 Hey everybody, welcome back to the program. Today I'm talking with Stefan Kinsella. Stefan is a legal scholar and a former patent attorney, and he wrote a book a few years ago called Against Intellectual Property, and he actually believes that patents on pharmaceutical drugs and even genes from companies like Monsanto causes a real big problem and actually stifles scientific innovation. So today Stefan and I talk a little bit about his book and some of the issues related to patents and copyrights and science. Thanks so much for listening. Stick around. Stefan Kinsella, thank you so much for joining me today. Glad to be here. So most of my audience probably isn't familiar with your work, so give people a little bit of background on what you do, what your expertise is, and then just a brief introduction to your book Against Intellectual Property. Sure. I'm a patent attorney and intellectual property attorney. I've been doing this for 20 plus years and have a technical background. So most of my work I do high-tech laser type patents and things like that. So I've had a lot of experience with the intellectual property field, copyrights, trade marks, and mostly patents over the last 20 plus years. I also have been interested in Austrian economics and free market economics and libertarian free market type theory for about the same amount of time. And so my interest sort of dovetailed on this and as a patent attorney and as an attorney and as a libertarian, naturally the topic of the intellectual property rights arose in my mind as to whether this is a legitimate type of law, a legitimate type of right, whether we can justify these rights under free market or individualist principles. Whether patent and copyright law in particular are compatible with a free market system and a system of liberty and property rights. That we tend to favor as Westerners and as libertarians. And you know, the answers I had seen or the arguments I had read, like from Ayn Rand and others, which were pro patent and copyright early in my education never satisfied me. So I kind of assumed that patent and copyright were legitimate, have a place in our system, but that the arguments weren't quite satisfying and maybe there were better arguments. And I searched for them and searched for them and I couldn't find any. But they all seem to have problems. For example, you know, why do patents last 17 years and copyrights last 150 years roughly? Why wouldn't they last forever if they're real property rights or if they're not going to last forever? Why would they last those amount of years? Why not 10 years for patents instead of 17? Why not 50 years? How do we know what the right number is? And so I figured, well, I'm going to be a patent lawyer and I'm a libertarian and I write on that area so maybe I can figure it out. So I started trying to figure it out myself and I never could find a good... I kept running up against the wall. You know, every argument I came up with failed, failed, failed. And then I finally realized the reason I was having trouble justifying this was because it's actually completely contrary to property rights. And I was trying to justify something that can't be justified. I was trying to justify the unjustifiable. So I came to the conclusion over 20 years ago that patent and copyright law are complete aberrations and complete abominations, you could say. They do nothing but harm and damage. They have no place in a pre-market system. They violate property rights. They reduce competition and they limit free speech and freedom on the Internet. They're very dangerous. They reduce innovation. They harm the human race, greatly, I believe, by slowing down innovation and the wealth that would have come along with technological developments that patent law has stifled. So I'm a complete opponent of patent and copyright law even though I've practiced it in my legal career for the last 20 plus years. Well, let's get into some of the details. So you said there's a lot of harm caused by these kinds of laws. And I've had a number of experts on the show who work in agriculture and biotechnology and despite having no problem with a market system or even biotechnology in general, they're very skeptical of companies like Monsanto patenting the plants that they develop or if they discover a gene that they can put into a plant that makes it resistant to disease. They're very, very skeptical of the results of that. So is there a history, just more broadly, is there a history of big companies using copyright laws and patent laws to keep competition out of the market and try to control the space that they're in? Well, absolutely. And look, I'm a libertarian. I'm a capitalist. I'm a free market advocate. I don't have a problem with corporations or other forms of business organization or with large companies. Whatever emerges on the free market is fine. But you do tend to find that the larger, more established, entrenched industries and larger firms, they tend to take advantage of whatever laws are available and they tend to lobby for the extension of the laws that benefit them. So, you know, just like Walmart is in favor of increasing the minimum wage because they already pay above the minimum wage and the minimum wage doesn't hurt them if it gets raised. It hurts their competitors who are trying to compete with them. You know, so everyone thinks that the minimum wage is for the little guy that really you have large companies in favor of it. You have lots of examples. Gabriel Calco, Murray Rothbard have written about this. You'll hear the mythologies put out there that patent and copyright are for the little guy, right? The small inventor or the sole artist. And these are just the result of propaganda spread by people who have an entrenched interest in the copyright and patent industries, which would either be the government agencies that promote it and they have the copyright. Copyright and the patent offices or the companies that depend upon this, which would be in the case of copyright, the publishing industry themselves, right? And the producers and the studios themselves, rather than the individual artists who, in most cases, don't benefit that much at all. But they're just stuck into this system where you have to have a publisher and you have to sell all your rights, your books and things like that. Thankfully, that's changing in recent decades with technology, which is helping to finally overcome some of the strangling effects of this. And in the field of patents, what you have is you have larger companies that will acquire massive war chests of patents because they can afford to do so because they're the entrenched incumbents already in an area. And then so they use their early advantage and their large or early large size to fund the acquisition of these patent monopolies, which they can use to stop competition. And it helps entrench their monopolistic position and it leads to sort of a cartel-like system or oligopoly system. So for example, in the smartphone industry, you have a few major smartphone makers, you know, Samsung and Apple and people like that. And they'll fight each other using their patent war chests and they'll each spend millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars on patent attorneys like me defending, fighting each other in court. And then they'll finally make a settlement, you know, they can afford to defend, they can afford to sue millions of dollars to file these lawsuits and to defend them. And then they make a settlement and they one agrees to pay the other royalty or whatever. And then the price is passed on to the consumer and then the companies can sit back on their laurels and they don't have to innovate as much because they're protected from competition from each other. And they can pass the prices on to their customers and their customers can't go to any alternative suppliers because there's only a few. And there's only a few because the small entrants, the upstars, the individual inventors, the very small companies, don't have the resources and the patent war chests to enter the field and fight with these big guys. If they entered into a patent battle with Apple or Samsung, they would be obliterated because they wouldn't have any patents of their own to fight back with. You know, it'd be like America and Russia can threaten each other with nuclear destruction, but smaller countries, they don't have that counter threat. So patents have led to larger companies and entrenched interest and slow down innovation because companies don't have to innovate as much. They can rely upon the patents which protect them from competition. This is the thing that people don't understand because this is not the propaganda that is spread about patents. The idea is that the propaganda is that, you know, the guy in his garage comes up with a new idea, should be able to make a good profit off of it. Or a large company, a pharmaceutical company or a gene company, they spend lots of money developing some new technique or some new drug or identifying some new gene sequence. They need to recoup their investment and therefore the patent help them do that. But all that means is that the patent protects you from competition in the free market for a longer period of time than you would be protected by your natural first mover advantage or your reputation or whatever. So basically, it's basically reducing competition, protecting you from competition. So it's clearly protectionist which is the opposite of a free marketing competition. And this is the reason I wanted to talk to you because even though you as a libertarian are sometimes outside of the quote-unquote mainstream view, your arguments are really similar to arguments I'm hearing from experts in biotechnology. So people that are also concerned about this and one of the points that stuck out to me and I'll link to this so people can read it. I believe he's a patent attorney as well but he says that by letting people patent genes that they discover or they figure out a new way to use the information to fight a disease, they just end up patenting whatever they discover. And so instead of having multiple people compete to produce the end product that everybody wants like a cancer treatment, you just have thousands and thousands of individual patents on things. And so no one is really doing the kind of work where you check each other's work and you build on what the last person did. And so we're not getting the innovation. So comment a little bit on that as far as you know. I know you're not a biologist. Well, I think that every proponent of the patent system claims that the patent system is a good thing and it's necessary because it gives a so-called incentive to people to innovate, because it protects their innovation from competition for a certain number of years. So it allows you to basically charge a monopoly price for a time on your product. So they believe that it has an effect, right? But if it has an effect, that means that it has a distorting effect or a skewing effect, which is well recognized by economists that when you have a patent system introduced, it's going to distort the market for the types of things that people devote their R&D dollars towards. You're going to tend to push your R&D dollars towards things you can get a patent on instead of things that you can't. So abstract, more abstract techniques that cannot be patented tend to get less funding and the things that can be patented get more funding. So I don't know why anyone thinks that it's a good idea for the federal government to have a system that would distort the natural landscape of where R&D dollars and the attention of scientists would go. So that's one thing. The patent system is a distraction for most engineers and scientists that I deal with because they normally, engineers and companies are trying to solve practical problems to make their products work better. They're not doing it for a patent reward. The companies are doing it for a patent reward. I don't think the patent system does actually incentivize innovation. It's just that when you come up with the inevitable discoveries and innovations that make sense in this industry, you're going to file a patent for it once you've done the work for it because you can use that patent either defensively or offensively like a patent troll later on. So the patent system simply is a distraction for these engineers who then have to meet with lawyers and give them explanations of their inventions and they have to think of them in certain ways. The patent system is basically an artificial, legislated scheme full of concepts that do not map to the natural common law property rights system that we are all used to that evolve naturally right like we have property rights and land and cars and our bodies and we have contractual rights, but the patent system, say, defines a property right in an invention and an invention is some useful technique or design of an apparatus or a machine that can be described in words by a patent lawyer who's sort of a cross between a technical expert and a legal expert and that is new and useful right and non-obvious. So these are all kind of fuzzy terms. So what you have is you have these engineers, you know, interfacing with the lawyers and getting basically monopoly protection sometimes on some of the things they come up with and then this leads to this arbitrary distinction between discovery and invention which really there's no clear cut distinction between them because in the field of science and technology in a sense you could say that all things that function and work or all ways of doing things that function and work in a certain efficient way that's different or better than what's gone in the past is a discovery. If you discover that you can use a certain material with a given property that's better than something that was used in the past, that the discovery is an invention who knows and the patent examiners don't know and the judges don't know and the juries don't know. So it all becomes a word game controlled by the lawyers and the large corporations. One kind of a devil's advocate kind of a question I suppose is that it really is expensive to develop new medical treatments and new medicines and legitimately so I mean to get through FDA clinical trials big drug companies for example have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars and maybe a decade or more just so they can get permission to sell their medicine. So is there a legitimate way in your view to protect that investment without putting restrictions on everyone else that might be in that market? Well I think that we have to step back and think about this it's not the function of the law or the function of the government to make it easier for people to come up with business models that work which is what we're getting at when people say I need to recoup my investment I mean every business needs to recoup their investment every business faces competition if they're successful there's of course a desire of every company to not have competition or to stay ahead of competition if possible and that's fine and that's part of the free market process but the way the free market works is you come up with an idea of how to solve consumer desires you put some resources into it you make a forecast about the future you make a judgment with your property you make a gamble you make a bet you put your money where your mouth is and you try to make a profit with a future plan right and you put your money towards it and you know that if you're successful you come up with a new idea that satisfies consumers that's going to be usually visible to the public in some kind of way it's going to send a signal a price signal or some other kind of signal to the market hey what I'm doing works what I'm doing satisfies consumers you know if someone starts selling Model T Fords or they start selling Coca-Cola or anything or movie you know they start showing movies to citizens and they start making a profit the profit is an aberration right from the standard returns on the market it's usually temporary because the profit signal the fact that you're making a profit is broadcast to people and people say hey this guy's selling hamburgers to people McDonald's let's form a Burger King McDonald's might not like having the competition of Burger King Coca-Cola might not like having the competition of Pepsi Ford might not like having the competition of General Motors right but and they don't give away all of their secrets if they can avoid it but they have to give away some of their secrets you know to sell a hamburger everyone knows that you have some kind of company you have employees you have a factory you have a chain of product distribution you have a way of doing it and other people will emulate more or less that model and they'll make some changes trying to out do you that's how competition works on the pre-market that's how society advances so when you have companies that say you know we have to expend dollars to research to discover new genes or to come up with pharmaceutical products it is true that they say it's cost something and it is true that some products are easier for others to emulate and copy than others digital information like CDs and records are easy to copy now other things are hard to copy like a hamburger restaurant might be hard to emulate but you have to also understand that one reason the costs are so high for some of these endeavors like pharmaceuticals the costs are so high because of another federal government agency the FDA right which imposes extreme delays and regulations and costs on companies the raises their costs and so you have these companies come screaming and complaining about the high cost imposed on them by the federal government and the solution is for the federal government to add another regulatory thing called a patent agency which is going to give them a temporary monopoly to allow them to recoup some of the costs that were artificially inflated by the federal government in the first place it might be a better solution to abolish the FDA to lower the cost directly and to abolish other regulations and taxes right which would lower the cost on these companies and then you wouldn't have to give them a temporary monopoly because they wouldn't have any costs like that to recoup in the first place yeah and that's a really interesting point and I think it goes to the issue of people not seeing the contradictions in their point of views so for example people on the left who typically don't like big corporations they will criticize patents you know this problem that's caused by capitalism this is the market these are property rights then they don't see the relationship to restrictions from the FDA so like we just talked about it costs hundreds of millions of dollars to get a new drug on the market and then in that case they go oh we just need price controls or we need the FDA to speed up their process they need a bigger budget and so they don't see the connection between these two things so let's talk a little bit about that sure one of the arguments given for the patent system is that without a patent system companies would resort more to what they used to do which was they would keep things secret that's called trade secret they would try to keep things secret as much as possible which they think is a bad thing that you should publish everything I think that there's always a balance between how much information any given company wants to keep proprietary and is able to keep proprietary a lot of things especially nowadays you're not able to keep things secret a lot of things that are supposedly secret like the Kentucky fried chickens herbs and spices and the recipe for Coca-Cola I don't think those things are even actually secret I think they're known it's just they're said to be secret the point is you can't keep a lot of things secret for a long time eventually they'll leak out so the problem with the left is and the right to be honest both the left and the right have made a mistake the left and the right both accept the false idea that property rights and capitalism include patent and copyright rights and because they accept this false premise the right is in favor of patent and copyrights and the left is opposed to patent and copyrights because they believe it's capitalistic but they're both actually wrong the typical example of socialism is centralized state control of the means of production but the essence of it is basically an institutional system which erodes and intervenes with and interferes with private property rights understood as property rights assigned basically according to the simple common law principles of whoever got the thing first right that's lock in homesteading or whoever contractually assigned it as an owner to someone else that's how you determine ownership by contract and by first use those are the basic hallmarks of the of the private property system anything else that deviates from that is basically socialistic if it's done by a state or institutionalized and patent and copyright do that because what they do is a right is given to someone by the state someone who applies for a patent or someone who gets a copyright the state gives that guy a certificate basically which says we give you a certificate that you can use you come to our courts we have a monopoly on the use of violence and force in the legal system you can come to our courts and present the certificate and you can use that certificate to shut down your competitors factory that's basically what patent and copyright do I call this a negative servitude I think that's the best way to classify the law a negative easement or a negative servitude is similar to what you have in a restrictive covenant when you have neighbors who agree voluntarily that no one in a neighborhood can you know paint their house purple or something like that it's a negative right it's a right of your neighbor to stop you from using your property in a certain way which is legitimate if it's voluntarily agreed to which it is like in a restrictive covenant in a homeowners association for example but when the government just grants this to one of your competitors and gives your competitor the right to stop you from making something competing with them it basically gives him control over your property rights it basically gives your competitor a property right in your factory right because he can he can say I can stop you from using your factory to make this kind of iPhone or this kind of widget or this kind of smartphone or this kind of book so the ultimate problem with patent and copyrights is that they restrict property rights they take away property rights and so basically patent and copyright are socialistic and that's the problem with them so socialists if they had any consistency they would they would actually not be so against patent and copyright it is true that patent and copyrights are used to artificially increase the size and power of large corporations but a lot of socialistic policies do like the minimum wage and others trade lots of regulations that companies can afford to handle which put smaller companies at a disadvantage so the socialists are just the leftists are just confused we need to have a vibrant competitive pro innovation realm and the government needs to set the ground rules of property rights and stay out of it it is not the government's job it's not the job of the law to make it easier for someone with a new business idea no matter what it is to recoup their costs or to avoid competition if you think about it it's almost like the mainstream people that are in favor of IP law they like a free market they like competition within bounds of reason they don't like too much competition if you have competition that faces you after you have a successful product or service you need to have competition gradually arise and then you can adapt and compete with your competitors but if it's too easy to compete with you they think that should be illegal which they think is the case for basically goods that can be easily replicated where a main ingredient of the success of the good is the information like the composition of a pharmaceutical or a digital version of a movie of software or a song which can be easily copied and the fact that our digital age makes it easy to copy simply means that it's easier to compete so what this means is the free market is working better there's more competition right away and these people don't like that because it's too easy to compete they say well how in the world can I start a new venture if someone can compete with me as soon as I start making money and by the way back on the pharmaceutical issue the FDA requires companies as part of the FDA process to reveal the details of their drugs and because the process takes years and because these results have to be made public by the time the company gets FDA approval and they're about to sell their brand new drug all their would be competitors already know what the ingredients are and everything because the FDA has forced them to drop their panties and reveal their goodies right so they don't have the natural advantage that you would have in a free market of keeping some things proprietary for a while and having a good first mover advantage you know maybe I come up with a new heart attack drug or a new cholesterol drug and I get it vetted by some private vetting agencies but I don't have to reveal all my details to the world and by the time I hit the market you know five years later maybe people start finally competing but I have a good first mover advantage the FDA removes that and therefore the company squeal and scream and say well well then we have to have patents because otherwise people can compete with me so easily well one reason they can compete so easily with you is because the FDA has forced you to reveal the secret sauce already so a lot of these problems is the result of what means is the great Austrian economist you know he said that the problem with regulations and controls that controls breed controls because one control has unintended consequences and it's going to have bad consequences and so then the regulators and the legislators rush in to fix that with another regulation you have another regulation and it's a never ending series of trying to fix the problem which is what you always get when you try to interfere with the natural order of the free market the best thing to do would be to respect the natural order of the free market respect private property rights let people compete let some ventures succeed some fail and let technology just proceed on its own pace whatever that is one thing and I'm glad you went into that explanation to give people some background but you see these contradictions over the place so for example Monsanto is trying to merge with Bayer right now and they're going to become this big conglomerate in the biotech space and people are freaking out about that because it reduces competition supposedly but then they don't see it on the other end all the issues you were just describing with patent law I mean you have the same result that you're so afraid of so you won't let these two companies voluntarily do this meanwhile on the other side you're going to say no we have to protect property rights and we can't have people just copying medicine and so forth so it's good to step back like you just did and kind of take a holistic view and people don't do that because they're so dedicated to whatever idea they have well I think most normal decent people are focusing on their own things and they don't have time to become an expert in political theory and economics and they're going to tend to hear the propaganda spread that people have a lot to gain from these things but on the field of monopolies the entire justification for lots of government programs like the antitrust, the FTC and the antitrust laws is this fear of private monopolies somehow emerging which has always been a schizophrenic thing I believe because number one the federal government has a monopoly it is a monopoly it's the biggest monopoly the government is the only source of true monopolies so you want to empower the world's biggest monopoly to stop private monopolies from emerging but then it helps to encourage private monopolies that wouldn't otherwise be able to exist in larger corporations that would probably exist in a free market by making the regulations so onerous that only the large companies can afford to negotiate them right and to navigate them and then by granting private monopolies called the patent and the copyright I mean the patent system traces its origins to a statute in England from 1623 called the statute of monopolies the government is handing out monopolies to people with one agency the patent office while it has another agency the FTC designed to stop monopolies which it helps to encourage happen in the first place in fact it's schizophrenic that there's a doctrine in the courts among these agencies where they say that look we know that we're granting companies an extra market which means a monopoly position with these monopoly privileges patent and copyright law they have a right to charge a monopoly price in fact we're trying to encourage them to innovate by giving them this monopoly price to recoup the cost we've imposed on them with the FDA which is another government agency right but they can't abuse it in other words so we have to have a balance so the judge in a federal court is going to be the one who's going to do the balance to decide whether you've abused the monopoly you gave you so we give you a monopoly the patent you're charging a high price but then you're using it a little bit too successfully or a little bit too aggressively now you might run afoul of the Sherman antitrust act or other antitrust laws so you have to have a balance between anti monopoly and pro monopoly positions of the same federal government so the whole thing is schizophrenic and the federal government has done nothing but to corrupt and distort the we haven't talked about copyright too much copyright is also another area where the copyright law heavily distorts culture of chills free speech and threatens freedom on the internet I believe the patent system does the most damage in a tangible sense I think it slows down the course of human progress and is a huge tragedy there are millions of lives that could have been improved or saved with a technology level we would have now if the patent system had not existed for the last 200 years or especially the last 50 or 100 years in the high tech era and it's it's it's it's like it's the scene and the unseen we can see the benefits of a law but we can't see the unseen costs of it right the things that we we lost that we never would have seen we might have flying cars by now we might have colonized Morris by now we might have cured cancer by now so to me it's a huge tragedy and we need to get people thinking that we have got to get the government out of this and let science and technology and the free market alone well one way I think that this causes problems especially in education and in scientific research is you have these private journals who they they publish the results of research that the government funds and then they put the content behind a payroll paywall and they copyright it and so if you're a consumer if you're a science writer like me and you want to get into this information so you can write about it well too bad you know you need to pay us $35 to access the article for 10 hours or you can sign up for $2,000 a year subscription and so you get the situation where everything is controlled by these big institutions I mean open access journals that are popping up which is a good thing for the most part you have the NIH and these other federal agencies funding a lot of academic research and then you have these big corporations these big publishing companies that own all of the final product so people don't think of that very much do you want to talk a little bit about that if it's not too far outside what you work on well no I think that's a good example of how a lot of these government policies and programs reinforce each other so not only the FDA right and the controls that they impose and other government regulations and taxes and the antitrust system which is in conflict with the patent system but then you have the copyright system which has has led to an entrenched system of controls by the publishers right it's almost a guilt type system like we had at the beginning of the copyright system under the statute of Ann in England 1709 which which came after the stationers company which was the actual publishing guild that emerged after the advent of the printing press so it was reformed and it led to what we have now which was what we've had for the 20th, 20th century, 20th, 19th centuries so yes you do have if we didn't have copyright and then the other thing is funding of research so basically every aspect of this is intertwined and entangled with each other they reinforce each other they cause problems which gives the government more excuse to come in with yet another program to try to solve the problem that they've caused but yes I completely agree with you on that the alleged goal of the patent system by the way it's not to incentivize innovation it is to encourage disclosure of things that would otherwise be kept secret that's what the patent bargain is if you read the patent act it's basically if you disclose in a patent application you disclose the details of this invention we will give you a temporary monopoly over it so that's the bargain they're trying to encourage disclosure and yet the copyright system has established these paywalls which wouldn't exist without copyright these artificial gated communities and gatekeeper type institutions could not survive without copyright if you remember what Aaron Swartz, the heroic internet pioneer the poor victim of copyright law did was he took a bunch of these scientific and papers and released them, uploaded them to the world now look imagine that close to zero percent of those authors were compensated for those papers they didn't write those papers for money they did it for their careers and because of their passion and because it was just part of what they do but they were controlled by the publishers right they want to keep it paywalled which is ridiculous why would you want to keep this amazing funded information that we have paywalled to an elite group of people to have permission to read this it should be released to everyone especially when it's funded by our tax dollars right so the whole thing is a travesty I believe what Swartz did was he was trying to free information that would not have been able to paywall without copyright and that was paid for largely by tax dollars and are written by professors who didn't even get paid and who want their work to be read by as many people as possible and because of that he was threatened with decades in federal prison so he committed suicide it's a young man a bright man you know it's a tragedy so I would say copyright and patent feed on each other and all the patent law does more damage and tangible sense copyright law is almost more insidious because it lasts so much longer and it distorts culture and it reduces the information we can read the good thing I would say in my view is that the advent of encryption and torrenting and the internet and smart phones and all these ways of communicating in a permissionless way has basically helped to kill copyright and I think that's a good thing and my hope is that in the future with a certain degree of technological development and advancement 3d printing will start to spell the doom for the patent system I'd give it 30-40 years but you know if you can print an iPhone in your basement with some 3d printers using a design you got by torrenting it over the internet and no one can stop you or know that you're doing it then patent law will be dead too or largely dead so I'm hopeful that technology can save us from these two horrible legal systems. Yeah well a final thought and I think it's getting better in the room of publishing for example so these open access science journals they make the researchers pay the publication fee and there are some problems with that where you have these junk journals popping up and they're based in India or somewhere and they'll publish anything but there are good ones too and so if the researcher pays the fee to have this published she then has an incentive to get the information out there they're like look look at this article I wrote it cost me money I want you to read it I want more notoriety and so it's effectively starting to end run big journals like Science and Nature I mean and those are the ones that everyone wants to publish in but over time we're going to start getting away from it which I'm excited to see. I think so too I mean I've run an open source journal myself it's called Libertarian Papers but it's basically zero cost it's free online and we don't even charge the submission fees and things like that that the other big ones do and I I've looked at the PLOS PLOS journals they look pretty good to me it seems to me that they are taking a little bit of advantage of the defects in the existing system to charge the authors but I would imagine that there's a limit to how much they can do that because at a certain point the researcher could simply publish his paper on his blog if you wanted to it might not have the same prestige but I think that's going to change over time so you know you want to have peer reviews and if possible but I think all these changes are good and they're shaking up the industry I don't think that we'll see the same industry in 20 years that we see now the way the way that publishing is done I think it's almost all going to be open most scholars and scientists that I know they want their stuff to be open they want to be able to link to it and send it to people and have people to be freely able to read it even if they're not the world's greatest experts why would you restrict it to a small community artificially so I think that's going to that's going to leave the day because it will never become harder to copy than it is now the internet's just making things easier and easier to copy things and information is out there it's out there and I think all these trends are good but they're going to spell the doom of some entrenched business models like the paywall journals yeah well and I hope it happens because there's always a way to turn a profit if you're producing content that people want there's always a way to do it because people will pay for quality stuff it's just you can't lock down their computers for too long before they get sick of it so anyways where can people find out more about your work Stefan and are you have any books coming out or any articles you want people to specifically know about yeah I'm trying to finish up a book this year probably the next six months which is a compilation an edited compilation of a lot of my libertarian legal theory articles called law and the libertarian world and you can find out about that and also about my intellectual property related thought on stephancancella.com cool we'll link to it and by the way if anyone's curious you can read his book on intellectual property for free won't charge you for it just in case anyone's wondering but Stefan thanks for joining me I thought this was a great discussion so thank you yeah and in fact I'm going to do a successor to that and the title will be copy this book so it's coming up to rip off the system of a down album title yeah or yeah well there was a Abby Hoppin book steal this book but he had it slightly wrong because if you copy a book you're actually not stealing anything so why don't you just copy this book but we'll see awesome I'm looking forward to it thanks