 Everyone, this is Robert Wenzel. Welcome to a special edition of the Robert Wenzel show. You didn't hear the usual music introduction because what we're doing is we're putting the raw audio tape up of the debate I'm having here with Stefan Kinsella. So this will be on my site economicpolicyjournal.com and it will also be at Stefan's site as part of his podcast. Actually I don't know how Stefan has what his link is so I'll have him mention that when he gets on the show which is right now Stefan so take it away. You have eight minutes. Thanks Bob. I'll try to use less than that. Long time no see and I don't really know if this is going to be a debate or a discussion or an interrogation because I don't really know if you have a whole position on IP so I'll wait for your statement to see. Been waiting for a few years to see what you could come up with. Let me just lay out a few things that I think ought to be fairly uncontroversial and I won't ask you to positively read every one of them because that's going to be tedious but what I would say is I would ask you to specifically tell me which ones you disagree with when it's your turn or later in our discussion. Otherwise I'm going to have to assume that there are pretty reasonable assumptions. Number one, you and I are both Austrian libertarians and I'm an anarchist and I'm assuming you're something of the same and a discussion about legal policy and rights and property rights among fellow libertarians and Austrians is going to be different than one between say me and the mainstreamer. I might have to see my whole position against intellectual property is based upon my understanding of Austrian and libertarian property rights but if I'm talking to a mainstreamer, utilitarian, Ecosian, a leftist, they don't necessarily agree with property rights at least the same way as I do so I can't even say that the problem with IP is that it violates property rights because they don't even necessarily agree with property rights at least the way I understand it. I'm going to assume you and I both agree and that it's uncontroversial that there ought to be a free market and a system of private property rights in scarce resources. I'm hoping that you and I can both agree on that and I don't care what your basis is or what others basis is, I don't care if it's utilitarian, consequentialist, pragmatic, intuitionist, the ontological or whatever. The basic of libertarian philosophy and the free market philosophy is that there ought to be private property rights in scarce resources. So if we can agree on that then all I need to show is that this idea of intellectual property rights sets up some kind of right that is incompatible with what you and I already agree with. Okay, I don't need to have an entire theory of property rights. All I need to do is point out that these other rights are incompatible with private property rights that you and I both already agree with. So then what I would say is this, I admit that among all the people arguing about this issue, especially in the classical liberal and libertarian framework in Austrian, I do myself personally happen to know a lot about the law because I'm a practicing patent attorney for the last 20 plus years, but I don't think we need to go into the details of it. However, I do believe that someone like you to establish the case for IP, which is your task here, I believe, you can't just pick apart things in my argument. You have to have a positive case of properties. You need to have a clear and coherent definition of what you mean by intellectual property and why you think it's justified and why you think it is compatible with regular property rights. It will not do to find little niggling things that are misstatements and people's criticisms of IP. Even if I'm wrong in all of my criticisms of IP, it doesn't mean IP is justified. So what we agree on as private property supporters is we agree on the need for private property rules in scarce resources. That's what we agree on. What we don't agree on is whether you can extend a similar type of right to intellectual things, particularly patent and copyright. So what I would ask you to do is to do a couple of things. Number one, confirm that I'm correct, that we both agree on private property rights in scarce resources. And then also, I would like you to give me, tell me what your general theory of property is that would extend to IP, how it differs from regular IP, that is patent and copyright, trademark, trade secret law, and current laws. What types of IP would it protect that the current law doesn't protect? Would you protect reputation which Rothbard disagree with by the way? Would you protect databases? Would you protect fashion rights, which are not really protected by IP right now? Would you make it international or would it be national? So I want to know what exactly do you favor. And then if you're not able to do that, at least give me one very simple, clear example. It's one clear case, the cleanest, most direct case you can think of that shows an obvious case for intellectual property of some type in a free market that doesn't depend upon the state. Just give me one example and explain how it's compatible with private property rights. Now my view is that the problem with intellectual property is that it is incompatible with private property rights. It's incompatible with capitalism. So it will not do for the opponents to say, well you're a communist, you're a leftist, you're a Marxist, you don't believe in this, you don't believe in that. It won't do to mix together a utilitarian case or a consequentialist case with a principal property rights case. You need to be clear what you're arguing for. Now my argument is very, very simple. And I would like to know if you disagree with this. I am sure Bob that you agree that people that have property rights and scarce resources have the right to make contracts with those resources. And I'm sure you're familiar with like the restrictive covenant idea or what's called an easement sometimes. So let's say you and I are neighbors and let's say you and I both have homes next to each other and neither one of us wants the other one to use our property for industrial or pig farm uses or hideous colors on our houses because we don't want to reduce the value of our property because of an unsightly or unenjoyable neighborhood. So let's say I grant you Bob the right to prevent me from painting my house purple or I grant you the right to prevent me from using my property in a certain way like for a pig farm. And you grant me a similar right. So we have these reciprocal rights established by a restrictive covenant. And basically it means you're a partial owner of my property and I'm a partial owner of your property. I retain most of the rights of use of my property but you have this detail right that I've granted you. Now this is perfectly legitimate in a free society because it's a contractual arrangement between you and me. The problem with IP is that IP grants this veto right to a third party. It lets them tell me how I cannot use my own property even though I never contractually agreed to this limitation. And even though I'm not using my property in a tortuous way or in an aggressive way like pointing a gun at someone or colluding onto their property or being a nuisance, etc. I'm using my property in a way that is totally private and does not invade the borders of your property. So I've not committed a tort, I've not committed a crime and I've not agreed to a contract. And yet IP law grants this veto right, this negative servitude or negative easement we might call it to the third party. By virtue of the state law right now and I suppose in your system, in a private system, third parties can just assert that they have this right to control how other people use their property. Now to my mind that is socialist, it is anti-competitive, it's anti-free market, and it would be completely laughed out of court and no one could get away with such an insane scheme. So I would like to see your response to that and I would like to see from you a positive case for intellectual property that is compatible with private property rights and I will stop here and let you go. Okay, thanks Stefan. The best way really to show my perspective on IP is to really discuss your book from beginning to end. I think there are so many errors in there and that as we discuss the errors it will become clear as to how I view IP different from you and how I would envision a free market IP world. But before we get to that what I really want to talk about for a minute because I've been getting some flak in the comments on my blog post is with regard to supposed names I've been calling you and the hard time I've been giving you. But at the same time I have not called you a clown, I have not said you were going to wheeze a lot of anything, I never said you were going to wheeze a lot of anything like a worm. You did all those things Stefan and what I want to do is I want to set the record straight exactly how this debate started and where you came in with this stuff and ask you why you did it. This is what happened. On January 23rd I wrote a column discussing some Jeff Tucker intellectual property theory and I wrote I continue to receive emails asking me to discuss my view on intellectual property and how it differs from the views of Stefan Kinsella and Jeffrey Tucker. As far as Kinsella is concerned he has written a deeply thought out and complete theory of IP that I will respond to in full book-length form. Kinsella's theory deserves serious treatment and I will not attempt to address that discussion in a blog post. So I don't see anything there that would cause you to go on an attack at me. Now from there what happened is I actually sent you emailed me back or you emailed me and said I have a new podcast. Do you want to do a joint discussion about IP? I can put it on my feed and you can on yours. So again very polite no problem then you sent I agreed to do that I said it was a great idea and then I sent let's see you sent a letter to me saying I think in part that said I think we should both commit ahead of time to be respectful, sincere, civil and give each other adequate time. No ad hominem, no personal stuff just an Austrian libertarian oriented focus on truth. I will not try to baffle you with legalistic bullshit just because I know IP statutes. So what happened is I actually sent that email to somebody else because there was some other information that I wanted to get out and the person I sent that email to me said boy does he have the wrong impression of you. I don't recall you're ever being ad hominem personal or disrespectful to anyone. Now at that point I sent an email back to this person defending you. I said Concella is probably getting that from Tucker. I actually have a good relationship with Concella. We once sat down and we talked a lot about his background childhood and all. I think he's wrong about IP but I think he is a very decent guy. I brought you a drink and I guess that didn't go very far. So the next thing after defending you the next thing I read you're calling me a clown. You say I'm going to weasel out of the bait that I'm going to do it like a worm and it goes off. Why did you do that Stefan? Well we can talk about a few of these things if you like it's going to eat into our time and honestly I'm afraid. Well I want to talk about it. Let me tell you something. I still have time left Stefan. You did three and a half minutes. Exactly. You also at some point you stated that I'll wait until you're ready. Okay yeah. It's some other point you stated that you did not think it was a mistake to make the debate. So my thought there is that someone told you it was a mistake because why would you say that you invited me in the whole thing. Okay and then you start with these attacks. And so basically what you have really done is really pissed me off. So whoever told you that it was a mistake I mean once we go into the details you'll see the work I've done on this it was probably a mistake but your second mistake was to piss me off about it. Stefan I don't know what you're doing but why did you call me all those names? Go ahead. Alright so let me just say either we're going to get to your positive presentation of intellectual property and I don't know if we will because honestly Bob I searched for 25 years for a long time for a way to justify IP. Knowing Rothbardianism, knowing Ayn Rand, knowing Nieces and knowing IP very well as a practicing attorney I searched hard for a way to justify IP for years and I finally realized I was failing, I mean not because I'm stupid but because it can't be justified. I was making a fundamental mistake. I really would be amazed if you've come up with an argument I have not heard of and already reputed. I have exhaustively catalogued and reputed dozens of fallacious arguments. So I suspect you either have yet another one of those or you just don't have an argument and you just want to nitpick on my stuff which is fine but the point was to try to justify IP. What I want to do is to get you to agree that the burden of proof is on you my friend because IP is a state created, legislated system of patent and copyright. I cannot believe that you actually defend patent and copyright so you must have in mind something sort of similar that a private system can come up with and that's fine. I want to hear about it but the burden of proof my friend is on you to justify it not to find nitpicks with my theory. Now, if we have time to get to that after all this background stuff that's fine but I'll address your questions for sure. Feel free to interrupt because we're kind of going back and forth. I just prefer to keep it freeform if it's okay with you as long as neither one of us steals the microphone. Bob, for several years you have out of the blue watched criticism starting with Jeff Tucker and then with me about our IP stuff and you kept saying it's communist, it's Marxist, it's all this crap mixing together the incentive argument with the principled argument promising you're going to write a book on it someday. Now this has been several years you've been doing this so obviously you have something in your craw and you have this innate theory which a lot of libertarians used to or did that IP is somehow legitimate and people that attack it are anti-property. Now, just because the word property is used... Stefan, Stefan, you're two minutes and something. I just want to stop here. You want to answer the question about Tucker? The specific answer I want is why regardless of what I said about your theories and whether it's communistic or not by the way in your introduction you called something communistic so why is it that you can call something communistic and I can't? Stefan, Stefan, you did that. Stefan, you did that. I have a coherent definition of my term. So do I, Stefan? Why do you think I don't? Why didn't you call me a worm? Because you have promised to write this book for years now. I don't think you're going to write it. I don't think you have a coherent theory of IP. If you have it, I'll be happy to hear it. Let me stop you there, Stefan. Do you want my answer or not Bob? Bob, let me get my answer then you can respond. My answer is I thought you would weasel out of the debate because you were afraid to debate me because you know you're going to lose. The entire tide is turning against IP. You know this, I know this, almost all Austrians, all principal libertarians are against IP and you see that this kind of weird idea you have is being completely defeated and demolished and you're getting worried. You know you don't have a positive theory. If you did, you would have written something by now. That's what I thought. That's where I thought you'd weasel out of the debate and you didn't and I'm proud of you for not doing it but it's not hostile. It's not personal. It was a prediction. It's got nothing to do with the legitimacy of IP. Whether or not I'm wrong or not about you agreeing to have a debate about IP is not a justification for IP which is what we have to keep our focus on. Now what other side issues do you want to get out of the way? Go ahead. Do you think I'm a worm? No, I don't think you're a worm. Do you think I'm a weasel? I thought you might weasel out of the debate. Yes, I did think you might do that. What basis? I just told you because you had been saying you're going to write a book for a long time and then when we agreed to a debate, you put it off two, three months. Maybe, Stefan, it's because I take my time and I am very careful before I come out with something so I know exactly what I'm talking about. I agree. I accept your explanation. I told you already. So am I a clown? Stefan, am I a clown? You make some clown-ish arguments, yes. And you treat some of your guests in a clown-ish way, yes. Give me an example. Oh, I can't think of any off-hand. But no, I don't... All right, let's start the debate. Okay, Stefan? Make me to do it. On page 18 of your book, which by the way I think is terrible, misleading, poorly framed arguments, illogical at points, quite frankly bizarre, it's getting the attention. You write on page 18. On the other hand, there is a long tradition of opposition to patent copyright. More than the opponents include Rothbard, McElroy Palmer, and it goes on. Let me repeat. On the other hand, there is a long tradition of opposition to patent copyright. Can you explain, Murray Rothbard's opposition to copyright to me? Yes, he opposed state copyright and patent law. In fact, there's an article on lewrockwall.com. Oh, hold it. Stefan, we started this by saying, you started the conversation, you're opening by saying, we are talking about free market in a way that we could not talk about with people that hold different views, that hold state views, and so on and so forth. Are you against IP, state law? Well, we need to define our terms. Intellectual property is a fairly recent term that the government has come up with to group together several state laws. Stefan, are you in favor of copyright on a free market? Am I in favor of property right on the free market? Of course. I just said that in my opening statement. So you're not against intellectual property? Yes, I'm in favor of property rights in scarce resources, which is what the libertarian tradition is all about. Yeah, but then you're going to say that, you're not in favor of copyrights the way a person would normally think about it. In other words, if I write a book and sell it to be with the determination that it shouldn't be shown to anyone else but C gets hold of it, you're saying all copyright bets are off. Am I correct? I don't think that's a precise statement for me to even respond to. First of all, you're not defining your terms. I am quite certain Rothbard was completely opposed to the Copyright Act as enacted by the federal government. Stefan! Bob, you're going to have to let me answer a question. This is not you interrogating me. This is an equal thing. Now you can answer my questions, I can answer yours. Look, Rothbard's view of copyright was a little murky. I agree. People are back and forth on this. Some people say he was totally opposed. Some people say he was partly in favor. He was against the copyright statute. He was against the patent statute, but he had this idea that you could use some kind of contractual mechanism, which he called copyright. But he used it, if you have read his Ethics of Liberty, he used it in the context of a mousetrap, which Bob is an invention, which is covered by patent law. So he apparently thought you could somehow put a stamp on some object that you owned that would limit the ability of the buyer to use it in certain ways. And he's correct about that. You can do that. But then to take that and say that that implies this should be an illegal property or copyright is just incorrect as a factual matter. All that is is contract law between two parties. So you have yet to define to me what you think in almost a property years or what you think is justified. So you've got to tell me what you're defending here. What you write here in your book, you're not saying anything about the Copyright Act or Government Intervention. You're saying on the other hand there is a long tradition of opposition to Pat in copyright. Warning opponents include Rothbard. Do you want me to read what Rothbard said about copyright? He wasn't talking about the Copyright Statute, Bob. I'm talking here about the Copyright Statute. Bob, first of all, this is the introductory section of my essay. What I was just trying to do is set the stage and explain there has been a lot of debate about this issue. There have been some libertarians and other free market advocates who have favored and endorsed modern patent copyright law and some that have generally opposed it. These isn't Hayek had statements which indicate especially Hayek skepticism about it. They did not go into it into a lot of depth and neither did Rothbard. And by the way, if you've read Rothbard's Knowledge, True and False chapter in Ethics of Liberty, you will see that he totally rejects the idea of trademark, I'm sorry, of defamation law and reputation rights as in having a property right and something that you create because it has value. That logic would imply if he had thought about it further he would have totally rejected. Look, he admitted patents skew research and development. He admitted the Copyright Statute was a legislative thing. All he said was you could have a contract and people are bound by the contract. That is all Rothbard said. That is not copyright, Bob. Everyone that knows copyright is copyrighted. Let me read you exactly what Rothbard said from Man economy and state. Copyright, in other words, have their basis in prostitution of implicit theft. The copyright is therefore a logical device of property right on the free market. Part of the patent protection now obtained by an adventure could be achieved on the free market by a type of copyright protection. Yeah, because it is due of how patents should be designed. So he has no problem with copyright or patents on the free market. That's completely false. Rothbard has a whole section. The copyright is therefore a logical device of property right on the free market. Stefan, it's his clearest day. The copyright is therefore a logical device of property on the free market. Bob, he's giving the example of a mousetrap. Do you understand that that's an invention? The mousetrap, don't you know the difference between copyright and patent? The mousetrap is a patent. It's not a copyright. I know. That's why Rothbard is confused. No, he wasn't confused. He said in the current law, copyright is with regard to a person that has independent discovery and patent law applies to the United States with regard to the first person that discovers it. Copyright has nothing to do with independent discovery. You're wrong. Copyright has nothing to do with independent discovery. It has to do with the original creation of an expression of some idea. That's it. I'll yield to you on the legal stuff. I don't know that. The non-legal way to understand it, the layman's way to understand it. I don't want to topple your legal bullshit. I'm trying to explain. First of all, you just said that Rothbard misunderstood copyright in implying it to a mousetrap. And a mousetrap has to do with patents. All right. First of all, am I right? I want you to agree with me that it's totally irrelevant to whether IP has justified what Rothbard thought about it. Rothbard could have been right. He could have been wrong. Even if I misdescribed his views on copyright because of his ambiguous use of the word copyright. How is it ambiguous? What is ambiguous about the way he uses copyright? How clear could you be? Copyright is therefore a logical device of property right on the free market. Face it, Steph, on your wrong. It's wrong in the book. You're just completely wrong about what you said. Rothbard is not against copyright in the way it stands now. And he's not against patents. He would tweak the way patent is done in a free market, but he is not against either. It's completely wrong for you to say, on the other hand, there is a long tradition of opposition to patent copyright, including Rothbard. First of all, you really don't think there's a long tradition of opposition to copyright in patent? Not by Rothbard. So what? Let's strike his name off the list. So what? The point is you're in error there. I don't think I'm in error, but it's a side point. Look, you're sloppy as hell in the book. Rothbard is a leading libertarian. A lot of people are going to consider his view, and people who don't have a long period of time to look up IP stuff with what Rothbard said already, and they're going to go to your DM booklet here, and you say Rothbard is in a long tradition of opposition to copyright in patent. Hey, Bob, if you're not... Later on in the essay, I have a several-page section called the Contractual Rothbardian Reserved Right, or something like that. Yeah, and I'm going to come back to that because you completely contradict it right here. What? Where Rothbard is wrong and where he's right. I don't hold punches. Let me explain something. So here's what happens. You're just wrong, Stefan. Face it. But how does this prove IP sentiment? What does it have to do with IP sentiment? It proves you're a sloppy writer and thinker. That's what it proves. So what's your case for IP? What's that? You'll see. It will come along. What is your definition of IP? Be patient. We have one hour and 30 minutes, Stefan. We'll get to you. I'm going to build the base. I am going to destroy you, Stefan. You were so wrong in so many places. It's incredible. But let's move beyond the book. Let me ask you this. Before we go on, I want to know what you think intellectual property is and why it's justified. Just give me one paragraph. I'm not going to do that. You wrote the book I did and you wanted this debate. This interview is not about my book. It's about whether IP is justified, Bob. Yeah. And I'm trying to take a step-by-step process to go through. I don't want to take this to trouble level where you have it in the clouds. Step-by-step, Stefan, we're going to get to you. Be patient, man. We'll get to you. Do you have a problem with patience? Do you have a problem with patience? I would like to introduce me to the debate right now. I'm not going to continue further until you give me a definition of what you mean by AP. You're justifying IP. You tell me what you mean by it. What do you mean by intellectual property? I am building my base towards it. By showing... I'm asking you a question. I want to know what you mean by intellectual property. I can't know what to disagree with you on, Bob. If you won't even define your terms. You chose to debate this way. You chose this way of debating, not me. You agreed to it. I didn't agree to let you ask me a question after question in the target. Look, look, look. If you don't want to answer the questions, I'll just continue. I'll just take my two minutes and go on with my next point. I'll tell you what. I'm happy to answer questions. Unlike you, apparently, you ask me a question, I'll answer it, but then I'm going to ask you one. I would like you to answer my question. I'm getting there. I don't want to wait until 24 minutes until I want to know what you agree on my next question to answer my question. Stefan, I'm going to answer these questions the way it makes sense. I'm not going to let you pull stuff out of the air without the right proper basis. The basis is I'm going to show you with a sloppy writer and that you don't know what the hell you're talking about. I have 16 points I have to go through to get to the point on my view of IP and where you were wrong with 16 points before that, just like you're wrong on this Rothbard thing. Do you want to continue? Your justification for IP is that Kinsella makes mistakes in his book. Therefore, if I had never been born, then there would be no IP justification. No, no, no. My IP view has nothing to do with your views. Thank God. I want to destroy you because, A, you've got me really pissed off with the clown, worm, and weasel comments that you've got me pissed off on. Secondly, you have a following in the Libertarian movement along with Jeff Tucker and you're both so off you're thinking it's so bad, it is so sloppy, it needs to be destroyed. That's what I'm going to do with you, Stephon. All the Libertarians agree with us now. It must drive you guys nuts. What's that? When I get through with this, Stephon, they're not going to be agreeing with very much of you. Let's go on. I now want to bring your attention to a book by Hans Hoppe called Economic Science in the Austrian Method. He quotes Mises in statements and propositions its statements and propositions are not derived from experience. They are like those of logic and mathematics a priori. He's talking about the science of economics. They are not subject to verification and falsification on the ground of experience and tax. They are both logically, they're not meant to see it to any comprehension of historical facts. They are a necessary requirement of any intellectual grasp of historical events. Would you agree with that, Stephon? Jesus Christ. Probably because I agree with almost everything Hoppe has written. This is painful. You're just reading stuff that's tangentially related. You can't get to a defensive IP. Basically saying you don't take empirical evidence and that's what he's saying. Do you agree with that or not? No, I think that's a clumsy way of rephrasing what Hoppe said. Well, first of all, that was Mises, not Hoppe. It was Hoppe quoting Mises. He didn't say what you just said. That was Bob Wenzel's paraphrase. I don't think that's a precise way of... Well, I'm trying to make it simple for you. You say you don't want to go through... You're doing that. Let's try the Hoppe version then. Hoppe says, non-praxeological schools of thought mistakenly believe that relationships between certain events are well-established empirical laws when they are really necessary and logical, praxeological ones. And they thereby behave as if the statement, a ball cannot be read and non-read all over at the same time, requires testing in Europe, America, Africa, Asia and Australia. Over the non-praxeologists also believe that relationships between certain events are well-established empirical laws with predictive implications when our priori reasoning can show them to be no more than information regarding contingent historical connections between events which does not provide us with any knowledge whatsoever regarding the future course of events. Of course, I'm a praxeologist, dude, but listen, you don't have to be a praxeologist or even a Misesian or even an anarchist to oppose IP. All you have to do is understand that there should be private property rights. I'm trying to establish something here. God knows what. You'll find out soon enough. I really doubt it, Bob. You are all over the map, man. You are not a clear thinker. Yeah, well, we'll see about that. On page 20 of your book, you say you have three subject-utilitarian arguments. The one I found most interesting You are utilitarian now, Bob? What the hell are you? Does anyone know? Wait, did I say that? Well, then why are you attacking my criticism of utilitarianism? Maybe a lot. I'm quoting you. I didn't say I was attacking you. I'm quoting you. Bob, all you do is carve and pick. You don't have any positive theory at all. I don't believe you do. Well, like I said, be patient. You're just quoting things in a podcast. I mean, Jesus. Well, we'll get to the meat of this one in a minute, trust me. I don't think you're full of shit. Okay, you don't have to trust me. I'll just read it. I'll just read it. Stefan, it's here. This is an example of the clown thing. Go ahead. Let's see where it goes. Okay, let's see where it goes, Stefan. In addition to the ethical problems utilitarianism is not coherent. It necessarily involves making illegitimate interpersonal utility comparisons as when the cost of IP laws is subtracted from the benefits. You go on to say utilitarian analysis, thoroughly confused in bankrupt. Do you still agree with that? Of course. Okay. So I found interesting. Do I need to start my timer, dude, because you're kind of monopolizing things. I'm going to give you some more minutes and go ahead. Okay, so you have a post-up called Boldern and Levine, The Case Against Patents. Now David Gordon writes in a review that their ethical views seem to be broadly speaking utilitarian. So in other words, you wouldn't agree with their utilitarian views to begin with. Is that correct? Correct. Okay, but anyways, you feature apart from their book, which is utilitarian, which you don't agree with. I think you are, because you want to answer any goddamn questions. I mean, I will tell you, I'm not a goddamn utilitarian. Okay, I have principles. I'm for property rights. I have a theory of property rights. I can tell you what IP is, why disagree with it. You apparently can't answer a single question. Well, but what you do here is you quote them and then you go on to say... Are you even a libertarian? Can you just tell me are you a libertarian? Yeah. Are you an anarchist? I consider myself a private property society person. It's not that I don't know. Look, let's get back on point. Are you an Austrian libertarian anarchist yes or no? Depends upon how you define the terms. But anyways, I want to go back to this Bolger and Levine, the case against Pez. Now this is where you get vicious. You say we can only conclude... I'm quoting utilitarians. Before I'd even heard of Bolger and Levine, as you might know. This was back in 2099 when I wrote this. Bolger and Levine even entered the scene, so I don't really know. Are you no longer against utilitarianism? I just told you I'm not a utilitarian at all. I've never been. No, you're against it. What difference does it make to whether IP is legitimate or not? That's what I don't know. I'm establishing for the libertarian community that you are totally sloppy and off the wall on this stuff. Let me finish this quote for you. If Stefan Kinsella, a patent attorney in Houston is sloppy, that must be Bob Wenzel's inco-hate and undefined definition of IP is justified. What kind of way of archery is that? I told you what I'm doing. I'm trying to destroy you, man. You're right. We can only conclude at this point that people who favor patents on utilitarian grounds are either ignorant or dishonest, who favor patents. So it's okay if they're against patents, but if they favor it, they are either ignorant or dishonest because of a paper that just came out. Maybe Stefan, maybe it's because they didn't read the paper yet. Assuming the paper makes any sense. So then they're ignorant. Ignoring, in a sense, the paper came out last week. You don't know what I'm going to say for the rest of this debate. So you're ignorant to that. That's not the implication you're giving. Further. Do you think utilitarians have a good reason for favoring IP, Bob? Do you think there are good utilitarian reasons for favoring IP? No. You agree with me that utilitarians are wrong in their arguments. But you're saying they're either ignorant or dishonest, but let me ask you. Here's the point. Do you know what Boldrin and Levine's argument is? What argument? In the paper you cite? What paper? You cite a paper. Here are the few lines of the introduction to the case against patents. A paper by Boldrin and Levine. Do you know their argument where you're calling it dishonest if the utilitarian is still in favor of patents? Are you telling me that in my against IP I call Boldrin and Levine dishonest? No, no. You called the people who favor patents dishonest. I think they're either dishonest or ignorant. But why? What in the paper would make them dishonest? Bob, it's 4 minutes. You're quoting a paper, Stefan. What's in the paper, Stefan? It's 4 minutes. It's my turn to reply. Okay, please reply. What's in the paper? I'm not an empiricist. I'm not a utilitarian. However, people like you often mix together the ontological and utilitarian or empirical arguments for IP, flip-flopping back and forth like little totally uncontrolled arguers all the time. You guys put up this argument all the time that you need IP as an incentive to create blah, blah, blah. That's why the founders put it in the Constitution. So, I would like to recognize now the positive case for IP based upon empirical or utilitarian concerns. And my simple reply is, number one, as a proper terrian, as a principle libertarian, I don't care. I'm in favor of property rights and justice, and that is my main argument against it. Just like Ein Rand and Rothbard would argue against laws, against antitrust, things like this, without an empirical backup. In other words, you do not have an empirical argument for your case. In fact, Bob, in the 200-plus years since the country has been founded and since the founders had this hunch that you needed IP, copyright and patent, to incentivize innovation and creativity, there has never been a single unambiguous, comprehensive study that has proved this. In fact, they all proved the opposite. So, what I'm saying is, if you're really a sincere utilitarian and you wanted to encourage creativity and stimulate innovation, if you were aware of the studies that have been done, you would have to say, well, God, I have to oppose patent and copyright, because it looks like, from the evidence, that they deter innovation. So my point is, if you really know these studies, and you're still in favor of IP, while saying you're in favor because of empirical reasons, which you don't have, then you're dishonest and you have another agenda, which I think they do, or you're ignorant and you're not aware of these studies. So it's one of those, too. It's a very logical argument to make. In fact, there are no studies showing that IP promotes innovation. It causes hundreds of billions of dollars of damage and wrecked lives and literal death, jail sentences, extradition, police state enforcement, SOPA, PIPA, the entire thing. These things are monstrous invasions of property rights. Bob, they are just below war, taxation, government schools. Okay, your two minutes is up. Let me ask you again. What is in the paper you cite? What is in the Boldrin Levine paper, The Case Against Patents? Are you talking about the recent paper or the one I cited back in my original article? Which one are you talking about? Tell me, and I, the one. Their basic argument is that they have studied from an empirical, utilitarian point of view the way the IP system works. Primary claims of the people that promote it and that endorse IP saying that it is necessary. So their basic claim is that it's not necessary to promote innovation and that it actually hinders it. That's their argument. They give lots of examples and explanations. And what do they use? What data do they use? I don't know what you mean. They use lots of data. Yeah, but give me data from where? Well, chapter nine of their Against Intellectual Monopoly You're referencing the case against patents. Yeah, but that's a summary of their entire argument. They elaborated it in detail and they're against an ultra monopoly. So, for example, chapter nine talks about pharmaceuticals and they just demolished all the myths about why patents are quote-unquote necessary for the innovation of pharmaceutical drugs. And they rely on tons of regularly established data. I don't know what you want me to tell you. I'll explain because the paper is different stuff on your babbling on because you didn't read the paper. You're just attacking. You don't know what's in it. You can't tell me one damn thing that's in the paper. What's in a paper that I cited in an article 12, 13 years ago? This is September 12th, September 5th, 2012. What the hell are you talking about? Yeah, that's what I was asking you. Were you talking about my original paper and neither one? So what's in the paper? Their paper concludes that there's no... No, what the paper concludes what's in the paper, Stefan? Did you read the paper? Of course I read the paper. I read their whole... What's in it? What's in it? What's in it? Stefan, don't be stupid. What's in the paper? What is their argument? What is their argument? Bob, what are you asking? Why don't you tell me what you're asking? What's in the paper that you can go and you can say that the those in favor of patents on utilitarian grounds are either ignorant or dishonest? What is in the paper? What is in the paper? What does their paper have to do with my claim about the general errors that utilitarians make that are prolific? Because Stefan, I'm trying to destroy you. You piss me off. You're sloppy. You're not clear. You're not making sense. You'll do your homework. And I'm going to... I'm showing... You're just trying to... Bob, you're just trying to evade... Let me tell you what's in the paper, Stefan. Let me tell you what's in the paper. This is what they wrote. Because I read the paper. According to the Bureau of Labor... According to the Bureau of Labor, they have exhibited any particular uptrends. According to the Bureau of Labor of Statistics, annual growth in total factor productivity in the decade 1970-79, in the decade 1970-79, actually, then they quote 1990-99, 2000-2009, they say growth was only about 1.2%. Meanwhile, U.S. research and development expenditures increased 2.5%. So isn't that, first of all, an empirical view that you would object to and that not necessarily even a utilitarian would agree with? Utilitarian can be against either empirical like you are, but still be utilitarian, so this argument would make no sense to them. As it should not to you, if you agree with Mises and Hoppe that I quoted. Am I correct? Yeah, I'm not a utilitarian, but... Okay, so why would you say... Why would you say a utilitarian is dishonest because of this paper? But let me move on. First of all, I'm going to answer now. First of all, I didn't say utilitarians are dishonest because of that paper. You certainly did! We can only conclude at this point after you quote from Baldwin and Levine that people who favor patents are utilitarian grounds are either ignorant or dishonest, and this is a paper you quote from, but you can't tell me anything about! Step on! Come on! If people that are listening will just go to c4sif.org and just go to my resources page and the other links on there. I've got a blog post called Against Intellectual Property and what I did there was I tried to collect as best I could. It's not comprehensive. I totally admit that it's not comprehensive because there's too many papers to comprehensively read summarized linked to and they're not all linkable anyway. But I collected dozens of studies and they are all pushing in the same direction. You have empiricist-minded people and what they do is when they look at this issue they all conclude it looks like this system is distorting things badly. It's resulting in lots of problems. It looks like this system doesn't do what it's claimed. It looks like we can't conclude because the data is ambiguous. So basically there is not a single study that I can find anywhere. Now if you can find one, show me Bob. But I'm just telling you. Are you in favor of empirical research or not? Why are you quoting empirical people? Step on! Why are you quoting this stuff when you said if you agree with Mises and Hoppe it doesn't make any sense? The red balls in Africa? It can't. Well let me ask you this. Would you quote this? Bob, I'm going to hang up if you don't shut the hell up. It's my turn. You're going to break all the rules. I'm hanging up. You can have some stupid blog post title. Now listen to me. First of all I don't know if you're literally retarded or what but your argument here is one of the worst arguments I've ever heard in my life. How? It is stupid Bob. Because like you I think although I don't know what your real motive is anymore like you I'm a defender of justice and private property rights human prosperity, freedom the free market, this kind of stuff as a general matter. And when someone comes along and says we need to have this government intervention which I think destroys lives and destroys individual rights and harms property rights and harms the free market and then they justify it by saying well we need to raise the minimum wage or we need to increase the money supply or we need to do X, Y and Z because it will have beneficial effects. If you increase the minimum wage we'll all be better off. If you have a tariff we'll all be better off. There is nothing wrong with saying well what's your data for that? And then when they give you data there's nothing wrong with saying even by the proponent of protectionism even by their standards their argument doesn't make sense. So there is nothing wrong that's a completely legitimate argumentative technique to take someone's arguments on their own merit and show that they're flawed. So I have no idea what you're talking about you're acting like I'm contradicting myself because I say I'm not an empiricist and yet I'm pointing out the flaws in the arguments of empiricists. Actually that's buttresses my arguments. Of course their arguments are going to be flawed but practical is the moral and justice dovetails with consequences and pragmatic things. There's no reason to expect that the data is going to show that we're all going to be better off when the government institutes a protectionist anti-competitive system of patenting copyright law a system that allows people to censor people's free speech to bully small people to distort the entire cultural landscape and to allow companies to form oligopolies like Apple, Samsung, Google, Motorola, to lock out small competitors because they have these explicitly anti-competitive grants of monopoly privilege, which you apparently are in favor of although you want to admit it because you know it's going to make you uncomfortable to admit it. So now you tell me what's wrong with showing that a goddamned empiricist is wrong in the stupid data they come up with to promote their protectionist argument. You tell me what's wrong with that, Bob. Well, Stefan, that's not what you're doing. You're using bouldering and levine. Oh, you're so bullshit. Stefan, September 5th, 2012, I suggest anybody that wants to go to the post, it's called Bouldering and Levine. This is pathetic. You have no argument for IP. You're defending one of the most six most evil things the goddamn federal government does. You should beg forgiveness for supporting this evil, evil protectionist federal scheme. Show me an argument, Bob. Show me why ideas are property. Are you familiar with praxeology? How about Mises? Mises says that action is the employment of scarce means guided by knowledge. Now, libertarians believe that there should be property rights not in the knowledge. Knowledge is an exhaustible free good that once you are aware of knowledge, you're going to use it to guide your actions whatsoever. Your attempts to protect IP is an attempt to apply property rights to knowledge, which is not a scarce means. Now, you can't anywhere that... Let's go on. Let's go on page 32, you write. Similarly, if you copy a book I have written, I still have the original book, and I also still have the pattern of words that constitute the book. Thus, authored works are not scarce in the same sense that a piece of land is scarce. Okay? How do you mean that? Basically, every economist on the face of the earth means it. This is not... Have you ever heard the word rivalry? Do you know what rivalism means? Go ahead, yes. I do. Do you think any economist on the earth would disagree that a pattern of words in a book is a rival worth scarce good? Really? Anyone? Let me tell you this. I have written out a formula that I think works to allow me to get a linked on drugs, which drives tremendous traffic to me, from time to time. What do you mean you've written it? What does that mean? I've written it on a piece of paper. Why did you do that? Why did I do that? Because I wanted to remember it in detail. What's the relevance of the fact that you wrote it? The relevance is... There's no property in your house. You have a piece of paper on your desk with lead or ink scratchings on it which you can read, which means something to you. Congratulations. Miracle. Okay. Then I sell this to person B under the condition that he does not sell it to anyone else. First of all, when I have it, is it a scarce good? When you have what? When I just have it written down and no one else is aware of it. It's what a scarce good. What do you mean the formula itself? Are you talking about knowledge? The formula itself? If I'm the only one that has it, does anyone else have it? Bob, tell me what the hell it is. The formula to get on drugs, to get a link on drugs. No, no. Is it the information or is it the piece of paper? Which one are you talking about? I'm not going to answer the question until you tell me what you're asking about. Let's start with the formula itself. If you have a formula, I'm aware of it. Actually, you don't have a formula. Let's be precise. You know a formula. You are aware of a formula. It's in your head. I'm not aware of the formula. I know the formula. Yeah, you know it, but you don't have it. You know it. I certainly do have it. Does it have a location? Is knowledge a locatable thing? Hold it. Is location necessary for scarcity? I have it. What do you mean by you have it? I have it in my brain. I have the knowledge. Where? In my brain. I thought it was on the paper. I put it there also, but that's just two places. The same information is in two places? Yeah. Well, that's amazing. Maybe we could put it in a million places. Yeah, but it's not there now. So is it scarce or not when it's just in two places? Well, information is not scarce. So who else has it besides me then if it's not scarce? You don't have it. You know it. Stefan, are you telling me the whole story? Who else can use it function? Look it. Who in the world besides me can act on that if I'm the only one that has that formula? No one, only you. So is it scarce or not scarce? Is it super abundant everywhere? It's not a scarce resource. It's not a scarce means of action. It's not scarce? No one has it, Stefan. What? No one has it. Right, so it's scarce, isn't it? No. It's not? What's the formula, Stefan? ScareCity. What's the formula? Okay, so here's Winslow's argument. Stefan Kinsella doesn't know private information and Bob Winslow said therefore patent and copyright are valid. No, therefore it's scarce. What is scarce, Stefan? Is it scarce or not? It's not scarce, but you don't know what it is. It's information. I know exactly what it is. Well, tell me the formula then. This is a stupid argument, Bob. How is that stupid? Here's the way a real libertarian looks at this issue. Okay, someone who's not a clown. Okay? You have a property right in your brain and your body. This is a scarce resource. This is a recognized right to control, to be the exclusive one who can control your body. Guess what that gives you, Bob? That gives you the ability to act and it gives you the ability to keep your mouth shut if you don't want to tell people your secret. It gives you the ability to keep secrets. It gives you the ability to run around your lawn naked at midnight, you know, worshiping the moon if you feel like it. That doesn't mean that you own this ability to run around. It doesn't mean you own your actions. It doesn't mean you own your labor. It doesn't mean you own things. You have the practical ability to keep it private. There's no big deal with you. So, Stefan, is it scarce or not? Stefan, when I have it, I'm not asking you what I'm doing with it. I'm asking you specifically, is it scarce knowledge or does everyone have it? Does every blogger in the world know this? No, but you're assuming that everyone doesn't have it. Everyone doesn't have it. Everyone doesn't have it. Everyone doesn't have it. Okay. You understand that? It's an economic concept, rivalry. If everyone in the world would agree that the information in your head is a pattern of information, it is not a rival with object. That means it cannot be owned. Well, whatever kind of object it is, there is something which you would admit I have a formula. Not in the metaphorical sense. It's a very real formula that I could ask on. Something that I can use and act on. I can act on it, Stefan. It's not metaphorical. It's information that can guide your actions. Exactly. Worded however you want here, but it is still information I have. I thought you were a museum. Mises talked about human action being the use of knowledge to employ certain causally efficacious scarce means to achieve a result. So the knowledge plays one role and the means play another role. So no, knowledge is not a scarce means of action. I don't know how much more clear it could be or that Mises could be. So you're saying it's super abundant? The my formula is super abundant? What are you saying? Who else is acting on it? How is it not scarce, Stefan? It's not scarce because it's not rivalrous. What do you mean it's not rivalrous? How so? Suppose something that's rivalrous means there can be rivalry or conflict or clashing over it. How could you and I have a conflict over that information, Bob? Very simple because if I sell it to be, give me an answer. How can you have conflict over the information? I can't think to do that. If I sell it to be under the condition that he not show it to anybody else and he breaks that contract and he shows C, then C is a rival of mine. If he attempts to sell that to other people, why am I trying to... You don't think there's movement on the supply curve? You don't think there's movement on the supply curve? That's not what a rivalry is about. A rivalry is about a specific type of good that can only be used by one person at a time. That there has to be conflict over... Why is that the definition? There is certainly rivalry. No. There is certainly rivalry between me and person C. If I am selling something and he's selling the same thing and driving the price down, that's not rivalry. Let me explain to you why. What you're using is equivocation. I don't think you're doing it on purpose, but you're getting confused with imprecise use of terms and overuse of metaphors. Let me give an example. I'm not using any metaphors. Hold on. Let's try to be a little intelligent for a second. Sometimes people say people fight over religion. Now, this is actually not literally true. What they mean is that religion is the motivation for why they fight over scarce resources. The scarce resources are always like land or people's bodies. For example, if I'm a Muslim and you're a Christian and I tell you I want you to convert to Islam, what I mean is I want you to go through certain motions with your body and that if you don't, I might kill your body. What I'm saying is I have the right to use your body despite your will. It's always a conflict over bodies. People would describe that metaphorically as a fight over religion, but the religion is just the justification they would give for why it's okay to use someone's body without the permission. But the dispute is always about a conflict, a conflictable rival scarce resource. Namely, your body or your land or something like that. In the same way, in the dispute you're giving, we're talking about money. What you're saying is if C doesn't respect the contract between A and B, then C can compete with A. Rivalry? Competition is not rivalry. On the free market is not rivalry at all in this sense. You don't even know what you're talking about. Let me finish my thought. I think you're confused. If someone competes with you, they are competitors on the free market and it is true that C might take some sales that you would have otherwise made. So the real claim is the money in the pockets of these customers that goes to C instead of goes to A. What you're really saying is that because of your cockamamie IP theory, because you don't like competition, because you had a contract with B, A thinks he has a property right in the money that customers gave to C. Now, how did he get this property right, Bob? You tell me. As far as I know, the customers owned it and then they gave it voluntarily to C who didn't violate any of A's cover. You're two minutes are up. I want to quote Hoppa from your book. I don't want to. I'm here to destroy you and show that you don't know what the hell you're talking about. Any reasonable person is going to know my knowledge, my formula of how to get on drugs is scarce and that people don't have it out there. If somebody else gets it, that person is in rivalry with me. I mean, Stefan, that's just common sense. I don't have to defend it any further. If anybody else agrees with you, Stefan, they should follow you wherever the hell they want, okay? Let me quote from page 29. Hold on. No, I'm not going to go back to the quoting right now. I want to ask you a follow-up question. Serious question. Let's suppose you have a drugstore, okay? You have a certain clientele customers. Now, a competing drugstore opens across the street. Would you call that rivalry? Of course. Okay, and so if they take some of your business, are they stealing something that you had a property right in? Rivalry. Are they doing anything? Rivalry is competition. If they stole my products and stole my products, that would be stealing. That's not your question begging. No, Stefan, I got you by the balls there. Let's go on. Page 29. I'm not going on. Bob, I'm not. I'm going to hang up if you keep doing this. I'm telling you right now that you're monopolizing it, which is fine to a degree, but I want to have a conversation about this. You can go on to your next little pointless question if you want, but I want to follow this because you're saying I'm trapped when you're the one making no sense of it. Go ahead. Why don't you distinguish for me competition that's permissible versus competition that's not permissible? Okay, if a person sets up a pharmacy across the street for me, that's rivalry. There's no question about that. If they buy it from the same manufacturer. That is questionable, but go ahead. All right. But if a person sets up a pharmacy across the street for me and it night goes in and breaks and steal all the drugs from my pharmacy to sell them in their pharmacy, that's rivalry, but it's also theft. Yes, but Bob, we both agree on that. That's why I started out this conversation by saying that you and I already agree on the basics of property rights in scarce resources. So what you're doing here, what you're doing is you're trying to make an analogy. What you're doing is just like it's theft of my products when you steal and break into my store and take some of my stuff. Similarly, in the case you gave, the knowledge that B gave to C is also a stolen product. But you're a question-begging because we don't agree that knowledge can be an ownable thing. Don't you see this is the problem? You have to have a problem. Yeah, I'm going to get to that. I want to go in the proper order Let me ask you one small question first. This is more of a preliminary question. Do you agree with me that you cannot establish something by engaging in question-begging? I mean, just as a general matter, do you agree with that? Why would I not agree with that? Just making sure. So would you agree that if you tell me this is property because it's wrong to steal it, that that's not a good argument because you understand stealing implies that there's something owned that you can't show that there's something I will get to that. I want to know if you agree with me. Or do you think you can prove that something is property by just labeling the taking of it theft? Is that how you actually show what property is by just calling it theft? I'm going to get to that, Stefan. There's a couple of steps here. I don't want to confuse. I'm trying to get to your, Stefan, from your own book, page 29. So your argument is so weak and stupid later. You can't even admit right now that that's a shoddy argument. I don't want to get out because you're going to take the debate in areas that I don't want to go. I want to do two things. I want to show how weak and sloppy your arguments are. You're off on Rothbard. You don't want to go in a book to back people. When you don't even read the paper, you don't even know what the hell they're saying. Let me turn to page 29 here. I'm going to quote Hoppe. Only because scarcity exists is there even a problem of formulating moral laws. Insofar as a super abundant, no conflict over the use of goods is possible. Why are you quoting Hoppe that way? What is super abundant about my formula? That's what Hoppe said. And you quote him. What's super abundant about my formula? Your formula is not super abundant, but it can be copied onto infinity. It's not super abundant. Hoppe is using it. You're quoting Hoppe on super abundant. You don't have an argument. There's scarcity and insofar as a good and a lack of scarcity insofar as a good is super abundant. You're quoting Hoppe I don't know what your argument is supposed to be here. How is my formula super abundant? Even if A, B, and C have it, there's no super abundance there. You see you're not making a coherent argument because you didn't start from fundamentals. You're not defining your terms. Hoppe is trying to explain why the institution of property has arisen and must arise only because of the existence of rivalries or scarce resources. So as a thought experiment like if you're familiar with calculus, which probably you're not, but there's something called the limit in calculus, which is Hoppe is saying that as things get more and more abundant in reality as they approach what's called super abundance and he uses the idea of the Shloropin land or the land of milk and honey it's like Rothbard's evenly rotating economy. It's an ideal construct that can never exist in reality. But what he imagines is you're in a land where things are so abundant that you'd be ever short of it or that people could even take it away from you. So it's sort of like the idea of abundance gone to the limit would approach non-scarcity. So for example if we lived in a land where we're just kind of ghostly things and everything is a magically you could just come up with something in the blink of an eye, like there's an infinite number of bananas everywhere and you could reach your hand up and grab a banana, you've got the banana. Property would never arise as a concept because number one no one would ever want to take my banana from me because they can have their own bananas at any time and if someone did take my banana I wouldn't care because I could conjure another one up in the blink of an eye. So he's coming up with an ideal construct to explain why property rules arise and why they have to relate to non- to scarce resources that is to rivalrous things. We do live in a world that is not this land of milk and honey that is not the Garden of Eden. We live in a world where there are scarce resources these are what Mises talks about as the means of action and we libertarians believe in property rights to assign an exclusive owner to each possibly contestable resource that does not include knowledge it includes scarce resources I don't know this very simple concept a lot of people seem to get it I don't know what problem you have with it if you have an alternative theory it is. Stefan, my alternative theory is that ideas are scarce and they are not the way hop on references so you think ideas are scarce you think ideas should be one of the types of things ontologically that's a type of subject to property rights so in other words you would probably believe that we need to have property rights in intellectual property rights in more things than the current law covers like we needed in fashion recipes and newspaper headlines and recipes for pizzas and bar drinks and also they shouldn't terminate after 17 years or 25 years or 120 years they should never terminate after all they are property right so by your theory we would all have to be walking around getting permission every second of our lives do you understand that they relied upon other ideas because none of us has born tabula rasa into the world we all are born assuming all the knowledge that other generations have come up with before no idea anyone comes up with is just totally brand new abneelo this always builds upon other people's ideas so basically you're advocating a world of total stufification and communism where you have to get permission from everyone to perform any action and we would all just die and get permission from everyone to do anything let me say one more thing then you can reply I'll make an analogy to what you're doing you have the mindset you don't seem to appreciate the terrible harm that granting new rights does although you probably do appreciate it in the context of money and in the context of welfare rights so for example most simple minded people who don't have an appreciation of economics because you can use money money's a sign of your wealth or you can use it to acquire objects that you value and so they don't understand why we don't just have a minimum wage or why the Federal Reserve doesn't print more money you and I understand what inflation is you and I understand that if the government prints more dollars it doesn't make us wealthier all it does is redistribute wealth and set the business cycle in motion same thing with welfare rights most liberals today socialist welfare type liberals say well I'm a favor of property rights but I'm also in favor of the right to an education and the right to a house and the right to a job and the right to XYZ they don't understand that these rights come at the expense of existing rights like if you have the right to a job if you have the right to an education that means someone else has to have an obligation to provide you with that so all these artificial rights that the state wants to create inflating money delutes the power of money right delutes the value of existing property rights if there's a right to welfare now my property rights are less secure because the government's got to take some of it to provide welfare for people it's exactly the same with intellectual property the libertarian Lockean idea is already complete Bob it has an answer for every possible dispute I really don't want to hear that stuff I know you don't you apparently don't want to hear any ideas it's babble you're talking about me quoting Mises and Hoppa and you're babbling on stuff that has nothing to do with the simple fact that ideas are scarce okay and you can't get away from that since you're the one quoting things before you go on here's a quote from Hoppa I'm actually at least giving my own thoughts here you're just quoting things but here's something from Hoppa in 88 before I even started writing about IP someone said in an audience Hoppa and David Gordon and others they said a question for Hoppa does the idea of personal sovereignty extend to knowledge am I a sovereign over my thoughts, ideas, and theories now Hoppa's answer is this in order to have a thought you must have property rights over your body that doesn't imply that you own your thoughts the thoughts can be used by anybody who is capable of understanding them now see you Hoppa recognized early on because he is so deep into Misesian praxeology he recognized even without thinking about it a lot he recognized the fundamental incompatibility because of the praxeological structure of human action the fundamental incompatibility of trying to assign property rights to knowledge the same way we do to scarce means of action these are two fundamentally different aspects of human action can you right now demonstrate to me how I use the judge formula can you tell me what I have in my left pocket no I can't that's the exact point knowledge is scarce it's not super abundant what's your argument about it my argument is your arguing that ideas are not scared are you saying if you have secret information let me ask you this let's try something simple do you want to scan multivariable calculus I used to well it's the extension of calculus from one variable it involves the differentiated functions that involve multivariables rather than just one that's a simple explanation well I don't know I've done first calculus second calculus multi-dimensional calculus I think you're talking about multi-dimensional calculus explain it linear algebra differential equations Stefan I asked you a question you couldn't tell me I told you I had it's another case something that's easily derivatives derivatives and stuff yeah the Germans they make good stuff derivatives and stuff Stefan the point is there's all kinds of knowledge out there and not everyone has it's not super abundant it's just not you have to think about it is your theory that if Bob Wenzel can think of some conceptual reference in life that is not super abundant that means that we should have property rights is that your theory the theory is that most ideas and information are not super abundant it's not like air air is super abundant but in paradise is super abundant none of this stuff is super abundant well Bob once you release the information I mean look I've already admitted once it's a secret you have the right to keep it secret because you have a property right yeah but even if you let the information loose upon the world Stefan if A, B and C have it that's three people it's not something that's just maintained in my mind and all three of those people they have incentive to keep it quiet not tell anyone else no no C has no incentive what's C's incentive tell me what C's incentive is so they can sell it so more people don't know C's incentive so you're talking about it so we can sell it it's a valuable information people would pay tens of thousands of dollars for it well but then 3, 4, 5, 10 people know pretty soon it's public right yeah okay so well no it's not you start you start constructs constructs which are not necessarily true let's focus on this very very unlikely unlikely for that information to go beyond the people it's really unlikely it's really unlikely that's why we have to have SOPA and cracking down on piracy and the six strikes hey that's government Stefan that's not me and you baby what I'm saying is it's not unlikely once information gets out information can spread you're creating a straw man if I tell you I will tell you the drugs thing but if that gets out to anyone either because you do it on purpose or inadvertently or error or you sloppy or you leave it on a park bench or whatever but if it gets out and I can prove it to you you will owe me ten million dollars okay either not going to enter the contract or B you're going to enter the contract and be very careful let's get to the nitty gritty here you can stop it from going hold on a second because this is really where you're going although you don't want to admit it you basically are trying to justify Rothbard's original half-hearted argument for contractual copyright which by the way you're calling Rothbard the time he spent on copyright we clearly thought it out he didn't take it very far he didn't even realize that it contradicted his defamation theories which you apparently haven't read I mean it doesn't contradict his it clearly does according to this logic why don't you have a property right in your reputation Bob after all you put labor into it why don't you have a property right in your reputation how would I have a property right in my reputation well it's a valuable knowledge okay so hold on but I think basically you understand by the way believe me Stefan I have an opinion of you and you don't own that opinion it's my opinion it's my scare sweet but it's just knowledge it's not yours but it's just knowledge that's the whole point you can do with you can do with knowledge in your head whatever you want with it just like if I learn of your little dredge formula hold on if I learn about your dredge formula why can't I act on it tell me why what's the point how you learn about it it does depend upon it that's correct so if you tell me and we have a contract you say Stefan right you pay me a thousand bucks I'm going to give you this information but you have to promise to reveal it to anyone else and if you do then you got to pay me ten thousand dollars damages whatever I don't know something like that right right but we both agree with that that's just contract law you understand this has nothing to do with intellectual property nothing it just means you and I can have a contract the contract is about by the way the contract is about money the contract is two title transfers one is I'm transferring a thousand dollars to you now in payment for your performing inaction that I want which is giving me this information number two there's a conditional title transfer that comes later which is my payment of damages to you if I do something with the information that you don't want me to do right so there's just two title transfer that's it that's what contracts are as Rothbard explained okay so hold on hold on this is A and B it's not super bunion at that point it's got nothing to do with that A and B made a contract with each other okay because you're going to come up with a scarcity the argument forget scarcity so now let's say I'm willing to forget but you're going to bring it up to two reasons but I want to establish at this point where A and B are involved the knowledge is still scarce here's how the argument goes why won't you answer that question Stefan I'm going to answer it scarcity just explains why we have property rights what the function is the libertarian believes that when you find a scarce resource in the world that is some object that more than one person wants to use at the time and that only one of them can use that's the possibility of conflict we believe that the guy that homesteaded it first or that purchased it by contract is the one that gets to control it that's it that's the whole answer and then the case against IP is simply recognizing that the only way to grant IP rights is to undercut these earlier homesteading rights that's the whole argument it's very simple okay so you don't have to say it doesn't matter if it's scarce in this case it's up to you Bob you are relying apparently on this contract theory so let's take it to the next step this is the nitty-gritty now you and I both agree that if I use the information in a way that you prohibited by our contract then I'm doing something that's at least going to cause me to suffer some penalty because I agreed upon a penalty but what if I tell the information to a third party and then they put it on the internet and then soon it's out for everyone how do all these 3rd and 4th and 5th parties how are they violating your property rights because they never did enter into a contract with you okay let me explain that I'm at Hertz I rent a car no no but you're question begging I'm at Hertz I rent the car and I sell the car to someone else no but we're assuming that the car you and I Bob are you just are you unable to understand an argument you have to at least understand what you're disagreeing with I've already explained at least twice in this in this podcast that you and I both agree the car is a scarce ownable thing what we don't agree that's why Stefan you have to identify A and B at that point when A has information and I give it to B the scarcity of that idea but you understand you don't have an argument your argument is circular do you understand why your argument is circular you're saying information should be covered by property rights should be a type of intellectual property because it's an ownable thing that if you use it without permission it's theft you understand it's a totally circular argument no no I'm not talking about theft it's not it's not theft if I use the Hertz if I rent the car from Hertz and I sell the car to C you can't sell it to C you can't sell it to C if C uses the car that Hertz owns without permission he's committing a type of trespass maybe he doesn't know it he's doing it innocently but he's still using property he has no right to use exactly but we agree that it's property so I keep it why can't I as the original person designing the contract go to C and say take that off your website it's not your property it was given to you illegally just the way the Hertz can't with the car the reason the person the third party can't use the Hertz car has got nothing to do with contract it's because there's in rim we're talking scarcity, we're talking property and we're talking legitimate rights transfer that's what we're talking about car or information you may not like that fact but it's a clear logical step as to why I can go to person C and say hey take that down you got a copy of a book you cannot sell that book why don't we enter the year 2013 and stop talking about paper books left on park benches I mean information now is digital and it's on the internet it doesn't have a physical substance really it's just patterns that could be duplicated perfectly forever so you know if you go to Google or you go to some website and you see a copy of Bob Wenzel's magnum opus proving rights which would probably have just two pages you know if I see that pattern of information you know you're a real snippy bitch well you're saying you want to destroy me so you know go for it what do I care you know I think you're I don't know maybe Scientology messed you up or whatever it is you know I don't know but um why don't you tell me Bob where did the third person who sees information on the internet where did I agree to a contract with the original creator of the information where's the contract now now you're you know you're creating a construct that has nothing at all to do with property rights property rights it's not limited intellectual property Bob if I created the construct I guess I if I created the construct I guess I own it you owe it but it's an absolutely stupid reconstructed I'll sell you my construct for 50 cents and then I'll give you the right to use it it's not worth 50 cents it's a piece of junk well I still deny your right to use my construct if something is on the web first of all we have to know why it's on the web what uh clauses or information limits what's on the web if someone puts one on the web it depends upon whether it's attempting to do is he trying to get that information out there for free or not I mean people putting things on the web and it depends on their purposes yeah okay that's a good argument for IP so far continue so far I don't know a definition from you all I know is you think if you have a secret then you can sell it you still haven't identified the difference between a person see who has a car that is unknowingly belongs to her and a person see who is using a formula that is not that he is not gain to legitimate channels you know you may not be aware of that but what's the difference you persuaded me Bob I think you're right April Fool's but seriously no I can't think of any difference except for the fact that the car is a rival with scarce resources and the information is not but other than that there's no difference why is it formula a rival with scarce resources with only three people have it and it drives down the price of the how is that different what are you Neoclassical what's the price being driven down have to do with its nature as a rival is good what's that got to do with anything because what you're doing is you're introducing a further supply of the good it's simple it's basic economics I thought that was a good thing to increase supply of goods it depends what are you doing if you steal the goods from somebody else you drive down the price of another market well who stole it who stole it in this case so let's say a b and c have the information and d over here c talking about it or observes the product that embodies the information when did the theft occur exactly okay well now what you're doing is you're going into the enforcement and protection of IP okay so you're against so you're against enforcement of IP no no no no that's why I put up the picture at the Mises Institute there are various levels and degrees of protection and enforcement depending what somebody wants the Mises Institute has a sign up there you know no trespassing at the same time as far as I can see you have some cockamamie theory where if you can show that you can sell something for a price then you need some kind of anti-competitive right to keep your market high and the price is high and that makes it scarce in a sense so it can be owned but by your theory you're as crazy as galambos or ran you would have to protect things for far longer Bob than the current law does in fact for forever after all it's a property right and you would have to protect things that are not protected now like database rights recipes, fashion designs you can create any straw man you want it's not a straw man I'm for competition you're apparently not for competition you don't want competition private property you think competition is rivalry competition is rivalry it's insane basically if someone obtains something illegally but that's question begging do you can't say it's illegal in the argument for why it should be illegal do you understand the argumentation Jesus that's why in the beginning I asked you about A and B and whether they had a contract or whether it was scarce at that point the contract scarce what's that what's scarce the contract the paper the formula the formula is it scarce I mean in your strange world it's super abundant or something it's infinitely copyable it's infinitely copyable of course it is it's infinitely copyable it's not the same thing not every blogger in the world knows now what my formula is to get on charge Bob let me give you a simple hypothetical and see where we disagree let's try this let's say you and I both want to make a German chocolate cake we each have our own kitchen our own house our own mixing bowls our own eggs our own flour our own oil our own ovens you would agree that these are all scarce resources correct yes you would agree that we would both favor a system where you have property rights excuse me you have property rights in yours and I have property rights in mine correct correct and you would agree that if we don't have these property rights then we can't both use the same mixing both same time to make a cake and that we might have conflict or violent clashing over this right you would try to take it from me instead of making a cake then we're just fighting with each other and then maybe one of us wins but this is not simple but let's say you and I both learned of my grandmothers or your grandmother's secret recipe for making a German cake and we're both following that recipe at the same time do you agree that there is no limit to the amount of people that could simultaneously make a cake following the same recipe but that each one of them... hold on , each one of them would have to have their own scarce resources their own raw materials, their own capital goods but they could all use the same recipe at the same time you do agree with that right but they would have to have knowledge of the recipe to make it they could all use the same they could all use the same knowledge at the same time but they couldn't use the same... not everyone would have the exact same knowledge about a recipe or anything it's good enough for government work You and I can look up right now, you know, Captain Bojangles, hold on, you and I right now could go Google, we could look up Captain Bojangles Bloody Mary recipe, and every one of the 7 billion people on the earth could theoretically do that. They could all use this. Yeah, but they're not all going to do it, they may not have computers, there's certainly a lot of people on the planet that don't have computers, others may not have Google skills, some may not know how to read. Yeah, but the point is, I know, so let's say, hold on, let's say there's 100 people making this recipe at the same time, right? Now I observe you making your Bloody Mary recipe, okay? Right. Speaking of which, I'm kind of craving one right now. So I observe you doing that. Now if I walk down and I take your pitcher and your tomato juice and your Tabasco, then I'm going to prevent you from making your Bloody Mary. Would you agree with that? Well, I'm sorry, I was... If I observe you making a Bloody Mary, right, following a certain technique, and I come and I take, physically take from you your bloody, your tomato juice or your Tabasco sauce or your pitcher, then I'm going to prevent you from being able to succeed in your project. Isn't that correct? That you're going to be able to prevent me from doing what? From making your Bloody Mary. If I take your ingredients from you. Well, you're talking about the recipe, you're talking about the physical Bloody Mary. If I just could take your ingredients from you, you won't be able to make your recipe, right? Right. That's why you would fight me. That's why you want property rights, because you want to be able to use these ingredients in peace. But suppose I observe you making the Bloody Mary, and I go get my own ingredients, and I start doing exactly what you're doing, and I make a duplicate Bloody Mary, right? Right. Now, how does that prevent you from engaging in your business? How does it prevent you from succeeding at the task you set for yourself? Again, you know, if you're creating it, just go with me. I will explain it to you. Okay. All right. Don't play it, does it? Do you think it does prevent you? I'm going to explain it to you. It is still a not a super abundant thing, not everybody in the world knows how to make a Bloody Mary. But if a person is stealing that from me, it actually pulls my point. But how would they steal it? You mean by observing you? Does that steal it? Yeah. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, back. Are you saying that if I observe you doing something, and I learn from your behavior that I steal it from you? All right. Let me say taking it. Let me say taking it, okay? But I'm not taking it. You still have it. I'm not taking it. What are you even taking? He takes it for his own use. He's not taking it, Bob. You still have it. How is it taking? Step one. Step one. I mean, he learned. He learned by observing, what you're saying. He learned by observing. All right. We'll go with the word he learned. He learned. The point is, are you going to give away all your legal education for free and stuff like that? Step one. Let me get back to the point. If you're performing an action in public, you need to learn to get knowledge. Bob, if you're performing an action in public, it's not super abundant. It's not super abundant. I don't care. If you're performing an action that people can learn from what you're doing, that's called competition. That's called learning. Yeah, but you just created a straw man where you said, everybody knew this. Everybody can look it up. Yet at the same time, you're telling me about a guy that doesn't have the information. It's a scarce good. What's wrong with that? Whether I go after the guy, look it. I've had economists steal some of my stuff, okay, where I wrote critiques of coups. You've got to quit using that. That's a question, but that's an illegitimate tactic because you know I haven't agreed that IP is a type of property, so you keep calling it stealing. You're interpreting it in your own world. I consider it best. You don't have to do that. Well, you can consider whatever the hell you want, but that doesn't mean you're right. What's your argument? It doesn't mean you're right. It doesn't mean you're right. It doesn't mean you're right. It doesn't mean you're right. It doesn't mean you're right. It doesn't mean you're right. It doesn't mean you're right. Bob, I've demonstrated very clearly that, look, I gave you the example earlier. Let's try this, because in my mind, I've thought about this from 17, 25 different angles over the years. And to me, to my mind, the clear... Clearly not enough, and you're sloppy about your work, but go ahead. All right. The clearest way of explaining or underlying the All right. The clearest way of explaining or understanding what's wrong with IP is the restrictive covenant negative servitude idea I gave earlier. Now, would you not agree with me that I can do whatever I want in the privacy of my own home as long as I don't, number one, commit a tort against you, like invade your property, like shoot a gun into your property or pollute into your property, or if I haven't given you a contractual right to prevent what I can do with it. Wouldn't you agree that that's the only way that you have the right to stop me from doing something in my own property? In other words, suppose the government says, Bob, we're going to enact zoning laws and we're not going to let you put two stories onto your house. Don't you think that's a taking a part of your property rights? That they're acting like a partial owner of your property with you? Stefan, you have this block that if something isn't physical, it's not But we both agree that physical things at least should be property. That's what we agree on, right? Do you agree that it's right? Well, hold on. Do you agree that it's right that the government can tell you that you can't use your property in certain ways, your physical property? Oh, I see where you're going. Yeah, you're wrong. You're really wrong on this one. Hold on. Hold on. Just answer the question. Yeah, let's go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm with you there. Hold on. Take this one. Go ahead. So you agree that if someone acquires the legal right to veto your use of your property, that that is a taking a part of your property rights unless you gave it to them voluntarily. That is by contract. Wouldn't you agree with that? It's just a simple thing. I'm not trying to trap you. I think this is the way property rights work. Let's say you and our neighbors, okay, Bob? And let's say you can do it. Yeah, but again, there are limitations there. For example, if the person shoots into my property, he can't do that. Likewise, if he somehow gains some information I have. No, no, no, no. Hold on. Hold on. An attempt to use that on his property, even though he did not acquire that information in a valid manner. What's that mean? That's question-begging. What do you mean, valid manner? What's a valid manner? Yeah, I'll explain that to you. What's a valid manner? If I have, I will explain it to you. If I have a formula for getting on drugs, which I sell to somebody being on the grounds that he not reveal it to anybody else, and then he goes to my neighbor, and then he goes to my neighbor and says, here's what? Be specific. What's the contract? You and your customer. You're telling them what? They have to pay you for information, and they also have to agree to what? To not reveal it to anyone else. What does that mean? Not reveal it. Can they use it? They can use it to attempt to get links on drugs, but they cannot use it for any other purpose. They can not reveal it to anyone. What? What does that mean? Can't use it for any other purpose? Can they think about it? Can they include? Yeah, they can think about it. Yeah, we can put that in. If you're a lawyer and you want to raise these kind of busy things with them, yeah. It's not dizzy because it matters here. What I'm saying is what if they use the formula as they have purchased the right to do, apparently, and someone else observes them over time, making a lot of money, and they sort of figure out what they're doing. Is that revealing the information? If it's another person independently gaining knowledge of the formula. Oh, good. You've apparently just given up the whole case for IP, so congratulations. I knew you'd agree with me eventually. You've just conceded there can't be IP, so very good. No. You believe in contract, apparently. See, this goes back to, you don't understand Rothbard, because Rothbard believes in copyright and patent. He says independent discovery is not a problem. What does that mean is not a problem? What does that mean is not a problem? As far as eliminating someone with regard to their use of an idea. However, what Rothbard means by independent discovery is by him thinking about it or doing something on his own versus someone under contractual obligation not to reveal it to someone else. That's not independent discovery in the Rothbard central law. Well, Patton law actually has no defense for independent discovery. Yeah, exactly. So Rothbard doesn't defend Patton law. Rothbard defends Patton law. He just says it should be a different structure. It should be the same as copyright. Read Rothbard. Rothbard is 100% in favor of copyright the way it is now. He's in favor of Patton law as long as it's structured the way copyright is. That's what Rothbard is all about. Well, he can't be in favor of what the way it is now because when he wrote in the 60s, the copyright term was about 20 or 40 years shorter than it is now. So which copyright term does he think is implied in the natural structure of the fabric of the universe? Is it like 40 years after? He would argue forever. He would argue forever. Oh, really? Well, that's not how copyright law is now. So Rothbard believes in copyright and perpetuity, you think? Really? Yeah. Yeah, so he was as crazy as one of those. You want me to dig up the quote? Yeah, I'd love to see Rothbard talking about perpetual copyright. Rothbard, there's absolutely no way that... But anyways, talk about some other thing now. Well, Bobby, you still haven't given your defensive IP. You told me, hold on, hold on. I'm getting to it, Sally, but I ain't seen no defensive IP. I don't see a definition of a good... Well, here's the defensive IP. Let me say it for you. Ideas are not generally super abundant. They are scarce. If a person has an idea, it's scarce. If he makes a contract with B, it is still scarce because it's between A and B. And B, if he reveals it to C, invalidates his contract in the same way that if I rent a car from Hertz... It's not the same way. That's question begging. What's that? It's not the same way. It's not question begging. It is question begging. After we're done, look up question begging. So basically, your argument is just Rothbard's confused contract argument, which I've already debunked, so I don't know. How did you debunk it? I've got a whole section in the article. First of all, you have Rothbard as the anti-copyright and anti-pat. You don't even understand Rothbard. Rothbard believed that you could create some aspects in a private society similar in some ways to modern IP systems by contract. Now, you shouldn't call it... He called it copyright because he's talking about putting a stamp on something. The copyright is therefore a logical device of property right on the free market, quote-unquote Rothbard. Yeah. That's what he said. So he's in favor of copyright? No, he's in favor of... He's in favor of... You're lumping in with people that are against copyright. He's not against copyright. Well, he was against statutory copyright and he was for contractual scheme. Hold on. What? He was in favor of... He thought you could use contracts to replicate some of the features of the modern IP system and he was wrong. But you have them in a category where he's against IP and he's not against IP. You're wrong. So what, Bob? What? You're bringing it up, not me. You're bringing it up. It's more swappy stuff from you. Well, Rothbard was a little... Let me get back to my point. I am not digging the question. I am not saying that because a... Yeah, you're making the analogy to the Hertz-Renacor case because you're assuming just like... But that's not digging the question. It's attempting to demonstrate... Bob, let me tell you what I said. Hold on. Let me tell you the difference between the two cases. Why do you have property rights? Intellectual property rights. Bob. If A makes a contract with B and then C attempts whether it's a book or whatever, and then now you want to go off into the mega-land of the internet because you can't defend C printing books. You're in trouble there. No, I can't defend C printing books. I would defend C's right to print books and I think he's doing nothing wrong whatsoever. I actually do defend it because C doesn't have a contract. Yeah, but C, it's the same thing. It's the same thing with... How is that different from a car? How is it different from... That's your argument. Why agree with Hertz to rent the car and then selling the car? Because Bob... Hold on. No, you asked me a question so now you get to have an answer and if you can listen, maybe you'll actually learn something which I won't consider as a violation of my property rights. You and I both agree that there ought to be property rights in the car. So Hertz owns the car. They're loaning it to... or leasing or renting it temporarily to someone for a restricted use for a temporary period of time and they have a contract between them and their customer that specifies how this person can use the car. They can't drive it to Mexico and sell it for spare parts. They can't destroy it. They can't use it in a stunt, in a movie. They can only use it for certain regular uses but specify the contract, okay? So if the owner of that... if the renter of the car loans it to his friend when the contract says you can't loan it to anyone and not identified in the contract ahead of time then here we have a scarce resource which we all agree is ownable and that in fact is owned and is owned by Hertz, okay? Hold on, I gotta stop you. I gotta stop you because you know when you last your ass off that me saying Rothbard would be against perpetual copyright. Well, I find the quote against Rothbard you do not know what the fuck you're talking about. His Rothbard quote-unquote is perpetual. On the free market there would be no such thing as... Oh, here it is. There would however be a copyright for any inventor or creator who made use of it and this copyright would be perpetual. That's not copyright though. He's talking about contract dude. He's not talking about copyright. So if you don't understand... I'll tell you what he's saying. There would however be copyright for any inventor or creator who would make use of it and this copyright would be perpetual. Talking about contract. He's talking about his contractual scheme which he's wrong about. Hold it. Stefan, I got you by the balls again. No, you don't. Rothbard was opposed to the copyright statute. Stefan, I got you again. You don't know what the fuck you're talking about. I got you by the balls. You last your ass off when I said Rothbard would be in favor of perpetual copyright and he says it right here. No, Rothbard is in favor of perpetual ownership. Stefan, you did not say that. You last your ass off. Yeah, you're wrong. You're totally wrong. He's not talking about... This is the problem. I tried to tell you earlier. You don't want to listen. We'll let the listeners decide. I'd love for them to. I'd love for them to. Rothbard is not talking about modern copyright systems or statutory. He's talking about his cobbled together contractual copyright scheme. And because Rothbard believed that contracts are ways of assigning rights in scarce resources, he did believe those lasted forever. But his mistake is in thinking you could create with a contract something similar to modern IP. He does not believe in perpetual copyright. Nothing whatsoever like the modern advocates of perpetual copyright do. You're just wrong. And still... He did not believe in perpetual copyright when he says there would however be copyright for any inventor or creator who may use it and this copyright would be perpetual not limited to a certain number of years. He's using the word copyright in a different way. This is the problem with equivocation. He's talking about something totally different. He is slapping the word copyright onto his contractual scheme idea. Okay? Which is obvious that he's misusing it because he uses a mousetrap as the example, which is a patentable thing, an invention. He's got nothing to do with copyright. This is the problem with people who don't understand the details of the law just slapping these things together. And if I'm definitely wrong, he makes a clear distinction between copyright and patent. He knows the mousetrap is... Pat needs to be applied to it. So why does he use a mousetrap for the example of a copyright then? Why? Because what he's saying is that the way patent should be constructed is the way similar to copyright. He's not confusing the two. You're confused. He is confusing them. He is confusing them. No, he's not. He goes right out, Stefan, and says copyright currently is such and such. Pat is such and such. Copyright is... because it's independent discovery, it's allowed works because patent does not allow independent discovery. It's not the way it would work on a free market. However, if patent would work in the way copyright does, you could have patent on the independent market. And that's why he uses the example of the mousetrap. Do you understand what he's saying? I fully understand it. Do you think that Rothbard... I think Rothbard believed in competition. That if someone puts a new mousetrap on the market, that other competitors are free to observe the structure and design of that trap and make a competing mousetrap using some of the innovations in that mousetrap. Do you think he believed that or not? Simple question. What he says, and again, Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob. Honestly, I'm just asking you if you think Robert believed in competition in free markets. It's a simple question. But it's a low question because you're going to go and defend competition as being a theft of intellectual property. You're not going to define it. I'm saying that Rothbard... I know what you're trying to do. No, you don't. You have no idea. You don't know how to make an argument. You're making... I don't know how to make an argument. I just showed you. You don't know Rothbard. You're quoting Bolton. You didn't even read the paper on Bolton. I can't quote a paper. If you get on drugs, it's super abundant. Come on. Anything that's not super abundant, Bob Wenzel can own. You keep making the analogy between the Hertz rental car. The reason that the third party is committing a type of trespass when he's using that car without permission of Hertz is he's using someone's property without their permission. Now, you come up with the red herring that, well, he might not know it. He might be innocent. Exactly. Exactly. That's my point. But he's using someone's property without their consent. What's your property? If I'm away on the weekend and someone breaks into my house and pretends like they're the owner and they invite you over for a party and they say, hey, let's trash my house and you do it, you're actually committing a type of trespass against my property. You might not know it, but you are actually using property that you don't own. Do you understand that? You're calling the law in-rim rights. Rights good against the world, rights in property. You're trying to analogize contractual rights which are in personum, just rights between two people. You're trying to abuse that, which is what Rothbard tried to build up an in-rim theory. It cannot be done. Stefan, it can't be done in your world where you think my knowledge is not scarce and I cannot continue to keep it scarce by contract. And then anybody that can go around and steal the information and therefore, voila! Well, what you call stealing, most people call learning. Your framework is based on broken contract. I have never seen any other construct of any other theory based on broke. Your theory doesn't even start until a contract is broken. It doesn't become unscars, although I don't even think it's unscars at that point. But in your world until it gets to party C, D, F, and G. My world is very simple. It's a libertarian world that we want to avoid conflict and we want to have property rights and scarce resources so that people can use them peacefully and cooperatively and generate prosperity for all. Now, I assume you tend to agree with that although the rules you're supporting would undercut that. You don't seem to understand that. You don't seem to understand that if someone has the right to the legal right to veto and use my property when I'm using it peacefully and without committing any kind of trespass or contract breach at all that's taking my property rights. That's what you don't seem to understand. Let me answer you on this point. You're basically saying I'm preventing you from doing something on your property with let's say you have a property and you want to build a house on it. You're saying because I have designed a house in a certain manner and you have a copyright on it. You don't have a copyright on it. What's that? Well, I'm saying I do. Or patents, whatever. It's written down or You mean in your ideal world where you have a right in the designs of things? No, no, no. Tell me. What would be the legal term if I have designed a way to build a house a unique way to build a house? Is that a patent or a copyright What is how should it be How would it be determined in current law? Well, in current law if you have a unique inventive way a functional practical idea of how to build a house in a more efficient way that would be protectable by patent. But if you talk about the actual architectural design and layout of the house, that would be something more like copyright. Yeah, so it could be. Either way, let's say I have a copyright and a patent on it. Okay, so then you somehow acquire my architectural design. What do you mean somehow? I'm walking down the street. I see it. It's not somehow. Nobody, no. It's part of the design has unique functions on the inside where you can't see from the outside. So you really can't know how I designed the house. How did I get the information? You've got to specify. How did I get the information? I'm sorry? How did I get the information? That's my point. You're saying that I am preventing you from designing a house like mine. Right. Okay. But under Rockward's view You are. You're preventing me from using my property as I see fit. I'm not committing trespassing. No, no, no, no, no. The only thing I'm doing is preventing you from somehow stealing the property. But you're stealing the formula. Bob, that's question begging. You're calling it stealing. You can't call it stealing to prove that it should be classified as stealing. That's question begging. You've got to prove. Let's say Using information. How about using information that I have? No, no, no, because you're your question begging. The point is let me continue here. There is no way that I'm going to let the design out. So there's no way why do you say that? Why are you letting the design out? Well, no, well, let's say this is a case where I bury it in my safe. That could be. Hold on. You can keep information secret, but let's specify something. You can keep information secret and that's fine. However, if you have a really unique method, first of all, if you patent it, you're going to reveal it to the world by patenting it, Bob. You have to reveal it. That's under current law that's not under Rockward. If you get a government-issued patent that you can keep the information secret but still have a property right. You already admitted he's against it. Rockward wouldn't require disclosure of patents, but go ahead. Go ahead, continue. The whole patent system is based upon the bargain between the public and the inventor and the deal is- Now we're talking about the public? This is why I'm against this socialist- I thought you were bringing that perspective. What are you talking about? This is why I wouldn't support it. I don't think Rockward would support it. Support what? The modern concept of patents. He doesn't. If you get a patent, the only reason to get a patent is because you want to commercialize. I can't believe you laughed your ass off when I told you Rockward would want a perpetual copyright in patents. What's in the thing? Wait, wait, now he's in favor of patents. I can't tell which is- Now he's in favor of patents? What? He's in favor of patents, not the current patent law. What kind of patents is he in favor of? A patent that works along the lines of copyright where it's independent discovery of ideas. That's fine. Don't you know what Rockward even said? I know Rockward didn't really understand IP law very well. Please, he understands it a lot better than you do. It's remarkable that your- If you ask any patent or copyright lawyer in the world, even a regular status one, if you could have a patent system modeled after copyright, they'll laugh in your face. It's like saying the Americans with Disabilities Act is going to be the tax collection system. Rockward addresses that. He says most people do not separate copyright and patent. He addresses why that's a flaw. I'm sure by your argument, Rockward's in favor of a private analog of the Semiconductor Database Protection Act and Boat Hole Designs and Moral Rights and Definition Law. Why not? The Boat Hole Designs are part of copyright. You're posting yourself as some kind of intellectual expert from a libertarian perspective and you don't even understand Rockward's perspective. Would I tell you Rockward's perspective? You're trying to intimidate me by laughing your ass off when you really get your head stuck up in your ass. Let's get back to the person next door to me. Let's get back to this person next door to me who's got a lot and lumber. I am not preventing him from independently building anything he wants, including but you're preventing him from learning from you and using what technique you've used. I have to tell him how I'm building it. I have to tell him how I built my house. What are you talking about? Did I say that? How is he going to learn if it's the key to my house is what's inside the house? How did he learn? I don't know. It's your hypothetical. How did he learn? He isn't. He can't. That's my point. Then why do you need a legal right to stop him? If he can't learn, then why do you need a legal right to stop him? What's that? If he can't learn from you, why do you need a legal right to stop him from using information that he has no way of acquiring? Just keep it secret. That's trade secret law. Yeah, but suppose I don't want to keep it secret. Suppose it's a great idea and I want to sell it. Exactly. That's my point. That's why you would get a patent because you want to commercially exploit it and you're going to reveal it to the world when you do that. That's how he's going to learn. If I sell it to person C, D and E and each one of those signs of contract is to not reveal how it's done, the person next door to me is not going to do it. However, that's not me preventing him from doing it, building his house that way. All it is is him preventing him from doing it because I have told B, C and D about it. Yeah. All it is is saying if he can build it, if he doesn't independently independently, he discovers the way himself independently. Yeah. Oh, I know. It's very magnanimous of you. It's very magnanimous of you. It's magnanimous of you to get from your permission. Your proposition, Stefan, your proposition is that I'm preventing the person from doing that next door to me and I'm not doing that at all. You're wrong again, Stefan. You're wrong again. My proposition is that you believe in a communist, listen, that he can come up independently and figure out how it's done. It's a totalitarian world where people have to live by permission, not by right, to perform any action with their property. They need to get permission of this network of billions of people who have heirs of ideas that they come up with and perpetuate it from the past. No, no, no, it's not. It's the nightmare scenario. First of all, you brought it. You in the beginning, you did not want me to bring up communism, dictatorship, fascist charges. Now you're telling me I live in a totalitarian, we are going to require people to go to... No, if I had an idea on my own, I don't have to go to anyone. You said you're going to magnanimously... I don't have to go to anyone. You're going to magnanimously allow people to build a house as long as they can show they came up with the idea originally. But no, you can't have learned anything from anyone because then you're committing some kind of... That is not true. It's independent discovery. Nothing is independent, Bob. Nothing is independent. Everything borrows from the cultural stock of humanity. We all learn from each other. You ever heard of competition on the free market? You see someone doing something to make a profit? You start doing what they're doing. That's called competition. Nothing is independent. Nothing is completely original. You know this, all information is incremental. All knowledge and learning is incremental. Yeah, so it's not... So it's not that kind of stuff that would be protected on a detailed actual part? What kind of stuff is it? You don't have an idea? My formula for getting on Judge is something that's protected by intellectual property. You're creating situations where it starts to apply. You're saying it's protected by intellectual property in an argument trying to show they should be protected by intellectual property. Look, if you reveal the information as a practical matter, Bob, let's be realistic. You're going to start making cookie cutter subdivisions with all these houses. You're going to have to train a staff of people to do your technique. That's going to be public before you know it. So I don't care if you have a contract with a dozen people. But this goes back to my picture of the Mises sign that says private property. It's a degree to which you want to enforce and protect your private property. Yeah, but we already agreed that they're building a private property sign. They could put a gate up. They could put on guards. They could call health angels to guard the thing. Any kind of property, whether it's private property, physical property, or intellectual property, can choose to what degree they want to actually protect that property. If you call it property, there are constant calls with protecting property. So basically if you have a situation where you're building houses, you realize that that information may get out some way and you have to determine to which degree you're trying to protect against that. Are you going to go all out, put a gate, health angels, and everything else to protect a piece of private property or intellectual property or anything else? Probably not. The upshot of all this is you've thought about it for years and you have no argument except you kind of think Rothbard, one interpretation of Rothbard. What I kind of think, listen smartass, my view ideas are not super abundant. That you quoted Hoppe without understanding what he meant by that. That ideas are scarce in many, many cases. Oh, it's so agonizing. Tell me what my idea is about the drug formula. No, the point is you don't even know how to argue. You have no point. You're repeating yourself. You basically act like you've got this moment. Step on. Step on. All you're doing is repeating. Just like you did when I proposed that Rothbard said he was in favor of perpetual copyright which he is. You're laughing again. Maybe copyright. Maybe over one of your clueless followers, but it's not going to fool anybody else. The point of the matter is that my drug formula is something that I have. It will continue to be scarce and Well, you know what Bob? In my world, tough shit because people are going to compete with you and there's not a goddamn thing you can do about it. So you can sit there and come up with a new idea or you can find a way to compete and lower your prices but you can sit there and fume and complain all you want, but in my world there's going to be competition and free markets and even people like you don't like it, you can't go to any government to get protection from competition. So if you're in favor of having to be able to sell it, then hey, people are going to learn from you and compete from you. It's a very simple idea. This is the I think you're distorting the idea of selling something with how I want to protect what I have. Rothbard's title transfer theory of contract you'll understand that you're making a mistake with your selling ideas. You don't understand Rothbard. It's clear right from the beginning you attack with articles that you don't understand. Stefan, it's a disaster. Yeah, I know. You've told me destroyed in Trump. You prove there should be IP. I know, it's great. Basically, you basically have a formula and a framework that doesn't even kick in until a contract is broken. You should be ashamed of yourself with such a theory. When property is respected, whether it's sexual or private, there is no problem. Then you move on to this bizarre situation. As long as the seat gets it, then it's going to get out everywhere. That's your theory. That doesn't happen until a contract is broken and then you assume it becomes super abundant, although I really won't even give you that. But that's your argument. It's a disgrace. It's a disaster. I think you should read. So, Konkin saw the nightmare world that your galimbosian spooner is an insane IP. It's not galimbosian. Stefan, you're throwing galimbosian theory. It's not my theory. He had no theory with regard to independent discovery. Don't you even understand galimbos? Galimbosian theory? Laugh again because you're wrong again. Every time you're wrong, you laugh. You must be a bad poker player. Your galimbos are so obvious. Your galimbos are so obvious. Anybody out here who can tell us laughing, he's caught another one by the boss. Galimbos has no room in his theory for independent discovery. I am not galimbosian at all. It's another distortion of yours. So your galimbosian lost the independent discovery exception. You're like galimbos prime. I both believe in a very open-ended definition of IP. I lost it. I lost it. Where did you see this galimbosian independent discovery? Where did you see that, Stefan? You threw him more shit out. Where did you see that? You're saying you're like galimbos with one exception, with one difference. I didn't say I was like galimbos with one exception. I said I am not galimbosian at the point where I'm not galimbosian. It's with regard to independent discovery. Galimbosian does not have that in his field. You both believe in a wide array of IP rights that would last in perpetuity. So did Spooner, I believe. But that doesn't go to the main point that you're just distorting it. That is the main point. No, it's not. I think your ideas are as insane as galimboses and Spooners. I think they would lead to the death of all humankind, honestly, if they were really followed. But of course, people... Holy, you think copyright and patent would lead to the death of mankind? Yeah, I think if you enforced it strictly... Holy, you think copyright and patent would lead to the death of mankind? I think your IP ideas enforced broadly... No, no, no, no, no. My ideas which are are less strict than the current patent ideas would lead to the death of mankind. No, they're not. Your's lasted in perpetuity. Yeah, but what does that have to do with some... That means that you couldn't use a goddamn wheel right now, dude. You couldn't build a log cabin. How is it going to lead to the death of mankind? Because you'd have to get permission from everyone on the earth to do anything. You couldn't cook food. What if you have independent discovery? You can't have independent discovery once the invention is publicly known. If it's publicly known, it's in the public. That is super abundant. Oh, now you have a public domain exception, too? I can't tell what you're in favor of. No, we're using the English language, aren't we? Are we not? One of us is. Does anybody have the patent on the English language? That is super abundant. Why shouldn't someone have the patent on or on the Constitution for that matter? I mean, what about Austrian economics? How dare you use ideas you haven't paid for? What are you talking about? I mean, you're using Austrian economics ideas and your reasoning. You learned that from someone else. Hold it. Hold it. Hold it. Let's get back to the English language. In fact, you made money off your blog, right? See, that's Galambosian, okay? Galambosian, since every word is invented and you can't use it in the future, okay? There is no question that there are words, ideas, and things out there in the public domain, okay? There is no question. Like what? Well, like the English language. That is like air. That is super abundant. That's why we're not even discussing topics like that. Wait, so are you telling me that if you reveal your house-building technique to a dozen people by contract, and for somehow one of them nefariously leaks it onto WikiLeaks in an encrypted file, you don't know which one of them did it. But soon, there's copies of this, billions of copies, and computers all over the world. At that point in time, are you saying that all the per-people in the world are free to use information because now it's super abundant and now it's a public good? Is that what you're saying? Or a public domain? See, again, that's my point. Your whole framework is built on, and I'm telling you. What's the answer? I'm about to explain that to you, okay? Your whole framework is built upon a broken contract. What's the answer to the question? Without a broken contract, once the information becomes public, can people use it or not? Let me continue. Without a broken contract, you have no theory. Okay, your theory doesn't apply until somehow... That's not true. The thing is, not only broken, but becomes broken in a super abundant manner. Okay, but first of all, that's not... The other argument is that your contract idea is ridiculous. No one would enter into these contracts, dude. No one would agree to this contract in the first place. The entire idea is totally... What contract? To keep the information secret and never use it. Who said something about not using the information? What are you talking about? Your contract is going to limit what they can do with the information they learned from you. Yeah, it happens all the time. Yeah, it happens because there's copyright. People can be bullied into this kind of crap. No, no. How about... What are the tipsters? There are people that gave information to Woodward and Bernstein. Yeah, and now it's out. Yeah, so the point is... So it's public. What? It's public. It gets out. Yeah, but at the point where somebody has the information, okay, it's private information and there may have been many, many reporters trying to get at it. There's another kind of rivalry. It's people trying to pick up the information. Flexible use of the word rivalry. Competitors are rivals. If I want your girlfriend, that's a rival. We're both rivals for the same girl. I guess if I steal your girlfriend, I violated your property. You're going into smartass mode again. Yeah, because you're going to be clear. I gave you the beginning. I told you to define your terms. There's rivalry between different news information, new sources, organizations to get information. It's a rivalry. It's searching for scarce information. Yeah, so we need property rights to stop this rivalry. It's horrible. We don't want people raveling against each other. No, there is no right. There's no problem there with people trying to search out information. You're totally distorting the situation. You didn't answer the question. Can people use the information about your house building technique once it becomes public? It's the way this works. You're creating a straw man. Not a straw man. This is how the world works, dude. Look at WikiLeaks right now. You can find the formula for Coca-Cola right now. It's online. Let me explain it to you. First of all, your framework doesn't work until a contract is broken. That's not true. Maybe a contract won't be entered. Why are you always bringing up these situations where the contract is broken? Because you're the one who's building your whole theorem contract, and I'm showing that it won't work. You can't find third parties with your contract. If I have a contract, if I have something that I consider extremely, extremely valuable, I am not going to release that to anyone unless I construct a contract where the person that releases it is not prevented or does not have to pay a severe penalty if he releases it to an outside party. This is why the contracts are not feasible. People are not going to agree to pay severe penalties. They do that all the time. Because there's a thread of copyright anyway. It doesn't add anything extra, but without copyright, look, imagine I'm J.K. Rowling, and I have the next Harry Potter book, okay? And I'm selling a copy on Amazon for $15, whatever. And I say, if you buy this book, you have to agree that if you ever make a copy of it, or ever loan it to a friend, then I can sue you for a million dollars. Okay? Now, what idiot is going to buy the book and be willing to pay? No one, Bob! No one will sign these stupid contracts! So the contract wouldn't be written that way. That's right! They won't be written! Your contracts are not realistic! You create absurd straw men! It's not absurd, Bob! The contract the contract is not going to be designed that way. Step on it! Wait, wait, wait, wait! How's it going to be designed then? Who knows? Let the free market decide! So in other words, you think maybe you can have contracts that can have something like IP, but what would the contracts look like? Who knows? I'm still in favor of it! Step on it! That's how the free market works! So, if what you're saying is whatever contract people come up with to save part of the nation... Now you're attacking the way free market works! The free market allows anybody to design any contract, any kind of way they want. Are you against that? You're so mad! Are you against that, Step on? You're such an idiot, dude! Can you seriously believe this, Bob? Yeah, right! Look it! You don't understand, Rothbard! You make terrible accusations against utilitarians when you don't even understand the paper they've written. Are you a utilitarian now? I thought you didn't like utilitarians either. I told you I'm not a utilitarian! That the only problem I have is the way you attack those guys. And you didn't understand the paper! You're all over the place! You don't understand this stuff! You create a surge! Here we go with the laugh! Here we go with the laugh again! Because you're insane! I think you really have a mental problem! I mean, you're insane! You really are insane! Do you really live in this dream world? Or are you just trying to get... Let me get this straight! I have a formula for Drudge which I think is scarce and you somehow think it's super abundant. I think it's actually made up in your own mind. I don't think you're even... See, you have a formula for Drudge. Well, hey, we can ask Chris Rossini, the producer of this show, because he knows part of it. I have a formula for Drudge. So you laugh again, and again you're wrong. Bye, Nichols! Hey, bye, Nichols, Bob! What's that? Bye, Nichols. You gave away that information for free. Bye, Nichols. Another formula. You got all these formulas. I don't even know what your point is there. That's just totally bizarre, Stefan. Along with your worm, weasel comments, your predictions and terrible that I wasn't going to be here, that I wasn't eager to expose you with all this stuff. Stefan Kinsala was wrong about Winslow debating, so their IP must be justified. No, the point is that you you create things in your mind that just aren't really the case from whether I would debate you and certainly we're going on over two hours now. Time to wrap it up, Bob. So you're wrong about that. You're not a clear thinker. I've only gone through about four things, unfortunately, of the many, many sloppy things she has in the book. It's a terrible book. Terrible book. You're just wrong. You don't understand Rothbard. You don't understand scarcity. I don't understand IP either. I don't know IP either. You have a phob. Are Mises that well? Praxeology? Rothbard? Contract theory? Yeah. I don't know that you should have a property right in your girlfriend and be protected from competition. I don't know that it's crazy to think that someone would agree to pay a million dollars damages for using information they paid for. Again, you're creating strawmen. You create these strawmen as to how a contract would occur, how it would be enforced, to what degree it would be enforced, and what would happen if the contract is broken. You get to the bizarre point that a contract will be broken and then become super abundant. That may not be the case at all. I think we need to wrap it up. Let me just add a couple concluding remarks. You can say whatever you like. But I will say that congratulations in a way because we're living partly in the world that you want, the nightmare world wasted on patent lawsuits and innovation, intimidation tactics, extortion, literal extortion, oligopolies are created, competition is reduced, innovation is distorted and reduced, the government is using copyright to censor, to threaten, to ratchet up the police state and to control the internet. People are going to jail for downloading copies of movies. So congratulations, you've kind of got part of the world that your nightmare vision of IP would lead to, a completely fascist, anti-property rights world, and I hope to God we will never get it extended any further than it is. But congratulations, you've kind of got part of what you want with the modern copyright and IP system. But thank God real libertarians and Austrians almost universally recognize the horrible, fascist police state, anti-competitive, anti-human life thing that IP is and are moving against it. Maybe someday that will help influence the policy and keep it from getting any worse. No thanks to the efforts of people like you to muddy the waters and to justify the police state actions we have now. Well, Stefan, it's really interesting, you can't even keep your argument straight from the beginning of your opening remarks to the end here, because what you've done is you've attacked them as being totalitarian, fascist, clearly things that you stated in the opening remarks that you didn't want me to say. Secondly, you've got a distortion with regard to putting me in the same camp as current government views. Again, that is not the case. My case is the Rothbardian case. It is not the current government message in which copyright and patent is used. For Rothbard, it's copyright, perpetual copyright. It is copyright that allows for independent discovery. And the same thing with patent, it's perpetual patent that allows for independent discovery. There is no government that instills laws or penalties. It's all done by private contract so no one would buy a record where the penalty would be many, many years in jail if they share that with someone somehow against the desires of the music industry. Again, it's another distortion of how you're attempting to view the Rothbardian method, which you don't understand because you clearly don't understand the book. I rest my case. Thanks, Bob. Thank you.