 All right, we're gonna talk in this video about how intellectual property IP as they call it is Fake and everyone knows it. Okay. That's we're gonna talk about now first off You got to clear some things up because a lot of people don't know what intellectual property actually is a lot of people got it twisted Okay, frankly because I'll talk about in a video. I'll say something like oh, yeah IP is obviously stupid and everyone knows it And then people will get confused as what that actually is because they did I think there's a lot of misinformation Two things first off intellectual property is not the same thing as branding or fraud for example If I want to start a power tool company, let's say I make a really junky Impact driver a drill or something like that an impact driver is like a drill. It's different. It's not important So let's say I make a really junky one of those and then I put because I actually want to sell it even though it's a bad product so I put The logo from another company on it, so I'll put like a DeWalt logo on it. Okay That is not intellectual property violation that is not that is not what that is. Okay, that's a that's fraud All right, if I sell something pretending that it's something else that it isn't especially if You know, I am putting the idea in the consumer's head that oh, this is actually made by someone else who actually has a good Reputation that's fraud. That's not the same thing as an intellectual property violation So a lot of people will get confused. They'll say, oh, you don't believe in IP That means that someone could just take your stuff and pretend to be you. No, no, that's not absolutely not what not what that means That means something different. Okay, you can say something like intellectual property is stupid but still believe be like Let's say I write a software project and someone else takes it and says, oh, well, I wrote this Okay, that's not the same now I I think that people should be able to distribute software take and change and you know software and stuff like that But obviously it is fraud to put that on your CV as if you do that. That is a different thing Just say that is bad is not the same thing as saying intellectual property is bad Okay, so that that's misunderstanding number one number two is saying something like oh software should be free or Intellectual intellectual property is fake does not mean you don't believe in trade secrets, for example So there's no I I write a bunch of software on my Computer there are some there are some scripts and stuff that I write on my servers. Those are not publicly available Okay, and believing that intellectual property specifically in software is fake does not mean that you have to make everything public It doesn't mean you have to share everything. It doesn't mean you can't have secrets in your life That is all if I say I don't believe in intellectual property. That's not the same thing Okay as this okay, so let's talk about what intellectual property actually is in context. Okay now Firstly culturally speaking intellectual property is really just an artifact of Anglo American jurisprudence Okay, you go to other countries you go to other cultures the concept does not exist Chinese people intellectual property what lol People in East a lot of people in Eastern Europe a lot of frankly everywhere in the world except for America and places that America has conquered culturally in one way or another They have no concept of intellectual property. It is a very specific meme that originated and it's a force to mean frankly So let's talk about property in general. Okay property in general You know you have the reason we have property property is a social convention to distribute To decide who gets to use what and and you know who has priorities, right? So in effect, you know if you have a society where everyone is extremely poor and or you know Not not just poor, but let's say You don't need objects to your hunter and gatherer. You don't really need like you don't need to have houses and land And and like cooking equipment or anything too fancy. There's really no need for the convention of property So although it arises sometimes in very primitive societies. It's it's at a very low level. Okay Whereas at a society of even a basic level of complexity the concept of property emerges very quickly even Especially if you're sedentary right because you have a scarce amount of Goods, you know, you might have you know, let's say you don't have as many cars as people but even Even in that case, let's say you have more cars than people one problem is If people do not take care of the thing if everything is public property or at least no one's property There's a big issue of who's actually gonna take care of it I mean, there's there's the idea if you own land for example that that's really like a double-edged sword You can use that land to make money, but you also have to take care of it. Yeah, that's a big liability Okay, you own a rental house. Oof ever owned a rental house. That's a pain. Okay You lose money in very unexpected ways, okay, so there's a dual responsibility with property. Okay now Intellectual property. What is the difference between intellectual property and property property? Okay? Intellectual property is not property. That's the difference. The difference is if I take your axe or something like that You no longer have an axe if I copy your song. You still have that song. Okay, there's nothing has changed I did not deprive it like Intellectual property so-called is not scarce. It does not have scarcity. There's no such thing. It doesn't happen Okay, no matter how many times I copy a song you still have it. You have not been deprived of that In fact, it seems a little weird to arbitrarily say oh well I mean if you thought about it in the context of physical goods It would be obviously absurd if we could just copy axes or copy houses or copy land That would be great. We could just give everyone everything and there wouldn't actually be a problem Okay, because there would be no scarcity. Okay, we actually can't do that in digital goods We can do that in ideas except unless we have intellectual property. Okay? We have to and it's actually a little absurd because I think even people who do this intellectual property stuff they they I know a lot of them think they're getting a quick buck But in reality, I mean I've seen people who like who have a thousand viewers on YouTube who like paywall half of their videos Okay, they're trying to put you know Protect the distribution of it and stuff like that which has always struck me as like frankly absurd because a lot of it I mean frankly For most purposes, it's nice to live in an in an environment where you can easily distribute Intellectual property. It's actually good for the people who make that kind of stuff Of course, there are ways you can exploit intellectual property law to sue people for royalties and like you know Become a millionaire due to like the the the kind of IP structure here, but it is honestly Frankly, I mean the reason I release everything obviously is free software is because I think it's a better thing for me long term if I do that Okay, I could be making lots of money if I sold. Oh, yeah, you want to install mutt wizard You want to install my email wizard, which is just like a script. Oh, you know, I can make I could make that a binary I could just make it. I could sell that for a hundred bucks a pop and for a lot of people actually would buy it I mean, it's it's very nice. I mean you could you could do cool stuff with that Have it set up your own email server, but you know, that's the kind of thing where It's just sort of sit. I mean another thing to think about if you're thinking about like cultural things Let's say like music. All right, so here's a fun fact Even in the United States if you look back at the early 20th century Intellectual property was never actually applied to music. It was absurd like the idea nowadays We have these multi-billion dollar record companies that are getting rich Off these songs and stuff like that but back in the past that wasn't the case Okay, people just guess what people still wrote songs. Okay And and back in the day, you know, how a lot of people got famous as singers is actually taking songs that other people had written and just recording them all singing them all and Making albums out of that. Okay sell their albums, which of course you can still sell albums. You can still, you know, physically Sell objects, you know, there's nothing You know saying you don't believe in IP is not the same thing as that. Okay But yeah, in fact technically IP is not necessarily the same thing as copyright either Copyright is sometimes thought of as a category of IP. You could believe in a copyright like a copyright would be You know, let's say I'm the first one to make this particular invention Well for the government says for the first 10 years you can no one else can copy that you only you can make copies of it Okay, that's technically a little different than intellectual property But I guess you could say it's a category of that but you could believe in Narrow copyrights and still not believe in intellectual property is the thing. Okay, but I don't believe neither I think they're same stupidity But what was I gonna say? So yeah, a lot of people have this weird idea and frankly, this is depressing to me like Because intellectual property I think brings mediocrity to a lot of art Because what happens is, you know people who are internally motivated to write or to make music or to I mean even frankly write software in a sense. They're gonna be doing it whether they're getting Millions of dollars for it or not. Okay, like when people are actually passionate artists That's just something they do if they're actually passionate writers That's just what they're gonna do the idea that we need some targeted economic incentive For people to do something is absurd It's just totally a historic like if we needed intellectual property for anything And I mean we intellectual property has not existed for all of human history There have even been copyrights at periods, but intellectual property as the idea I you know as an idea does not exist and you don't need it like even in the case like if I become a famous Sculptor now I make a great sculpture It is still if someone copies my sculpture and tries to sell it as mine. Okay, that's still fraud That's not the same thing as intellectual property. It's a different thing Now if they're just selling it openly as a replica Oh, this is a replica of this famous sculpture that he made and that would be different But the idea like a lot of people just think that not believing it not believing in intellectual property Means all this weird stuff that it doesn't or it means I don't know Just people are or it means you have to share or if you believe in free software that means you have to Give everyone the passwords to your computer so they can see what's going on. It's just like I don't know I've had people had oh you believe in privacy, but you're not telling everyone what you're doing on a computer It's just so stupid But yeah, that's about it. So I just find it intellectual property I just find it very frustrating and it's hard to describe the world We would live in if we didn't have to deal with this kind of stuff if we could just If you could just look at a program you like and just take a snippet of code from it or a Video game or something like that and we would have in a whole environment of people especially in software of People sort of creatively you people who are genuinely inspired Using these this kind of stuff creative and actually this is I want to do maybe another video on this Maybe I'll just turn this off when I'm done with this video and start the the other video I was gonna record, but I want to talk about How I know this sounds not characteristic of me But gaming on Linux and how much better it would be if there were no intellectual property, okay? I know that sounds like an absurd thing, but anyway, that's my view on it I don't know and I one last point though. I don't I'm not like a moralist I'm not like oh dude if you use intellectual property. That's wow. I can't believe that's terrible No, I don't I don't think that at all Like I think that people should exploit the legal system that they live in, you know And if that means you making a bunch of proprietary Programs or something and taking advantage of those laws like I'm not really gonna think you're a bad person for that at all Now I believe that it is better even in my own interest to release things as free software and that's why I mean I Like I think that that is just better long term frankly That's just how I see things like I feel weird about artificially constraining How things can get around and I think it would be weird if I did that for my YouTube channel like I look at Other people online like there are some other channels who do who will do this stuff where like they they put some videos on YouTube And then they put a bunch of other videos behind a paywall or something like that like oh you got to get my my oh my My better tutorials my Luke Smith plus you got to pay $60 a month or something stupid I just find that a little like self undermining. Maybe you're making a buck. I'm just maybe not about that Even if I like wrote a book or something like that like I want people to take those ideas Like I'm not there to make money off of it I want people to be able to copy and and change that around and you know, I will sell physical copies of it But that is not the same thing as it's not the same thing as intellectual property. It's just not the same thing So I just think really hard about that or don't