, maybe, or maybe results in reduced wealth if I make a mistake, but at best it results in increased wealth. But the reason I own this new wealth is because I own the material that is more valuable and more useful. So the mistake that people make is they assume that if you create something, you own it, but that is a false assumption. The only way to come to own things is, number one, to come to appropriate or start using something that was never owned before, because if you do that, no one could ever claim that they have a better claim than you, because to claim that means that they owned it before you, which defeats the presumption. So if it's unowned, the first person has a better claim than late comers. And that is Hans Hermann Hoppe's sort of crucial insight and the explanation of his theory of socialism capitalism. Or if I contractually transfer it to another person, then they have a better claim than everyone else, including the original owner, because the original owner gave it up by voluntary consent. So other than contract and original appropriation, there's really no basis for claiming the ownership of a scarce resource that could be contested. So this idea that creation is a source of wealth is based upon a confusion. It's confusing the nature of wealth with the nature of ownership. So I think that libertarians should realize that they're making a mistake when they say that whoever creates something owns it. That's simply not true. The problem with this statement is that it doesn't specify what the object of the creation is. If you create a thing, you own it. Well, what's a thing? A thing could be a scarce resource or it could be some idea. So we have to first specify whether it's an ownable thing or not. That's the question. And that's the question that's skipped by Randians, Objectivists, and intellectual property supporting libertarians. Sure, that part is pretty much assumed usually in the question. And let's talk about contracts for a second. Because when I read a lot of the pro IP side, I think that they always keep pointing to contracts. And that's something you address in your book as well. They say, or Murray Rothbard even said, you can have a contract or something attached to something that you sell. And that binds that person that buys it not to copy it, not to sell it to someone else. But that can only go so far. And can you kind of describe the problem with just relying on contracts or thinking that contracts and somehow recreate modern day copyright or anything like that? Well, so Rothbard tried to walk his way through this. So Rothbard admitted and acknowledged that, well, there's a problem with trying to base some kind of intellectual property based theory on property rights. And that is that property rights only affect people that own these resources. And then he said, well, what about a contract? So let's suppose you have... The basic idea is that the advocates of IP admit the flaws in the basic theory of IP, but they say that it could be recreated by a contractual scheme. So the people that sell goods like a book, which is a copyright type item because the book embodies a pattern of information that is protected by copyright law. Or let's say I sell a new mousetrap, which has an innovative feature, which is an invention, which is protected under today's law by patent law. They sort of admit that they couldn't be protected under current statutory schemes, but what they say is, well, the creator of this item, the book or the mousetrap, could make a contract with every potential buyer of the item. And they could bind them so that they can't reproduce the information inherent in the item, or they can't use it or learn from it in certain ways or whatever. And therefore, because you have the possibility... You can already stop right here. You can see that this is similar to the social contract argument of status, when they argue that, well, we don't really have a contract with each other to agree with the state. But theoretically, everyone would agree to cede some of their rights to this state so the state could protect them. So it's ridiculous. It's basically a social contract argument. It's the idea that it's just an assertion that you would agree to it, and therefore we can pretend like there was an agreement. But just for the same reason that the social contract theory fails, the contractual argument for IP fails. People actually, in fact, do not agree to such ridiculous terms, and they never would in the free market. I mean, if some author was selling a book for $5 and said, I'll give you a copy of my book, but for me to transmit these digits to you, you need to agree to be bound forever for life for a billion dollars of damages if you ever use the information in any way that I don't approve of. I mean, no one's going to sign on to this or not many people would be. And so this would just fail as a business model. So I think the entire idea of contractual recreation of patent or copyright is completely absurd and ridiculous. And honestly, I would love to see it tried because it would just fail miserably in reality. Isn't saying that it could fail kind of a different point from saying that it shouldn't work or it shouldn't be what companies try? We live in a society where there isn't our current copyright scheme or any of that stuff. But let's just pretend that maybe a large portion of society really respects the right or they're perceived right or whatever. I don't want to question beg or anything. But they're right of a first creator to get the profits from his book or his song. I mean, well, for how long? That's a good question. I don't know either. But let's just say that it's the hypothetical. This is a question that was sent to me. Say a company like Amazon just makes anyone that wants to buy a product from them a download a song, download a book, sign a user agreement saying, I won't copy this and give it to anyone else for X amount of time. Now, regardless of the utility of that, that may not work. I don't think it would. I think we know it won't. But is there anything in libertarian legal theory that would have a problem with that? Well, there actually might be. I can mention a few. Number one, there's the effect on third parties. So are we including third parties in this or not? I think that's the key point is that whenever there's that contract, this is where I start to lose it on that argument. Because I can get the contract. So regardless of whether I think it'll work, that's just one thing. But a contract, if a user does agree, I won't copy this. Amazon says you shouldn't and they both agree. I don't see a problem with that. But what you hit on there is that you can't find anyone else to that. Well, but let's back up for just a second. A contract is just an implication of the right of ownership. The basic libertarian principle is ownership. That is the exclusive right to control a scarce resource. And one thing that that implies is that you can decide who you can permit to use a resource or who you can deny your right. So if you own a house, you can invite someone to a dinner party or you can deny someone the right to your house. But the fundamental right is the right of property, the right of borders, the right of control of borders. And so the question is by this use of contract rights, can you deny people the right to use information that they obtained? Okay. And I don't know if that's so obvious. And I think that's another thing you talk about in your book. It might not even be your book. It might have been an interview I read recently is kind of the extent that contracts can go to like a contract can be between two people. But when is a contract more enforceable, I guess by force, like when two people make a marriage contract and one violates it, say cheats on their wife and they get a divorce, that contract is violated. But no one would claim that, you know, that person should go to jail or you know that violence should be inflicted on one of the parties for breaking the contract. And I think that's kind of a difference between how many people see contracts in a way they're in agreement. But when you're talking about it in this terms, in my example, the Amazon example, we're associating that contract with control of property and calling that information property. And that's kind of where we get back to that problem. Yeah. So let's assume that Amazon, if they make a contract with their customers, that it's a binding contract, which I think is even questionable. I've got some blog posts and articles on, on, look, people make assumptions about contracts. Like I've got articles on fine print and things like this. I mean, let's, let's, I mean, honestly, let's just take a simple example. Let's suppose I send you an email tomorrow. I mean, you're Mark Claire, right? And I say, Mark Claire, I will mail you this, you know, this teddy bear. If you agree to the following terms, please click here if you agree. Let's say you just click here and you pay me $5 for the teddy bear. But buried in the fine print is a clause that says, Mark Claire will be my slave forever if he accepts the teddy bear. I mean, look, there are certain fine print terms that most people would agree are not legitimate or enforceable for certain reasons. Now I could go into the legal reasons why I think there's a problem with it, but I think everyone's intuitions would say that there's something wrong with assuming that whatever happens to be written and whatever happens to be agreed to in some formal way is necessarily part of an enforceable agreement. And their intuition is correct. Okay. But the reason is because they're recognizing that the agreement and the written evidence of it is not the same thing. Okay. So an agreement is in what we call in contract all the meeting of the minds, what we really have kind of talked about and agreed to. And you could assume, for example, that when we have an agreement that we agree that if we have fine print that specifies the details, that there's nothing of bad faith in there, nothing you're trying to trick me on. I mean, there's all kinds of ways of specifying these things, default terms. Because the contract is supposed to be, like you said, an agreement, not a way to trick somebody into doing something. So if it becomes that, then it's not really a valid contract. Yeah. Exactly. And so we shouldn't assume that the written, Times Roman 10-point font piece of paper is the agreement. All that is is evidence of possible things that people had a meeting of the minds or agreed upon. The real agreement is whatever the two people really did agree to and really did mean. Exactly. And the printed piece of paper is just evidence that could be presented of that. But it's not definitive proof. It's not irrebuttable. So that's just an example that, look, you can't assume that whatever Amazon puts down is going to be part of the agreement. So that's one problem with this contract theory, that you could have tons of buried arbitrary unreasonable terms put in the contract that would be assumed to be binding. But even if you assume all of this, even if you get over the problems of fine print and shrink wrap and click wrap and unreasonable terms and lack of good faith or bad faith or whatever, still at most all these things only bind people that actually make an agreement. That is Amazon and their customers in your example. And that is not IP. IP means a right of property good against the world. Okay, the contractual rights of Amazon are only contractual rights between concrete identified parties. In the law, we call this impersonal versus in-rem. In-rem means a property, a right in property. In-personal means a right between people, identifiable people. So you and I could have a contract saying what you and I have agreed to do, but that doesn't affect the rest of the world. And in-rem right, a personal right, I mean, I'm sorry, in-rem right, a property right, like your right in your house is good against the world. You don't need to have a contract with someone to prevent them from invading the borders of your house. Yeah, the very idea that there would need to be a contract to me completely differentiates it from what we already accept as property rights, like you just said. I don't need a contract, an individual contract with everyone else in the world to know that, you know, my house is my property. If they break into my house, they violated my property rights. So I think that's a really good, it's a really good way to explain it. Yes, so what the debate comes down to for people that are talking like this is, they basically concede that there's no good case for IP, but then they shift their ground. And what they say is that, well, you agree that we can have contracts right? And now I say, yes, people can have contracts. And they say, well, we can't predict exactly what people would agree to do in a free society. Yes, okay, fine. And therefore, maybe they would agree by some kind of contractual regime system to something that looks a little bit like IP would today. Not exactly, and I don't know exactly how it would differ, but something like it. So you really can't object to IP. So this is the worst argument. I mean, you argument to argue anything. You could use to argue for, you know, the right to enslave women to be raped or the right to drug laws. Because you could say, well, look, in a free society, maybe everyone really thinks drugs are bad. And maybe they would voluntarily agree to seed control of their homes, to search in seizures by some central authority, to be searched, to make sure they don't have drugs, you know, marijuana or cocaine. So in other words, you could use this stupid contractual argument to argue for any fascist, tyrannical, totalitarian, un-libertarian. I mean, you could use it to argue for anything that you object to with the fiber of your being. Torture, murder, drug, the drug war, war itself, police, the police state. I mean, I mean, you could just say that we could agree to it and therefore it's legitimate. So basically it devolves, as I said, to this idea of the social contract, the idea that there's a hypothetical contract that we all are quote deemed to agree to, because it would be reasonable for us to agree to it. And therefore we can assume that we kind of would or do agree to it. I mean, it makes no sense whatsoever. The entire argument is completely morally bankrupt, completely intellectually dishonest, and complete bullshit. I mean, I'm really sick of it, to be honest. I can tell. These people, I don't know what people are even trying to say, and they don't know what they're trying to say. What they're trying to say is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah bullshit. Therefore I've confused you and you can't really argue against patent and copyright. So shut up and let us keep enforcing it in the meantime. This is my perspective on it. Gotcha. Do you have much more time? Because I want to grab and get another couple more questions in, but I don't want to keep you along if I need to. No, I don't have enough time. Go ahead. Okay, great. I just want to pass along a couple questions I got from some of our readers over at linesofliberty.com. One is, and they're both, I'm sure, things you've heard well before, a million times over. But this is the kind of stuff that the man on the street thinks when they think, oh no, IP is wrong. Well, what about this? So I mean, one is from a reader, David. He asks, he says, I think that a barrier for people to get them to accept consels position is that they're not able to see how creators will get paid when there is no IP enforcement. For example, how would a writer be compensated for a book if there's a PDF scan on the internet the day after the book release? This is actually the same question. That may as well combine them into one. Another reader, John, said, would you be opposed to someone making a copy of your book against intellectual property, making a copy and selling it under the ghost name Stephen, S-T-E-V-E-N, Kensella, K-E-N-S-E-L-L-A. Obviously you'd be opposed to it. It's a dick move, but it's a dick move. No. The same thing as theft. Actually, I wouldn't be opposed to it at all. I wouldn't be opposed to it at all. And I don't think it's the same question at all. The question of how people would be rewarded in a free society for creative effort and the other question of whether plagiarism or fraud or some kind of disingenuous misrepresentation of your effort in something should be prohibited, they're totally different questions and they could be answered, but they're not the same question. The first question, I mean there's several answers to it. One is that it's not the province of political theory to tell people how they're going to succeed in a free market. These questions come from kind of a utilitarian point of view. Kind of, well, under your way, how is this going to happen? Well, it's kind of up to that to make the money. I understand, but I'm always leery to just launch into an answer because it's like buying into the presumption of the question. The presumption of the question is that how are you going to guarantee that I can make money doing X in my ideal utopian society? In other words, what they're saying is unless you can tell me and prove to me how your society will do X, I'm not going to agree with it. It's kind of like the who would build the roads question. Well, I don't know exactly how every company or how people would determine where roads go, but that doesn't mean that government should build roads. Yeah. I mean, my primary thing is I'm against the state taking people's money to build roads. That doesn't mean that I have a theory of road building, right? Now, it so happens that we have good reason to believe that there would be plenty of innovation and creativity and invention without the state. And in fact, I personally believe, and I think there's plenty of evidence to support this, there would be a lot more innovation and creativity without the state. I think that copyright law and the state and patents and the state's existence itself, taxation regulation, retardation of progress, et cetera, but just patent and copyright by themselves, I think they heavily distort the market for innovation and creativity and they retard innovation and creativity. And there's plenty of evidence to support that. So that means that if you got rid of these systems, that you would have an unleashing of innovation and creativity. And there's plenty of reason to believe that. I mean, before we had the modern copyright and patent systems, which really only have existed in the last two, 300 years, we've had plenty of innovation and invention and discovery and scientific achievement and artistic creativity in human history. I mean, no one can deny this. So to be honest, it is really absurd for someone to say that if we got rid of patent and copyright today that we would have no creativity, no innovation. All they could say is we would have some, but we would have less than some optimal amount. Which is some kind of arbitrary something that someone comes up with in their mind. So basically they have to become a central planner and they have to say, listen, I know in my objectivist mind of minds that we need to have X level of innovation and we would have it if we had a pre-society of a quote, rational, unquote, rational people. By the way, rational people means a bunch of psychos who are going around suing each other for using their ideas, even though they're trading them in public. And now we have X minus 10 or X divided by 3 or whatever. So if we just implement a patent and copyright law, even though it's costly and even though it's not efficient and even though it's run by the goddamn government, it would be a little bit closer to the ideal and so we should implement this. Now, this is the most unprincipled, ridiculous, psychotic reasoning I have almost ever heard of in my life next to something like Nazi genocide or something like that. I mean, it makes no sense whatsoever. There is no evidence whatsoever that this is correct. These people have built their entire property rights theory on a faulty foundation. They don't know what they're talking about. They really have no freaking clue. I mean, Iran admits in some of her writings, for example, that we don't create anything as human beings. We only rearrange the matter that we're dealt with in the universe. We don't create things ex nihilo. And she admits that when we do this, we create value, et cetera, and she's right. But then, on the other hand, she says that we create values and we have the property rights and the values that we create. This makes no sense. If you have a property right in values that you create, that means that you have a property right in other people's brains or minds because values are subjective phenomena, right? They're relations between a valuer and a scarce resource or a means. If someone regards something as valuable, it's more valuable. If they don't, it's not. So the only way to have a property right in a value is to have a property right in what other people think about or how they assess things, which is really, to be honest, the ultimate totalitarianism, which is why the Randians, the fundamental mistake of the Menarchists and the Randians, they have two fundamental mistakes. One is that they are statist. That is, they're Menarchists and they cannot see why Anarchy is the end result of their theories. So they're not Anarchists. Number two, they're in favor of intellectual property. And in a way, I think that the latter is the worst mistake because Anarchy could be reached by a process of continuum, right? You could, if you're a Menarchist, you could push the state back, back, back, back. Finally, you could reach a state of Anarchy. You could see how someone could finally become gradually an Anarchist. But if you have this intellectual property mentality, you will never, you'll never be able to get rid of the state because you need a state to implement these bizarre rights to control how people use their property. That's a very interesting point. I wanted to get into just a little bit, another good point I found in your book that kind of ties into this. It was something you said about trademark and how really, if we're looking at trademark, it should really be the consumer's right to sue for fraud if somebody is kind of misrepresenting themselves. Like, so this ties back into that question. If someone misrepresents themselves as Stephen Kinsella, Stephen Kinsella by pretending to be Stephen Kinsella and misrepresent themselves as the author of your book, would say someone who bought that book thinking it was by Stephen Kinsella have any kind of recourse in your view. Would that person be able to say, hey, look, I thought I was getting by the real author. I thought he was going to get the money for it. I'm upset about that. I want to sue this guy that this fakes Stephen Kinsella. Okay. A couple of things. Number one, this is, so it's the advocates of intellectual property that lump together these different legal regimes and treat them as though they're connected. Like, they connect trademark, trade secret, patent and copyright law together. Now, these are highly technical specialized fields which most people don't understand. So far, we've been talking primarily about patent and copyright and now you're switching to trademark, which is fine and it's considered to be a type of intellectual property. But the bases for the arguments for these things always jump around and differ. It's the advocates of statism. It's the advocates of these systems that lump them together in a sort of incoherent ad hoc way. I don't agree that they're property. I don't agree that they're really even that related. But what they do have in common is that they all are systems, government systems, government laws that basically take away the rights of people to use their scarce resources that they legitimately own as they say fit. Okay. Now, under that sort of classification scheme, you could group together a lot of other laws which are not typically considered to be IP laws or intellectual property laws like defamation law, et cetera. But let's talk about trademark law. Okay. So the typical... I'm more viewing it under the example, I think the example of your in your book was a burger place. I think you said like a Rothbard burger or something and this place has great burgers or whatever and there's crappy burger down the street and they say, oh well, Rothbard burgers are popular. I'm going to change my name to Rothbard burgers. And then when the consumer shows up and gets this crappy burger that they thought was a Rothbard burger, your argument is that they would have a fraudulent claim against the fake Rothbard burger. But Rothbard himself wouldn't have any claim because he can't control what that guy's doing with his property. He can call his thing whatever he wants. Yeah. So basically what trademark law says is that you have a property right in your reputation. Okay. And they justify this based upon some kind of incoherent vague claim of fraud. And what they say is, look, we all agree that fraud is wrong, right? And you look, you and I agree with that, but they never specified, never won what fraud is and they don't connect it up to fraud. So fraud to my mind has to be defined carefully and that's rooted in a careful theory of contract and property. So fraud is simply... I think of fraud as theft by trick. Like you tell someone, you give me your apple, I'll give you this gold coin or the silver coin or whatever. Okay. So that's a deal. We're making an exchange. But if I'm giving you a fake coin or you're giving me a rotten apple, one of us is deceiving the other one. And so the conditions of the transfer of title to the thing that we have the ownership of, that we're giving to the other person in exchange for the other thing is not fulfilled. Okay. And the other person knows that. So they're basically getting something and getting the use of it when they know that they don't have the really right to do it. It's similar to if you have an operation from a surgeon, let's say you, you tell the surgeon, I consent to you knocking me out and taking my appendix out. Okay. Because I need to take my appendix out. And while he's got your stomach open, he takes your gallbladder out. Now that is considered to be a tort of aggression in the regular law if you didn't consent to it. So the question is always, was there a knowing consent? So I think it's similar in the case of any kind of transfer or exchange. Was there a knowing or knowledgeable consent given for what was done? And that's what fraud gets at. Okay. But the case of trademark fraud doesn't really have anything to do with this. So let's take a typical example of trademark infringement. So let's say that, let's say two examples. You want to buy a new Mercedes car. Okay. So you go down the street, you go to the Mercedes dealership and you buy a Mercedes. Now, if that car is really a fake or a fraud, I mean, this is really a non problem. This is never going to happen. You're never going to go to an actual Mercedes dealership and get a fake Mercedes because they would go out of business if they started doing this. And there's no one's going to take the time and effort to build an actual dealership if it's just a fake place. Just like the fake Rothbard burgers won't last more than a couple of days until people catch on and don't want to eat them anymore. Exactly. So in this case, this is like a really, literally a non problem in a real free market. Okay. So let's take the other case that trademarks usually apply to in today's legal system. You go down to some kind of sidewalk merchant who's got a fake Rolex watch. And you know it's fake because it's $20 instead of $5,000 or $10,000 and you hand the guy $20 and he gives you the fake Rolex watch and you give it to your girlfriend and she's happy. She knows it's fake, but you know, you have a good time, whatever. Now, under the current law, this is considered trademark infringement. And everyone that defends trademark says, well, it's based upon fraud. Well, where's the fraud? Who was defrauded? The guy that bought the fake Rolex was not defrauded because he knows it's a fake Rolex. Right? I mean, there's no fraud going on here. Maybe only in the case where I, as the buyer of the watch, am gullible enough to think it's a real Rolex, but in this case, I think both the buyer and the seller, both kind of are in on it. Yeah, I would agree. Which goes back to our contract thing. It's like, it doesn't really matter what it says. It matters what we both know and what we both agree to in reality. The libertarian law would say that I believe it would basically implement a caveat in tour, which you buyer beware, which is, listen, unless you ask for some kind of verifiable proof of the, you know, the characteristics of the thing you're buying, then, you know, you're on the hook, but let's, let's forget about that. Let's assume that, let's assume that the guy, there's some really stupid guy who buys a Rolex for $20 and it's a fake Rolex and he's ripped off. Well, first of all, his damages are $20, right? It's not $17 million or whatever, it's $20. And, and, and he's, he's an idiot, and he could have avoided it easily by going to the Galleria or the mall and buying it from a reputable dealer. You know, just like when you go to the Kroger and you buy toothpaste, you assume that the toothpaste they're selling is not knocked off toothpaste because if they sell knocked off toothpaste, they're going to lose customers. So, I mean, there's ways of getting around these issues. There are not really big issues in a free market. These are complete red herrings. These are not serious arguments for, for trademark law. And in fact, as I said, trademark law is not the big IP law anyway, patent and copyright are. So what everyone does is they come up with these red herrings like plagiarism. They'll say, well, you're against plagiarism, aren't you? And everyone sort of has in their minds a bad taste about plagiarism because it's dishonest. But no one really knows what the hell plagiarism is. They can't define it because, you know, they're not scholars or whatever. And, and they don't really know what this kind of fraud is either. But the point is plagiarism has almost no overlap with copyright infringement. And the fraud that we're talking about here has almost no overlap with trademark infringement. And yet they use these ideas to justify these systems which are totally illegitimate. Even if, in the case you gave, someone is defrauded of $20 or buying a fake purse. And even if you forgive their stupidity and their naivete, and even if you admit the rule of caveat and tour, they have the cause of action. That is the customer is the one defrauded. But under trademark law, the cause of action is in the person using the trademark. So it would be Rolex, the corporation, or Lexus, the company that sells the car. Lexus ensues the Lexus Nexus database company, right? So that's one problem with trademark law is that it puts the cause of action on the person who is not the victim. And second of all, their, their cause of action can be satisfied, even if they don't show there was any kind of fraud. All they have to show is that there's a likelihood of consumer confusion, which just means that the names are too similar. Okay, so if I, if I sell a bag labeled Chanel, well, that sounds too similar to Chanel. But even if someone who buys it knows it's a fake Chanel and they're not defrauded, then there can be a cause of action against that seller, which means that trademark law is simply not based upon fraud doctrine. So we got to get over this idea that copyright is based upon plagiarism and trademark is based upon fraud. Look, if you're against plagiarism, which I am, but it's not even a crime in most cases, then it's more like a dick move. You know, it's like, if I lie to my friend about something, you know, or, or, you know, someone cheats on their girlfriend, it's a dick move, but it's a dick move is not the same as, you know, something being, you know, a violation of someone else's rights or yeah, I think it's, I think it's a reasonable human being. You can say, look, I'm opposed to plagiarism. I think it's immoral. And in some cases, it can even be a type of, I guess, contract breach or fraud, but you don't need a copyright law to support that. And you could also be opposed to fraud, but you don't need trademark law to oppose fraud. I mean, if you imagine intersecting sets, it's like there's a very little overlap between trademark infringement and fraud. They're just a little bit of overlap. They have nothing to do with each other. Same thing with plagiarism and copyright infringement. So the arguments for copyright law and the arguments for trademark law, based upon these hand waving, well, you're against fraud, you're against plagiarism, are completely red herrings and, and illegitimate, in my opinion. And I think that's the biggest point with, I mean, that I got from your book and from, from everything else, something that most libertarians would agree on in almost every other aspect is that the market will sort this stuff out. And, you know, just like with, you know, fraud in any other area, you know, the market will punish the frauders, the frauders, you know, crappy burger will go out of business. The Rolex guy is not going to make much money. And this stuff kind of self-corrects. And I think that would you say that's basically why we don't need any of these laws? I mean, not not why, but for the utilitarian, I guess you might say. I mean, well, I'd say there, I'd say there's two perspectives on it. Number one, the reason we don't need the laws is because the only laws we need are laws that prohibit the forceful invasion of the property borders of other people's scarce resources that they've legitimately acquired by either appropriation, that is lucky in homesteading or by contract. In other words, that's the only way to, which is, which is a complicated way of expressing what I'm Rand and Murray Rothbard and others have said that really the only way to violate rights is to initiate force against someone as long as you don't mess with someone else's property or body, then then you really can't stop them from living their lives as they see fit. So in other words, the only thing that can be prohibited is that. But from the utilitarian perspective, I would say that let's let's just assume the entire utilitarian perspective, let's assume that the purpose of law is to come up with rules that maximize some kind of overall social wealth or good or whatever, unless even defined in terms of innovation and creativity. Well, there is simply no evidence whatsoever. I mean, literally none. In fact, the evidence is negative. There's no evidence that without patent or copyright law that we would have a a a substandard amount of creativity, innovation, artistic creation. In fact, there's every reason to believe that the patent and copyright laws that we could ever have in a real world always, always, always reduce and severely distort the culture and the scientific edifice that we have in society. I mean, all the studies, if you were a pure utilitarian and you looked at the studies dispassionately, you would have to say, we got to get rid of these laws because there's no evidence whatsoever that they do any good, none. There's evidence that they do lots of harm and distortion. And we know that they cost a lot costs a lot to have a patent system costs a lot to society to have a copyright system. It costs a lot in terms of freedom, in terms of cultural expression, in terms of freedom of speech, in terms of innovation, in terms of all these artistic and innovative areas. We know these things. They're not even controversial. So if you were a real a serious utilitarian, you would you would be the first guy saying, we have to get rid of patent and copyright right now. But what do they do? They say, well, copyright last 20 years, and it covers software and allows patent control to operate. And copy and copyright lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years, and fair use is a little bit vague. So instead of saying we should get rid of them, we need to maybe consider getting rid of software patents, and maybe we should increase the quality of patents. And maybe we should increase the standards for patent trolling lawsuits. And maybe we should clarify the fair use standards, right? This is what they say. And maybe we should reconsider the expansion of the copyright term from 14 years from 200 years ago to life plus 70 years now, which is like it's tinkering. It's just yeah, well, but but they have no but the point is it's tinkering, but there's no reason behind it. What they say is, we should reconsider these edge cases, you know, but but that's all we should do. So they have no principled case whatsoever. And so it makes me think of of Thomas soul and the vision of the anointed, you know, social self congratulation as a basis of social policy, these guys claim one basis for their advocacy of these ridiculous fascist, anti free market laws, which is that it increases innovation and creativity. And when you show them, well, you have no basis for this claim whatsoever. And in fact, all the claims seem to indicate the otherwise. They just change their tactics. They just say, well, we can't be extremists. Or they'll say, well, there's a natural right to your creations. I mean, they just keep changing their godium tactics. Right. And when those tactics keep changing, then the framework keeps changing, then maybe we need to question the validity of that position in the first place. I want to change the subject real quick. I want to ask you one question. I think I read an interview with you the other day. I was talking about Walter block in his position that someone can this guy goes back to the contract discussion that a person is able to sell themselves into slavery if they so contract to do so. And you, you don't agree with that position. So I'm just curious your take on that. It's an issue I find interesting. It's one of those weird fringy libertarian issues that we only discuss amongst ourselves, but I'm really interested in your take on it. Well, okay, so there's a few ways to look at this. Number one, if you gave me a deal and you said, I'll give you a free society, but the danger is that if you sign on the dotted line to be, you know, an indentured servant or even a slave, then you're going to be held to it. You know, I take the damn deal because and we're talking about a case where someone, it's an agreement on both sides, not like your case before where, you know, you tricked me with the teddy bear thing. And oh, no, I'm stepping. Walter's argument is that if you, if you actually agree to it, like in some kind of consensual agreement, then it should be binding. So my point is I don't agree with him on this. I don't think it should be binding. I don't think it should be enforceable. But even if it was, I would take the deal because it'd be a big improvement. And, you know, honestly, it's easy to avoid that. Just don't, you know, don't sign on the dotted line. I mean, you know, if someone said, Stefan, you have to pay X thousand dollars taxes next year if you sign on the dotted line. But if you don't sign, then you don't have to pay it. I just wouldn't sign. You know, it's very simple. Okay, if that was my choice, it'd be easy. So, you know, that's that's one aspect of it. I agree with Rothbard. I think Rothbard, the more I've thought about it and read what Rothbard wrote, he is actually right on this issue. And I think he didn't explicate it as much as he could have. He could have gone further. But his reasoning, his basic argument is correct. There is a difference between the property in our bodies and the property in other things that we homestead as as actors. And the reason is because you can't even imagine someone being a homesteader, that is, the person, an actor in the world who comes to acquire the ownership of scarce, you know, unknown scarce resources without imagining them as a body owning person moving around in the world. So the idea of homesteading your body doesn't make as much sense. So there's, there are different bases for ownership of your body and other things. That's the reason circular kind of you're using your body to homestead your body, which is already yours and your homes. I mean, exactly. And the idea of alienability, that that is the idea that you can abandon something and get, you know, contractually give it to someone else to my mind is simply the converse of the reverse of the acquisition of it. So, so let's say you're just a naked, you know, human body moving around in the wilderness and you come to acquire some things that you encounter in the wilderness, you could, you could, you could drop them, you could just get rid of them. You might use them for a while, then you get rid of them. Or if you encounter another human being, you could transfer them to that person. But the point is these things came to be your property, they were previously not property. So you can unacquire them. If you can acquire something, you can unacquire it. That's to my mind, the reason why your property right in a scarce resource that you acquire can be transferred contractually to another person is because of the mode or the nature of it's becoming to be owned in the first place. But that is not true for your body. It doesn't make any sense. You can't acquire your body. Your body was not an unowned resource. In fact, you could say that it was owned in a sense by your mother before you, right? I mean, it was a tangible physical resource. Now I would argue that she had an obligation, even legal obligation to care for you because she brought you into existence. But she was sort of your caretaker or your guardian until you came to the capacity to exercise choices for yourself. But it's not like you homesteaded your body as a homesteading agent because to be a homesteading agent, you have to have a body and to be an actor in the first place. So I don't see the basis for ownership of bodies and other things as being the same. They're different. One is homesteading. One is based on the natural as Hoppe calls it, the natural connection, the natural relationship between the person himself and how he controls his body. That's why you have a better connection to your body. That's why you have a property right in your body. It's not because you homesteaded it. In fact, if you had to homestead things to own them, then your parents would be slave owners. They would be the owners of children. Like when your child wakes up at age nine or whatever, you would own him as a slave. But we don't believe that. We say that, no, the child at a certain point is a self owner. So either that means that he takes the property away from his slave owner, which is his parent, or he comes to own it because of a certain relationship and connection to it, which is what I believe and what I think Hoppe believes and what I think is implicit in Rothbard. So I think there's a different basis there. So that's my disagreement with Walter. I respect it. We talked about it. I understand it. But I don't agree. I think Walter's mistake is this. Walter makes a mistake of thinking if you can sell something, you can own it. In other words, if you can sell something, you have to own it. And he also makes the other mistake if you own something, you have to be able to sell it. I think both assumptions are actually slightly wrong. Ownership means the exclusive right to control or really to exclude other people. It doesn't necessarily imply the right to sell. It does imply it in certain cases. For example, when you acquired the good because it was unowned, because you can unacquire it and your ownership of it then means you could transfer it to someone else. But it's an implication. It's not a necessary aspect of ownership. Ownership just means the right to control. But in the case of your body, you never did really come to own it. Anyway, that's my basic argument. I've written on this. It's on my website. I've got some articles on this. That's a good time to plug all your stuff. I definitely recommend your book to everybody. Any libertarian serious about basically really anything. You touch on a lot of important topics, but anyone interested is who thinks they're against IP, thinks they're pro IP. If you're confused about the issue, this book will really open your eyes and really help you form an opinion on it. Obviously, you'll likely form an opinion that it really doesn't make sense. But if you are for intellectual property or you think you are, you better read his book because you're going to have to try to counter his arguments. I haven't read a convincing piece that has done so as of yet. Again, if you want to tell people where they can get your book, where they can find your stuff. Yeah, it's all at stefanconcella.com. Great. And again, I really appreciate your time. And perhaps we will do it again sometime. Okay, man. I appreciate it. Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot. All right. And we sure did cover a lot of ground there with Stefan Concella. Again, be sure to check out his stuff, stefanconcella.com. And we will discuss this a little bit more when we wrap things up in a minute. But first, a word from our sponsors. This podcast is a member of the Place To Be Nation family. Visit us at PlaceToBeNation.com, your pop culture home. Agree to disagree. Yeah, it's a radio show we have on thenewamericanmedia.com every single Friday at 4.30 p.m. Pacific. Join the show. What do we talk about? Politics, religion, and spirituality. Basically, anything you're not supposed to talk about in a bar. You're not supposed to have these conversations inside of a bar, but we have them every single Friday at 4.30 p.m. Pacific on thenewamericanmedia.com. Join the show, offer your opinion, and let's agree to disagree, but let's have a good conversation. And we are back to wrap things up here at the Lions of Liberty podcast. Guys, make sure you check out some of the sites associated with us that you heard about in our short little break there, PlaceToBeNation.com. It is your go-to source for pop culture, your pop culture home, sports, pro wrestling, TV, movies, comics, absolutely everything. If you're interested in it, I guarantee someone over there, they've got a great staff, is writing about it and talking about it. You're gonna love it. As a bonus, yours truly. Your host, Mark Clare. I am also an occasional contributor over at PlaceToBeNation. I'm also a member of the football staff, so if nothing else, go check it out for me. Do me a favor. Also, please check out our good friend, Brian Engelman, who runs the newamericanmedia.com. Brian has been working hard over the past couple years to create an alternative to the mainstream media. He is constantly driving to put forward stories that the mainstream media simply refuses to cover. Check out his radio show once a week every Friday, 4.30 p.m. Pacific. Agree to Disagree, where you talk about just about anything, like he said, religion, politics, sports. We mix it all together, throw it around, and yours truly, again, is an occasional guest on that program. Now, the interview just heard with Steph and Cancella. This might be a lot to take in for some people that are new to the Liberty Movement, new to libertarianism, new to all these terms. But as you heard Steph and say in the beginning, it's terms that are very important, labels, because these things have meaning. And it's important that we properly define terms in order to advance a rational debate on a subject, on the issues, in order to have a conversation with people. That's why we have language, so we can understand what we're talking about. A banana is a banana. So if a banana is a banana, what's property? What's a contract? Or what's aggression? These are some of the key terms that you will hear as we go along our little libertarian journey here together. And while IP or intellectual property might not be the sexiest topic for a lot of people, it does provide us with an important opportunity to really sort out some serious issues. And it is a serious topic, because guess what? People go to jail over this. People go to jail over copyright, over patent. These are things that have serious consequences. So anytime the state uses power to harm people, I think it's very important that we break it down and say, is this really something we should accept? Is it a violation of property rights? Or is it the state that's violating property rights by forcing itself upon people, stopping people from using their property as they so choose? And in order to argue for any kind of certain philosophy or pitilical ideology or what have you, in this case, it's one that is primarily based around the concepts of private property, in the case of libertarianism, based around private property, voluntary contracts, non-aggression, it's important that we sort this stuff out. And words are just words until we understand their meaning, and more importantly, until we can effectively explain that meaning to other people. So I hope you guys enjoyed the conversation between Mr. Cancelo and myself. Hope that you found it interesting. Hope that it got your wheels turning just a little bit, because that is our mission here at the Lions of Liberty podcast, and at our website, lionsofliberty.com, to advance the ideas of liberty. I plan to bring you guys many more interesting guests in the near future. And again, please check us out. Find us on Twitter at Lions of Liberty, Facebook, Facebook.com, slash Lions of Liberty, Google+, Tumblr, we're everywhere. If you look for us, you'll find us. It's not too hard. And we'd also love your feedback if you have any questions, comments about the show, things we can do. This is my first time. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm just taking stabs in the dark here. Any kind of feedback is appreciated. You can email me directly. Mark, M-A-R-C. That's a C, not a K, kids. Remember that. M-A-R-C, markatlionsofliberty.com. And also a big thanks to Ron Branch from DrawingForLiberty.com. He is the one who created this kickin' musical track you're hearing on the way out of the show. He is also the artist for the Ron Paul biography for youth called Meet Ron Paul. You can find out about that at meetronpaul.com. I have a copy at home. It's a good book, a great introduction to Ron Paul, especially for the younger audience. I highly recommend checking that out. Guys, it's been fun. It's been the first of hopefully many. Until next time, live long and live free.