 Afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the fifth session of the 62nd International Affairs Symposium. My name is Alessandro Cicero, and I'm one of this year's co-chairs. And good afternoon. My name is John Bandai. I'm also a chair for this year's symposium. Tonight's and this evening's debate will be about intellectual property. Patents, copyrights, and trademarks are tangible legal protections that allow creators to monopolize their ideas. The international system managing these protections, however, promoting, sorry, the international system managing these rights is often praised for managing these rights and protecting their innovation. However, it also raises costs for acquiring new technologies for developing countries, which also includes life-saving medicine. So the question then becomes, is intellectual property and the standards of it, are they able to balance the competing interests? And today's question more precisely is, is international intellectual property regulation necessary for protection, or is it a form of modern imperialism? We hope this debate will equally and fairly look at both sides, and we hope you find the following presentations from our speakers fun, engaging, and of course, I hope you learn something or two. Thank you. Our moderator this afternoon will be Dr. Elizabeth Bennett, a Joseph M. Ha associate professor of international affairs and the director of our political economy department. So thank you for being here, Elizabeth. And I'd like to now invite our student hosts up to the stage. So Leilani and Lauren, please come and introduce your speakers. Thank you. Joining us today, all the way from Brussels, we have Peter Klepp. Peter has accomplished a lot through the years. He has practiced law in Belgium, worked as a cabinet advisor and speech writer to the Belgian State Secretary for Administrative Reform, been a co-founder and analyst at Itinera Institute, been the founder and head of Open Europe, a free market think tank in Brussels. Peter's work has been featured in notable publications, such as The Economist, The BBC, and The Wall Street Journal. Today, his work continues to be centered around the European Union and its single market as the founder and editor-in-chief of the Brussels Report News site. Peter has written about a wide scope of issues facing the EU, such as the Euro crisis and Brexit. Related to our next hour and a half together, Peter has also prominently critiqued the World Trade Organization's intellectual property policies in response to COVID-19 vaccine distributions. Maybe that's a spoiler, but it is what we're all here for. So I'm sure we'll hear more about it soon. Anyways, please join me and the beautiful weather outside in giving Peter a warm welcome. Welcome, everybody. Tonight we're also saying hello to Stefan Kinsella. He is a patent attorney in Libertarian legal theories residing in Houston, Texas, with a background in electrical engineering. He is also the founder and director of the Center of the Study of Innovative Freedom and was the founder and executive editor of Libertarian Papers. He has written extensively on the property rights, legal theory, international law, and broader intellectual property issues. Amongst his most recent books is the published legal foundations of a free society that talks about property issues as we're doing today as well. He is mainly retired, but he's still up here helping us and doing a small presentation to us in a small debate. But we really do appreciate his ideas and his support. He has also studied previously in King's College, which, you know, incredible. But I really do recommend you all to please read his book as it's incredibly interesting. So please also join me for a round of applause for Stephen Kinsella. So thank you very much for inviting me here. It's a real pleasure to delve into the topic with Stephen. I've read his work already 20 years ago, I think. And yesterday also, when I read his book, it's called one of his books against IP. You can download it freely, obviously as an anti-IP advocate. That was quite evident. And I did find a lot of very interesting, intriguing arguments in that. So one of the interesting things was that he was discussing how, you know, when Einstein came up with his discovery of ESMC to the second, he said, well, you know, the fact that others actually can use this to their benefit. Why is that not being protected? And why are other IDs legally protected? And that's, of course, a fair argument. So my take to give a bit of a theoretical justification for the point of view I'm supporting is that you could argue that IP does not have a position. But I think in today's world, I see it as an imperfect necessity in order to be able to protect contracts. I've given example. For example, somebody comes up with a song and sells it on some kind of a digital carrier to a friend and says, look, you can listen to the song and you can play it in family or private circumstances. But you cannot commercially exploit it and pretend it's your own. Now, if the person violates that deal, clearly I think everybody will agree that this is unacceptable and the contract needs to be policed. Now, practically with music, that's clearly not always as easy. And that's why I see a justification for having some kind of a bureaucratic system to make it easier to apply contracts that would otherwise not be applied. Actually, there's a relatively recent series. I think it's on Netflix, maybe Prime, on the emergence of Spotify. And you can see the whole history of I think it's in six episodes of how you had the Pirates, the Pirate Bay website in Sweden. And then you had Spotify trying to do things legal. And there were some tensions between the two. And then you have a character that plays the representative of Sony music who's basically accusing anybody that is, and that was at the time everybody that has illegal music as being thieves. So I do think it's quite an interesting series in that regard. Now, to come back to my argument, what's the difference between Einstein and songs? And I guess it's not so easy objectively to make, but I would see that clearly there was no intention to have some kind of a contract that needed to be respected in the case of Einstein coming up with his great invention versus somebody that came up with a song. Now, another fair point I think that Stephen makes in his book is that there's a lot of arbitrariness in the protection of IP. For example, patents tend to only be protected for 20 years, whereas copyright is 70 years, so Walt Disney, he died in 1966. So that would mean that we have until 2036. But I think they extend that a bit, or I'm not sure about the details. But I do think it's fair to say there's a lot of arbitrariness, why 20 years, why not 30 years? And indeed, I remember from my classes in law and economics, which is a field of economics where you try to estimate the efficiency of law. They try to model in an imperfect way sort of what would be the ideal duration of a patent of copyright balancing, the cost to society of the monopoly versus the benefits of the incentive to innovate. And to be fair, this is very difficult. I think we're in imperfect territory here. But yeah, in some I think the ideal should be, the criteria should be that IP protection can only be given to innovations that would have been protected by contracts that are very difficult to enforce. Which means that current protection of some of the contemporary protection of IP should actually not be there, or should not be as generous, or perhaps should be more generous. Then I'll come back to that, think about pharma, where some pharma companies are complaining that it's taking so long, it's so incredibly expensive to come up with life-saving medicines that perhaps the protection should be longer. And I do think you can make a case for that in some cases. Now I'll move to then maybe the more practical, some statistics backing up IP from I guess a more utilitarian perspective. I'm from Europe, Belgium, which happens to be vaccine valley. A lot of vaccines are produced in Belgium. So IP is essential to the EU economy. The industry is estimated to comprise almost half of GDP, 90% of EU exports, and robust patent protections generated about 76% of trade within the EU internal. I mean, obviously these are economic estimates, don't take them too serious, but it's better to try to estimate something, I guess, than not to. And I do think it shows that, I mean, this is valuable and throwing it all away may not be the best idea. Let's take a deeper look into the whole vaccine debate. So when the pandemic broke, Moderna here, it only took them 25 days to develop the vaccine, which some vaccine skeptics have seized upon to criticise, as an argument, to criticise the vaccine. But of course, in reality, these inventions have been developed over decades. And the fact that you had legal IP protection there, you could argue was actually quite important. So I refer to a paper by Philip Thompson of the Property Rise Alliance, and he describes how all the late stage vaccines and development in the States and in the COVAX portfolio, he says this was the result of decades of research, often by small startups that laid the groundwork for companies, universities, state-owned enterprises to be able to produce these vaccines in record time. And he says private sector companies and universities where legislation permits research institutions to own and market intellectual property from government-funded research led the way. Also, there is an estimate from, which looks at how well countries protect IP and it finds an almost perfect correlation of 0.92 when comparing property rights overall with the Global Biotech Innovation Index, which measures success in biotech. Now, I get back on the whole COVID vaccine development and how you could see that IP was actually quite important there. But then first, let's dive into the WHO proposal and ultimately decision to waive the vaccine. They're also still trying, I think, to expand this, to also the therapeutics. And a lot of people, of course, industry, but not only industry, lots of economists have criticized that. They have pointed out, for example, that the TRIPS agreement of the WTO actually already permits countries to make generic versions of branded drugs and vaccines by using what is called compulsory licensing. But at that point, none of the developing countries had used the option when they were sort of campaigning to waive the protection. What's the reason? Well, according to Dalin Diebo Shabbalala, who is an American legal scholar, he wrote also an interesting article on that for the conversation, which I quote in one of my articles. So he says that the simple reason is because many of these countries don't have the production facility to do so, because especially with COVID vaccines, the technologies are so complex and involve multiple patents, trade secrets, and now how? So a compulsory licensing system would need to address not just patents, but all related IP, all related intellectual property. What's more, countries that do have the production capacity, like India, they are not allowed under WTO rules to issue compulsory licenses to companies within their territories to produce products primarily for experts. So if your export, this derogation is very, very restricted, which is why he is calling to scrap specifically that limitation for export. And you could say, you could argue something for that, I think. But at the end of the day, what you see is that a lot of the real obstacles have simply remained, scaling complex manufacturing, resolving difficult logistic challenges. So it's a little disingenuous to present this IP hurdle, as the main hurdle, why these vaccines were actually not then produced in these countries. So that was a bit, like a note under, I guess, in that debate. Another argument is that at the moment, we already have lots of IP violations. For the European economy, this counterfeit is costing about 10 billion euro damage a year. 80% of the seizures of counterfeit and Paris goods are actually from China. So yeah, the question is, do we really then need to undermine it even further? So first, before I go back to the vaccines, I'd like to discuss how, in general, it's estimated that it's taking 10 to 15 years to develop a new vaccine at about 900 million euro. There was actually once the fastest one that was developed in four years. And this was when Merck produced the world's first effective vaccine against mumps in the 60s. Of course, with the COVID vaccine, then things went a lot quicker. Now, what happened is that you had two researchers, Kathleen Carrico, originally from Hungary, and Drew Weismanth from the States. Now, what they did is they filed patents for the MRNA technology, which is at the heart of these life-saving vaccines. And at some point, they launched the wrong company, called RNARX in 2006. Now, in 2013, the donors, the investors, they pulled the plug because it was not delivering results fast enough. I mean, it's already quite long, so you could understand that. And the argument for IP here is thanks to the fact that it was respected, bigger companies, in particularly Moderna in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a German company, Biontech, they saw the potential of MRNA and they licensed these patents. They invited these two researchers to come work with them. When we had the pandemic in December 2019, Ms. Carrico was actually working on applying her MRNA technology on a flu vaccine, and that's why she could very quickly change it, well, she could very quickly change it to COVID, which explains why then they could come up so quickly with the vaccine. Now, going back, the argument here is that if it would not have been protected, it would have been way more difficult to come up with this medical product, effectively. Another interesting quote in this regard is from the Indian trade minister, Piyush Yogyal, if I pronounce that well, who was actually a proponent of the patent waiver, but he acknowledged that, quote unquote, not a single plan to manufacture vaccines will likely result from the IP waiver, as quote unquote, there is not even demand for vaccines anymore at that point, which was already quite early in the pandemic. I mean, again, in itself, that's a bit unrelated to whether or not to wave vaccines, but it just shows you how the debate has not always been to genius also in Africa, specifically, vaccine campaigns were hindered by a lack of trained vaccinators, insufficient cold storage, the need for basic supplies. So also in the ultimate deal, there was not a guarantee against Chinese piracy, which was already happening in a big scale anyway. They were seizing fake vaccines in Mexico at the time. So obviously, also the safety of medical products here are actually a very big issue. Now, what I would like to end with is not a vaccine case, but a different case of a Belgian biotech company called Argenics, which is in valuation, the most valuable European biotech company. And what they do is they have invented one specific medicine. It is called Vivgard, that is its commercial name. I don't find it very commercial. The real name is Evgardigimod, but it's a great medicine because it's supposed to be what they call a Swiss army knife for autoimmune diseases, supposed to deal and help cure or improve the conditions related to 16 or 17 autoimmune diseases. They have already operated for one disease. It's already allowed to be operating, and they hope to make progress for the other 16. They actually did last summer. That's why their stock went up so much. Now, the CEO has pointed out that the weaknesses in IP protection contributed to the very high price of this success medicine produced by his company. He says that the reason that it cost 225,000 US dollar, that's a lot for one year of treatment, is he said, you need to put it in perspective. In the past, the pharma industry did not develop drugs for so-called rare diseases. They did not. And these are diseases from which only a very small group of people suffer, but which have very serious consequences for them. He said to remedy that, the following arrangement was made between the pharma and biotech industry and society, develop innovative drugs for those rare diseases. And in return, we offer a fee which allows you to recover the high costs of research and clinical development. He says that the development of this particular medicine was up to 1 billion euro. And the patent is only valid until the middle of the next decade. From then on, you can counterfeit it for free, and we will not earn from it. So he says, I think this sum, he argues, is a fair price for the 160,000 patients suffering from the disease in the US, Europe, Japan, especially if you've taken into account the huge gain in quality of life for the patients. These now have the prospect of a normal life again, being able to go to work, go to school, work again. And they don't just receive an infusion of the drug either. There's also a whole follow-up provided by us. His company has about 300 granted patents, both in Europe and the States. And a lot of efforts of this company to develop life-saving remedies are devoted to legally protected and legally enabling cooperation to foster its innovation. So IP is really at the heart of for them being able to come up with these innovations. So I think that's a good case to show that we better tread carefully when we're experimenting with eroding this protection. So thank you very much. All right. Well, thank you very much. I'm glad to be here. Thank you, Mr. Klepp. I am a, what you're going to hear is not what you're going to normally hear in a forum like this. Usually I talk to radical Austrian economic and libertarian audiences. So I will try to speak in a way that's intelligible anyway. I'm a practicing patent attorney for over 30 years and a practicing libertarian and writer for even longer than that. And at the beginning of my career about 32 years ago, I came to the conclusion that patent and copyright law, which I practice for a living, are completely unjust and evil and should be abolished, including patent and copyright law. After many years of reflection and thinking about property rights and the nature of law and things like that. So that perspective will inform what I'm going to say today. And I respect my opponent, but notice that he didn't really give a systematic case, didn't find the relevant terms. Let's return to the debate. The debate topic is international intellectual property regulation unnecessary protection for innovators, or is it a form of modern imperialism? So to really understand this question, we have to look at the terms. OK, so let's talk about imperialism. What is imperialism? That's a policy of extending a country's power and influence through diplomacy or military force. It's when a country extends its power into other territories for economic or political gain. OK, so the first question is, have we done this with IP in the West? It's clear to everyone that IP, which means intellectual property, which includes primarily patent and copyright and trademark and trade secret and other new forms of law, but primarily patent and copyright, they're very prevalent in the West, especially in America and Europe, patent, copyright, trademark, and other forms. And there can be little or no doubt that the West, especially the US, has used its influence and power to push and even coerce other countries to adopt American-style IP law, primarily patent and copyright. And by the way, just to be clear, patent is a type of law that protects inventions, for example, in gizmos and processes and machines and compositions of matter and pharmaceuticals. And copyright protects creations of intellectual work, like novels, some say now software, movies, things like that. So American IP imperialism has been done clearly for decades now, sometimes by direct imposition, sometimes by softer forms of coercion, like investment and free trade agreements and our power in that way. So as just a brief set of examples of how the US has imposed Western-style IP protections on the developing and the rest of the world, when the United States invaded Iraq and they took over the country in 2003 and 2004, Paul Bremmer, the American who was the administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority, just issued a decree in 2004 expanding Iraqi patent law. Now, this poor country that's been destroyed by American military action, we use this chance to expand their IP law. The German Constitution, the basic law in 1949 under the auspices of the American dominating authority authorized in Article 96, the federal law of the federal patent court. And I probably won't have time to get to this, but there was a case where the TRIPS agreement, one of these international treaties that required international patent protection all around the world, but it had an exception where you could issue, which Peter mentioned earlier, a compulsory license in certain cases. The US forced other governments to not use this right to issue a compulsory license to lower the price of drugs used for the AIDS and HIV virus. So Thailand, for example, even though they were having a huge AIDS crisis, paying insane prices, monopoly prices for these AIDS and HIV drugs agreed not to use their authority under the treaty to lower prices by issuing a compulsory license. And then there's a network of treaties in the world. For example, the Berne Convention requires member states and almost every country is a member of the Berne Convention, even commie states, Soviet states, socialist states, Cuba, North Korea, Russia, they're all part of the Berne Convention. So when people accuse people like me of being commies because I don't believe in private property rights and intellectual property, they're confused because the commies like IP is so does the West. The Berne Convention requires there to be a 50 year term after the death of the author. So that's over 100 years now. And remember, the original copyright was 14 years in the beginning of the United States. And then there are other treaties like the Paris Convention and the Patent Cooperation Treaty that require other countries to maintain minimum standards for patent rights. So almost every country is roped into this web. And the United States, what we do is we use our dom, I shouldn't say our, I don't agree with it. The US uses its dominant position to force other countries and regions to adopt American-style IP policies by free trade agreements and other bilateral investment treaties called BITS. And by the way, there's over 2,500 BITS or bilateral investment treaties in the world today. Many of them are like 40% are American, which the purpose of these treaties is to allow countries to have an agreement where their host citizens can invest in that country or have free trade with each other. And the United States always inserts a clause or a big section which requires the other country to strengthen their IP protections. What does IP have to do with free trade? Like literally zero. The trans-specific part, because free trade means we just say, if you import your goods into our country and we export our goods to your country, we're not going to have as high of a tariff as we did before. It doesn't have anything to do with what your local internal property rights laws ought to be. So the US government all the time uses its power to try to twist the arms of other countries to keep expanding, keep adopting American-style copyright and patent protections. The trans-specific partnership, which some of you might remember, which died a couple of years ago, but which was a hot topic for a good decade under Obama and Trump, was ostensibly a free trade agreement, but it was really just a disguised attempt to force other countries to strengthen their copyright law. Now, usually when you have a free trade agreement in the past, the text was open and people could see it. This was kept hidden and the reason was because one of the chapters was all about making the other countries. For the price of getting a mission to trade with America, you have to strengthen your copyright and patent laws. Oh, guess why? So for example, during this, Canada wasn't originally part of the agreement and they wanted to be part of it. And so we said, well, you might need to expand your copyright protection. So just to get admission to negotiate the TPP, Canada did actually expand their copyright protection by 20 years for certain aspects of their copyright law. So, and we also said, so you have to agree to change your law to do it like we do in America, which is if you violate copyright law, you have, it's actually a criminal fine, not just civil. So people can go to prison for this and add 20 more years to it, okay? So the United States at the behest of Hollywood and other special interests keeps pushing other nations, like for example, we try to get them to join into the enter anti-counterfeiting trade agreement or ACTA and the TPP, which was trying to do international control to stop piracy like the SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act in America, which also failed. And Mexico's IP office under pressure endorsed ACTA and attempted to persuade its legislature to ratify it after the European Union parliament even rejected it. And in fact, oddly in the recent COVID pandemic, there was a COVID-19 relief bill and someone snuck in a criminal copyright streaming penalty provision, okay? Nothing to do with COVID, but what it said was that illegal streaming would be a felony. I guess the idea was that if the government is locking us down and forcing us to live at home and we have nothing to do with watch Netflix, if you pirate a movie, you can go to prison, okay? And then part of that bill said that of the $17 million in funds for modernization initiatives, 10 million for something else, 100,000 could be used for an international copyright institute for the copyright office in America to train nationals of developing countries in intellectual property laws and policies. Now, how condescending and imperialistic is that? And what the hell does it have to do with COVID? Okay, so there could be no doubt that the US and the West have succeeded in having almost every country in the world sign on to their major IP treaties, conform their local laws to Western IP standards for patent copyright and trademark. So for example, for copyright, there's the Berne Convention of 1886 and the WIPO Copyright Treaty of 1996. For patents, there's the Paris Convention of 1883, the Patent Cooperation Treaty of 1970 and for trademarks, there's the Madrid system. And there's also the GATT, the General Agreement of Terror for Trades in the 1994 year-grade round, which covers intellectual property and TRIPS, the trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights agreements. These things form a web that ensnares every country in the world into Western-style IP laws. And why do we do this? We do this for the benefit of about four industries in America. Basically, Hollywood and movies, which rely on copyright, the American music industry, which relies on copyright, the pharmaceutical industry, which relies upon patents and the FDA protections, big agriculture like Monsanto, which relies upon seed patents, and the book and journal and publishing industry, this is America and Europe, and some, a few high-tech industries like Microsoft, Apple, IBM, which rely upon all of them, copyright, patents, and trademarks. All these industries benefit from these protectionist laws, which are basically monopoly privileges granted by the state, the corrupt state, which is being corrupted and bribed by all these companies at the expense of US consumers and especially developing countries who are forced to pay higher prices to enrich these special interests. The history of this is interesting. I can only get into it briefly here. Copyright basically came from the attempt of the government and the church in Europe to prevent the ability of publishers to publish things that the common person could read that the government and the church didn't want them to read. And so first they started this, after the printing press came out, this threatened, you know, before that it was just scribes who would do things by hand and they were under the control of whoever paid their salary, the church or whatever. But if you didn't want the Catholics to read the Protestant Bible or vice versa, they had the stationess company. It was a hundred year monopoly which had, that's the only way you could print things. When that monopoly expired, there was a big debate about what do we do now? What do we do now? Do we renew the monopoly? And the decision was the statute of Anne in 1710 which led to the modern copyright. It gave the copyright to authors. Patents emerged from the practice of monarchs granting protectionist privileges to their court cronies, saying you're the only guy who can sell sheepskin in this town. You're the only guy who can sell playing cards in this town and if anyone does it, we'll kill them. And so that allowed them to charge monopoly prices and then they would give a little bit of that back to the government, to the crown as a kickback. Well, that got out of hand. So the parliament in England in the statute of monopolies, back in those days, we were honest about our terms. We were talking about monopolies in 1623. The government, the parliament reigned in the power of the crown to do this but they retained the power of the government to issue patents for inventions. Nowadays we're less, the US used to have a department of war. Now it's called a department of defense. Even though it's really a department of war. And so then America with the constitution in 1789, they put in there a clause which allowed Congress to enact copyright and patent laws because hey, after all our mother country had that. So we're gonna allow Congress to do that and of course the next year they did it. And then this started the rise of patent and copyright law in Europe and America. This is how we have it and this is why we have it. Now, if we had a policy of going to a country and benevolently helping them adopt civil liberties and natural rights, maybe people would call it imperialism but maybe we wouldn't mind as much. I mean, after all the United States and the Western powers dominated Japan and Germany after World War II and turned them into liberal democracies with civil liberties and free markets, no one seems to mind that much. I don't hear people saying that's imperialism. So the question is what about IP? Are these genuine, natural, good, legitimate, helpful, useful, productive property rights that we should be trying to nudge other countries to adopt or not? Now my argument as I indicated earlier is no. IP is completely illegitimate, completely unnatural and should be totally abolished. Now there are three, two primary arguments for intellectual property, which I have five minutes left so I can only get into one of them quickly. One is the more natural rights idea from Locke, the idea that if you create something of value that you ought to have a right to it, right? There's a third called the personality theory of Hegel which no one understands and no one uses because it makes no sense. Sort of like a watered down version of Locke. But then the main argument that has been used for over 200 years and which is implied in the US Constitution's authorization of the Congress to make patent law which was to incentivize these innovative works is the utilitarian or the consequentialist theory. And that idea is basically a sort of Chicago market failure type of theory. The idea is that in a free market everything is fine and it works good for most things like producing saddles for horses or selling apples. But for certain types of products, innovative products, things where most of the value lies in the design of the thing, right? Like an invention, a new mousetrap idea or for new pharmaceutical. The problem is that competition is too easy because the competitor just has to copy what you did, make a copy of it and then he can compete with you and undercut your price and you can't sell it at a high price for a while and you'll never be able to undercut, you'll never be able to recoup your R&D cost so you'll never do it in the first place. So the argument is like a utilitarian argument that there's a market failure and that is that on a free market we will have an underproduction of innovative goods be that books or movies or music or new pharmaceuticals. And so the government can helpfully step in because it's so helpful all the time and so intelligent and so wise, right? That even though the copyright term was 14 years and now it's 150 years, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So the idea is the government can step in and say, well, we're gonna help you guys out and there's some joke about the most scary words in the English language or I'm from the government I'm here to help you. I mean, so the government basically says, well, we're gonna give the creator a monopoly for 17 years or maybe 14 or maybe 14 times two or maybe 170, I don't know, some number and we're gonna let you charge a monopoly price for a while and that'll let you recoup your costs and so everyone's fine. Even though in the case of patent pharmaceuticals and the COVID case, you have FDA officials like Fauci getting 150,000 bucks a year or something like that because the Baidol amendment which allows the government to pay for the development of the basic research which led to these pharmaceuticals and then government employees help these private companies do it and then they accelerate the FDA examination process so that it's not a billion dollars actually and then the government pays the billion anyway and then they get a patent anyway and they charge a monopoly price for these vaccines anyway, but no one sees it because we never pay for the vaccine and the taxpayer is paying for it so the whole thing is a rotten mess. So the point is the developing countries should tell the first world, no thank you and they should bow out of these treaties and they should have a free market and they should not adopt patent and copyright protection in their own countries. Thank you. Hello and welcome. My name is Elizabeth Bennett. I'm faculty in international affairs and political economy and this is great. Thank you for starting such a fantastic conversation. It's a delight to have you on campus and I'm really excited to hear more of your thoughts. So I have a question for each speaker and then you'll have a few minutes to respond and the audience will be invited to ask their own questions afterward. So Mr. Klopp, you describe how the current intellectual property regime created a significant challenge, perhaps not the greatest one, to dissemination of the COVID vaccine, that the regime itself made it more challenging for people the masses of the world, all over the world and huge numbers to access a life-saving vaccine. You also describe how intellectual property regimes have improved the lives of a small number who can afford to pay an incredibly high price. Does IP compromise the health of the masses to promote the health of a few who can pay? And perhaps because the elites today are not all concentrated in the United States, we might not call this US imperialism, but in a Marxist world we would call it imperialism, nonetheless, the tyranny of a few who can pay over the masses who cannot to equally have a good quality of life. So convince us that this regime that we have today is actually better than no intellectual property at all. In other words, would we be better off without this type of regime? While you think, I'll pose a second question to Mr. Kinsella. You argue that IP comes at the cost of US consumers and that it's a tool of foreign policy. In the current context in which there's never been a higher threat of nuclear war, in which the US and China are battling head-to-head for hearts and minds and economic policy all over the world, in which we are in the face of climate change, are you truly suggesting that the best solution before us is to strip the United States of a tool of foreign policy instead of maintaining that tool of policy and allowing it to modify it as needed to solve the world's most intractable challenges? Could you convince us that we're actually better off without intellectual property than a modified version that allows for strategic geopolitical engagement? Thank you, Professor. Well, actually, maybe I should make myself clearer because I was mostly making the case that to have a vaccine waiver would not have made a difference, right? So I don't think it's the case that if only there hadn't been the current regime internationally, the trips and everything as it stands, that then the whole developing world would have been able to produce en masse these vaccines because the real obstacles were to scale the manufacturing, the difficult logistical challenges and relatively early in the pandemic, simply vaccine skepticism. So I was mostly making that case while adding that if you would have had that waiver, yes, you would have had the cost for those companies, but you wouldn't solve much. And in the future, they may think again before they make massive investments, given that the protection is not there. And, well, and if you allow me, I'd like to shortly respond to some of the things Steven brought up, it was very interesting, but I thought when you mentioned the utilitarian justification for, you know, for having IP, which is that the idea that there's a free market failure, right, so we need to then have this protection. Well, I mean, that may be one justification, but I don't think a corrected justification. I do think that we have a government failure in the sense that, you know, it's very difficult to enforce certain contracts, but that does not make it, you know, less moral to enforce them. And I mean, in continental Europe, I'd like to make the comparison with the notary system. If you buy real estate, I know you have notaries in the States, but very different from in continental Europe. Napoleon came up with the idea and it's often, you know, criticized by classical liberals and libertarians and most arguments are definitely correct, but in itself, the notary system is an admission by the state that it will, in certain cases, be failing to protect property and therefore it may be better to force people into some kind of a bureaucratic system with some person with a monopoly just to make sure that something as important as protecting a property is done. Napoleon was very big on property and has been working for 200 years, which I think in itself, you know, justification that some of the criticism is misguided and I do think it's the same for IP. If you see that and think the music industry in detail, you have so much piracy that it's hurting innovation. Then I do think to have IP is really the government admitting it is actually failing to police and enforce certain contracts and coming up with a bureaucratic system. Again, this is all second best. In the first best scenario, the government would simply police and enforce every contract, right? So just to make clear that this is my justification, which is clearly different from the utilitarian justification that you've given. Okay, quickly. I'm actually from Louisiana, which is a Napoleonite code system and I'm actually a notary. And I'm a libertarian. I've heard a lot of crazy theories but I've never heard the notary threat thing, but okay, I'm sure it's out there somewhere. That's funny. On the vaccine waiver really quickly, I agree with you on that. I think that a vaccine waiver compulsory license would not have made a difference but that supports my case. It wouldn't have made a difference because it is simply not true that knowing the formula for a drug allows you to just start up a company and compete with Moderna tomorrow. It's not so easy. You need know-how, you need knowledge capital. And so the fact that, but that's the argument for IP is that, oh, some products are intellectual products that are really easy to copy and so the original producer could never get their costs back because they're gonna face competition too quickly. It's just, it's not demonstrated by the evidence. Now, ask for your question about China. Well, I think that we live in a fraught world where nuclear peril is around the corner and other types of peril and although I think intellectual property is one of the worst things the governments do next to the drug war, central banking and inflation, welfare, taxation and war itself. War is probably the worst because it poses the most existential risk to mankind. So anything we can do to avoid war is a good thing and that would include not calling China a country of thieves when they're not, which we do all the time when we say, oh, they're stealing our intellectual property. I mean, this is a country of honor and integrity and it has some good things about it. And just because they're not respecting American style intellectual property, draconian enforcement and putting people in jail and causing Aaron Schwartz to kill himself because you're threatening to put him in prison for 50 years for uploading some documents at Columbia or threatening to extradite British students like Richard O'Dwyer from Britain to the US to face federal prison because he had a website with links that link to pirated content. Okay, if China's not doing that, I say China's on the better side of this issue. But the point is, I don't think we need to keep this card in our pocket. We're gonna call you an IP thief just so we have the ability to manipulate you on, I mean, why don't we look at China as an adversary, not as an enemy and at least don't call them thieves, which is insulting and just wrong. China is not an IP thief. China is just another country that is also signed on to the Berne Convention and the Paris Convention and the Patent Cooperation Treaty and they have patent courts. People file patents there all the time. I've done it myself. There are patent lawsuits there. They might not be quite as efficient and draconian as America system, but you know what? We don't put every copyright thief in jail here either. We only get some of them, you know, fortunately. China gets maybe a lower percentage. So these are all just big state actors who have totally draconian illiberal laws which penalize people for doing nothing wrong, like copying other people's products, copying books and songs, listening, learning, emulating and competing. This is what we used to call in America the free market. So no, I don't think we should keep that card to condemn China as being an IP thief. We can condemn China for other things or doing that are wrong, but not for IP. In fact, there's a book I read which is interesting. It's like, and the title is an ancient Chinese saying, to steal a book is an elegant offense. But what that gets said is that there's nothing wrong with learning and sharing knowledge and spreading it and I think we should adopt that attitude instead of attacking China and making them our enemy where we don't need to. Your comments, I'll open it to questions. I have a question for both of you. First of all, thank you so much for being here today and providing such valuable insights. First of all, for Stefan, what does the process of getting rid of intellectual property look like and what does a post intellectual property world then look like? I have more questions so I'll come back later. But for now, for Peter, does intellectual property cause like monopolization and do you think that this is a problem and do you think the US oversteps its boundaries when it comes to intellectual property? Was it a lost part of the question? Do you think that the United States oversteps its boundaries when it comes to intellectual property like Stefan was suggesting? Okay. What would an IP free world look like? It's almost like asking an anarchist libertarian like me, what would a free world look like? It's like, I don't know, but I'd be pretty happy, right? People that imagine that things would stay the same with a few differences when there's radical changes are just wrong. So for example, the reason that we oppose laws that we oppose like, I don't know, abortion laws or drug laws or whatever, you oppose them because they have consequences. They have effects in the real world. If there was a law that had no effect then you would just let it be a dead letter of law and you wouldn't whine about it, right? So clearly if we get rid of patent and copyright things would change. And so if you pretend like some libertarians do that, oh, don't worry about the poor if we get rid of welfare, the private charity will take care of them because then the question will be, are you guaranteeing that? Because welfare is a guarantee and that's what I want although it's not a guarantee because the government's going bankrupt and can't do any of this anyway, but whatever, you know what I mean? So you can't pretend like there will be no change. If we got rid of patent and copyright it would basically hurt the industries I mentioned although it might not in the long run, but because they're trapped by this system, right? Hollywood, music, pharma, big agriculture. But right now they're extracting rents basically from everyone in the world, Americans and others around the world and I think that's a transfer of wealth which is unjust and it's good to end that. So what would the world look like? Well, business models would change, business models that have adapted to the current age. Now, for copyright we can make a guess because we've seen changes in our own lives because streaming has become the new thing and that has ended the ability of a Madonna to make $100 million on CD sales. No one buys music anymore and that's not because of copyright, that's because of technology, things change. That was a brief blip in human history just like the buggy whip was a brief blip in human history and people aren't buying buggy whips and candles anymore in the way they used to because the electric light bulb and the automobile, they change these things, these business models change. And so musicians now, you'll see a lot more musicians, they don't make as much money off of CD sales and they don't get much off of streaming royalties so they do concerts and they tour. They've adapted their business model. We can't predict everything. Now, poets, they used to make millions off of poetry books, right? Oh no, sorry, they never did. I'm not sure how they'll adapt. I don't think anything's adapted. So I think an IP-free world honestly would have a less distorted cultural landscape. You would have people freer to use, I mean, hip-hop and rap music in the beginning did a lot of sampling. That's basically illegal now, right? Unless you get a license. So that whole musical form would have been stifled in this grave, in this crib if copyright had been enforced maximally as it is now in this modern digital age. So we can't predict what new forms of music and art would emerge if people are free to use and reuse and remix without worrying about stepping on someone's toes. As far as invention goes, and I think copyright, copyright is number two on my list of evils because it lasts longer and it does stifle freedom of expression and freedom of the press and it distorts culture and it is threatening internet freedom. There's all these laws and treaties that are designed to stop you from using the internet as you want because it might violate someone's copyright. So copyright's a big threat, but patent, I think is even worse, it does more damage to the human race because the reason that we're richer than the Romans is not that we're smarter. We might be dumber if you've seen the movie Idiocracy. The reason we're richer than the Romans is because we have a bigger technological base of information to draw from because we're later down the chain and our descendants will be even richer if we don't kill ourselves with nuclear war with China or with Russia or with AI, implosion or gray goo or something like that, right? So the point is the reason that we're rich is because of the knowledge that we have and the patent system impedes the development and spread of that knowledge. So the patent system is literally killing untold billions of human beings depending how you look at your timeframe. So the patent system is only a 17 year or so period but it's even worse because it literally kills so many people and makes us poorer. So a world without patents would be a richer world because we would be more advanced technologically. We would have more recipes and things we developed to manipulate matter and to make our lives all better. We could cure more diseases, solve more, provide for hungry people, provide housing. So I think an IP free world would be way better because we'd be richer and freer and culture would not be as distorted. So that's my take on that question. Thank you. Sure. Yeah, thanks. So, yeah, is it a monopoly? Yes, as I've maintained, I think it's an admission of failure by the government that they can't properly protect contracts and then give very arbitrary number of years protection. Your second part, does the US overstep its boundaries? Well, let me talk about the EU. What they're doing more and more is to try to link trade deals with all kinds of things. They almost had a deal with the Latin American economies and then they suddenly say, oh, we actually also want you to implement this range of regulations in your domestic regulatory rulebook and these countries say, well, I thought the idea was to have a trade deal, not you telling us what regulations to introduce. So obviously the US is much more powerful than European nations. So has been doing that equally including for patents. And as I mentioned, there's many arbitrariness in the system and absolutely many opportunities I think you can find to improve the situation. I was reading in Stephen's book how this is domestically how there's a patent for a method of exercising a cat, patent number 5443036 in the 90s. And the method is shining a laser light onto the floor to fascinate the cat and cause it to chase the light. So apparently somebody filed a patent protection for that. So which I think is a good example to demonstrate Stephen's point that well, he would just throw the whole thing overboard. For me, I do think there's justification for it. And I do think you can definitely, like the example of Thailand, I didn't know the example, but it strikes me as an example that you could say, wow, I mean, here maybe if you're looking at some kind of a cost benefit analysis, that may have actually been not the right thing not the right thing to do. But yeah, in general, I'm not happy with countries, including the US attaching all kinds of conditions to trade. Indeed, ideally you have a unilateral free trade, but with trade deals, you can try to get both sides to open up. As I mentioned, yeah, like I can see still a place for IP in trade deals if European countries can suddenly start pirating Netflix to a high degree. I do think that's gonna hurt ultimately innovation, which you, Stephen, you seem to concede, but then to be fair, you say that something better is gonna come in the place. I think to tread carefully with this is the right path forward and to at least start with rationalizing the system. I think we should both hopefully already agree with that and to cut out the worst excesses of the, yeah, the, in NIP, I think that would be already, you know, a good step forward to make it more in line with some ideals of efficiency, fair trade-offs, but as I mentioned, these are very arbitrary because the whole thing is at least from my point of view a second best, the best option would be to protect every contract anywhere all the time, which is not gonna happen. Thank you. Hello, I wanna thank you both again for being here. I have a question first for Peter. Stephen mentioned the way in which some pharmaceutical companies take lots of government money to fund their research and development. And so I suppose if the purpose of intellectual property is to allow for these creators to recoup their research and development costs, when that money is coming from the government, how should we feel about that? And my question for Stephen is Peter mentions the way in which intellectual property is not the only barrier to the dissemination of drugs, for example. What is your opinion of the idea that by releasing an IP waiver for vaccines, for example, you alienate the companies like Moderna, like Pfizer, who have the resources and the know-how to actually disseminate these more successfully? Thank you. Well, yeah, I mean, I personally wouldn't support the government handing out these fortunes to private companies. I mean, maybe university, something I could go along with more easily, even that ideally like, of course, a completely free academic system. But yeah, again, in the second best world where this happens, what do you do then? And I think like whatever thing, if such privileges are given, I would not mind if it comes with certain strains attached. And one of these strains could be indeed to enjoy the monopoly to a lesser degree or to have to share maybe part of the proceeds with the taxpayer in some way. Of course, you know, the problem is when you're in the second best context, one intervention and one bureaucratic distortion leads to the other. So ideally I wouldn't prefer to go there, but I do think it's fair to criticize the fact that they get lots of research money and then they can cash in privately. That's a fair argument, yeah. Yeah, and that comment about one distortion leads to, the other is reminiscent of what Ludwig R. Mises said that controls lead to controls. When the government intervenes in the economy, it leads to problems and then people complain and the government has another control and it never ends. As for the contract point, I'm not opposed to second best solutions. And if your first best solution would be moving to a contract system, I assure you that every entrenched interest for IP would disagree with you because they know that if you move to a contract system, it's a local property, which is what we call in law an in-rem or a real right. It's a right against property, a right to go against the world, whether you have a contract with someone or not. You know, like you own your car, you own your house because it's an in-rem right. It's a property right. People can't break into your house only if you have an agreement with them ahead of time. Contract rights or in-personum rights are different. They're rights that only apply as between the parties. And so when you imagine that you can build an IP right, which is a property right on a contract, which is an in-personum right, you can't do it because you can't bind third parties. When A and B make a deal with each other, they cannot bind C. This is the whole problem. This is the reason why the IP industry wants patent and copyright law. And if you got rid of it and replaced it with contract law, which by the way, you wouldn't replace it, we already have contract law. It's like we have it right now. We have fraud law, we have contract law, we have property law already, then IP law would disappear and they know this. So the idea that, oh, if you're against copyright and patent law, you're just against contracts because really copyright and patent are about contracts. BS, they're not. Oh, I found a book on a park bench and there was a little notice on the front page that says by opening this book, you hereby agree not to copy it. So you're bound by a contract. And if you sell it to a third party, they're also bound to. It's all mystical nonsense. I mean, what if it said by opening this book, you just agree to give me a thousand bucks a month for life? Oh, sorry, I'm gonna put the book back down. This is not how contracts work. Intellectual Property is not based upon contract. This is a lie that is told by defenders of IP over and over again or a confusion. It's just not true. As for the drugs, well, I think why I touched on that. I'll stop here. Time for another question. Hello, my name is Teresa. Thank you so much for coming out today. We are so happy to have you. I think I'm wondering every, a lot of conversations about IP seem to be mostly focused on the pharmaceutical industry, which makes sense because it, that's probably where the most serious implications are. But I see a lot of stories of young professionals kind of having corporations slap their name on new inventions by younger folks and kind of ending up profiting off of that in other sectors, mostly creative ones. I know this happens a lot in the fashion industry or even in the music industry to a certain degree. And I just wonder if there is anything or any regard systematically to ensure that enforcement is prioritized across different sectors and also the individual versus corporation dynamic of it. I'm also curious if you could speak a little bit on that as well. Yeah, thank you. What was the last question? If you could speak on the dynamic between individual and corporation level. So yeah, how IP might succeed or fail in protecting individual innovation or stifling it. I know it's a double-edged sword, so thank you. Well, I mean, in terms of companies sort of buying up innovation rights from small players. That's quite standard, right? Typically you have established companies not being able to innovate as well anymore. They're big mollocks, not as bad as the government, but still pretty bureaucratic sometimes. And they focus then on looking around, okay, what are the new innovators here? And basically biding up to maybe stifle innovation or try to stop competition or hope to benefit and grow and use it to challenge their competitors. So in itself, there's nothing wrong with that strategy. I do think if you're like a young innovator, you may want to resist. There's small startups that say, oh, we want to remain independent. I think it wasn't the Snapchat innovator. Didn't he refuse like a massive offer? I mean, maybe wrong, but yeah, like you could point at examples. And as long as it's happening in a free market with all rights respected, I would not have a problem with it. In fact, as my example shown with Ms. Kariko with her RNA, I mean, she tried on her own. It failed in the end, thanks to the fact that it was sort of protected. She could continue and it eventually became something useful. So yeah, I think, and in terms of your second part, like individual versus cooperation, what is that then, Oro? Yeah, I think for this scenario in particular, I was more thinking about the unpaid intern who just has an idea and ends up having said idea kind of quite, not necessarily a transaction of ideas, but more of this exploitative potential for IP protections and in that scenario, I guess I was kind of wondering what my, how am I an individual who has an experience like this be protected when dealing with a corporation that might have the funds to go ahead with the process of patenting and such. And is this even a concern that has had systematically or a conversation that you have even, yeah? Yes, good question. I mean, I think any system is imperfect, right? I'm sure in this ideal system or whatever ideal system we have, there will still be all kinds of unfair things happening that are not necessarily against the law. Somebody trying to convince a young intern to work for free and then basically profiting from this person's ideas is clearly then not fair, but at the same time, it's legal in that ideal system. And I think the argument would be that look, this is an imperfect system. It's the best there is, but once in a while, there will be failures as well, yeah. Thank you. Yeah, I would say that if there's patenting copyright law, it's not a free market, number one. So you can't just say whatever happens in a market that's dominated by these special interest privileges, it's a free market. So what happened was the common law evolved certain legal rights. Two of them were trademark, which was originally rooted in this vague notion of fraud, which is a lie, but that was the idea. And then trade secret, which is also confused, but okay. And then patenting copyright came along as these privileges. Because the free market economists of the 1800s were objecting to these patenting copyright privileges, government granted monopoly privileges, the defenders, these entrenched industries, said, oh no, it's a type of property. So they all got lumped under the IP intellectual property rubric. So these four classic types of intellectual property emerged in the late 1800s, patent copyright, trademark, and trade secret. And then of course, the legislatures got involved after democracy took the field after World War I, and legislation became dominant and started submerging the previous customary law of the civil law in Europe and the common law in the Anglo-American sphere. And to the point where legislation and then treaties became the dominant form of law. And of course, the legislatures started inventing all new sorts of rights. And so there's other types of IP rights now. There's not just patent and copyright and trademark and trade secret. There's also both whole designs and database rights and the Semiconductor Masked Work Protection Act and moral rights in Europe. And now there's headline rights for copying a newspaper headline or linking rights. There's always attempts to always, always, always expand the domain of intellectual property because of this fundamental mistake that was made because of the utilitarian ethos and because of the propaganda by the IP industry participants and because of the mistake made by the interpretation of John Locke's theory, his labor theory of property, which I didn't have time to get into. And the latest one is fashion, because you mentioned fashion. Fashion designs are not technically protected. So you could have a brand new hot couture if I'm pronouncing that right design in New York and then the next year Walmart might have a copy of it because they're not stopped from doing that. And by the way, we don't have a shortage of fashion because we don't, but there's always people that say we should have fashion rights too. They always want to extend it. So what has happened in the meantime? In the meantime, you have producers of fashion who don't like the fact that they don't have a special type of IP for themselves. So what do they do? They look through the catalog of IP rights and they said, well, maybe we can use trademark. I know, I'm Chanel, I'm Louis Vuitton. I can put my logo all over my purses and then it's covered by trademark. If someone knocks off my purse, now they're violating my trademark. So we leveraged their one type of IP right to protect their fashion designs. But why did they do that? If you buy a Mercedes, you don't see a million Mercedes logos on the car. Right, it's a bizarre thing that we've gotten used to, but it's just an artifact of the existence of IP. If we didn't have a copyright, if we didn't have trademark, then I don't think we would have seen, you know, a Louis Vuitton purse with the LV symbol over, maybe we would, we don't know, but we can tell that this is an example of how culture is distorted by the existence of IP law. This is not the most harmful thing that IP law does. I don't think I would point to the existence of bizarre purses as the worst thing that IP has done. As I said, it's killing people from patents and putting people in prison for copyright and restricting internet freedom. Those are the worst things and restricting freedom of the press and freedom of the speech. But trademark and trade secret and the other types of laws all have their costs. And the problem is that they're not always seen. This is something that some of the great Austrian economists and libertarians like Henry Haslett and Frederick Vasiat have pointed out that the art of economics and the art of political theorizing is to recognize that there are things that we don't see and there are things that we see. And if we see something that's harmful, we can complain about it. But if something never gets done because it was prevented from happening, there's no one around to complain about it, but it's still a cost. If the people are taxed for some student loan relief bill or a COVID relief bill and then those multi billions of dollars now can't be used by the private owners who would have had it to build a private bridge or something, you never see the bridge didn't exist. And so yeah, there's nothing really to complain about. But that's what the art of economics is about. Understanding there's always a cost to anything you think is a benefit, especially if it's done by coercion of the state. All right, yes. To ask you a question, I'm seeing that we have three questions and only a few minutes left. So I'll ask that each of the three folks who'd like to ask a question, ask one succinct question, we'll take them all at once and then we'll give each speaker an opportunity to respond to anything that's come up from all the questions and tie up your remarks. Please. Okay, so I feel like neither of you addressed some of the major criticisms of either of the policies that you're suggesting. So of the current system, some of the major criticisms include like one person buying a pharmaceutical company and then raising the price of insulin 30 times what it was before just so they can make a profit. That had nothing to do with the actual innovation of the insulin to begin with. And then on your side, you haven't actually discussed how you would protect the innovation that is, like if a drug costs a billion dollars to make it, how are you gonna make that profitable to the company to actually make that billion dollar drug? So both of you like two key policy changes that you would implement if you could that would make the world better in your opinion. Just that are not just like throwing the whole thing away because we all know that's not actually feasible. So yeah, that's my question. Thank you. The next question. Not really a question, but yeah. My question's for Stephen, which is that I heard a lot about how you, international IP laws heard developing states by making it so they can access reasonable prices. But my question is what if somebody, what if those countries have their own intellectual property or own inventions? Doesn't it also like, doesn't that hinder imperialism if you have a robust intellectual property law that makes it so that developed nations can't then steal those ideas and realize the potential gains of taking the ideas of developing nations? My question goes more into the trademark aspects of intellectual property and it's like with the businesses that are trying to put themselves out there with specific set of beliefs and practices like ethical production and they are trying to trademark that abroad and within different countries. How are they going to protect their business and also claim that they're actually doing those practices if it's not protected by intellectual property rights and if other states could just use their logo, use their trademark and all of that and present it as such. And I guess for your side would be how did IP laws actually help prevent those things from happening. Our conversation in the same order that we began, Mr. Kup. Yeah, well first question. Well, that's a question about, yeah, can this monopoly be abused? As I mentioned, yeah, absolutely. And it's sort of a privilege that the holder of the monopoly gets in like imperfect second best scenario. So I think it's absolutely justified to put some, to rein this in a little bit and I'm sure you can point at examples where this has not happened again, like if, forget the pharma, but in the music industry somebody comes up with a nice song, sells it to somebody else under condition that they cannot commercialize it. They do it anyway, somehow, it's out there because they violated the contract, then the sort of the imperfect thing is, okay, let's give a monopoly, let's give a privilege, but then, yeah, let's also restrain that monopoly. I have no problems with that. I think that makes absolute sense and then, yeah, maybe the second question, sorry, I was a little unsure about that. Where is the lady? You're welcome to just respond to the ones that were clear and we'll play up on that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, fine. Sorry, I can opt towards it if you want. I think that was the question for Stephen, right? Okay, let me go through them quickly. Drugs, okay, you want a practical solution? First of all, the reason that the costs of innovating a new drug are high are because of state interventions. The FDA, which some of us libertarians call the Federal Death Administration, they impose these crazy clinical trials and by the way, during the process, the applicant has to reveal their secrets and so by the seven years have gone by the time the process is over, all the competitors are ready to go. So instead of saying the government's going to impose a billion dollars of costs on you, which by the way, during COVID they didn't, the government paid for it and accelerated it with emergency authorizations anyway. So it's all nonsense in the case of COVID. But instead of the government opposing a billion dollars and then giving you a patent monopoly to let you charge a monopoly price for 17 years to try to recoup that and then extending it for five years if the FDA delayed you, why not get rid of the FDA? Okay, that's a little bit radical. A compromise proposal, which I've come up with is when the second company, the second generic competitor to the first authorized patent holding drug pharmaceutical manufacturer wants to apply to the FDA for clearance, the FDA simply says, okay, then you have to split the clinical trial costs with the first company pro rata. So come up with half of that cost and you can come in. And then the third one comes in, it's got to pay a third to the other guys. So that would be one practical way to do this if you don't want to abolish the FDA. As for inventions in the third world, I actually believe that patents slow down innovation if there are third world countries that have innovation and they do, of course, they would be better off not having a patent system. So I mean, my whole argument is that patents are contrary to property rights and they harm the countries that have them. As for ethical production, like if you pretend like you have a product that is solving some kind of humanitarian crisis and you're just lying, the trademark system now doesn't stop that. The trademark system is just one way that you can stop your competitors from using your name. That's all. And so the private alternative to trademarks wouldn't do anything. I mean, trademarks don't solve this problem anyway. Just like copyright doesn't stop plagiarism or fraud, they have nothing to do with each other. Everyone confuses all these things. So trademarks are only there to stop a competitor from using a similar name. It doesn't mean that you have to be honest in your advertising. That should be covered by fraud law. And if the problem is that fraud law is not adequate, it's not an argument that we need more intellectual property law. It's an argument that the state is bad at everything except for the one thing it's good at, which is death and destruction. And so the state is bad at enforcing its own contract law, its own property law, its own civil rights laws, its own constitutional laws, and its own fraud laws. So yeah, so the argument would be there that we should replace the state system with a private system that enforces fraud law in a better way, at least argue that the state's fraud laws should encompass lying to customers about your mission statement or whatever. But it's got literally nothing to do with intellectual property and trademark. I want to thank both of our speakers. And if I can ask you to hold your applause for a moment, whether you've landed on the side of revolution or reform, whether you're hatching your next big idea and hoping to make money or release it without protection to the world. This has been a fascinating conversation and we'll continue the conversations this evening at 7.30, talking about culture currency and asking should developing states be willing to sacrifice control over their cultures for the potential economic benefits of marketization. So please join me in thanking our two speakers and I'll see you at 7.30. Thank you.