 Excellent. No, I'm gonna leave meeting. Nice that zoom gives me that option. I'm just gonna leave. By your own, I don't want to be recording. Here we go. The radical fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual wants. This is the Iran Book Show. All right, everybody. Welcome to Iran Book Show on this Thursday, January 12th. God, January's already almost in the middle. Time just flies, flies. Second show today. And I am particularly pleased to have Adam Masov join me today. Thanks, Adam, for joining. You've, you've all got Adam's formal biography in the description below. Adam is a professor of law at George Mason University. He has also got a degree in philosophy. He is a longtime objectivist and one of the original students of the Objectivist Graduate Center in the good old 90s. We usually remember those days. So we were students together in some classes. Yeah, that's great. And yeah, yeah. So thanks, Adam. Thanks for joining me. This is, I don't know, your second, third time on the show, but I really appreciate it. Well, thank you for having me. It's a great way to kick off the near. Absolutely. This is, this is great. So you guys know the drill. If you have any questions, try to focus them today on law, constitution, property rights, intellectual property rights, patents, but you know, we'll go broader than that. But let's let's try to at least get a bunch of questions about that. We have an ongoing competition among the people I interviewed to see who can generate the most super chat dollars. So Nicos has set the bar pretty high. So we will see how we do how we do with that. But it's up to you guys. It's up to you guys. All right, so I want to I want to get to intellectual property rights, which people always have an issue with. And it's always good, even though we've talked about this in the past on the show, it's always good to kind of dig deep into it and remind people and bring it up to kind of up to where we are today. Also remember, you have some interesting things to say about China. So I want to talk about China as well with regard to intellectual property rights. But I want to start with a kind of a broader, broader view of property and property rights. Where are the I mean, Rand has a particular view of of why property rights are so crucial and why in a sense of the essential right to right from the right to life. But historically, where does where does the right to property intellectually? Where does it come from? I mean, who are the key figures? And then how is it conceptualized kind of in let's say in the founding era? It's a great question. Excuse me. And yeah, so in the modern era, in the modern era, I've got to count you from the approximately, you know, the 17th century up to today. You know, it's large, you know, the people if you said, you know, who's the primary intellectual source for our own share of property today, I think people would rightly identify John Locke. John Locke, he he moves beyond a lot of the kind of the initial errors of the founders of natural rights philosophy, the modern theory of natural rights philosophy, Hugo Grosius and Samuel Kufendorf and really situated the right to property within an understanding of why, you know, government needs to protect it and why government needs to be limited just to the protection of the rights to life, liberty and property. And he conceptualized it properly as a result of that. He saw, you know, it's fitting within this trinity of life, liberty and property. So how did he connect it to life? I mean, how did he see kind of the Rand's view that, you know, we have to produce in order to survive and therefore, you know, that that make that connection to life? Unfortunately, no, at least not explicitly. So I mean, there's in-cleans of it, because he was on the right track and he was very reality oriented and he was very, you know, he's really an incredible, you know, philosopher and, you know, very ahead of his time. And but, you know, he he was still shackled by, you know, his, you know, commitment to religion and and they could not bridge the hisocat. He couldn't they did not know how to get it started. So what did it mean that you had a right to life? And so so from that perspective, you know, they really just thought that well, you know, just God basically says you have you have a right to life. And that's what starts it all. And they and Hugh Grosius also has this kind of notion as well, it's kind of implicit that you do have to kind of produce and act in order. This is why you have a right to liberty, because you have a right to life. And so you act in order to sustain your life and in acting, you make things and you make those things, you know, Locke's famous phrase, you mix your labor, which was his metaphor for productive activities. And that's what then creates the right to those things or right to property. And you can see it's kind of implicitly running throughout. And this is one of Rand's, you know, great insights and contributions of her, of her many, many of them is that she actually recognized the key issue that they all missed, which is that it's man's rational mind that is really guiding everything. And that it is the rational mind and the values that man identifies through the use of his reason that actually is the basis of property as serving one's life. So is the fact that they didn't realize this, did that result in a kind of a you know, sense of materialistic view of property? Somewhat. I don't know if it's materialistic or intrinsic, you know, and the two are similar in some ways, but they're still distinct from each other. You know, and this comes out of, you know, the, you know, the initial inability to objectively identify and ground this concept and they, so they, so natural rights has the sense of that it's natural and sense that it's intrinsic in you as a person. And, and, and this is, you know, where you get all these people who struggle with what does it mean then when you delegate your rights and how do you lose your rights if it's intrinsic in you, and things of this sort. And this is, you know, Rand's incredible achievements also in epistemology that she recognized, no, these are concepts, these are principles that serve our life. And, you know, and so, and, but because they because they had this intrinsic view of rights being instantiated in you in some way shape, perform as part of your metaphysical essence, so to speak, as a rational being, you know, it did orient them ultimately toward kind of a more physicalist conception of rights at times, but, but then again, you know, Locke also had in his, in his theories, you know, in cleans of well, no, it applies broader than that property can be extended to this, even in the second treatise, he talks about how well even the, the, when he's describing his, his theory of property in his chapter called property is chapter five. He's, he's giving examples of property, and even says the proper that grass that is bit by the horse of my servant is my property. And that's a really, really incredible insightful insight that, you know, that you can alienate and transfer down through these rights. And that, you know, you can have moral claims and legal claims that extend out beyond you to things that you've entered into agreements with people over. And so, you know, he was, so they were, they were, they were, they were slowly kind of gravitating toward it, but it really took Rams, you know, to, you know, theory of objectivity, her, you know, her, and, and her real key insight about reason as man's basic means of survival is kind of, kind of breaking the Gordian knot that they'd all been struggling with for so long and fully justifying and explaining what is property. And what do you think the consequence of being of that Gordian knot, the fact that they didn't have a full explanation? And they recognize property rights, they, they recognized intellectual property rights. It's in the, it's in the constitution after all. And where did it, what caused it to fall apart? I mean, clearly, we don't have a full understanding to this day of property rights in the world of government. Where in the chain does it fall apart? Oh, yeah, great question. So first it falls apart philosophically, because of course, wrong, all the way from just plain wrong to vicious and evil philosophers always understand what the fundamental error is. And so the philosophers that followed unlock, especially philosophers like Bentham, who infamously referred to natural rights as nonsense on stilts. And so he was going right to that foundational point, like you, you know, you basically start with this bald face assertion that we have rights, because God says we have rights and that's just nonsense. You can't validate that rationally. So it so immediately it lost its philosophical foundation as justification. And the founders really weren't philosophers, so they couldn't, they couldn't respond to that and follow on legal scholars couldn't, couldn't respond to it either. And, and then it, and then because of the intrinsicism and some of the mistakes that they had in their theory, like they embraced this notion of eminent domain, for instance, which is in the Constitution. And, you know, they didn't have, you know, a full conception of what it means for government to be limited just the protection of individual rights. You know, those were also chipped away at slowly the government has police power. And this, so please, this notion of this police power slowly expanded over the 19th century and encompassed more and more regulatory controls on property in the name of the public good. And so you get the combination of this kind of, you know, philosophical attack and, you know, reinforcing and driving this legal attack. And, and it starts to fall apart by the end of the 19th century. Yeah. And of course, today we're left with, you know, even somebody like Scalia saying rights and nonsense on stilts and, and, and, you know, there's, I guess the sexiest supposedly the sexiest thing in, in law schools these days is common good, common good constitutionalism from the mule in, in at Harvard. So that there's actually he not everyone embraces that this is really interesting. No, they don't. It seems like the students, it seems like the hot sexy thing, right? A lot of, a lot of people have embraced it. Yep. And, you know, and it's part and parcel of this kind of broader, you know, yes, I think, you know, cashing in on the collectivism and the impressive collectivism of conservativism and, and, and, and shifting to its populism, right? You know, the, you know, in the classic, you know, historical staining of the Vox Populi, Vox Deia, right? And so, so of course, you know, if it's the voice of God, it's also the voice of people. So we, and so they're now, yes, it's all just about letting the people decide and letting the people do whatever they want. And, you know, we should let the, the levers of government powers that one of their phrases, you know, be used by the people to express their interest in what, in what we're trying to achieve. So I was going to get to this much later, we'll come back to populate in a minute, but does, does the popularity of Vimule worry you? I mean, is this a, is this a trend that you think has legs within the legal community? And I mean, I think for him, it's more than just democracy. I think for him, for Vimule, it really is the voice of God. I mean, he is a Catholic and believes in, in, in using scripture to govern. Yeah, I know he, he's like unreconstructed, you know, pre, you know, pre Renaissance. Yeah. And, you know, which is very interesting. I actually had him as a law professor. Oh, you did. He was at Chicago. He was before his conversion to Catholicism. So he wasn't like that when I had him as a law professor. So it's just been very interesting to, to, to watch this development that he's undertaken. You know, it's among legal scholars in the Federal Society and on the, you know, on the, you know, the right of center for lack of a better term. You know, there's, you know, there's, there's actually a very robust debate going on about common good constitutionalism. And, you know, because one of the things that common good constitutionalism does too, is it, is it's, it's taking some kernels of truth and it's, and it's leveraging them. For instance, the kind of the implicit legal positivism that's inherent in originalism and textualism. Scalia is, you know, that, you know, if you want to write, put it in the constitution, but otherwise there are no rights that don't exist in the constitution. Tell us what legal positivism is because I'm sure a lot of people don't know. Yeah. So that, so legal positivism is typically the theory that was contrasted against natural rights. So these are kind of the two opposing theories of, of, of rights in history before objectivism, which is, you know, the natural rights say you have rights that pre-exist government, but it did, but it's the intrinsic view that they're inherent in you as a person and, you know, God given. And then the reaction to that was people by Bentham and many others, which said, no, rights are created by governments, rights are created by laws that say you have a right. So a positive expression in a statute or in a court decision. And that's the source of rights. And that's the only source we have. I mean, they say, we look out in the world, I don't see rights, but I see legal documents that tell me I have rights. And that's why I have rights. And so, so, and that's the subjectivist view. And so this is kind of the classic historical clash between intrinsicism and subjectivism that Ayn Rand rose above and recognized and identified the errors in both and fully validated rights. And in this sense, the common good conservatism represents intrinsic side and it's replacing kind of the originalism or textualism that was popular among center right. Well, regionalism and textualism are still very, I mean, those are the dominant methods of legal and constitutional interpretation right now. In large part because the left and the opposing side didn't really have a methodology, you know, it was living constitutionalism, which is not really, that's not a method. It's pure subjectivism, just as the Constitution is whatever we say it is at any particular point in time. And so, you know, originalism was a reaction against that. So a legitimate reaction. And of course, but then they went intrinsic and said, well, the way we understand the Constitution is not being this subjective open blank slate is by understanding it solely in terms of what the founders understood to be. And the common good constitutionalism is kind of reacting that saying, well, but that's still, that's kind of a positivist slant on things because you're still saying it's what the founders gave us and we have society for a moral ideal. I mean, so the common good constitutionalism is appealing to people's sense of we live for a moral purpose society. Societies are good and bad. And you should have a flourishing society. Your notion of what is a good society is fundamental. And that has been lost in textualism. And it really was never part of textualism and originalism, which is, I think, a right identification. And so again, you can see, so yeah, so they're going intrinsic because they're going more fundamental. And of course, the only thing that exists more fundamentally in the moral space and is religion, if you believe in a right and a wrong. And what do you think their attitude is? I think we towards property rights, for example. Yeah, so well, it's proper to them, you know, this kind of fetishization of property is completely wrong. There's like the point is not, you know, individual rights, the point is not, you know, rights of life to their property, the point is having a good society, right, the common good constitutionalism. And of course, the good society then is the good society is defined by people like St. Augustine and others. And so and so this is kind of what their, their, you know, their appeal is. And so they're actually very, very much, you know, viscerally reactive against anything from the age of enlightenment and the age of reason. They dislike Locke, they dislike the appeals to them. And they argue sometimes when they try to invoke the founders that oh, it's a mistake. They really weren't, you know, driven and motivated by Locke. They were driven by, you know, Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine and other more, you know, in religious leaders. Yeah. I mean, I've been doing talks at Federalist Society. I did a few at the end of last year. And that this is what they want to talk about. I mean, they want to talk about this new theory in law. It's the exciting thing. And it appeals to idealism, I guess, right? Because because it is kind of a more philosophical. It has a vision. It's not just, you know, let's follow a text, but there's an ideal that we're striving towards. And I find it incredibly scary that this is the future of the Federalist Society potentially, you know, not now, but 20 years down the road when these kids, and or that this is the future of the right, because I think this is seems to be the direction the right is heading towards. You know, the vacuum, ideological vacuums don't survive. Yeah. Yeah. This seems to be one of the things that is trying to fill their vacuum. And, you know, and it's a great example, too, of Einrann's point that, you know, fundamentally, people, you know, in a choice between being practically effective and being morally right, people will choose to be morally right. People are driven by what they think is good and right, not what is should be, you know, practical and effective, which is kind of how conservatives and economists try to argue these issues. So this is why this is, I think you've rightly identified it so appealing to especially young people. All right. So let's go back to property rights. So, you know, obviously, the founding fathers understood the ideas of property as best anybody could, I think, in the Enlightenment. And they, to what extent did they, you know, make that clear in the Constitution? To what extent is the Constitution as a document, a document that protects property rights? Well, that's a great question, because there's, I think there's a lot of confusion about, you know, this certain about what is the Constitution, because the federal Constitution's job is not to protect property rights. And so, because the federal Constitution was to restrain and limit the federal government. You know, so, you know, we have two systems of government, we have the state governments and the federal government. And so, you know, what the founders were creating was the federal government, which was very, you know, from their perspective, you know, small, weak. Primarily, its job would be to have an army and a navy to defend the country as a whole. And even that's not a standing army. Well, so this day, we don't have a standing army. It has to be renewed every two years. They pass a bill to renew the military every two years. And essentially to prevent the states from warring with each other and destroying each other even through their own policies. So this was the problem under the Articles of Confederation as the states were adopting regulations and trade protection measures against each other. And so, they created the federal Constitution and the federal government to enforce basically a free trade zone between all of the states. And so, they didn't view it as their job to, you know, it wasn't the job of the federal government to protect property because the federal government doesn't create property. Property was already recognized and secured through the common law, which were the courts. And that was at the state level. And in fact- And they weren't worried about the fact that these rights would be lost and that these rights needed protection? Well, so that was the debate between the federalists and the anti-federalists as to whether we should adopt the Constitution was, you know, have you sufficiently limited the federal government such that, you know, it won't, you know, aggrandize more and more power to itself and thus essentially become an authoritarian regime and replicate through kind of a, through a demagogue, you know, what they were trying to, what they were escaping under King George. And so that, so there was, there were founders who recognized that there was a concern here and that the government wasn't limited enough, even in the original document, which is why we ended up with the Bill of Rights, which by the way, weren't even identified as the Bill of Rights at the time. They were just the first 10 amendments. So you have, for instance, with the federal government, you have doctrines like it's the doctrine of enumerated power. So for instance, the federal government is limited in the way that in the sense it has no powers other than those expressly granted to it. And so, so if it doesn't have something that it says, it explicitly says it can do, it can't do it. Of course, that's been totally lost. That was the destruction by the early 20th century American progressives, capital P progressives, the leftists at the time, and, you know, which has unleashed the administrative state. And, and so that, you know, so they, they saw themselves as, you know, is creating a radically new system of government that wasn't just, you know, a federal government that was a new government system in the sense of also we had the federalism where the state, the states were actually viewed as the primary protectors of the rights of life, liberty and property. And the federal government was the, was the backstop against that essentially at the time. So, you know, over the 19th century as, as, as we kind of start losing rights to property and whether through eminent domain, but, but also through, through lots of other regulations and controls and right of contract gets lost and through the regulatory state. What is, what is the debate going on? Is there a debate among legal scholars around this idea of property rights? Is that, is that a conception which covers, I don't know, Lochner and things like that? Is that a conception that covers contracts? Do they perceive it in that way? Yeah. So there, there are a lot of different scholars who are doing different work on, on rights on, on property rights. There's also, you know, a lot of lawyers who are doing work on this, you know, Institute for Justice and the Pacific Legal Foundation and the others, you know, their, you know, mission is to protect property rights and to restore the rights of property and the rights of contract. You know, but, you know, you can't talk about, you know, protecting the right to property without, you know, reducing it ultimately down to a discussion and debate about, well, is the administrative state that, you know, legitimate or not? You know, and, you know, should we have regulations and what type of regulations, if we do, and things of this sort? And the moment you start to enter into that space, you know, you, majority of people today don't want, don't want that to happen. They don't want to get rid of the regulatory state, what lawyers call the administrative state or the welfare state. And so there's not a fully robust discussion about it, but there are people who are trying, I think there are some people who are trying to bring it back and are trying to engage with it at a theoretical level. But a lot of those people are, you know, still working within kind of historical traditions of Locke. And so they still have a lot of the same similar mistakes that you see that Locke made and other natural rights scholars made. So when you see somebody like Gorsuch who came into the Supreme Court with, there was a lot of hope about his opposition to the administrative state. I mean, to what extent is that opposition, do you think motivated by an understanding of property rights, even if not a full understanding? Or is it something else? Is it more separation of powers issues for him? Oh, yeah, that's a really interesting question. You know, I don't fully know. So I mean, if I was to guess, you know, because he cares very much about separation powers. But one reason why he cares about separation powers is he sees that as an essential mechanism that was innovatively created by the founders. I mean, there's so many things that the founders are amazing. They're just such incredible men, such heroes. And but he sees the reason why he believes so fervently in the separation powers is because that he sees as an essential mechanism for limiting the government and leaving people free in their rights to life, liberty, to exercise the rights of life, liberty and property. And so so in a certain sense, he does see it connected to property as a right to property as a right to contract. But he also sees it as well. But a key part of being a lawyer and being a judge is actually thinking not about moral concepts like what is a right to property, but thinking actually about the legal institutions and the legal doctrines and the processes that we that we use in society to protect those rights, like the doctrines of separation of powers and the doctrines of federalism and things of that sort. Now, that that's distinguished. So Gorsuch is, you know, he's actually fairly good as a justice. I've impressed with him. And I'm not saying that simply because he cited my work. But but that is like compared to like Justice Kavanaugh. So Justice Kavanaugh is a, you know, what you would call process conservative. So he thinks, you know, he's like, you know, what we were talking about with respect to originalism and textualism. It's just all legal positivism at the end of the day. It's just as long as the government follows the proper processes, that's that's fine. And so he's more than willing to rubber stamp raw exercises of power as long as the government crossed its knees and dotted its eyes under under existing illegitimate doctrines that exist. Anybody else? Anybody else, you know, in the court with better views in terms of in terms of rights and in terms of the role of government? Well, I mean, Thomas historically has been better. But he's becoming a little bit more mixed now as he, you know, as he starts to get very much caught up in the concerns about, you know, big tech, and he's now views them as a monopoly, and he thinks that they should be, you know, you know, addressed as such. And also he's become very anti IP. And yes, he's written in many of the many of the really bad opinions in the past 10 years. And he wasn't always years. Not always. In fact, yeah, in the 90s, he wrote one, you know, he a really good patent opinion in the 1990s. But but I, you know, I think he got heavily influenced by anti IP libertarians who are working for him. I know some of them. I personally, his classmates. And, and I think also Justice Breyer was also very anti IP. And he was a he was he played a very significant role in the Supreme Court influencing its patent law and its patent decisions. And I think, you know, he also helped influence Justice Thomas somewhat in that respect. Interesting. That's too bad. I mean, Thomas, yeah, by the way, that's a theory how I don't have any direct evidence of it, but just my observation doesn't surprise me. I mean, something something is off with Thomas over the last few years. It's hard to tell exactly what you know, there's a certain pragmatism that is set in. And he used to talk about individual rights. He actually used to talk about them. I think that's that's out these days. He assigned, he would give his clerks a phone head. I think he still does. I think they it's an annual they annually get together and watch the movie. Yeah, I don't actually read it. I think they watched the movie once a year. So I think that is ongoing. I think his understanding of the of the movie has deteriorated. I mean, it used to be that this was that, you know, Thomas and and Scalia kind of represented kind of the the two forces that were really were were were intellectual power houses on the on the Supreme Court in terms of Thomas, you know, we very explicitly rejected the legal positive and Scalia. So one of the key differences between Thomas and Scalia is Thomas really believes and still to this day says says this that the Declaration of Independence is an authoritative source that they should be able to cite for interpreting the Constitution. Whereas Scalia is on record saying the Declaration of Independence is a bunch of rhetoric. It's it's beautiful sounding, but it's not legally relevant or meaningful to what I do as a justice. And I and I think that that that division says it all. And there's no I don't think there's anybody else that agrees with Thomas on the court right now with that view that view of Thomas is that explicit that explicit view. Gorsuch might, you know, and we haven't seen enough of Justice Barrett yet to know, you know, where she might come ultimately come down in some of these matters. Okay, so let's let's talk a little bit about IP. So, you know, Locke talks about mixing your label with the soil right with with with with. How does that then get translated into intellectual property rights? To what extent did they have a proper understanding of the intellectual property rights? And, you know, how does that lead us today with so many so-called defenders of freedom or anti intellectual property rights? Oh, yeah, great question. So, so as a preliminary matter, we know, and Locke used his phrase, you mix your labor with things, you know, and he's been, you know, really viciously attacked by this by contemporary philosophers and Jeremy Waldron, many others. Oh, this is just nonsense and things of this sort. You know, I think they're dropping context. I mean, it was when you read it, it's clear he means it as a metaphor. In fact, Locke liked metaphors, he uses a lot of metaphors and his and his and a lot of his philosophical writings. Because when you look at all of his examples of what he means by mixing labor, they're all examples of productive activity of someone taking something in nature and converting it into a human value, whether it's like killing a deer to make steak or, or, or, you know, the famous example of picking acorns, but he also talks about like making wine out of grapes, a very important activity. I don't know what they knew about that in England. I don't think they knew about that in England. Still don't based on the tasting of British wine. They read stories about it being done in another country. So, and so he said, and he did, and if you read his other works too, and I've written a little bit on this, he had this kind of, he did have a nascent idea that you do have to kind of create and produce things in order to live that we are not like animals that, you know, you know, in his treatise and human understanding and his works on education, in particular, you know, he talks about how, you know, learning virtue is fundamental to living a happy life. So, virtues themselves are values. You have to pursue them and achieve them. He actually talks in those terms. It's really interesting. And so he, he has a nascent understanding of this. And I think this is reflecting the fact in 1695, he writes a little essay on copyright, where he actually identifies copyright as a property right of an art of our author, you know, and, and, you know, which is really unusual at that time, because you know, this is pre like copyright as we now understand it. So, and, and he does refer at the very end of his chapter on, on, on property to kind of, he he's supposed to be first innovation as kind of a value in, in society that you want to promote and will follow from protecting property rights. So there's there, there, he hadn't, he hadn't inkling of it, but our, we had to recognize in the 17th century in 1690, when he wrote the second treatise, they didn't have an intellectual property that they didn't have this, they didn't, we didn't have patents as property rights protecting inventions. We had government granted monopolies. We didn't have even copyright yet. Copyright was a government granted monopoly to publishers by from the crown. So, you know, it's not until the next century that, you know, and it correlates with the industrial revolution at the start of, you know, the industrial revolution that people start to recognize, well, you know, people are creating machines that are valued to us, that these machines are necessary, you know, are necessary for human survival and that their productive labor goes into it, that they should have a right to adjust as much as a farmer has a right to his field, and we should protect it. And so, you know, I get from there to where we are today where there's so, I mean, it strikes me that there are more people attacking property rights from the so-called rights or from the so-called free market side than there are people defending it. One of the few out there defending, fighting the fight to defend it. How did we get, you know, freedom and lack of litigation of property rights mixed in together with the pretence of freedom, anyway? Yeah, it is. It's a real conundrum. And I spent a long time trying to figure it out. And I think the key is that is utilitarianism and bentham and just kind of this, you know, in economics. And so, basically a more positivist view of the matter of things in the sense of that, you know, people read, continued to read Loc treat us and they said, yeah, this is kind of mushy, sounding rhetoric, mixing labor and picking acorns and things of the sort. And they also, and, you know, and Loc does have some intrinsic transicism in his theory of mixing labor, because he wasn't a directivist. He didn't fully understand these are values created through purely through the rational mind. And so, you know, people felt like, well, really, we need to be able to provide a solid rational foundation for this. And this comes from Bentham. So really, what we have is not mixing labor, what you have are conflicts. And that's observable. That's a fact. No one can dispute about this, that people are beating each other up with clubs or then eventually guns over a piece of land. So how do we have an understandable baseline to resolve a conflict? And of course, that baseline, they say is property. So they say so they so they starting now from property is arising from value creation, which is Loc's implicit point, not explicit, but implicit to now property being explicitly serving as a function of resolution of conflicts and scarcity. That strikes me as this is the whole idea in economics that scarcity is the fundamental idea and land is scarce and ideas are not. Well, economics then provides the theory that explains this conflict resolution. Well, why are there conflicts? Because no two people can use that same piece of land at the same time in different ways. It's a scarce, it's a quote scarce resource that is inherently rival risk. And so they start from that premise. And then if you start from that premise, well, inventions and books and all the other types of, you know, even corporations, which are abstractions, are not scarce and rival. They can be recreated and used by multiple different people in different ways without there being conflicts over in the same way you have over a piece of land or a river. And so they immediately see this as not property. And as a gut and therefore for government is securing this means that this is a monopoly grant. And so, you know, so the typical libertarian out there thinks that intellectual property rights are just creation of government and therefore status status issue. Yeah, well, creation government and therefore a status issue or even worse, they see as a violation of our property rights because hey, I'm, you know, if I copy this machine, I made the machine it's mine. So you're telling me that I can't use it is actually violating my rights of liberty and property. And is your sense that that is that view gaining ground among, you know, in the world around us both intellectually and from political perspective? So that view is not gaining ground. That became, I mean, it's dominant in libertarianism now because Murray Rothbard embraced it. There's also a huge overlap between anarchism and libertarianism and opposition to IP because, of course, you need a government to recognize and enforce the rights and intellectual property. And so they tend to, you know, so, oh, then intellectual property has to be out too. And so this kind of, you know, anarchist, utilitarian, economic scarcity justification for so-called justification for property is really dominant in libertarianism right now. And, and, and this is why I, we see a lot, this is why we see a lot of rolling back of protections of intellectual property in the United States in the past 30 years is because you have libertarians openly joining with explicit leftists and collectivists to attack intellectual property. So you have the Cato Institute joining in legal briefs at the US Supreme Court in Amicus briefs with leftist organizations like Public Knowledge and the Center for Democracy and Technology to attack patterns, copyrights, trademarks. Wow. So, so, you know, we've got a lot of questions. So we'll get to those. But so what do you, what is your, where do you see this heading? I mean, are you optimistic, pessimistic about kind of intellectual property rights in the next decade or so? So I was, if you would ask me that question five years ago, I would have been much more pessimistic than I am now. So I am, you know, five years ago, it was, you know, you just, you could not break the, this, this patent troll rhetoric that had come to dominate Washington DC and was being exploited by libertarians and the leftists and big and, and, and, and the Fang companies to attack you who are funding a lot of this because they, because they in very short-sighted pragmatic way view IP as contrary to their business models. So it's not a theoretical issue to them. It's just a business model issue to them. But but I'm, I'm more hopeful now because I think a lot of people are now recognized the concern and problem here. Good people and people who recognize that intellectual property is, is, is fundamental to a successful economy, a successful free market. You know, it's very interesting, you know, that libertarians who will beat up on Marxists for, you know, having, you know, not looking at the facts of the world and just having their theory and imposing their theory on the world are doing that with their attacks on IP. They have this economic theory that tells them that IP is not property. And yet they know nothing of actually how intellectual property has actually driven the entire industrial revolution has driven our biotech revolution has driven the computer revolution. You know, it's, it's, it's property rights, which are the basis of contracts and companies and venture capital investments and everything of that sort. And, and so it's, and, and there are a lot more people who are starting to write about this and to talk about this and engage with on these issues. And so I'm, I'm a bit more hopeful now. And also you mentioned China. China has helped in this little respect because they copied our patent system. And, but they're, you know, but they did that because it's part of their, you know, socio political agenda and goal to as an authoritarian regime. And so that's actually helped us a little bit because, you know, this kind of this growing conflict with China, you know, intellectual property is now being viewed as part of that conflict and it actually is. So the fact that the Chinese have stolen intellectual property rights is something that bothers people? Yes. Yeah. In fact, you know, China ends up being kind of a, for people, it's another conundrum. They're like, we constantly accuse them of stealing our IP, which they do. I mean, billions of dollars is estimated a year. And yet they've developed their own very, very strong intellectual property systems in their own country. And it seems like a paradox at first. But if you recognize, no, will they go together because China, what they want is just, they want to get as much invention in their country as possible so that they can, you know, can, you know, rise as quickly as possible so that they can then become militarily dominant and, you know, and dominant in the world. And so this is all part and parcel of kind of a domestic industrial policy that they have. So they have a patent system locally to encourage entrepreneurs and investors. And then from a policy perspective, they'll steal all they can from the West. Right. And the result is more technology for them. And as we know, it doesn't work ultimately that way. Well, in the short term, in the short term, it works. Right. And, you know, in a certain sense, every authoritarian leader knows this is, this, this isn't going to, we're going to run out of people to steal from at a certain point. You have to tell Putin that because I don't think he's done that less than yet. And he's running out of people. Yeah, he certainly is. Horrible fashion. Oh, yeah, I horrible regime. Yes. Yeah. But I mean, China was, I talked about, I talk about this a lot on the show, because I care about China, but China seems to have been on the right path and veered off into this, you know, real authoritarianism. I don't know if that's your sense as well. 100% my same sense. I was so like hopeful. And, you know, in 2010, 2010, even seven years ago, I would have said China is a real serious, you know, it's going to be a success story. And G is like a switcher's throne because they, you know, he ultimately had to make a choice, you know, let the free market continue to grow and develop and let people be innovative and creative, secure patents or loose power as a consequence, power and he chose power and they've become very authoritarian. And so, you know, I, you know, and I think that we're going to see the same story play out now with them as we saw with the Soviet Union and other authoritarian regimes. So when you say they have a strong patent system in China, to what extent is it backed up by a rule of law? So if somebody steals my patent in China, they might have violated the law, but can actually get at them, particularly if they're members of the Communist Party and I'm not. Yeah, that fantastic question because, you know, China, you know, they, you know, they kind of thought like, oh, you know, they studied the United States, what made us successful. By the way, this is explicit and known, you know, they said, oh, with their patent system, you know, it's clearly a patent system. So they think like, oh, we'll take their patent system and we'll be successful too. Like if we build it, they'll come. It's like, no, it was the US patent system worked because it was part and parcel of a system that of the rule of law, the protection of individual rights, you know, stable political legal institutions that were restrained the protection of individual rights and the rule of law. And so, but in China, you have this veneer of the law, right? You have, you have things called courts and they, and they superficially follow processes that we see as you file a complaint, you have discovery, but they're not courts like in any authoritarian regime. If there's an issue that the Communist Party cares about, then the Communist Party is going to tell the court, you have to rule a certain way. We've seen this repeatedly actually in patent cases. And so, and so it can't be successful at the end of the day because you can get as many patents as you want, but if you're not protecting these patents as property rights in a system of a rule of law, then they're worthless and, and the innovators will figure that out. People who think they're rational people. Yeah, I mean, I, I've always thought of China as having kind of pseudo property rights, right? They give everybody the impression they have property rights until you piss off the right authority and lead us somewhere and then poof, your property with a land or IP is not yours anymore. It's gone. Right. You know, that's, you know, they're Chinese or what communism with Chinese characteristics, right? It was kind of like, well, we'll, we'll create a veneer of capitalism and as long as people don't interfere with our, our fundamental more authoritarian commitments, you can, you can be capitalistic and free, but the problem is eventually there's going to be a conflict. There has to be and, and then they're going to have to make a choice. And she's clearly in the past four or five years making the choice that no, power and authoritarianism is what matters most to me. Yeah. Yeah. I still am over for that. I'll somehow find a way to get rid of him. We will see. It's, it doesn't look like he's solidified his position, but they're going to struggle economically. They're going to struggle in other ways and maybe that'll, that'll get people upset. He did fold on zero COVID. So yeah, yeah, that was surprising. I wasn't expecting that. Neither was I. So, but I don't think the protesters were expecting it. I think there was a price. I expected to line up in jail. Many of them did. So they were, they were not expecting to be successful and they were incredibly successful. So you're right. So I'm, I'm, I'm interviewed in a documentary called the innovation race, which talks a little bit about this issue with China and how China is using patents and innovation and technologies as a way to kind of challenge the United States and to rise as a global power. It's the first kind of authoritarian regime that's recognized this that, you know, so it presents kind of this unique challenge in the United States that we didn't face with the Nazis. And so, you know, because that was a military conflict, they thought they would dominate us militarily. China thinks, yeah, we need, we will eventually have to dominate the United States and other free countries militarily, but we're going, but we, but what's going to drive that ultimately in the end of the day is technology. They, and they have kind of a superficial recognition of that. And so they're trying to promote technological innovation and economic development for that reason in their country. And so it's just kind of a race between like how far they can they get in the short term before it all collapses in the long term. Have you read the, I don't know if you've read this book that I'm recommending to everybody because I think it's really fantastic. It's called Chip Wars, Chip War, like Chris Miller from the, no, I didn't, but I'm going to get it now. It's, it's, it's really good. And it, it gives you a whole new perspective on, on the, on, on what China is doing and, and why it has to fail in some sense. But also, you know, my perspective on Taiwan has changed. My perspective on all the things geopolitical has changed. And the book is basically just a description of the, of the microprocessing industry since, you know, since the days of Shockley all the way, all the way to today. And it's, it's, it's fascinating. And right now, I think I can't, you know, semiconductors seem to be like, you know, maybe with exception of energy, maybe semiconductors are the most important industry in the world right now because basically we have a chip in everything, whether we need one or not. And Musk is, Musk is trying to get chips into our brains. So we'll really have a chip. But, but it is, it is a, it is very well written, and it's really interesting. Yeah. A computer scientist actually computed that, that there, there are now more transistors on the planet earth than there are leaves on trees. I mean, because there's, you know, there's hundreds of thousands of transistors just in your smartphone. Oh yeah. I think there are billions of transistors in the smartphone. I think it's stunning. And when you read the book, you'll just be blown away by how stunning it is. And by how much we've, I mean, this'll be right up your alley in a sense of how much has been achieved in 60 years. Right. If you think about Shockley and, and all of that in the fifties semiconductors were still like these big things with bots in them and stuff. And now you have chips that are almost as thick as an atom. It's, it's mind boggling. And anyway, I've read about the chip manufacturing, the fab, the fab, you know, the fab. And of course, all that happens in Taiwan now. And, and the, and the way that happened just really, really interesting. You know, we, we, you know, so China recognize, has recognized this is probably in the chip wars and how they've been trying to develop their own semi, their own domestic semi-conductor manufacturing. And it's been completely decimated in the past couple of months because of the, the law that we passed that no U.S. citizen work or a company can work for a Chinese company because these aren't private companies, right? Huawei is not a private company. It's an organ of the Chinese Communist Party. And so, and so, so they were all U.S. people who left China and they were all the people with the knowledge in the know-how. And it turns out, I mean, this is, this comes out of the book. It turns out that even if you have all the knowledge in the know-how, you can't make sophisticated chip without the, the tools to make sophisticated chips. There's only one company in the world that makes the primary tool to fab these chips. And it's a, it's a Dutch company. That company, in order to build its machines that fabs the chips is as contracts with like, I don't know, hundreds of smaller companies all based in Western Europe and in the United States to produce lasers and mirrors and stunning stuff that I, you know, and if China's cut off from that, if basically China's not, cannot buy the mirrors from Germany, there's no way it can, it can compete with Germany on mirror, Germans have been making mirrors for, you know, cameras for well over 100 years and they have the patents and the Dutch company's called the SML. And so you get a sense of the supply chain and you get a sense of what it takes. And you suddenly realize that China can know everything. It can have the talent. It can have the people. It's always going to be 10 years behind at least because if the West chooses not to deal with it and right now in semiconductors that West has chosen not to deal with them. So whether that, you know, some of those laws are good, some of those laws are bad, but the reality is that we have chosen not to deal with them and they're screwed. I mean, they've been fighting, they've been such in an undeclared Cold War with us, right? For, you know, I think for at least 20 years now. And I think suddenly since Xi came to power, so, you know, I don't know if it's 20 years. I don't think that in the, I don't know that they conceptualized it that way pre-Xi, but I definitely think they've conceptualized it that way now. And so I think some, so I think some of this is good. I mean, some of it's bad, as you said, you know, we shouldn't be, you know, shutting in. We can be subsidizing our chip industry. Oh, certainly not. No, tens of billions of dollars picking winners and losers. Oh, God. I also think that it's reasonable to say we shouldn't be selling the most advanced chips in the world and the most advanced chip making technologies in the world to China when we know that all those chips land up in weapon systems. It was interesting. They took a bus on the drones that the Russians are using in Ukraine that they are buying from the Iranians. And what's inside the drones? American chips. I mean, literally American chips. And this is a country that's supposed to be embargoed. So, you know, let's let's let's let's get chips to the people who want to destroy us. Let's let's sell them. That makes complete sense. All right, let's see. Adam. Adam has a question for Adam. All right. I am questioning myself. Why are so many patent cases taken to the court with the least literal, literate jury pool in the country that believes that illiterate jurors will be direct directly guided by God or more likely to be swayed by scams? That's okay. Well, you know, the jury, look, you think juries in the 1830s were any more literate. And, you know, I mean, in the 1830s, you had patent trials over the electromagnetic telegraph and mechanized reaper, vulcanized rubber, right? You know, before there was chemistry before we even knew what electricity was. And the and you had juries, right, who who couldn't either read or if they read, they only had read one book in their entire lives. And that was the Bible, right, at that point. And so, you know, and so, but they figured the stuff out, you know, they those those cases were good and right, and they reached a lot of the right decisions. You know, and I'm less skeptical of juries than than than other than other people are. Because there's a certain sense in which juries can kind of cut to the chase. You know, because you can really, especially in patent law, oh, it's the monoclonal antibodies with the valence levels with the protein receptors, and you can just start talking about all that stuff. But, you know, and that's but at the end of the day, it's like, well, describe the invention in the real world, what is this thing that you've invented that's a value to humans. And, and, you know, and having juries who don't have PhDs is actually really good, because it forces lawyers to have to think about like, what's the real world reality, you know, technology, what's the focus of what we're doing here that matters. And this prevents them from getting caught up in a lot of the, you know, the technical details and theoretical issues. In fact, they don't in patent trials, they usually don't have PhDs as as as running the trial. Because the worst person ever to talk to a non technical person is a person with a PhD in molecular biology or something. So they usually have someone with us, you know, with a philosophy background or political science background, because they're the ones that know how to talk to regular people. So from your experience, you know, tracking these trials and being part of I'm sure many of these trials, are you still even today making decisions that make sense? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think I mean, I haven't done all the empirical studies. The problem is, is that you have kind of a selection bias in the sense that, you know, of course, you hear the news reports of all the crazy decisions and the crazy or the crazy ones, right, and you have to realize that there's thousands and thousands of cases that occur every day that where everything works out. And, you know, the the right that's been infringed or violated as a judge, just such a lot of trials also aren't before juries. You know, so you have a right to a jury, but you only get a right to a jury there, if you both ask for it, or one of you ask for it. Sorry. So and there are a lot of cases where the parties say, no, we want to, you know, we want to litigate before the judge. So there was a massive worldwide patent war, as they're called between Erickson and Apple that just settled last month. And that was before judge in the Eastern District of Texas. So that wasn't before the jury. And it actually is it the case that almost all of these cases get settled without going to a fight? Yes, a lot or they start their trial and the person eventually settles because the moment you realize we're going to lose this, you stop, you stop wasting money on your lawyers and you settle. So and so Apple settled with Erickson and how Erickson was sued for patent or Apple was sued for patent infringement by Erickson. Yeah, so and yeah, so and and there's actually a filtering, right? So you have you have complaints that are filed and a lot of cases settle at that stage because you immediately know that person figures out, I'm in the wrong, I'm going to lose. Why should I waste hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars on lawyers? I'm just going to settle now or you go through discovery and sort of pretrial motions and things like that. So you hear about kind of the crazy cases and things of that sort because those are the cases typically also at the end of the day where there really is an issue in which you have arguments can go either way, essentially under the laws written or is the nature of the patent or the nature of the copyright or even a dispute of regular property. And that's why you've got to get those prominent cases that are in the newspapers about those issues too. All right, Millen asks, has the Ninth Amendment become meaningless? Yeah, the Ninth Amendment has largely been meaningless. Say a little bit about what the Ninth Amendment is and in what sense it's become meaningless. Thank you. I should have said that. I'm not just jumping in to ask the question. My job. You're doing it very well, Yvonne. Gold star for you today, as I say to my students sometimes. So the Ninth Amendment is the amendment. So when they enacted the Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments, one of the arguments about why we should not enact the Bill of Rights is because they said, well, if we enumerate all of these rights that can be protected, that leaves a logical implication that the rights that we're not explicitly saying can be protected, like the First Amendment, the right of free speech, or Second Amendment, the right to firearms can be abridged, can be violated by the government. And so to address that, Madison wrote the Ninth Amendment, which says, essentially any rights that are not specified as protected in the Bill of Rights are still secured to the people. So it's kind of a recognition. It's a reaffirmation of the kind of the natural rights philosophy that animated the Constitution, that animates the declaration of pendants that Thomas used to refer to a lot. And so for people who are positivists in inclination, like Judge Bork, who was a very positivist, originalist, he literally said, the Ninth Amendment is an ink smudge. He literally said that. He's like, if you don't recognize individual rights, then the Ninth Amendment is kind of meaningless. He literally said, it has this legal standing of a smudge. We don't know what it means, it's just meaningless. So we just can't enforce it. And it was cited a few times in the 60s by the Warren court. But of course, it was caught up with their living constitutionals and this. So they were invoking it. Oh, yes, there's all these unstated rights and we can create new rights all the time. And because rights are whatever society said they are. And so the reaction against that was very strong. And so for all intents and purposes, it's the dead ladder of the Constitution, unfortunately. Is there any legal movement, legal scholars out there that want to kind of resurrect a proper view of the Ninth Amendment? So there were, Randy Barnett used to write a little bit about this and others. And I know that the libertarian law firms, Pacific Legal Foundation, Institute for Justice, they see that also as an important amendment. Because of its dead letter and law, they don't want to invoke it a lot. But it's very much part of kind of, I think their overall strategy of what they see as bringing back into American law in a more effective way. Good. All right. Let's see. Len asks patent rolls. He challenged me on three element water chemistry. Ignored Rambus Fiasco, Betray DD, two group Qualcomm built on patents accountants and lawyers, drug companies buy patents, jack up prices and use the suffer. Okay. So give us the deal on patent rolls. All right. So patent rolls is a, you know, I'm really used to say you should always ask people to define a term. And if they can't define it, and there's no subtle definition for it in discussions, then that's an indication to you that it's a anti-concept. It's a package deal. It's an invalid concept, an invalid term. And that is certainly the term patent roll. It essentially has come to mean any patent owner that has sued me for patent infringement. And it was effectively used in the policy debates in Washington, D.C. to very effective, in a very effective way, to push for legislation, to weaken and eliminate patent rights that unfortunately, the FANG companies, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, in Cisco and a few others, supported and spent hundreds of millions of dollars pushing this narrative, funding, bogus junk studies, statistical studies that tried to show that there, oh, there's patent rolls are causing less damage and whatnot. You know, they would never define it because, you know, if you say to them, what's the, what is a patent roll? They'll say, well, it's someone who doesn't manufacture. Well, you say, well, Thomas Edison didn't manufacture. Is he a patent roll? Oh, well, not him. So it's someone who has a bad patent. Well, but there are, but there are people who don't manufacture, who sue and their patents are held to be valid. And so like, you know, Apple was just sued by VSLI, a so-called patent roll because it's just, it doesn't manufacture. It has a, what you call a licensing business model. And, which is what Thomas Edison's business model was, so was Tesla's, so was Charles Goodyear's. And it's property rights. And, and, and their patents were upheld. So, but the, but they're smeared as being patent rolls. Universities have been smeared as patent rolls because they don't manufacture. And so it's, you know, it's a, it's a rhetorical term that's been used by people to attack the patent system. And, and, and it's, and it's captured good people who are like, yes, because there's always some bad actors. There's always some bad people out there doing some bad things, you know, with the, you know, with, with, even with their property rights, abusing them. And there was other doctrines in the law that addressed that. And there aren't patent laws as well. And, and, but, you know, you don't need this term patent roll. In fact, they had a term in the 19th century. Their, their term for the 19th century was patent shark. People attacking the patent system at that time were called pat, you know, they, they're always patent sharks. These people who don't manufacture or just license their patents and attack people in their bogus and all sort of stuff. And we should get rid of the patent system. So, so it's a finance guy. I know people who raised money, went out and found people who own patents, bought the patents from them, and then went around and sued companies for patent infringement. Is there anything wrong with that? Nothing wrong with that whatsoever. I mean, how about I buy a piece of land? I don't live on it. I don't build on it. Someone's trespassing. I sue that person for trespass. Am I a property troll? No. And, and more, but more fundamentally, the, you know, what, what these companies are, they're financial intermediaries. They are serving a really important function in a free market and that these inventors and others, people who are there buying their patents from are people who are, are under capitalized or lack the knowledge of how to enforce or license their patents. And the business model of these companies is not patent litigation because litigation is expensive and who wants to pay a bunch of lawyers millions of dollars over the span of many years to go through multiple courts and appeals, eventually, you know, the business model is licensing. The business model licensing is contract. So I, I, I've created something. I am not going to work with it myself. I'm going to give you the right to do so through a contract and intellectual property space. We call those licenses, you know, and there are, you know, licensing is a longstanding fundamental key part of what makes a free market work contracts. And in fact, economists have identified it was a unique part of the protection of US patents as property rights that inventors didn't have to manufacture the way they did in England and other countries, that they could license their rights to the people who did have the skills to do those things that facilitated the explosive economic growth through the division of labor and specialization in the industrial revolution and in the 20th century with, you know, the pharmaceutical revolution and the computer revolution. And do you know what this Rambus fiasco is? So Rambus was a, was a company that did something bad that about 25 years ago where it was part of a, there are these organizations called standard development organizations that develop technological standards like, you know, which are universal. Your three prong plug is this technological standard. USB, these are set by private companies. They go by weird acronyms like Etsy and IEEE. I'm a member of these, some of these, I'm a member of ANSI and IEEE. And they, they engage in some, and Rambus engage in some shenanigans where they participated in the development of a standard without telling people they had patents that covered aspects of that standard. And then when the standard was adopted, they then turned around and started suing people for using, you know, for using their patented technology. And, and so, so, of course, standard development organizations are private organizations. And they recognize if we let people do this, that's bad that undermines and prevents standards from being adopted. So they all adopted rules prohibiting it. So they, so as private organizations as part of the agreement that you, you know, when you join a standard development organization, you agree not to engage in what's called patent ambush in that context. But by the way, that was one company in standard development organizations have been around for a hundred years. It was patents covering their technologies and billions of dollars are exchanged through, you know, standard licensing of patents on standards. You know, by the way, the Ericsson Apple case was a case over standards. It was a, it was a, it was a speed over 5G, the use of Apple's, Apple's use of 5G technology that have been developed by Ericsson. By the way, Ericsson is a patent role because they just license. They don't manufacture anything. They used to. They don't anymore. They used to make phones. Yeah. Nokia is a patent role. They just license. They don't make, they don't make phones anymore either. Qualcomm is half a patent role because they license, they created 5G, but they also make chips. Well, they design chips. They don't, they don't actually fabricate chips anymore. Yeah, okay. But they, but well, they, well, they are closely connected with the companies that make them such that their view is making them essentially in the same way that Apple's view is making the iPhone, even though it literally doesn't make the iPhone. Yes. Through, by licensing, because I mean, this is, this is how it works. Yeah. This is why your iPhone, when the box says designing Cupertino, doesn't say manufacturing Cupertino. That's licensed. Yeah. All right, Jennifer. Jennifer says, hello, Adam. Can you comment on the recent story regarding right to repair involving John Deere? Oh, yeah. Well, hi, Jennifer. And yeah, so, so the right to repair movement is this, is, is again, this July patent role, is people who kind of created this, this furor over something that really wasn't a big deal, but they, but because they wanted to attack copyright. And so they're like, all right, we really want to roll back copyrights. You want to eliminate the ability of people to have copyright protections and their software that goes into the computers that are used in tractors and in cars and in your toasters. And so they said, oh, well, now, well, you know, you have all of those, you know, computer software in there that's protected by copyright and other, and other IP protections. Well, that prevents people from repairing their cars and their toasters and whatnot. And they got farmers all riled up about this. You know, so, you know, it was, you know, it was, it was what we call astroturfing in policy debates where organizations go and find people who are sympathetic, like who could be opposed to American farmer, you know, and, and, and they, you know, manufactured this huge attack on IP, and having, and, and you know, it's a huge attack. It's being well funded because it's in 50 states lobbying for state legislation and in the federal government. That doesn't happen unless there's coordination and millions of dollars behind it. And, and so, of course, you know, some states have adopted a few states have adopted right to repair legislation, so to speak, they adopted under their antitrust powers, which automatically tells you like they call unfair competition. So, you know, nobody can compete with Iran book show because nobody can use the words you're on book show. He has my mind and you're a monopolist. You're a monopolist. John Deere is a monopolist because nobody else can make John Deere equipment. So this, so this development is really awesome because it shows you that the market, you know, will evolve and develops and people respond to it. John Deere wants its customers to be happy. John Deere does not want angry farmers who don't want to buy extractors anymore because they'll buy tractors from someone else. And so, and to the extent that John farmers were having legitimate concerns, there's always a small kernel of truth that they're leveraging in these debates. You know, John Deere recognized that. And so they entered into what's legally referred to as a memorandum of understanding with with various associations representing farmers that they that they will be provided the means and be supported in repairing their own tractors. But what's really interesting about this agreement, which makes it even really cool is John Deere also recognized all the political machinations that are going on because they made it as a condition in the in this in this memorandum of understanding that if if the organizations that they made this agreement with start lobbying for more for life to repair legislation, the MOU is canceled. So this agreement, this memorandum of understanding this MOU is remiss is automatically canceled and done with. So so it's really good. And it's a really good development. It shows you that to the extent that there is a kernel of truth that's always leveraged by, you know, by, you know, but how much of it is a kernel of truth? And how much is it black man? Oh, it's like 0.05 percent kernel of truth and 99.95 percent black man. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But so I co-authored a what's called a policy brief, a shorter white paper on state efforts to adopt the right to repair and why actually these conflict with the under federalism with the federal protection of copyright that states aren't allowed to do this even because states were basically effectively trying to take away copyright on rights protected under federal law and they're not allowed to do that. All right. Shai Levy asks, what would be the role of common law in a proper society? IIRC is one, in one interview, ran extroperaneously likened it to implicit philosophy, fine at the start, but necessary to make explicit in statute to become civilized. Yeah. Great question. And I'm going to be talking about the common law as distinguished from civil law systems, which are statutory based systems. And my course, I'll be teaching the UNRAN University on legal systems as an intellectual achievement. So common law, which means. So let me remind everybody that the UNRAN University is a sponsor of this show. Yes. You know, you should all go sign up to take Adam's course. You know, you can be auditors, you don't have to, you don't have to be graded students, you'll learn a ton. You can go to university.inran.org. Yes. And by the way, that was not coordinated at all. Most of the people I interview happen to be teaching courses at the UNRAN University. So I'm really excited to teach this course, because there's no textbook for it too. So, you know, I'm bringing together materials, you know, court opinions and chapters of books and things of this sort. So common law is judgment law for those you don't know. And the reason why it's called common law is because it started in England with the King's courts, which were common to the entire realm, which is how it came to be called common law. So you got a judgment from the King court as opposed to a county court or an ecclesiastical court, a church court, or the, you know, a merchant's court, which were only enforceable between the people who participate in those areas. And, you know, there's a real epistemological virtue to common law systems, which is they're very, they're inductive. So you don't, so this is the problem with statutes in civil law systems is you have legislatures who are studying with, well, this is how we think society should be organized, is top down, theoretical, and, you know, and, and the common law is bottom up. It's, you know, so it starts with, you know, Farmer Joe and Farmer Smith have a conflict over a cow. And so they go to a judge and, you know, hey, Smith took my cow. How do you know that, Joe? Because the cow is now on his land. And the judge decides the case and then writes it down. And then that, and then the next time there's a dispute over a cow, they cite to this earlier decision as a basis to understand how to decide the new case. And you have, through this process, an inductive development of law. And it's, so it's very inductive, it's very reality oriented. And it's very much about the, it's very much consistent with our view of government as being restrained to the protection of rights. So there's a correlation between civil law systems being very statist and, and common law systems being very free and more individualistic because it's, the government is a passive institution. It just sits there and waits for people to come to it with their disputes. And, and so it's not a coincidence that the common law was really a good legal system and developed really well. And it's not a coincidence that the administrative state, the regulatory state, is a civil law type system. It's top down, and it's really, really bad. And the reality is, is that the common law was never a pure just court made system. Every legal system is a mixture of statutes and court decisions. It just, it just the, it just the question is what's the ultimate source of some of the ways in which the law is being developed. And, and the laws being understood as how to be applied to new situations. Because the reason why you're in court is because there's an open question about how the law applies to it. You can't foresee every conceivable situation because new inventions, new ways people are interacting, just human mind is always creating new values. And, and because this is why tons of cases settle because they immediately figure out, oh yeah, the law easily applies to this. So it's only when you actually have a new situation where it's unclear and there's colorable arguments on both sides, that's when you have a court decision. And, and that's what makes, in a common law system, that's, forces the courts to be very inductive. They have to, they're basing it in the facts brought to them by the litigants. And it's, and, and, and there's really strict rules of evidence and rules of procedure, which by the way, Congress doesn't follow. Congress doesn't have to follow rules of evidence. It doesn't have to face its decisions as we know. So what do you think Grand meant when she said, but really to become civilized, you need to have this legislated law. Yeah, you know, this is, it's, I think you can disagree with that. It's okay. Yeah, no, it's not that. I know I can disagree with so yeah, I don't want to imply that I'm struggling with the fact that I might be disagreeing with her because I'm not, because that's not my struggle. My struggle is trying to understand fully where what she was framing it. I think she was making a point of intellectual history that what you have is if, if you have systems that are purely common law, eventually there have to be statutes that do codify and formalize what are, what's the law because you do have rule of law and what we call notice concerns. People have to know what the law expects of them. The objectivity of the law, you know, and making it objective. Yes. And, and so, so for instance, you know, everything used to be common law, including criminal law. And, and in the 19th century, they started to codify criminal law and statutes for precisely these reasons. They said, well, if the coercant coercion of the state is being brought against, to bear against people, they really need to know beforehand what are the terms and conditions of which this is going to happen. And they don't know when it's judge made law as well as well as they would if it's codified. So, but for private law disputes, property, what we call private law in legal theory, which is property contracts, torts, so issues of disputes between private individuals, I think that that really should remain actually a fundamentally a common law type system. All right. So we have a ton of questions. You're going to be here for a while. I hope that's okay. I don't mind. I'm happy to keep going as long as you have energy. I'm not doing any talking. You're the one who needs the energy. The lens says, you have started the tech revolution with IP, with Einstein in a patent office in Bern, I think. Well, he was, but that didn't start the tech revolution. But is this, is a kind of structure we have today with patent courts, with people owning patents, with the lawsuits, with all the conflict that that generates and all the, is that the best we can do? Is that the best system we have? No, but that's not because of the patent system. The patent system is not immune from all of the bad influences of the irrationalism and the collectivism and the statism and, you know, and, you know, and all the other kind of attacks on rights and reason that we have in our society. And so the patent system has been affected by that just as much as we see, you know, contracts being affected by that and corporate law being affected by that. And so it's not the best system we have today. Now, is it, could it be worse? Yes, it could be, it could be a million times worse. And, and there are a lot of people who are working to try to make it worse. So, and we need, so we need to defend patents. You know, in the same way, you know, I ran, you know, I, she recognized you have to defend capitalism wholly, wholeheartedly, you know, and she had that great saying. I forget, I forget, I think it was in the anti industrial revolution where she says, you know, if you see a city smoky, you know, smokestack, thank that for giving you life, right? You know, and she was making a fundamental point about what, you know, what is at stake? And then, and with all of its problems, you know, in litigation and things of this sort, the patent system, you know, is still, you know, at core, you know, a fundamental part of what has made America, you know, a free, flourishing, successful society. And what big changes would you make to the system to make it better? Oh, and so one is go back to our first to invent. So we used to be first to invent from, from the very first patent law statute that was enacted by Congress in 1790, all the way up in 2011. We were, we were unique in the world. In fact, the whole argument about why we need to get rid of this is because the rest of the world doesn't follow this. Well, right, because we viewed patents as property rights as the property right of an inventor who created it. And now we're what we call the first to file system, which makes it more like this is like an economic regulatory entitlement. It's just whoever happens to make it to the patent office first gets the patent, you don't have to be the inventor anymore. And, and also getting rid of this horrendous institution created in the same law in 2011. It's an administrative tribunal that was created at the patent office whose sole purpose is to cancel and eliminate patents. And it's an administrative tribunal goes by the acronym PTAB stands for patent trial and appeal board. And it's exactly what you would expect of any other regulatory agency. They don't follow due process, they, they stack panels to reach preordained results. They have canceled tens of thousands of patent claims. You know, people get 50, 60 petitions filed against the exact same patent. And it's the valuable patents that are being attacked for this very reason, because they're valuable patents. And this is massively undermined this the kind of the reliability of patents as property rights, their stability, the certainty that they provide for investors, for innovators and, and for business persons. Okay, Michael asked, what would the self defense laws look like in a free society? It seems as of now only Texas has decent self defense laws by lying the use of deadly force and defensive property as well as person. You know, so I don't know Texas is a law and I'm not an expert in self defense law in terms of, you know, what are the specific laws and things of that sort. But I do, but I do know a bit. And I've thought about these issues, especially when I was specifically studying legal philosophy. So you do delegate your right of self defense to the government when you enter into government. And that's really important and significant. Now you're not giving up your rights. And so this was, this was, you know, John Locke's innovation over the people who came before and we really thought like when you created government, you really did give up all your rights to the government. He said, no, no, you're delegating it to protect as your agent. But that does mean that the government has legitimate monopoly on the use of force in the defense of rights in society. Now you do have the right to own a gun. It's why it's in the Second Amendment. You do have the right to defend yourselves. But that but the presumption is that it's the government that actually gets to exercise coercion. So you can and I do believe in every in every state. I could be mistaken about this. If you are under a threat to your life, you have a right to use deadly force to defend yourself. And by the way, anyone who breaks into your home, automatically that's understood as diff automatically a threat to your life. If they're willing to break into your home at, you know, at 1am, they're willing to do more worse things. And and so these are the as what Locke referred to as the dangerous and noxious creatures who have quit the law of reasons and need to be removed from society. And so now, but if you know anything about these retreat duties where you're supposed to retreat from deadly conflict, yeah, that that I'm more, I mean, because how you define that and things of that sort. Now, but what I think should happen though is when you use when you use force to defend yourself in your home and things of that sort, right? Well, the presumption should be you used for so the police have to investigate that. You know, in and they have to make sure that this was actually properly objectively a use of self defense. You know, you shouldn't just get off like, Oh, yeah, I was defending myself. So that that's all I need to say. And so I do think that there's an obligation of the state to investigate claims of self defense, because it's very serious. And because vigilantism is not allowed and properly so, you are not allowed to take the law into your own hands. But, you know, with the boundary line between defending yourself and being a vigilante can, you know, it's not a clear bright line at times. And that's why you need investigations by the police to ensure and by just returning to ensure that it's properly self defense. Yeah, absolutely. All right, Justin says, Can you explain what the principle is that makes a product design element patentable? Yes. It's the so what Justin is referring to let me back up is there's actually two, there's actually three patent systems we have in the United States. The one that everyone thinks of is the patent system patents for inventions, what Thomas Edison got. And we we actually call those utility patents. We also have a design patent system and a plant patent system. So, because plants present kind of interesting unique issues that are distinct from because they're living organisms and they self replicate from machines, which don't. But you also have this design patent system, which was created in the 1830s. We can get patents on designs and literally designs like, you know, like the design of a tapestry or the design of things of this sort. But they have their own rules because designs are different from inventions too, but they follow the same general requirements that has to be new. So, you have to have created it. So, if someone had created it before you, and it's not then when then we're not certain that you didn't copy it. And it's just not the byproduct of your your own actual rational mind and creative labor. It has to be, you have to, what we call disclosure, you have to describe it fully in your patent application and eventually in the issue patent, such that people can look at it and understand it and know how to replicate it once you go off protection. It has to be useful. So, it has to be useful and well, has to be a value. That's the patent system recognition that these are values we're protecting. And it has to be non obvious. And this is a really, that's a really hyper technical issue in patent law. I'm not going to get into it too much just that, you know, meaning that it can be something can be new and useful, but it just such an obvious logical next step that it's not something that you really want to grant a patent for. So, the classic example I use when I teach patent law is someone invents the bicycle and then which is a patentable invention and was patented. And then someone invents a tricycle. Like, well, it's kind of obvious putting three wheels after someone had two wheels out, you know, there's not really an invention going on an active invention going on there. So, those are the same requirements in design law as but they're framed around the specific nature of designs as distinguished from inventing a machine or a new process or coming up with a new plant hybrid. And the idea here is there is real economic value to design and it is a product of an individual human mind. Yes, designs are have to be in their values are created by humans. You don't go out in the world and find designs. And in fact, a lot of the patents that Apple sued Samsung on, they sued them on both utility patents and design patents. And in fact, the trial ultimately ended up being about the design patents. And a lot of people are like, oh, like the slide to unlock. Oh, like that's so obvious. Well, you know, there's a saying in we have a saying in patent law, every invention after it's been created is obvious. Because once the person has solved a problem, if it's a good solution and it really solves their problem, then it's hard to like, of course, it's hard to get out of that context anymore and of recognizing, yes, that had to be the solution. And so we've lost the context of what it was like, you know, before slide to unlock where you had to have a phone that, you know, you come up with a phone with a screen that people have been trying to come up with that you could easily turn on. But without, you know, what we proverbially refer to as the but call and without needing a mechanical button every single time. So do you sue Apple sued Microsoft in the for windows, right, for the for the same kind of thing, right, for the object like the trash can. Yeah, they say yes. The user interface, which is also designed. Yeah, yeah, and they and they settled. Because Bill Gates said, well, all of your patents, you know, you got a lot of that from Xerox, because actually Xerox was the one who invented a lot of what we now take for granted as our as our modern computer personal computers, the trash can icons, the calling the desktop, the mouse, everything. I was actually invented at Xerox Park and in the Bay Area in the 1970s. Oh, by the way, but by the way, it's a there's a myth that Steve Jobs stole it from Xerox. He didn't. He got a license from Xerox. Xerox licensed it to him because they couldn't figure out how to make the personal computer inexpensive. Their personal computer cost $30,000 in 1972. And so they were like, there's no way he's going to figure out how to solve this problem with making personal computers cheap. So we're happy to license to him because nothing. Yeah, we'll just make some money off a few, a few that he'll sell. Dean asks, hey, Ron, can you talk about art and property rights or music and property rights? Did I man have a point of view in the subject? Also, my friend, Gina, really likes your show and she says hi. Hey, Gina. So arts, art property rights, music property rights, obviously this was a big deal with was a Napster. We were still alive. Most of most of my listeners would, but we remember those days, right? Yes. Yeah. And there were big arguments at the time. I remember everybody was downloading music, right? Everybody was stealing music and it was like, not me. Me neither. And it was very, not to be one of those who were using Napster. I was at Silicon Valley and it was like everybody. I know. I was like, this is, this is, you can't be on the highway. And, and, and, yeah. So, well, I ran did have a view on this. I mean, she recognizes copyright as being a valid property right and her essay patents and copyrights. In fact, she speaks more to copyright than she does to patents in that essay, which really is, is, is another indication of just how objective she was because she, she herself was a creator of copyrighted works. So she understood copyright law. She recognized, I don't know as much about science and technology and patent law. So she kind of left that to, you know, more general statements about what they do, what it does. So copyright should protect creative works like songs, movies, artwork, you know, and there's, you know, requirements for it has to be creative and has to be something you created and things of that sort and written down in some type of tangible form. But the digital form is a, is a tangible type form. And it really shows you the influence of kind of the whole perspective of, oh, but, you know, if property is about conflict resolution, where's the conflict? If I'm copying a song, you can still listen to your song and I can listen to the song too. And there's no conflict there. You know, so where's the conflict in this? And it really shows you how that whole framework just completely perverts your understanding and basis of that these are property rights and the presumption should be that they should be protected to the creators, you know, within the scope of what they've actually created and within the scope of their legitimate property rights, because there are limits to them as well and their legitimate limits. And I actually have a talk on that from an old conference on, on, on why there are time limits on patents and copyrights as well. Okay, the lightning Goza. No idea who that is. Hi, lightning. With Google versus Oracle in mind, is it moral to buy or use an infringing Android device or perhaps further any Google product? How do you judge mixed companies and whether or not to interact with them? Yeah. Oh, by the way, I think that person's, that's a ghostbuster reference. Goza had the lightning that came out of her fingertips. I'm more of a geek. I can tell by the, by the characters in the background. There's a Spider-Man in my Spider-Man. And there's a Star Wars drawing behind my head. It's other Star Wars things. So, so great question, right? In this and by that, that question, we start, we used to debate and discuss these issues even before the internet and before Android and things of this sort, you know, because companies are mixed, people are mixed. And how do you, I mean, and so what are the principles for how you interact with those types of people? By the way, I have an Android phone. I've always had Android. And I love my Android phone. I think it's so superior to an Apple. And, but I joke sometimes when I give talks, I'm like, and I here's my, here I am with my infringing smartphone product. But it is, you know, it is a, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a good question, you know, you know, where do you draw the line, you know, between, you know, in deciding how to interact with people? Because your job is not to be, you know, you know, I forget who, was it, was it diabetes with the, with the lantern and the search of the one just man and ancient Greece. Your job is not to like the assessing every aspect of character of every person you interact with and whether, and same with every company as well as legal persons. You know, your job is to define the context of your interaction with them. And to, you know, and as long as, you know, in within that context, is that an appropriate context. Now there are some companies and organizations and people that are so bad, right, that you that there isn't any legitimate context, but that's like, we're talking, those people are like, that's like the Communist Party or, or, you know, or, you know, or, you know, AOC or something like that. This is, you know, you know, Samsung, you know, infringed the, you know, Apple's patents and guess what, they were found liable for it and they paid for it. They had, you know, I think at the end of the day, it was about a $350 million judgment that they paid to Apple for that, for that infringement. And they went on. By the way, you know, it's really interesting to know that while Apple and Samsung were in a lawsuit with each other, Samsung was providing chips to Apple because Samsung is this massive conglomerate. They built, they built ship engines and airplane parts and all sorts of stuff. So like, so while in the time that they're suing each other, Samsung is an Apple supply chain. And they're competing with one another. I always told people capitalism is about cooperation much more than it is about competition. Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, so while you should pay attention to these things and, you know, and, you know, and I think it's perfectly fine for someone to say, I care about this issue so much. I'm, I choose not to do that. I think that's perfectly fine. But, you know, but, you know, if, but it's, you have to also recognize it's perfectly fine too for, I think in this context for other people to say they're a company, a legitimate company, they got in a dispute, it got resolved, they paid for it, and they've continued to move on and innovate. And the Galaxy phone is actually a great innovation. In fact, to be frank, I think this is Google versus Oracle, right? So that was a case where, yeah, Google steal a bunch of code from Oracle. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I'm sorry, I've forgotten that it was a question about, because he asked about Android and I got, yeah, thank you for that. Yeah. No, I was, I was, yeah, I was, I was involved in, I filed an amicus brief in that case and followed it very closely. It was, and the Supreme Court decision was awful. It just horrible decision. They said, you can't have copyright protection and computer programs called API's, which are the, which are the programs that make the entire internet function. Those are the computer programs underneath the hood, so to speak, that allow you, you know, your email client to communicate with your computer that allows it to communicate with the internet server, that allows it to communicate with another computer, where this is code. And this was a case where, yeah, Google created the Android and wanted Android to become a quickly valuable product. And, and Oracle actually, it was some microsystems at the time. It got bought by Oracle. Some microsystems had developed Java and Java, which became the dominant API program that was driving the internet, Java made the internet. And, and so they realized we need Java, if our our new Android smartphone is going to be out of the gate successful. And at that time send microsystems had four licensing programs, four different licensing, one of them was, was a free one, was an open source free one. But the requirement was you couldn't make any, you couldn't make changes to it. You, and they're like, no, we want to make changes to it because, because Google wanted to take the program and they wanted it for free, but they wanted to make it proprietary too. So, so Android is open source, but it's open source within a proprietary model of the Android system. And so, and, and there's all these internal emails that came out through discovery, where they literally were saying, yeah, you know, our, we can't make a good API, we need Java and another license program's work, so we're just going to take it. And this was undisputed. They stole 13,000 lines of code from Sun Microsystem in the Java APIs and just put it on Android. And, and eventually Oracle buys Sun Microsystems and Oracle sues for, for a whole slew of things and infringement copyright management eventually just becomes an issue about copyright and the code because it was undisputed that this was copyrighted. They took it without authorization. It was a copyright violation, but Google came up with this, oh, it's fair use because it serves a functional purpose, you know, and, you know, everyone needs it. It's essential to running devices. So you can't have a monopoly through copyright on things. And, and they were able to convince the Supreme Court without argument. Now, I, it was awful. And, and by the way, I, I have lots of criticisms of Google as a company. You know, they've been a source of the destruction of a lot of our patent system in the past 15 years. It's well documented. And, but, you know, but like I said, I use Android, you know, because they, you know, it's, I haven't decided that it's an immoral company to the point that I'm not going to use it. But, but, you know, so many companies, all companies that, you know, you mentioned Sun Microsystems, Sun Microsystems, whenever they mentioned, it reminds me of they're the ones who sick the antitrust lawyers on Microsoft in the, in the 1990s. And Sam McNeely, by the way, at the time was, was on the board of the Cato Institute. So here's a libertarian CEO of a company using antitrust to go after competitor. You know, how do you, it never ends. If you can find a pure company out there, and you can't sacrifice your life in the name of, in the name of, of seeking that purity. Right. I mean, especially in today's world, I mean, right, exactly. In today's world where there's so many bad ideas, you're not going to find that good, pure company any more than you're not going to find a lot of good, pure people either. I mean, are you going to, are you going to find, you know, how do you know your grocer that you purchased your, you know, your fruit loops from last week is a good person that they're not lying to their spouse and having, you know, elicit affairs with it, you know, without, you know, knowing and are stealing money or something. It just, it's not your job to be, to investigate those things on the basis of principle. Principles are, for you to be a happy person, to give you a tool set to be a happy person to live a flourishing life. And that helps you understand like, well, if there are bad people, the reason why I don't want to interact with them is because they will make my life bad. And so, and so, you know, you can personally decide as a personal matter, you don't want to interact with Google, but I don't think it's a moral matter, at least at this point yet. It might be. And there are some companies that get really bad. But then, but that's, but those are, those are standout cases. All right. Mellon asks, whatever is of the law are you optimistic about? Oh, these are great questions. You have a great, you have a great audience. I love you. Yeah, great questions. And they put money behind the question. They put their money where their mouth is, it's great. So where, what areas of law am I optimistic about? Yeah, that's, that's a, that's a great question. Because it's, you know, because the problem is that what you had is what is, we started with good law, really good law in this country. And then it's been all bad. It's this being attacked, it's being destroyed and degraded through, you know, the philosophical, bad philosophical premises that are being deployed then through politics, statism, collectivism, irrationalism, you know, the religion. And, and that gets in that seeps into even the good areas of law. So like, for instance, you know, I, I used to, you know, patent law has been affected by this, the class that I teach now in patent law is completely different than the class that I started teaching 20 years ago. And, and it's not as fun for me to teach it because it's not as good. It's been degraded. I don't enjoy teaching it as much as I used to. So what areas of law am I most optimistic about? Well, you know, there's the, the core kind of private law areas, you know, are still kind of the, our, our bulwark, you know, they are what keep our society going. You know, a lot of people, when they think about why we have government, they think, oh, we need government to stop those dangerous and anxious creatures are referred to criminals. And that that's an important part of government in society, because you can't have society, civil society, if you have criminals running around rampant. But the government serves a much more fundamental role than that. It effectuates and makes possible good people to live their lives by providing a framework through legal institutions and legal doctrines like contracts, torts and, and property to, for good people who end up, end up in disputes with each other to have those disputes resolved and resolved without having to resort to force resort to self-defense. And, and the, you know, because it's been common law, it's been kind of a bulwark. It's what's been continuing to drive our society. It's been kind of the basis by which people have been able to continue to do what they've been able to, all the good people have been able to do what they've been able to continue to do. So I'm optimistic that that will hopefully still kind of stay the way it is, but it is being degraded nonetheless. So Lightning Goza says his name is not a Ghostbuster reference. Oh, that makes me sad. I don't know what it is, but if you're left to enlighten us, Lightning. Yes. All right. What's Adam's opinion? This is Richard. What's Adam's opinion on net neutrality? For example, should AT&T be able to lower priority content coming from Comcast properties like NBC Universal? Okay. So let me, let me ask that question in a more fundamental sense. Can a property owner fundamentally make a decision as to who can use its property and under what terms? Whether you're, who can come into your home or if you're a hotel operator, do you get to decide who gets to rent hotel rooms from you? Or if you're, or if you're a plane operator, you get to kick people off your plane who are causing problems and things of this sort. So AT&T, which spends billions of dollars to create the foundational infrastructure of the internet, they put in, you know, they put in the backbone of the internet and the primary servers that carries the traffic and everything. Can they then decide how that is used? I think in principle, you have to understand the answer has to be yes. You know, it's no different than any other property owner, whether they're a railroad or an airline or a factory owner or a homeowner. And so I think that that's what, that's the starting point that you start with. So you don't start with, oh, but net neutrality, because net neutrality was coined by leftist law professor Tim Wu at Columbia, who by the way, just is now who's been working in the Biden administration and has been an architect for a lot of antitrust attacks. He's the person that's been behind a lot of the antitrust attacks on big tech and on the patent system. And who said to me, actually literally said to me 15 years ago when I gave a workshop talk at Columbia and we were at dinner and I was having dinner, he was sitting next to me. And I forget specifically what we were talking about, but he became very agitated and he said, I just don't understand why people are opposed to price controls. And he turned to me and he said, Adam, are you opposed to price controls? And I said, yes. Yeah, absolutely. He was, he was soaked taken back by that, the cognitive dissonance. And so then he said, well, on theoretical or practical grounds. And I said, both. And he couldn't, he couldn't, he just, he was so flummoxed by that. It was just, it was such a funny exchange. So what do you make of the argument about common carriers, right? So it is true that they're not ATT. I don't know who do I use. Yeah, use AT&T. That ATT cannot discriminate on who uses its network. Is that obviously that can be legit. But that's the law. So, yeah, so that's a bad law. And it's a bad law, you know, that it actually has roots in the common law because the common law wasn't perfect, just like the founders weren't perfect, because they didn't have a full consistent rational theory of rights. So they didn't fully understand these issues. And it was actually a derivative byproduct actually of, of common carrier doctrine, this idea that if you serve the public in some way, you run a road, you run a railroad, you run, you're right, quote, common carrier, and therefore you're going to have duties imposed upon you in terms of prices and who you can serve and things of this sort or who you can discriminate against, generally not racial, just anything. And it actually derives from the crown. So it shows you how like, you know, this is this, in England, 300 years ago, if you wanted to set up a market or get a hotel or create a, or an inn, as they were called, or set up a road, you had to get permission from the crown. You had to get a grant from the crown. And when the crown gave you the grant, the crown as the king imposed all these duties on you and said, well, I'm giving you something. So you're, you take the king's, the king, you know, get the benefit of the king, you get, you get the obligations to the king. And this got transferred into just through legal process, through legal argumentation into just the common law and through, and, and got applied to all the corporations and new companies that were being developed in the 19th century. It's a bad concept. It shouldn't exist. There's, you know, if, if you're, if you create a company that sells a product, you know, that doesn't create any special duties on you any more than an individual who says to friends and other associates, you can come onto my property. Now, when you say that, you might create specific obligations given the nature of your interactions with those people. And there's really good doctrines in tort law and contracts about these matters. In fact, some of the problems that were identified, some of these so-called problems that were identified by the advocates for net neutrality, which was to impose very severe heavy handed regulatory common carrier obligations on internet service providers and the people who, you know, manage traffic on the internet. You know, a lot of those were just straightforward violations of contracts and, and, and other, and, and other kind of straightforward kind of just, you know, rights violations that could have been adjudicated and addressed through those, through those mechanisms. In fact, that's one of the problems in the law when you create bad law, you know, it drives out good law because people stop thinking about the ways in which good law can address these issues. And so it's the legal equivalent of an economics of bad money drives out good money, you know, bad laws eventually crowd out and drive out good laws. Yeah. And the common carrier stuff is big now with the internet and Twitter and all that. Yeah. And, and it's the conservatives now, you know, as, you know, it's always conservatives who end up being, you know, the, the, you know, the people who end up abandoning these principles or going more to their more fundamental principles. And, and, you know, in doing this, because they're so upset about, you know, the sun, the sun, the censorship, so called censorship, which is also not a term that should be applied to Twitter and your private companies. But that, you know, that they are then saying, well, you know, we, and we, we need to find a way to address it. Well, there's antitrust and there's common carrier duties and stuff. And, and so they're just, you know, it's, you would, you would think at a superficial level, they're willing to sell their soul just because to stick it to these companies that they feel that they've been harmed by, but actually it's more, it's more fundamental. They're going to actually, what are the foundations of their soul? Absolutely. All right. Michael asks thoughts on mens re. Men's rare. Men's rare. It doesn't seem just that if someone doesn't know they're committing a crime, that they still get punished because of their intent. Why are squatters rights not criminal matter, not a criminal matter? All right. There's a couple of different questions in there. So I'm going to do some time. Yeah. So, okay. All right. So let me, let me back up and be so for those of you know, men's rare is the requirement in criminal law, you have criminal intent. So it's not, so, so, you know, and these are Latin terms. So, so to be guilty of a crime, you have to actually have men's rare, you have to have criminal intent, and you have to have actus reas. You have to have acted on that intent and committed the crime. So, so there's no such thing as an accidental crime. So if you don't have intent, but you commit the action, you're not going to, it's not a criminal act. If you have the intent, but don't commit the action, it's not, it's not, it's not a criminal act. Now, you know, but like attempted murder, still a little valid crime, because in those instances, it's just an accident. Sometimes you didn't commit the crime, right? You know, you committed, you took, you shot the gun, you just missed. Taking actual action. Yeah. You did take action on the basis of a criminal intent, and that's what we're punishing you for, right? So, and by the way, this shows, this is, this is, this was developed at common law, shows you the objectivity of the law, right? It's not just about action because people can take actions that are not intentional or accidental. I can trip and bump and bump into you. And you could be injured by that. And, and I've injured you. So I've committed criminal battery. And you should, so, you know, I should be thrown in jail. It was an accident. Now, now you might be able to assume me in torts if you can show that I was not being reasonable. And that's why I tripped. But, but it's not a criminal matter. And this is a really, so it's the objectivity of the law. It's also a really important limitation on the use of state coercion, because it really limits what the government can classify as a crime. This has all been thrown out, by the way, in the modern era with the Ministry of State. Now, any, you know, anything's criminal, unfortunately. And so mens re is actually a legitimate concept, and it's a good concept. Now, is the squatters rate? Yeah, no, no, there's, there's, so to address the squatters rights issue, I'm going to step back again. So I mentioned earlier private law. So there's, I didn't mention the other kind, there's two foundational kind of divisional concepts that we have in, in legal theory or jurisprudence public law and private law. Private law is the law that governs interactions between private individuals. So that's torts contracts and property. And then there's public law, public law is the law that governs the state in the state's use of coercion against individuals. So public law is constitutional law, because that's fun, that's about limiting the state, and it's criminal law is primarily, and then administrative law is a type of public law because it is the state after. But, but so now those, they can overlap, right? So you can have matters that you can have private issue, private rights of action about your private complaints about. So a squatter is guilty of a private cause of action for trespass, I can sue them in court for trespassing on my property rights and get damages and an injunction to kick them off. They're also committed a crime. Trespass is not just a private cause of action in property law and torts, it's also a crime as it should be. And, and so if a person cross, you know, she can show men's right, they intentionally did it, they deliberately did it, and it cross, it was more severe than just a mere trespass, you can also have it prosecuted as a crime. And, and that, and so you have this overlap and you've, you've, you've, we've seen this before, probably the most prominent example was OJ Simpson, where he got, he got off on, on, on, you know, because his lawyers were able to razzle dazzle and confuse the jury so that they didn't realize that you had a guy committed first degree murder and multiple murders. And, and he got off on the crime. And because of, and because of double jeopardy, he can't be prosecuted, you can't be prosecuted twice for a crime, a very important, another very important limitation on state power. But then he was sued for wrongful death, which is a private tort. And they, and that's why they got millions and millions of dollars in judgment against him. And also because the standards are proof are a lot lower because you're not talking about the government coercion in that context, you're talking about payment of damages. So can, can the police just kick a squatter out of private property or does this have to go through a court and a whole process? The police, if it's, if it, if it, if there is a squatter, and they're being deliberate, and it's, and it's clear that they're squatting on someone's property rights, the police can forcibly remove them from the property. Yes. If they refuse to leave. If they're, but, but it has to be clear, it's a squatter, right? You know, so if the person that they're saying, well, I have a right to you here, and here's this lease, right? You know, that I signed and it, you know, please start lawyers and they're not, their job isn't to resolve those types of disputes. So if there's some lack of clarity as to what the nature of the dispute is, they, they may not take action. And there seems to be some states in which squatters have more rights or more allowed more leeway than other states. Yes. It's a good bit of people in California, the easier in Texas. Well, and, you know, and we should be thankful we don't live in England. England, they have absolute squatters rights. So there are stories of people who go on vacation and they come home and there's someone in their home and they can't get them kicked out. Really? Yeah, because the rule is as long as the person is in the home, they have a right to be there. And, and so, and so the, that's the rule in England. And so of course, if the person leaves, if they leave, then the real, then the person who actually has title legal right to the property can then close the door and lock it and keep them out. But so that some people like arrange for their friends to bring them food and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah. So, so there are these issues. And then there's, but there's also a really cool doctrine that I teach as I do the first year property course, which I love teaching and every year just taught it last semester. There's a really cool doctrine that had developed a common law called adverse possession, which is a really fantastic doctrine, which basically says, look, if you're an absentee landowner, you know, who is just has this piece of paper that says I have legal title, but you're not doing anything with your property for a significant number of years. Usually it's about 20, it's about 20 years, sometimes 30 or 40. And there's someone else who comes on the property and for 20 or 30 years is living openly on the property, like they build a house, they cut down trees, they, right. So all the property owner had to do once in 20 or 30 years is come out, look at the property, see the person and say, Hey, you're on my land, you're trespassing, get off. That's all they have to do to stop it. But if you don't do it, then, then if when they eventually come around, they'll say, you've lost, you've lost your right. This person has been doing everything with the land that is fundamental to what we mean when we want to protect property. They've been engaging in value creating productive activities with material, valueless materials in the world. And you've been sitting back for several decades with a piece of paper that says legal, legal, legal title. And that's not what makes property property is a great example of the common law is not a legal positivist regime. It always is focused on the underlying reasons for why we have property contracts and why we protect people's bodily integrity through torts. Yeah. Yes, I liked that too. I talked about it on the show a while ago. Some people couldn't believe that you could actually lose your property by not doing anything with the property. But, but yeah, I think that's completely objective. Like Caleb says, and I'm not sure exactly what they, oh, another question by Caleb, but we have two questions by Caleb. All right. Caleb says, from what I hear, to get work as a screenwriter, you have to be in the screenwriter guild, but the guild will own anything you write and almost always studios will just fire you and hand your IP to other writers. Is that true? I don't know. I don't know the structure of the guild system for screenwriters. I'm sorry. There is pretty nasty is from what I can tell. Yes. You got to be suspicious of guilds in the 21st century and any organization that calls itself a guild. There's a reason there's a phrase guild socialism. And there's a reason. And so yeah, so you automatically suspicious of anything that calls itself a guild. But, because guilds are protection, we're created to be protectionist. In fact, if I can take a moment to just say something here, this is another important and significant aspect by intellectual property, which shows you again, like the libertarians were in the world of theory and aren't actually looking at the history and how it developed and what it functioned as intellectual property served a key function historically for getting rid of the guild system because the guild system arose in the middle ages and continued to the Renaissance because that was the only way at the time since they didn't have intellectual property laws yet that you could protect valuable tradecraft and knowledge and inventions was by basically creating these little protectionist regimes where if you take your knowledge and give it to someone else, by the way, we'll kill you. And by the way, the rate of innovation from like 500 AD to 1600 AD is flat. It's almost no, the real hockey, the hockey graph is the innovation graph, right, the 19th century. And by the way, what was it, what drove that was because intellectual property because patents finally said you disclose your invention. In fact, that's the key part of patents, they're published. In fact, they're published the moment they issue. So they're public. So other people can read them and invent upon them because they serve as your title documents, your title record for your property, right? And that's the basis for you to get the license with people because you can go and say, here's my patent. You can see it for yourself. It's at the patent office. So they say you can publish your knowledge, your information, and we will still protect it as a property, right? And that was really, that was the key legal innovation that made people realize we don't need guilds. And this is a well-accepted historian's economist tell this story all the time. And once you started having patents published as legal title deeds, so they were protected as property rights, people then licensed with them, transacted with them in the marketplace, people built upon them, right? So this is the, usually the people say, oh, well, see, it's totally locked up for 20 years, the term of the patent. And then it falls into the public domain. No, it's published. And so people then build upon it and improve upon it and then license with the original patent owner. And this is what is a property rights system. This is what drives economic growth and economic activity and creates a flourishing society. Sorry. The boss asks, no, this is great. I assume you've got another hour or so because we've got time. Yeah. Can I ask, wrote a policy review on PA oil and gas zoning laws in college in retrospect, I'm not sure subsurface mineral rights should be granted to surface landholders in the first place. Any thoughts? I don't think they are. Are they? They are. Yes, they are. I had a, I did a show with Harry Benzwanger on HPL or HPTV on this because this issue kind of came up in his email list of stuff, too. So there's a rule at common law. It wasn't a legal rule. It was rhetoric, but it was called a legal rule and that's caused confusion. It's a Latin phrase and it goes by the first two Latin words, ad colon, means the column. But the Latin phrase is, you own, he owns the land, owes everything from the heights of the heavens to the depths of the earth. So it means there's a column from the, you know, that goes through the land. So you get all the air rights and you get all the land rights. Now, the reason why it was rhetoric 500 years ago is people weren't building skyscrapers. And 500 years ago, people weren't, you know, you know, drilling, you're digging mines two miles underneath, weren't fracking to 500 years ago. Plane airplanes above your property. Yeah. So it was a way that they were, so the function of the ad column or common law was to really just emphasize very strongly what it meant that you had what was called at that time also dominion in a property right that you had full control over this area. You could decide what you wanted to do with it as long as you weren't violating other people's rights. Well, when you started to get into the 19th century in the 20th century, where people are starting to build skyscrapers and stuff like that, people said, well, common law, they had column rule. And they, and they said, yes, we adopt the ad column rule. And so then people would start it. So when airplanes came into existence, people sued airplanes, you're violating your trespass because you're 30,000 feet and you're, you're, you're violating my property rights for the ad column rule. And, and, and the courts rightly said, no, you're not doing anything at 30,000 feet. The courts rightly took the perspective again that property is a value, a value that you are mean, something you're acting to gain and or keep in or developing. And so they said, that's not, that's not a valid claim. But with respect to middle rights under the ground, they've, they've retained the principle that none of you get the middle rights going all the way down. And so this has then led to all sorts of problems and, and, and issues in, especially caused by fracking because it goes so deep. And you have so many conflicting claims because the earth is not flat. It's, it's a globe. And so you've got all these columns intersecting as you go straight down into the globe. And you get all these interest. And so then they've created all these regulatory regimes to try to, you know, navigate these processes and stuff. And it's a mess. Yeah. Okay. So, let's see. All right. Justin asks, can the novel combining into a new product class of two existing technologies owned by a single company be protected in favor of an external innovator? I don't fully understand the question. So it says, for example, NDA. You know, yeah, I don't, I don't understand either bit. So, yeah, if you have, if you have one company create an invention, as long as it's new and novel and not obvious, and they created it before the other company does under the old rule first to invent whoever invented it first is the person who gets the patent. Under the new rule, it's whoever gets whoever files first at the patent office. So I don't fully understand the scope of the question. Maybe Justin can clarify, but let's move on in the meantime. All right. Let's try to get short answers because it is getting late. So let's start with Apollo property rights in space. Who owns planets and asteroids, mining for minerals? Anyone who gets there first and sets up their mining operation, it's called the discovery rule and property law. Unfortunately, you don't have that in space because they signed in 1966, they, the UN created a treaty called the space treaty, it's called that, which prohibits property rights in space. What a great way to, you know, to totally, you know, just to disincentivize anyone's desire to go into space and to develop it. Is Alon Musk aware of this? I mean, I think he's hoping that that that yeah, well, I would, or he's hoping that he's going to be so successful that they'll, they'll, they'll, they'll junk the treaty. He'll show that he will show that this is not viable. Okay. Landon asked my tech company claims developers product shouldn't research third party IP for identification of acquireable features on our own. Is this reasonable? It might be. It's hard to tell without knowing the exact product and things of that sort. But what they're concerned about is someone then saying, Hey, you, you've incorporated in your product something that I already own, copyright or patent or treaty. And, and therefore you need, I'm going to sue you for infringing my rights for trespassing on my rights by taking my property without my authorization. I mean, that's the concern that they have for doing that. And that could be a legitimate concern. That's why a lot of companies suggest that some companies prohibit it just because they also want to, they also have a policy view that, Oh, the IP system is broken. You can never know what truly is a patent and invention, even for patents at issue, no one can read them. And so they, so they direct their, they tell their employees not to read patents for exactly that reason. Yeah. So just to let you guys know, you know, this show is in striking distance of Nikos, right? So about $100 would make, would make Adam take the lead of on the super chat interview. So let's make it happen. We're close guys. We're close. Con law. All right. Michael asks, do courts today typically uphold and respect patents or do they see them as guidelines that can be ignored? Has it been getting better or worse over the last 30 years? So the, the problem is no, it's been getting worse. But that's because courts are applying the law, the law as created by Congress and their statutes because the patent law is ultimately a fundamentally a statutory system because it's set in the Constitution and Congress enacts the patent act. And then the Supreme Court, which then interprets the patent act and the Supreme Court has been issuing really bad decisions and panel law in the past 20 years. In fact, the Supreme Court is deciding patent cases at a rate that we haven't seen for about 100 years. I mean, I think they've decided like 48 cases in the past like 10, 15 years. I mean, it's a really high number. And they've almost all been bad. And of course, then the lower courts have to apply those bad decisions because that's their, that's their job. And so, and this is something that I've been playing a significant role in in terms of the policy debates in Washington DC. I've testified before Congress on this. And, you know, and a lot of us have, you know, are working to try to fix this by convincing Congress to pass new laws that will reverse these bad decisions by the Supreme Court or reverse the laws, prior laws that Congress enacted and restrain the regulatory agencies like the antitrust officials from continuing to engage in their shenanigans as well. Oops, what did I do there? Okay, do Europeans have, also from Michael, do Europeans have an even lesser acknowledgement of intellectual property than American law does? Is that why so few innovations come out of Europe these days? So historically, yes. You know, and, and, you know, the United States was unique in its patent system. We were the first country that protected patents as property rights. We took that principle seriously. So you could license it. It was a very expansive principle. Anything you invent, other countries were much more restrictive about this, view them as regulatory entitlements, you know, imposed what's called compulsory licensing that govern the state could just basically take the invention and order and give it to other people and things of this sort. We didn't do those things because we said these are property rights just like a property right in the home or a factory. And this is why we became a technological and economic leader in part, you know, along with all in our rule of law and other institutions. And, and, you know, it's why we led the world and started in the industrial revolution and in the biotech revolution. It's why to this day, two thirds of all new drugs are invented in the United States. And that's because we led the world in protecting drugs as innovations that deserve to be protected in the 20th century. The pharmaceutical revolution occurred in the United States because of that. So historically, we were better than Europe. Right now, though, we have so weakened our patent system that there are some respects in which Europe has actually a better patent system than we have right now. You can get patents on innovations in Europe that you can't get in the United States anymore. On cutting edge drug treatments and cancer treatments on new technologies that the patent office in the United States just rejects given these bad decisions by the US Supreme Court. I've written on this and many others and I've testified on this and there, and there's there's a significant effort to try to fix this, but it's it's it's been difficult. Different Michael, since firearms are property and in a free society, the government has no right to violate property rights. Wouldn't anti gun laws be abolished in a free society? And he says I'm not including nuclear weapons. I'm not sure why on those private property. Yeah, he's in a tank of private property service to air missile. So this is an example that it's a great question. And I don't mean to do a little by saying this is an example of a bit of rationalism and thinking about kind of property. I have a property right there for I can do anything I want with it or I have a right to my life and I can do anything I want with it. I illustrate this sometimes to my students by saying, you can't say I have a property right in my gun and in my bullets. And so I'm just exercising my property rights by pulling the trigger and transferring my property to another person by putting the bullet in their body. I don't want to have an hood before that's good. And if you think, and by the way, I'm not making that up. You hear, if you've got hundreds of thousands of courts hearing decisions over centuries, you get all crazy arguments, right? Because that violates the conceptual hierarchy of that it's rights to life, liberty and property, right? Property follows from the rights of life and liberty. You can't have a right therefore that denies or contradicts a more fundamental right when you're right to life. And so it is possible that there would be so first of all, you certainly can't have got tanks and surface during missiles and nuclear bombs. But why not if it's property? Those are weapons of mass destruction. Those are weapons for countries to fight against other countries. So by me having them, it constitutes a threat to my neighbors. And you can't on your property create a threat to your neighbors. Yes, it's an objective threat, right? Because how does your neighbor not know you're not going to set off the nuke? I mean, they can't and that's an objective threat. Now, and also, you should have some restrictions on guys. People who have been adjudged mentally ill should not be able to buy guns. People who've been criminals and criminal records, I think it's legitimate to restrict their rights. Just like by the way, they're restricted in voting. And if you're under age people should not be allowed to buy guns. You can't say, oh, it's a right to property. I've saved up my money. I'm 10. I should be able to buy air 15. That's not respecting context and that's not respecting the hierarchy of how the rights function in society and how they should be protected. Yeah, I mean, you can't constitute a threat to your neighbor. Even if you build a building that looks like it's teetering and about to fall, the government has a role to come in and inspect and check if there's a complaint. If it constitutes an objective threat, they have a way to tell, they have an obligation to have to tell you to diminish the building or to fix it. Oh, I mean, in fact, at common law, there's a whole doctrine that arose where people interfered with other people's property rights without actually going on their property, without trespassing. It's called nuisance. And that's an entirely legitimate doctrine. It's like, you know, if you're like, you know, creating toxic fumes and the fumes are going over into your neighbor's house and is peeling their paint and is making their house unlivable, they can sue you for interfering with their property, for posing an objective threat to them, even though they're not physically coming onto your land. And, you know, having a teetering building is the same type of threat. All right, Landon says, what would be ideal corporate policy for protecting against antitrust? I just went through some very left-leaning HR training on anti-competitive behavior for employees, which seems worthless. So I don't fully understand what they mean by corporate... Ideal corporate policy for protecting against antitrust. Well, so, well, at core, antitrust is not objective, right? Because so fundamentally, there's nothing you can do to stop the antitrust officials from coming after you, because at the end of the day, you know, what constitutes an antitrust harm, a quote, harmed competition, is whatever they say it is, because it's not an objective definition, it's not tied to an actual harm that has been experienced by someone. You know, and this is shown repeatedly, right, in the Microsoft antitrust case. I remember that distinctly, the harms that were identified by the harms that were identified by the court to justify the antitrust punishment of Microsoft in 1998 was some people are confused by having explorer already on their system. Some people don't want explorer on their system and they can't figure out how to get it off. I'm serious, these are in the opinion as the identified harms that were created by Microsoft in bundling Explorer with its operating system and therefore violating antitrust laws. You just, yeah, so there is no way to avoid it. Companies can try and they do, but you just try your best. All right, Michael says, I've heard many freedom-leaning lawyers criticizing Marbury versus Madison as giving too much power to the Supreme Court. In a free society, what is the proper role of the US Supreme Court? Yeah, that's a really great question because there is a lot of confusion about this and there are a lot of mistakes by people who get caught up in these attacks on Marbury and Madison. Marbury and Madison is the decision from 1803 that said the Supreme Court has the ultimate job of interpreting the Constitution. The buck stops with the Supreme Court, essentially. It doesn't say that in the Constitution, so that was a power grab by Supreme Court. First of all, that's false, as been shown by legal historian Philip Hamburger wrote a book called Long Judicial Duty that it was well understood at common law and for a very long time that courts that have the ultimate decision as to the determination of the interpretation of legal instruments and whether rights have been violated or not. Now, it's a valid decision and it has to be valid because there has to be a final decider. For the same reason, you can only have one government for the exact same reason. The same reason you can't have competing governments that offer their alternative. You can't have competing, you can't have different institutions within a government have equal say as to, well, we have equal authority that you can't talk. I'm Congress, so I can pass a law and the court can't say it's unconstitutional. Well, that's anarchy. Then what rule of law do you have? No one knows what the law is. You have Congress saying one thing and the Supreme Court saying the other, that's anarchy. That's like the same situation with competing governments. We're allegedly competing governments. We have two different governments saying two different things. At the end of the day, what does that reduce down to? It has to reduce down to people duking it out with military force in the streets because that's what happens when you don't have a state, a properly functioning state, which is an institution with the sole monopoly on the use of force in self-defense or in defense of individual rights. So there has to be a sole decider of what the meaning of the law is and what the meaning of the Constitution is. By the way, that's why the Constitution has mechanisms for amendment. The founders saw this. They said, yeah, if the Supreme Court screws it up, you can pass an amendment to overrule the Supreme Court. They've done that with amendments a couple of times. The Eleventh Amendment does that. The Eleventh Amendment was enacted specifically. It's a complex issue that I'm not going to get into, but the Eleventh Amendment, the very first amendment enacted after the Bill of Rights, was enacted to reverse a Supreme Court interpretation of the Constitution. It's a valid decision. Judicial review is legitimate and it's part and parcel of having a government. All right, Apollo Zoo says, why does Adam like Spiderman? Is it because of Steve Ditko? Yeah, so it's funny. I'm a geek. I like the Marvel Universe. Generally, I equals like DC, but for people who know me, I'm more of a sci-fi fan and also much more of a Star Wars fan. People know me for that, but I like all sci-fi. Star Trek, Star Wars, Firefly, Expans. As I joke, I'm sci-fi fluid. Yes, Expans was very good. So was Firefly. And there was the latest Star Wars. What was it? Andorre, which is fantastic. Andorre was very good. Star Wars by far. I 100% agree. It really shows you. You can actually do legitimate character-driven drama in the Star Wars universe. It's possible. Yeah, I agree. I guess you do more of that. Maybe I'll become a fan then. Let's say, I really thought fracking was an Alberta Canada innovation and discovered it is actual American. Well, you're not allowed to say American anymore, according to Stanford University. Because the Canadians are Americans too, according to them. Although Canadians deny it wholeheartedly. Downhole chemical treatment at all. What makes your innovations patentable anyway? What makes what innovations patentable? I missed that one. Fracking, I guess. What makes fracking? Oh, fracking as a patentable invention, because there are patents on it. So there are several different types of innovations that go into it. First is the ability to drill that deep, which involves very highly specialized machinery. At the depths that they go down to, the pressure and the temperatures are extreme. The fluid that's developed actually, the fluid that they inject down to crack the rocks, which is called fracking, that's actually protected by trade secret. That was a huge innovation in of itself. So there's massive innovations that went into making this incredible technology that for a brief period made the United States energy independent, right? We were actually at one point, we were actually exporting more oil. But this was like 10 years ago or 12 years ago. Then we were a net exporter of oil for a few years, which was fantastic. Tells you what innovation leads to. Let's see. Frank says, I wrote songs with my own music to words by Tolkien. I want to record them on a CD. If I try to sell it, will the Tolkien estate come after me? So I can't keep legal advice. You're asking about a very specific concrete act. So my primary advice is, so my initial statement is talk to a lawyer, because the Tolkien estate does have copyright in all words written by Tolkien. And if you're using his words, that's raising a potential copyright issue. It must be close to being in the public domain if it's not yet. Yeah, I think he wrote in the 30s. And I think the caught off point right now is 1923. Yeah. So like Sherlock Holmes recently fell into the public domain in a couple of other ways. It could be soon. It could be soon. All right, but talk to a lawyer. How do rights apply to personal, this is hello there. How do rights apply to personal identification information? Also, is the court's power to subpoena witnesses in initiation of force? Yeah, that's a topic. I remember debates in the nineties on back then on the use net, which, by the way, were justice, you know, vicious, rhetoric laden as the debate was worse. Yeah, it's just the nature of the internet, nature of human debates like that. But I'm sorry. So identification. So I think he's asking about data, like your Yeah, so your personal data, I think. So right now, unfortunately, the United States has taken the approach. You don't have property rights in data, which by the way is one of the fundamental problems with which is kind of facilitating the issues with what's called to big tech, right? If you imagine if you had rights in your data, your property rights, right, they would have to get permission from you to use your data. And one of the reasons why they feel like they can do anything with your data is because the United States took the position. No, this is you cannot property and data. Now we're seeing a byproduct of that. And of course, the solution isn't to then recognize property rights where there should exist. The solution is to use any trust and common carrier doctrine and all these other horrible doctrines. So they're just magnifying the problem. So you should have property rights in your data. And and it would resolve a lot of problems if you did. It's a peanut power. You know, yeah, this is an issue. This is like in the abstract that people argue and debate endlessly and objective is circles and libertarian circles generally. And I fall on the side that yes, subpoena powers are legitimate. If you know, if someone has information that is absolutely necessary for that, for a court to do its job as a court to resolve a dispute between two citizens, it can't resolve that dispute. And it may resolve dispute improperly. If it doesn't get access to that information, then we're undermining the very function and reason why we have courts. Yep. Let's see. Z ways. Samsung literally had an internal document 100 pages long, where quote, here's what Apple did on the left. Here's what we do on the right solution. Copyable. Next page repeat is just he's asking if you've seen that. No, I haven't. I haven't. I mean, as in this, by the way, so, like I said, Google was incredibly innovative. The search algorithm, of course, massively innovative. And they have brought information to our fingertips in a way that is unprecedented in human history, right? I mean, this is incredible, the world we live in today. You have the entirety of all of human knowledge available to you at a touch of a screen button. I mean, it's just incredible. And Google facilitated that. And so, you know, they should be praised as innovators, but their policy positions have been awful. And they've, and because of their policy positions, they've done some really bad things like to liberally copy and French other people's copyrights and patents and things of that sort. You know, and so I've, you know, you have to distinguish the company sometimes from in their innovators from what the company's policy positions are. And I always, I explain this in a certain sense when I tell people like, you should be suspicious of Google when their motto is do no evil. Because, because no one wakes up in the morning and looks in the mirror and says to themselves, make sure you do no evil today. If you have to do that, you have a problem. You have a real serious problem that you need to address. So, so that's that. Yeah. All right. This is a weird one. Let me just read this. I am 85% done writing a new Objectivist Constitution from scratch over the last five years. Can I get a voice call with Adam Ortega Smith to pitch it to them and gain their interest? You're on. I am the genius from Scott from Fabian Liberty told you about. Do you want to take a call from somebody who wants to pitch an Objectivist Constitution? Sure. An email they can send. Oh yeah, Mike, just Google me it. Google Adam and send him an email. Use Google. Like I just said, use Google. You can send me email. I get emails from people all the time. Or use chat GPT. Microsoft is buying chat GPT so that to compete with Google search, I think. Oh, interesting. That's that's that's cool. $100 million. I think it's cheap, I think. But by the way, I just want to say there's no such thing as an Objectivist Constitution. Objectivism is a philosophy. You know, the drafting of a Constitution and what goes into a Constitution is not philosophy. That's that's political. That's legitimate political science, right? What they talk about in the Federalist Papers. That's political theory as legal theory. And that's law and politics at the end of the day. That's applied philosophy. And so there are Objectivist applications in that space. But I I'm you know, you if you're thinking of the Objectivist Constitution, it's already you're somewhat mistaken about what actually is Objectivist. All right, friend Hopper says just just got here. Has anyone asked about AI, generated art trained on someone's copyrighted trademark? And if the artist can do anything about it, would it matter if the person with the AI art is making money with the image? So not that the image is copied, but that it was trained using copyrighted. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, this is that that other AI that the there's an art version of chat GBT that I that I that I played with with someone and it was really cool. And it's a really raises a really interesting question about how at what point, how far do you get from the original work that you've by putting in your own choices about the how it should be structured that you've actually created your own original work? It's a really that's a fascinating question. And it's one that's going to eventually have to be addressed by the courts. And again, it's why you need courts because it's a legitimate question. You know, it's not obvious what the answer is. Yeah, it's not. You can't. And this is why you this is why legal. This is why you have jurisprudence and legal theory and and laws and as a professional extra size, because you can't deduce straight from principles of the right to life, liberty, property and contract to specific answers to specific legal questions, especially when they're between legitimately good people, right, who just happened to have a disagreement as to what the boundary line of their respective rights are. Absolutely. All right, Justin's clarifying the previous question. So to clarify previous question. Oh, good. Yes, you may have cleverly combined into a new product to separate existing mechanical technologies owned by a single company. How do I protect the idea and sell it to said company? Well, if you're working for the company in your employment contract, it says they already own it. So he's not working for them. Well, if they've taken your so but if they cleverly combined it, that's an act of invention. So he's cleverly combined it. I'm sorry, he's cleverly combined. Yeah. Yeah, well, then that's an active invention. And if you've committed an active invention, you should go talk to a patent lawyer to see if you can get a patent on it. So in fact, most inventions, you know, we usually call it brothers and Thomas Edison. The reason why the right brothers and Thomas they stand out is because they're the exceptions. Most other, you know, there's been, you know, there's 11 million patents that issue. Most of the others patents are, as you're on just set, are combinations of preexisting materials. And those are just as important inventions, but their invention is still the same. All right, last three questions. Len says, what about time limits on drug patents? Is that legitimate? What technologies would necessity necessity time limits? It seems that information and art is blurred with software, music and dialogue. Well, there aren't any special limitations on drug patents. Drug patents have the same limitations as all other patents. So it's 20 years from data filing of the patent application is your term of patent copyright is life of author plus 70 years. Or if you're a corporation, you know, you can live forever, so they can't go to life of author. So it's 90 years straight. And the issue of term limits in IP is one that drives, you know, a lot of debates and consternation. It's a complex issue. I ran addresses it actually in her essay patents and copyrights. I think she addresses it appropriately. But of course, being the genius, she addresses it like in three or four paragraphs, because she instantly gets it and sees what the issues are. And, you know, me and every other normal person has to spend pages unpacking that and understanding it. And I did a whole talk on it at Ocon about about eight years ago called term limits for patents and copyrights and why they're valid. And it's an example of how property is an abstraction. It's a concept. So you have actually different protections for different types of materials, given the nature of those materials as values as they're used in human life. So you have property rights in water, property rights in land, property rights in personal goods, like your phone, your bike, your computer, property rights in stock and corporations, there's property rights in legal judgments, you can buy and sell legal judgments. You know, so in all of those property rights are structured differently because they all protect the exclusive control over something, but the thing is different in the nature of the value of how it's being used. So the protections are different. And given the fact that you're protecting underlying new innovations, you know, that are the foundation of all value creation in human life, the further you get out from the original innovator, the moral claim of ownership diminishes in a way that it doesn't with land and things of that sort. And so I don't want to go on March because I could go on for an hour about this because it's a complicated topic. So I'd recommend people just listen to my talk and if they have further questions about it, feel free to email them. All right. Paul says, after Apple created the Mac, a user interface Bill Gates went by Apple saw it and literally decided to copy it in Windows and rip off the Mac GUI. What is the moral status of a company that did that and created so much value? Yeah, it's similar to the earlier question about Google, you know, oh, Google stole, you know, oracles, you know, copyright. So, you know, isn't that a moral company? So by the way, it's not exactly 100% right because they didn't create the Mac. The actual people who created the GUI interface is not Apple. It was people at Xerox. In fact, the Xerox researchers were really upset when Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, by the way, is the real technical genius. Jobs is not the programmer and a computer engineer. We're invited over to Xerox to look at everything because the researchers were like, you're giving away the crown jewels. This is everything. And they knew it at the time. But Microsoft still stole it because Apple licensed it and Microsoft didn't license it for me. Well, so that's why Apple sued Windows, right? And what Steve Jobs said to Steve famously was, well, your claims to IP, distinct IP in the Mac are not valid because they weren't original to you. And that's true. The GUI interface was not invented by Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak. It was invented by the people at Xerox. And so the extent that he was claiming, I get IP rights in this, he didn't. And so Bill Gates had the right argument in that instance. And so I don't think of what Bill Gates did as immoral. In fact, Bill Gates is fundamentally a moral person in so many important ways. Oh my God, you're in trouble now, Adam. I mean, it doesn't matter what you set up until this point, the libertarians, the conservatives, some objectives. I just lost everyone. He just lost everybody. Bill Gates is the devil. What do you mean he's buying up land all over the United States in order to poison us all? I meant Microsoft. I don't mean Bill Gates post retirement. I mean Bill Gates and Microsoft. So he's responsible for the computer industry. A lot of people don't know this. He wrote, so he wrote a very famous open letter to what we're then in the 70s called hobbyists and who we would now call hackers. And it was a one page letter that explicitly said, we have to stop stealing each other's work because at that time the programmers were writing stuff and they were like, I can just take whatever I want and just make it. And he explicitly says, if we are going to make an industry, if we are going to revolutionize the world, we have to start respecting each other's property rights. We have to start respecting each other's rights. And he caught massive flak for that. He's hated by the entire programmer community, but that was fundamental to the creation of the high tech industry as we now know it. Paulo-Zu says, is the lack of use of land the same as public domain law? No. No. So public domain means completely unowned. So something is in the public domain or in the law, it's race nihilists. Totally unowned is the Latin term. That means no one had any claim to it whatsoever. And that's what space is public domain now and works that fall into the public domain can have no claim made on them. Non-use is just, I have a property right, but I'm not using it. Now that can be legitimate and some non-use, physical non-use can sometimes be a type of use, like for instance, real estate developers who buy up land because they foresee that that's going to be valuable land 10 or 20 years from now. So land can be an investment commodity, for instance, and that's a legitimate use of land. So we don't mean literally like physical use, but if real estate developer, if you buy up land, like once every 20 years, you need to go take a look at your land to make sure that there isn't someone actually that's now using it that has been using it. And that's not that big of an obligation. Okay. So this is the last question. I think Boaz has asked this question. There's a different Boaz. Different Boaz. He asked this question to every single one of my guests so far. I've only, I haven't had that many, but he's asked it. It sounds like he's going to ask it to every single one of them. He's actually uniquely qualified to answer this question, which the other guests were not. So here it is. Any tips for burnt out parents of a seven-month-old? So that's one. And then he says, just for the help, how to bring back focus and motivation. And what's your opinion on Bitcoin blockchain NFTs, Huawei, the Chinese company, AR, VR, and 3D printers, and all this for five bucks. Awesome. By the way, did I top Nikos? You did. Yeah. I was waiting to announce it. You are moved into the number one position. Awesome. You've also topped them in time. So we're getting to three hours here almost. So I'll go another hour. I need bed. It's a question of the questions. Okay. So any tips for burnt out parents of a seven-month-old? All right. Well, I have three children, two of whom are twins. So I know this quite well. Nikos was not. Yes. And my wife and I form a later principle. We call it selfish parenting. And the idea is that you have, yes, your children are important, but your life is at a fundamental more important. And you have a relationship with your wife that's also very important, and you have to prioritize that. And we set aside time where we were like, well, we're going to get a babysitter because we didn't have any family networks to fall back on. If you have family networks or something, just do that. But if you're done, you just very selfishly have to set aside time and be selfish. It's good to convey to your child later in life that my values are important to me, your value, but your value should be important to you, too. And children pay attention to your action more than anything. In fact, my wife and I wrote children's values to each other, where we explicitly wrote out that we committed to each other that even though we were having a child, that our marriage was a value and our individual lives were values, and that we were going to continue to roots remain committed to them. And the other one is, it does get better. They were like, yes. No question. No question. You've got another two years or so, but yes, absolutely. Around three, they become amazing. Even a two, they're pretty much talking. But I liked every age. I mean, I did, too. I like, I like, but teach them sign language, too. We did that with all three of our kids. It's really awesome because yeah, they figured out that kids can, one of the reasons for the quote terrible twos is that they understand what they want, but they, but the vocal cords haven't, actually the nerves haven't formed yet. So they can't vocalize. And so they're expressing frustration because they know what they want. They just can't express it, but they can control their hands. And, you know, and you don't have to, you know, you have to teach them full sentences. You just teach them, you know, like this is more and this is water and apple, you know, words like that. And it's amazing. And you're communicating with your kid at one. That's pretty cool. Yeah. All right. I don't know. Do you want to say anything about Bitcoin blockchain NFTs? Yeah. Okay. So Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, kind of cool, but not really hard to see what, you know, what's going to happen with it. NFTs, total flash in the pan type thing, I think, not really fundamental or important. The, what was the other? ARVR and 3D printers. 3D print, incredible. That will be a manufacturing revolution if it isn't already. And it was AI, it said to, was it? ARVR, virtual reality. It has potential, but we're not there yet. I mean, so it's still too early, as I think the whole disaster of Facebook's virtual world is proving to be. And then what was the other one? So I can do that. That's it. That's it. All right. So Paul says, for David Gorgans of intellectual, for the David Gorgans of intellectual property, I take that as a compliment. I'm not sure who David Gorgans is, but he's referring to you. Thank you. I don't know who David Gorgans is either. So that's why I'm okay. Anyway, but it's a compliment. So he's the $20 to thank you. And then Ali, we shall have the final word. He says, do you have a book? Have you written a book? Unfortunately, no, because law professors primarily write our work through articles. So where can you find your articles? But all my articles are online and easily accessible on a website called SSRN.com. It stands for socialscienceresearchnetwork.com. I post all my articles there in PDF. It's downloadable. And because law journals allow that. And so in fact, you just Google my name, Adam Mossoff, SSRN. You'll see my page come up and even some hits are my articles. And the nice thing about law-read articles is they're accessible. I pride myself in writing articles that are accessible and understandable. You don't have to be a lawyer to read my articles. Well, this is great, Adam. Longest interview. Awesome. Most money raised in an interview. So we're getting to, this is like Lex Friedman length. We're competing with the big guys now. This is, what's his name, the other big podcast with those three hour interviews. So this is great. I really appreciate it. I know it's late. So thank you. And yeah, look, look at him up. It's easy to find. I think the leading voice today in defending IP in the world and is doing amazing work. Joe Rogan, yes. This is Joe Rogan length, like. I know Joe Rogan, yeah. Lex Friedman less so, but Joe Rogan, yes. I know Joe Rogan. All right. So thank you. Well, thank you. This has been awesome. You're on. I'm really honored to have been invited here. I get to ask fantastic questions. I really enjoyed myself. The best audience on the internet. The best audience on the internet. Well, of course, it's your audience. That's why my audience. I love them. So have a great weekend. Say hi to your family. And if I don't see you sooner, I'll see you at Ocon. I hope so. Yes. Yeah. I don't wait. Yeah. Sure. I'll see you somewhere. I'll pass somewhere, but looking forward to it. Same. Best to the family. Bye.