 Okay, I just hit record let me just say some brief words and then we can I can add something out to if we need to but hey this is Stefan can sell off talking to a libertarian from Las Vegas named Dennis. Is that right. Yes. And we're going to talk about IP. Let me just explain what what happened so on Twitter, I don't remember how it came up but some anti IP comment was made by me or someone and then this weighed in with pro IP comments and I tried to argue with them and I just said look let's just talk about it. So, that's the purpose of this and I'm going to let you talk a lot but I'm going to set it up. I'm going to ask you some questions or see where see where you are. So I see you have a libertarian party in Nevada had I had that exact hat friend. You're not the one who gave it to me know someone else gave it to me. I went to I was it I was at Reno, and you do. And I was at. I think it was not Reno think it was Las Vegas I was at and I went to know it was it was some convention I was anyway, there was some Las Vegas guys there and I got invited to their house and he gave me the hat so I wear it around. I was wearing it around Houston but I quit wearing it because everyone assumes I'm from Las Vegas. Okay, so you're in your obviously libertarian right. Oh yes. Okay, most definitely. Um, or what kind of libertarian are you like are you menarchist anarchist manarchist. Okay you're a man I'd say yeah, I'd say manarchist. That's what we call these many, we call you a mini status then but that's okay. I'll take it. And are you like sort of natural rights type or consequentialist or utilitarian or like who do you like Rand or Rothbard or Milton Friedman, Ron Paul, who's your guy Ron Paul, you know, Ron Paul. Rothbard, you know, I read a little bit. I mean, I'll be honest. I'm not. Like deep, you know, in the, you know, like I have, you know, I haven't read all the all the different guys, you know, right. Like I said, I'm not deep into the philosophies. I got it. That's fine. That's fine. And listen, I want to say a lot of people think I'm kind of an asshole and I'm really hard on people, but I never mind people that disagree with me and I never mind people that ask questions and I never mind people that are not even they're not even intellectuals. That's fine. What I don't like is when people make confident assertions about something that's really bad, and that they don't know anything about it. Like, it's, it's better to just ask questions or say, well, how would this work or what's the right way or what should I go read you know what I mean. So being a little bit humble. So that's kind of my the reason I'm kind of sharp with people sometimes is like, when they just make an assertion. Now if there's someone who studied it deeply and they still disagree with me and they make an assertion, well, then I respect the fact that they at least know what they're talking about. They just come to a different conclusion than me, you know, like Richard Epstein or someone like that. Right. But. Okay, so let me ask you this. If you're a libertarian a menarchist libertarian, you believe in some form of that of natural right or you believe in property rights, correct. Yes, I believe in property rights, you know, I believe that, you know, someone does have, you know, right to their to their own property. Correct. But at the same time, I'm, and I hate to use this word being as a, you know, as a Mises caucus, I'm a bit of a pragmatist. I think property property rights are pragmatic. Actually, they're there. They're a practical solution to a real problem, which is the problem of conflict over scarce resources. Right. I just, I honestly disagree where I disagree is is that only physical items are scarce. Well, let's let's not go there. Let's hold on a second. Let me let me let me see where we have common ground. Let's go first. Would you kind of agree that most rights are the rights that we libertarians support are basically negative rights like it's a right that other people not do something to you, and that positive rights generally are welfare rights which which gives you a claim on someone doing something for you, which is which, which, which undercuts rights. In other words, if I have a right to my body and my, my car, all you have to do is just not take it. Right. But if I have a duty, if I have a duty to education, and I mean if I have a right to education and health care, you have to provide it to me, but with taxes or something like that. So that would claim over your property. So would you agree with that basically that we oppose positive rights in that sense. Right in that in that sense, yes, you know, I mean I do not agree that one should say we have we have a right to health care because then that would force someone to provide that health care. So, so what I'm getting at is a lot of liberals are kind of moderates would say, Well, we believe in property rights, but we also believe in welfare rights. So they think you can add on to the set of negative rights you can add positive rights on to it because they don't understand that the positive rights undercut the negative rights, like to the extent you have a right to health care, that takes away some of my rights, because I have to be taxed to pay for it. And so I'm going to explain later. The analogy is, when you say you believe in rights and physical things but you believe in other rights and other things too that are not physical what you're doing is exactly the same thing as someone who says well I believe in negative rights but I also believe in positive rights, because when you grant positive rights you take away from negative rights, and whenever you recognize rights and something that's not a physical scarce tangible material resource. It takes away from those rights because they're in conflict with each other. And I'll explain that later but let me ask you this. So, as a libertarian, we have some common ground the non aggression principle property rights things like that. Right. And you just spout off on this list. Oh, well I believe in property now you start giving reasons for like oh how are producers going to how are artists going to make a profit how are inventors going to make a profit all that stuff. But the first question would be when you say that you believe in in intellectual property rights. Would you agree that the burden of proof is on you to number one define what you mean, and number two to explain why we have those rights and why it's compatible with our right do you agree that the burden of proof is on you. Well of course if I say if I say I believe something then I think that yes the burden of proof. Well then let me ask you the what do you mean by intellectual property rights. What I mean is this is someone should have the product of their mind to be able to be protected in a way that gives them, you know, you know cover. That's from someone, especially using their in, you know, their intellectual property for profit. Okay, so, but you see that's not a, but that's, that's not a definition of what the rights are. I mean, you know, patent law and copyright law don't say what you just said, patent law and copyright law say that someone cannot copy an invention. I wouldn't say product of your mind and all this stuff so that's not what I mean by product of your mind. So, so do you basically mean the existing American legislative patent and copyright law that's what you think is legitimate. No, no. Would you be okay with abolishing the patent and the copyright system. No. So, so which one is it are you in favor of it or are you opposed to it. I just get thing is you're going to extremes from one to the other. Well, what do you want to reform it. What do you want to do. Okay, so what's your ideal IP system. What's wrong with the current law is my question, if you don't like it wrong with it. Let me go there. I'll get there. So what if you have a patent that lasts for 17 years a fixed term. It's not exactly that but it's roughly that. So if you if you're 90 years old and you invent something and you have a patent, and you die two years later, you think the patent should expire when you die. Yep. Okay, do you think that that might give an incentive to someone to bump you off so they can start competing with you trust me actually when I went up when I was talking about that on Twitter I actually thought about that. You know that could actually you know create a kind of you're kind of waiting so you're winging it as we're talking you don't really have a system worked out. Okay, I do. Okay, I think I did I did you know when we were talking about that it entered my mind that with it, you know, being a, you know, ending at death. Yes, that could incentivize someone to knock off the inventor. You know, is that likely. I guess it depends on me for some patent inventions I think it could be very likely I mean it depends on how many zeros are involved. You know, I mean so yes I do that I do think that that could be a thing but I don't think that IP should be extend beyond the death of the creator because it is descendants. Had no hand or mind in creating that intellectual property. Yeah, but I mean think how arbitrary that is I mean so let's imagine a guy invent something and he he sells the patent to a company for $10 million. Okay, now if he dies the next day he can still leave that 10 million to his descendants candy. Right but then he also at the time at that time no longer owns the patent. No, but no, but no, no, but the point is, whether he leaves the patent to his heirs, which has a valuable has a value or he leaves the money he got from selling the patent to his heirs. I mean, it makes now you're artificially incentivizing someone to hurry up and sell their patent so that they can leave something to their heirs. And on the other hand, also, you know you're treating people differently based upon their life expectancy because if I'm a young guy, or if I'm a very old guy, and I have the same invention hold on listen. If I sell that patent to a company or license it to someone is going to have more value if I'm younger, because the company that buys it from me knows that it might expire in a year or two if I'm very old. So they're going to pay me less for it so now if you're an older and you're penalized. But see, I'm not treating anybody different based on their age. The law, the law would be the same across the books for everybody. So it's you know it doesn't matter if you're 90 or nine. You know, um. So, are you aware of what the copyright term is right now for copyright. I believe it's life plus 70 life of the author plus 70 so it's generally over 100 years old in many cases, which I don't, I said I don't agree with. And so what would you what would the so you think there should be a fixed term for copyright and patent and it should, and it should expire upon death. There you go but it's not a fixed term, you know it's on that so it could be 20 years it could be two years. Well that's fixed. No I mean what what what are you so what should the terms what should the term of a patent be in your life. If I if I invent something when I'm 20 it lasts for say 80 years maybe potentially. So it lasts so it lasts your entire life is what you're saying because your mind is because you're the mind is the one that created it. Okay, but generally your favor of the copyright and patent system you just think that they should be the term should be modified. I mean, I believe like I said, I believe that someone like, for example, the example I used was, say I invent something, I spend 20 years, right. Testing and retesting and recalibrating and everything like that, until I have invented transparent steel. Yeah. Okay, nobody else has come up with it. Nobody else has thought of it. Only mine. Yeah. And someone comes up behind me and basically copies it or whatever reverse engineers it so on so forth. They learn they learn from you. Yeah, you taught them something. You taught them something by giving by making something public you pop you made your steel publicly available so they could say you taught them. No, you're probably you're probably going to have brochures saying hey I'm the inventor of this new transparent steel come take a look it's better than other steel. Why don't you come by it you're going to have brochures and magazine articles and you're going to be you're going to be that's teaching people. So, anytime you buy KFC, they're teaching you the 11 herbs and spices. If it's possible to reverse engineer yes they are. But that's the thing is is nobody has. Well, that's actually I think that's actually a myth I think you can actually Google right now what they are I think, and people know people actually know what they are I think. They don't but that's the thing is they get they there's lots of guesses out there, but that's not enough property by the way that that's a trade secret they're just keeping information secret. I mean but it's it's in the same realm. Well, you're assuming that it's possible to reverse engineer the steel or, you know, a lot of lots of inventions as soon as you know that something is possible then you can figure out pretty easily how to do it. Like if we knew that transparent steel was possible then scientists say oh I didn't know that was possible and then they would they would say okay, that must be done one or two ways and they'll they'll quickly figure it out. Right. They could to so you are teaching them in a way in a sense. Well, I mean you're letting them know it's possible here but you're not teaching them the formula because I mean. Actually when you file a patent you are teaching them because you're publishing how to make it right but that's when you file a patent because you're filing a patent because you know it is protected. Correct. It's called that's actually the patent bargain the patent bargain is that we the government will give you a 17 year limited monopoly on this idea if you disclose to everyone how to do it. So that so that when the monopoly expires everyone else is free to use it and start competing with you then that's the patent. Right. Basically it's giving you it's like it's like listen okay you you've basically done this thing that nobody else is done. Okay, and then we're going to say okay for for a little while because you know it's it's it's I mean I guess it's almost a I guess it would almost be like a reward system. Because you know you basically put all this into it. Yeah. Yeah, so don't you see that that's, I mean the government does that also with government funding of science they they give money to people to encourage them to do things to reward them to incentivize them to do things. I would assume you're against that I assume you're against the government taxing me and you to fund science, like the National Institute for Science. Right. Yeah, I mean I don't. You're breaking up. I mean I do believe that yes all all taxes are theft. Okay, so if but with the government can't incentivize in innovation that way why can they incentivize it by granting. There's so there's so there's so many, you know, private companies out there. Yeah, and, you know, I mean, I think you know, and the reason why there's so many private companies out there is because they know that if they invent something they actually can get a return on investment. They don't know that. All they know is they can all they know is they can maybe stop a potential, they can stop a competitor. And they can only stop a competitor they can afford to enforce the patent so if you're a small company, and you invent something, even if you patent it. What are you going to do if Apple starts competing with you, you're going to sue Apple. You're going to hit you with $10 million of legal fees. You know, I mean, these patents actually help the big companies you do realize that they don't help small companies. Which is why I said, I think that a lot of these patent laws, you know, should be reformed. You know, I think a lot of our laws should be reformed to be, you know, but so you're more simple. Your proposal is a unique one I've never heard that one for and I've heard a lot of a lot of stupid ideas. You realize that the ideas for reforming the system stupid. I'm just stupid they're stupid because there's no there's no basis but you just made it up. I mean, there are other proposals like to take the 17 year patent term, and the, and the life of the author copyright term some people say oh wait we should The copyright term should be 14 years extendable once like it was in the beginning of the country. Okay, that's arbitrary but it's something and some people say that the patent system should have different terms for different technologies like something that's like like software should maybe seven years instead of 15 or whatever are set instead of 17 because it's a different type of it advances so rapidly. I don't think you should have different terms, or the term should vary based upon the probability that someone else would have independently invented it, or some libertarians believe that the term should be perpetual should last forever like So, what's your argument for life of the author and that's it. Because like I said it's because nobody else beyond that had you know that the brain of the person who came up with that idea. Yeah. Beyond that, the brain of the person who came up with that idea is no more. So what? No. Technically, you could put a brain in a jar or whatever, but that's, you know. Yeah, but what's the brain existing have to do with how long the rights should be? Because, I mean, you realize the transistor, for example, and there's lots of things that have been invented, like the light bulb. There was multiple people working on the same thing at the same time. And one of them happens to get there first, but others are right on their heels. You know, the calculus was invented by Leibniz and Newton at the same time. Marginal utility was invented at the same time and economics by Manger and Val Ross and Jevons at the same time. I mean, lots of those are things that are, you know, like, I mean, I'm just giving an example. There's lots of things that are like light bulb airplane. The point is, if I get a patent on the light bulb, and there's other guys right behind me, if I hadn't existed, they would have invented it two years later. It was, it was going to come. So if I get a patent on it for the next 80 years of my life, I've got a monopoly on something that everyone would have had for free. You know, it would have been in the public domain if I had just hadn't patented it. Like it's unfair for it to last for 80 years because it would have been invented by someone else, even if I hadn't done it. What if it only lasts for six years or two years? Exactly. The point is, the longer the term is, the more you start running into the unjustness of preventing someone who could have independently invented it from using it. So let's say you invite, invite, invite, invent the light bulb, right? Now, if I remember correctly, if I remember correctly, the first light bulbs were you had a wax filament. I think it was, I think it was, or paper filament, bamboo or something. It was, it was shit. Yeah. And then, and then when they put it in, they then they realized if you have to put it in a vacuum and then use tungsten or whatever. Right. And so that's the thing is, is that new invention is then patentable. Yes. Okay. Anytime, you know, but it's, but it's unjust. It's, it's patentable because that's what the law says, but it's unjust because, you know, Edison's competitor is about to do the same thing. Why can't he use the light bulb that he invents just because Edison did it a day earlier. Now, here's, now here's the thing is, I, I know that at least my, I'll be honest, my limited knowledge on patent law. Okay. I'm not a patent lawyer like you, or an IP lawyer, you know, like yourself. So you don't have to rub it in. You don't have to criticize me like that. Well, you know what they say, you're right. You know, call, call me an engineer. Don't call me a lawyer. What do you, what do you, what do you call a lawyer at the bottom of the ocean? A good start. Yeah. There you go. You know, why sharks don't eat lawyers, right? Professional courtesy. There we go. How do you, how can you tell when a lawyer is lying? These lips are moving the same way with the politician. That's true. So, no, I, like I said, I will admit, I, I don't have the depth of knowledge in IP law that you do. So I correct me if I'm wrong. Patent law, I mean, could ding someone even for copying somewhat something and using it themselves. Wait a second. Patent law, like if I, if I build my own light bulb, right. That is an exact copy of say Edison's back then. Doesn't have to use that copy as long as it, as long as it's similar enough to the way the patent claims it, then you, then you can't make it, you can't make it, use it, or sell it. Right. And that's even for personal use. Yes. 100% it's got nothing to do with whether it's commercial or not. Right. And, but correct me if I'm wrong. And by the way, even if you invented it first, so let's say you invent the light bulb in your garage. But you don't tell anyone so you're lighting up your house with these light bulb but you don't tell anyone because you're a miserable, misanthropic bastard you want to have the you want to have a special thing no one else has. Okay. And then a year later Edison and Edison invents it independently in piles of patent, you have, he can make you stop using it. Well, actually there's a, there's an exception to the law since Obama changed it. Which would give a prior user a limited defense. So, until, until 2011, you would, you could be forced to stop. Right. Now the question I had though is is how many, how many cases have you seen of that where someone using something for personal use like if I like build a mousetrap and have it and I mean, and have it in my house. And it never happens because companies just want they want to go up to the big guys but and their main competitors but and plus they would they would have a hard time finding out, which is another reason I piece of bullshit because if someone is in their house using a light bulb that they made that they invented and they're technically violating your rights and you don't even know they're violating your rights. What kind of right is it that it can be violated without you even knowing it. Well, I mean, a lot of things, you know, a lot of rights can be violated without you knowing it like what I walk across your property. Yeah, but in principle, you could know because, you know, you could have you can have a fence up or something or sensors and you could, you know, sensors yes but if you had a fence up and I climbed your fence. But the point is, when they're walking across your lawn, you actually cannot use your lawn for certain purposes, they there is a conflict in the use there, even if you're unaware of it, you know, you can rape a woman when she's in a coma, and she might not be aware of it but it's still rape right. Right, I mean, I'm just saying there's something, there's something, there's something unreal about the idea of. Of someone on another planet doing something that violates your rights and you can't even principle know about it just it's it's not how it's not what property rights it's not how property rights were. But that's the same thing that was if I so like you said if you have a fence up right. Yeah. And I jumped your fence, or let's say you don't even have a fence up, you know, but I and I just walk across your property. Right. Now you're saying that, you know, technically at that point in time I you can't do something with your lawn at that time, but you can't like you know if you want to do if you want to have a photo shoot and take a picture of your house for to sell it you can't can't do that because picture and you know there's there's all kind of things you can't do at that at that time you would then know of that violation of your rights. The point is it has an effect, you could know theoretically, you know, you could but but right, but anyway, it's a side point you see where you see where I'm getting at it is, you know, it's like it's like, shorting your label. Yes, you know, I mean, you don't know that it's being used unless you actually see it being used or not being used, but you but you also realize that all know and no innovation comes out of nothing. Every innovation always is always incremental it's always building upon past innovations of others. Right. So, Einstein didn't invent glass, he didn't invent electricity. I mean not my sign Edison, you know, he put things together that were already known. And if Edison had tried to invent the light bulb in the year 1700 he wouldn't have been able to do it because the background technology wasn't there yet. Someone tried to invent the light bulb in the year in the year, you know, 1950 it would have been easy because everything was ready to go. So, basically things become invented when the technology is not right for it to be invented so someone's usually going to invent it because everything is ready. So, you basically make a tiny incremental improvement based upon all the innovations in the past which you're treating like the public domain you're using it for free, and you get you get a claim on the whole thing on the whole light bulb. It's hard because you're putting the you're putting the pieces together. Yeah, but other people are putting it together to or they could. Why they could, but they didn't. They did actually sometimes I mean that's why we have what's called a race to the patent office so under the current law since Obama, under the current law we have a first to file approach so if, if, if, if inventor a invent something. And six months later inventor B invents it, but then inventor B files the next day at the patent office. He gets the patent, not the first guy. Right. So what's stopping inventor a from going and filing for the patent. Maybe he maybe he's trying to perfect it or maybe he doesn't have the money to hire a patent lawyer just yet he's trying to save up for that I don't I mean there's there's such a thing as you know like the four man's copyright. There's a provisional patent, but it's, but you know, you know where the four man's copyright is. Yeah, that's that's a myth. That's not that's not real. And for the audience of poor man's copyright is the idea that you take something and you put it in a sealed envelope and mail it to yourself and then you don't open it when it comes not just not just not just mail, but certified mail. Yeah, so that you have a postmark and you can prove it was mailed to you and that's really had that had nothing to do with copyright it doesn't. Doesn't that's not copyright law works anymore copyright law works now by it's since 1980 something when we joined the burn convention we modified the patent law to abolish formalities, which means that copyright is now automatic as soon as you write something on paper. You have a copyright in it, whether you publish it, whether you put the word copyright on it, whether you register with the copyright office it's automatic, which is another problem with it it's it's you can't even get rid of it. There's no way to get rid of it. I don't agree with that. I don't agree with that particular thing. And this is the problem with. Okay, I don't insist everyone has to be a patent attorney but when you're a libertarian. You have to go with the core principles and if you start approving of a massive federal statutory scheme that you don't really understand, you really should be cautious and humble about it like be be careful about advocating something where you obviously don't understand the law very well because it's complicated. And it's horribly unjust, even in your lights it's unjust I could give you a dozen other features of these laws, which are obviously unjust even to you. You know, you can you can, for example, there's there's statutory damages for copyright you can you can have to pay 100 and I think $150,000 per active infringement, even if there's no actual damages. Right. And every active infringement we like copy like this woman jammy Thomas just uploaded once, one, one song. The Napster thing. That was ridiculous. That was the Napster was ridiculous too but yeah but see this the problem. When I talked to libertarians you think they're pro IP, and I start listing horrible aspects of the law, or examples, you always say oh I agree with you on that I agree with you on that. I left asking well then what the hell are you in favor of you don't and they say well I'm not an expert I don't know it's like well then why are you. But I am giving but I am giving you things that I'm in favor of and I'm saying that there are things need to be reformed as well. You know, but all but all the other libertarians who are pro IP have a different thing than you. Some think it should be in perpetuity something it should be a customized term. Some think it should be shorter something it should be longer something it should be this something should be the founders copyright and you think it should be life of the author only, but they're all arbitrary how am I supposed to pick between these proposals they're all arbitrary none are grounded in libertarian principles. No I think that they are. I think I think that they are you know why you think they are let me let me get to it. I think the mistake you have is a mistake a lot of libertarians have and it's because of the influence of iron rand and even john lock, which you might not even be aware of but that's sort of seat. I don't mean you're not aware of them but you. A man should not be provided for not should not be deprived of the fruits of his labor. I don't dammit I had to go I just can't quote it from memory. Well, so so this the problem with arguing by metaphors. I'm talking about the fruits of your labor I mean, you know, this this term fruit arose because number one we have literal fruit and what that means of when you when you have a tree, it produces fruit. And so if you own the tree you own the fruits of the tree. Okay. So, but you don't own the fruit because of some natural law that says you own the fruits of things that you own. You own the thing and when the thing rearranges its form. So if you own a piece of metal and you shape it into a sword, you own the sword, but you don't own the sword because you created it. You own the sword because you own the metal that you made it into do you would you agree with that. What do I own right here. You own your brain, because you own your body exactly, but you don't know, you know, you don't own your, you don't own your labor or your thoughts or your effort. I don't own my thoughts. No, they're not an ownable thing. Thoughts is just what your brain does. Look, if you go for a jog, do you think you own your jogging? No, your jogging is just what you're doing with your body, right? Right, but at the same but at the same time. My thoughts actually can produce something jogging doesn't produce anything. Your thoughts can't produce anything actually. Your thoughts can guide your actions. That's what they can do. Your thoughts guide your control you have over your body. It can make your body move in certain ways. And when you do that, you can manipulate scarce resources in the world to cause the intervening to change things. That's what we do as actors. And without my thoughts, these are useless. Correct. Yeah, we need intelligence. Okay. Well, most animals have a brain. They need something to guide their body. But if I don't think of the thing, these don't make the thing. That's correct. Okay. And intellect and a will and thoughts and creativity are necessary for human successful human action. There's no doubt about that. Right. And so when I am talking about owning the fruits of my labor, I'm talking about my mental labor as well. But you don't own the fruits of your labor. Why do you say you own the fruits of your labor? Because if I don't, because if I don't create it, it doesn't exist. That doesn't follow. First of all, you don't create anything. We don't create anything. We mean, we rearrange things, right? I mean, I guess we want to get to the, like, like, we need to be clear about it. Yeah, we need to be clear about it. You don't create matter. You know, even Iran said that we rearrange matter. We don't create matter. You agree with that, right? You know, when we, you know, we're, that's just like, this is where I'm talking about where we get into the utopianist and pragmatic and, you know, and things. Honestly, I have elements of both of my belief. I believe in principles or what you call natural rights, but I also believe in pragmatism and because I think they converge to each other, they support each other. So let me, let me explain it this way and see, see where you would disagree. Okay. So we live in this world of scarcity. Now that what that means is scarcity is a better word might be conflict, conflictability, that in other words, we have our bodies, and we live on this, a planet full of raw materials that are all scarce in the sense of we could use them to do things like we can use them as means of action, but other people could too. But we can't both do it at the same time because it's just, that's not their nature. You know, if, if, if, if some, some, someone wants to have sex with my body, but I don't want them to. We can't both have our desires fulfilled. So the question is who gets to choose how to use my body. And we libertarians say that each person gets to choose how to use his body. That's what we call self ownership, would you agree with that. Yes. So everyone, everyone is the presumptive owner of their own body, right. Correct. And the reason you need ownership rights in your body is because you need to be able to tell someone no, you need to be able to decide when they can use your body or when or when they can't use your body. That's what it means to own something is to have the right to deny someone permission to use that resource right. Correct. In the world, we also live in the world and we need to roam around this world and use the land, and, and use, use food and water and make objects that were useful. Those are scarce means of action and those things are also scarce, meaning there can be conflict over them. They're conflictable things right. What the libertarians say is we, we, we basically take an extreme or a consistent version of what the private law has always done in the West, like in Rome and in England, which is we say number one. You can own each person can own his body but he also can own other things out in the world that were previously unowned by number one starting to use it like if you're the first one to use it like if you homestead up a farm in the middle of nowhere. So you are that that tract of land, correct. And if I if I chop down some unknown trees, and I use them to build a log cabin now I own those logs and the lumber and the timber and the house that I built. Now I own it, not because I created it but I own it because I appropriated it I took it out of the unknown state of the world, and I started using it and I made a connection between me and the thing by, by transforming it basically or putting a fence up around something like that would you agree roughly with that roughly yeah. Okay, and a second way that I can come to own these things is I can purchase it from someone who already owned it. So, I could see someone who's already done this he's already homesteaded a farm and built a little log cabin on it, and I can go buy it from him. So that's that's the only way to come to own things is you either you either find it in an unknown state and you take it to yourself you appropriate it, or you buy it from someone ahead that is the only two ways to come to own something. There is a third but it's subsidiary that is it if you if you do harm to someone you and you owe them reparations or restitution, you might have to give them some of your property to pay to compensate them but that you can do that it's like That's like a type of contract to. Yeah, good. Say for example, you do me harm. Yes, right. Yes. And so, which means I'm trespassing against you or your property I'm using your property without your consent. That's what it means to trespass is the opposite correlate is the correlate of what ownership is your ownership of those things means you have the right to tell me not to use it. So if I do it anyway that's trespass, and now I've damaged you and so I have to buy me using your property without your consent, you can effectively do the same to me, you can get back at me you can take some of my stuff from me to make yourself whole we can call that you can call that rectification or reparations or restitution or whatever you want to be you know going to be also considered that at that time that I do own some of your property. Yes. Okay, I think that's what I'm saying there's a there's there's three ways to come to own property. One is you find it unowned and you homestead it. Mm hmm, which which means you have to transform it or in border it somehow you have to you have to establish a public connection between new things so other people can see that you have a claim to it and that they can they can respect your property they have to see the connection between you and the thing it has to have a border basically for them to know that it's yours and for them to know how not to trespass. So if you transform raw iron into a sword, that's pretty obvious that you've transformed that thing you've you've homesteaded that iron, or if you build a farm you put a fence up around it and you put a cabin on it. So they used to see that someone has transformed is using it and from historical records are just evidence they can tell who it is so there's a connection. So the second way is by contract, someone owns it and they give it or sell it to you. And the third way is rectification for a for a tort that that's the only way to become the own property. Okay. And the property is always a scarce resource which is tangible material. It's not an idea, but go ahead. Well, let's keep, let's keep going for a second before we go there but keep going what was your question about. You're saying that, you know, people have to know that they're trespassing, you know, so and so forth right has to be at least it has to be at least possible in principle. The reason is because ownership means the the the right to exclude people from your property, which implied which presupposes the ability to communicate. No, you have to communicate your wishes to other people. So, in other words, it has to be possibility of language and communication. So you can say yes or no and they can understand it. And, and when you say yes or no it has to be about something. So you have to read that when you say no you're saying no you can't use that. Well, that is the thing that that you don't want them to use, but they have to know what you're talking about so there has to be some discernible borders and some link between you and that so they can know that you have the right to tell them. That's why there has to be a visible. Yeah, right. No, that has no, you know that's the problem is you, it's not sufficient to communicate. It's necessary to communicate. In other words, if I just say, I'm telling everyone right now I own Mount Kilimanjaro. Or I'm, I'm going on the internet, I own Mars. Sorry, I missed part of that somebody was was trying to call me. Okay, what I said was communication is necessary but it's not sufficient for ownership. You have to communicate your ownership by establishing a link between you and a given scarce resource. So number one, it has to be scarce resource and number two, you have to do something you can't just do it by mere verbal decree so you can't say, Hey, there's an unknown island down there in the Bahamas I'm here by telling it, but I never even been there. Everyone can, everyone's free to ignore that. So you, you can't just right, or I can't say, Hey, I hear by decree that I'm the owner of your cow. I mean, you own the car, not me, right. Right, but at this, you know, but see the thing is, that's also, you know, you're, you're also talking about like, for example, you know, turning iron into a sword. Okay. Correct. Now you own that thing, right? Not because you, not because you made the sword though. Because you own the iron to make the sword. Yeah, because so if I work at a factory making swords, I am the one making the swords but do do I own the swords that come off the assembly line. Let me let me get to my point here. What I meant was is say I say I built I make a sword out of my own iron, you know, so and so forth, right. Yes. And then I leave that sword somewhere. Yeah, you can abandon it. You can abandon it. Abandonment's possible. Abandonment is possible, but let's say I don't abandon it. I just forget it somewhere. Yeah, right. I set it down. Possession and ownership are not the same. So you can own something and not possess it, and you can possess something and not own it. Like if you borrow someone's sword, you possess it, but you don't own it. If you if you loan your sword to someone you own it, but you don't, you're not possessing it. And if I leave it somewhere, if it's not clear that you've abandoned it, then you still own it. But how does someone else know that? Well, sometimes it's not possible to know. There is there are there is a possibility of an uncertain area and that's because of the neglect of the owner. But generally, there are conventions and default presumptions about things like that. And the context usually gives a signal. And the fact the fact that it is possible for there to be ambiguity means that people try to avoid that. So you would try not to leave it somewhere where it looks like it's abandoned or it might look like it's abandoned. So those cases would tend to be small because you're going to be punished. You're going to be harmed by it because you might lose your sword in some cases because of the uncertainty, or it might be too expensive to sort it out or whatever. So you might leave it somewhere and you might put a note on it saying, Hey, I'm going to be back in an hour. This is mine. And then there would be evidence. Right. But at the same time, if you don't, right, you were talking like you were talking about, you know, letting people know about ownership by, you know, like for example, you're scratching signs and things like that nature. But if I, if I lean a sword up against a tree and then I leave it and there's no note and someone else comes and goes, Oh, somebody abandoned a sword. Yeah. If that kind of thing happens often enough, then people are not going to just leave their sword against a tree when without somehow indicating that they're not abandoning it. I mean, you know, if I leave my bicycle. I intentionally know. But what actually all your all your pointing out is that property rights are not perfect because you got to you got to remember what what happened to you right. Hold on week week week. This is not a flaw in property rights. It's not an injustice. It just means that they can't do everything. We live in a world where we, we will have the need to use resources. And if we don't have property rights, then we have a war of all against all we have constant fighting and conflict and violence. And some of us don't like that. So we prefer a world where we can minimize the conflict. So we come up with these property rights to assign ownership to these things in an attempt to to reduce or minimize all this violence. And it does do that. It doesn't eliminate it completely because some people still violate rights. And sometimes, sometimes there are edge cases which are in between like the sword case you gave and property rights can't solve that. So what that doesn't mean that IP rights are just has nothing to do with IP rights. So, let me keep going and I'm going to try to trap you but only for that coming at all. So, it, given the way I just laid out these rights I think you can agree roughly with that just like you agree with me earlier about negative versus positive welfare rights right like you think like that's a fair characterization of what our rights are. First, we own our bodies and we own other things in the world that we found that were unowned, or that we bought by contract that's basically the picture right. And with the things that you own you're free to use those things in any way you see fit, as long as you don't what as long as you don't use other people's property without their permission right. In other words, I don't, if I have a big farm, I can, I can have a new, I can have a nude beach party on it. If I want to, not because I have a right to have a new beach party, but because my action is, is not interfering with anyone else's use of their property right. Right. So if I have a cannon, I can shoot the cannon, but I can't shoot it into your property because now I'm my cannonball is trespassing the borders of your house, right. Right. And but that's not a limitation of my ownership of my cannon, because it's got nothing to do with my cannon ownership. If I stole a cannon, and I have a stolen cannon, I still don't have the right to shoot it into your house. The reason is not because of limitations. Somebody was trying to call me can you give me one second. Yeah, sure. A lot. Now this background doesn't work. Okay, I'm back. So what my point is, the fact that I can't shoot a cannon into your house is not doesn't mean my property rights in my cannon are limited. It means my actions are limited like I'm free to do. I'm free to engage in any any actions I want as long as I don't use someone's property without their permission. Right. That's the basic libertarian principle correct. Okay. So, so, so let me ask you something. You can't fire your cannon into my property. I can't fire anyone's cannon into your property. I can't fire my cannon. I can't fire a stolen can I can't fire a borrowed cannon. It's got nothing to do with my ownership of the cannon. I can't know I understand it. So let me ask you this. Say, you know your cannon can fire 300 yards. Right. Yes. You get the permission of the property owner. That's, you know, let's say my, my, my property is only 100 yards wide. Right. And you get permission from the neighbor that's, you know, 300 yards down the road to fire a cannon into his property. But the ball passes through my property through the airspace you mean through the air. So, the question I have is, is, do you believe in air rights? Sure. Within, yeah, I think that there, there are some air rights, but it's not, it's not, doesn't go all the way to the heaven. I mean, it doesn't go, it only goes so far. And common common law would typically custom and common law and agreement would typically find find answer to these things. Just like, just like underground rights you, you have rights underneath your house to to a certain degree but it doesn't go to the core of the earth. However, if someone, if someone dug a tunnel, like, you know, a mile under your house, I don't think it's trespassing on your rights but if they caused your house to collapse, that would be, that would be causing damages that be causing damage to your property. But, but that those are interesting but kind of irrelevant to where I'm heading so not necessarily, not necessarily, because, you know, basically, you're not doing any damage to my property. You know, you're not touching my property but it's a, you know, you're basically going. No, I think I think shooting a cannonball just over my roof line is cause is basically a trespass because, number one, it's imposing a large risk on me and one reason I buy a house is I'm I don't think it's a trespass. What's that if it's, you know, over a field. I think it depends on the context yeah I think I think it actually depends if it's an occasional use that no one notices it doesn't do it really. The essential question is does it disturb the owner's ability to use his property in its say normal. The normal way that he's homesteaded it in the way he's using it. You know, I bring up IP rights is because, you know, for example, like I said, say I come up with transparent steel, right. I spend 20 years, you know, testing it creating, you know, and finally, yes, I Eureka, I've made it, right. You know, without IP rights. Someone could come up right behind me. And go, yoink. Thanks for all the hard work sucker. And create it and sell it. And that causes damage to me know how does it cause damage to you. How does it trespass against your property because it because it basically wastes 20 years. You just you just seem to agree with the way I laid it out I said, we have property rights in our bodies and in scarce resources that we homestead or that we buy by contract from someone else. And that means no one can can invade the borders of these things they can't use them without my permission. Now when someone copies your idea and they make their own steel with their own resources. How are they trespassing against anything that you own. Because I still own my my creation my they're not trespassing against your creation. They're copy they copied it they learn from you. They're not trespassing against anything. How are they interfere? How are they interfering from you from using your your property. Because they're basically take you know taking sales. You don't own sales. What are sales sales means customers give you their money right. Who owns that money. When they give it to me I do before they give it to you who owns it. They do. So they have the right not to give it to you right. Correct. So if they don't give it to you you don't own it. Correct. So what's sale you don't so you're never entitled to sales. You're not entitled to potential if your customer money. If I don't if if they're able to copy you know my. My invention. Yeah. Right and sell it. That. If they if they weren't allowed to do that. Yeah, I know it makes it harder for you. Yeah, but you're not you're not you don't have a right to have sales. My God. Why how can you be in favor of free market competition with this kind of reasoning if I own the only pizza restaurant in town. Right. And another one pops up across the street. Now I'm losing sales. It's harder for me to sell at a higher price to my customers that I that I was hoping to sell to because now half of them are going to go to my competitor. Not necessarily. Well, but they could some of them will. You know, if I have the only caught little dinky ass coffee shop in town and Starbucks opens up, what do you think is going to happen? If I've got a shitty hardware store and Walmart opens up, what's going to happen? They're going to steal my customers. Right. Steal my sales. It doesn't matter. Competition always takes it's always a threat to your business. That's why. Mm hmm. That's why people don't like competition. That's why they try to get governments passed laws to protect them from competition, like from the tariffs to protect them from overseas competition. Right. And minimum wage laws to protect them from small companies competing with them like Walmart, some favor of the minimum wage for that reason, because they're going to pay minimum wage anyway. So make it higher. You know. And that's why people want patents to protect them from competition from competitors. I mean, the sword example we gave earlier. What if I take a piece of metal and making it to a sword. And someone else sees that and they go, oh, that's a good idea. And they go, they find their own metal and make their own sword. And they'd not be allowed to make a sword because I did it first. No, because you're not actually copying exactly there, you know. Yeah, no, that's bullshit. That's how patents work. If I say, let's say, okay, so you make a sword, right? Yeah. Let's say no one ever made a knife or sword before. Right. And you make a, and you make a broad sword. Right. Whatever. No, hold on. That's not whatever. Let's say you make a broad sort, right? Yeah. And I make a scimitar. Yeah. The patent system. It is markedly different. Wrong. Wrong. You don't know, see, this is the problem is you don't even understand the system that you think you're in favor of the patent system. I tell you what would happen if someone invented a sword and he came to me, I would file a patent and say, I hereby claim a cutting a weapon comprising steel shaped with at least one edge and at least, you know, two feet long, terminating at a handle with a guard of at least so many inches and that's it. And so that would cover a scimitar. It would cover long daggers and long swords and it would cover all kinds of things. That's how that's how patents work. You claim it as broadly as you can. You know, let me give you another example. If I'm the first guy to invent a stool. Okay. No one's thought of a chair yet, just a stool. So I would claim it as a sitting implement comprising a relatively horizontal seat member operationally connected to at least three legs of roughly equal length. Okay, that's a stool. And someone else says, Oh, if I put a back on that thing, the chair just even more useful, right? And they file a patent on a chair, which is a stool having a back. Now, the guy that invented the chair can't make his chairs because they're stools because it has a has a seat and legs. That's what a stool is. The fact that it has a back doesn't make it not a stool because a chair is a stool with a back. You follow me? So the guy that invests a chair, which is an improvement on the stool can't sell it and make it. And the guy that invented the stool can't make a chair because he would be violating the other guy's patent. And they're in lies. Another reform that I think that, you know, but that is that that is that that's impossible to reform. That is the patent. That's what patents are. But that's what patents are. But that doesn't mean that that's what that's that they can't be reformed. But you said you don't want to get rid of, I mean, if you change that, then it's not a patent system. It's something else. No, it is. It's not. This is all right. I understand that. I'm saying things like that. Now, now your thing is you're saying that's what patents are. Right. But if we reform it. That's no longer what how they are. So when you know you're wrong. A patent is a right on an invention. Okay. Right. That it that in itself means that if you have a right and that invention, it would cover improvements on the invention because they would still be the invention. And see, that's that's like I said, reform. You can't, you can't. You want something impossible. You can't have it be both things at once. No, you can't. If you, if, for example, let's say we make the patent law to be when you, if you patent something, right. You have the patent to that particular item. Right. You have to submit schematics and drawings and so on and so forth. And then you have the patent for that particular item. Right. Now, someone comes along and sees that. Right. And they, like I said, they put a back on it. And they add a leg. And they put arms on it. So it is materially different. Then the item that you have a patent on. And then they can have a patent on that. And you can't turn around. And, you know, I think I hear what you're saying. What you're doing is you're hearing a natural. Obvious simple. Consequence of the patent system, which seems absurd to you because it is. And you're doing what every IP libertarian, I know does. I don't agree with that. So I would have a different, but so you, you want to, you want to change the term. You want to, you want to get rid of statutory damages and copyright. You want to. You want to narrow the scope of patents. Because. And I have the report. But this is just like this. You sound just like liberals who favor a minimum wage of say $15. And when we say something like. Well, why don't we just make it a hundred? They say, oh, that's ridiculous. So they say, oh, that would hurt the economy too much. They're willing to hurt the economy a little bit for $15 wage, but then it won't hurt the economy that much. So you're like, well, we can, we can have outrageous examples to a small degree, but we don't, I don't want a big, big amount of outrageous outrageous consequences. Well, this is how this is how societies and, you know, society's work. No, no, your assumption though is here's your assumption. Your assumption is that no patent system is bad. And a terrible patent system is bad, but in between there's a good, no, there's like, there's a sweet spot and we need to adjust to find the sweet spot. But your assumption is that no patent system is bad. That's, that's, that's your mistake. No, I don't think it's a mistake. You know, I mean, that's, that's, that you think it's a mistake. Obviously. You know, that, you know, I'm certain that it's certain. And just as I'm certain that it's not. Yeah, but I, but I have, I have, I have heard and examined every argument for IP that has ever existed. And, and I'm, you know, still of the opinion that, you know, well, I mean, the way this, the way this started was, listen, the way this started was I was always interested in libertarian theory. And I was always puzzled by the, by the argument for patents because there was problems with it. Like I'm Rand, you know, said, Oh yeah, it makes sense for there to be a finite term for copyright. And, but her reasoning was just, it made no sense. It was, and so I, I thought, well, I'm going to be a patent attorney and a libertarian thinker. So I'll figure this shit out. So I started, I tried, I tried to come up with arguments, defending annals of property. And I kept failing, which is unlike me. And I kept wanting, I'm like, damn, I'm pretty smart. I'm good at this shit. And I can't figure it out. Why am I failing? So I tried and finally I realized, Oh, now I know why I'm failing. I'm failing because I'm trying to justify the unjustifiable. This system is horrible. Rand, I'm Rand misled me, man. Well, no, I mean, so for example, I was reading, I was reading on your, your, your. Your article here. Now you're saying, like, for example, like the thing about adjusting your carburetor. Yeah. To, you know, double the output and such and so, like that. Yes. In the IP world that I would envision. Okay. That is perfectly acceptable. Why? That is that because that is materially different. Oh, no, it's not. No, no, no, you're wrong. It's materially different. It might be de minimis, but it's not materially different. So if I created, so if I see a carburetor and go, if I add this there and I change that to this and I move that over there. Well, listen, if you're going to, if you're going to change your patent system to be really narrow, like you're talking about, then I could just modify my example. So, so for example, I have a patent. I have a patent on a carburetor with exactly these, this shape. Okay. And someone reads my, someone reads my patent and they go into the garage and they, they change their carburetor around to be exactly like I described in the patent. No, they're doing it in the privacy of the garage with their own raw materials, but they do have a carburetor when they're done modifying it. It's exactly what I've claimed in my patent. So that would that, that would not be a materially different. It would be exactly what was claimed in the patent. So it would be patented. No, you're saying, you're saying that you were talking about someone who goes and changes the carburetor to double the output and everything like that. But because that's the way patent law works now. I'm giving example of the way the patent system as it presently exists works, but if we modified it to your system, you would still have unjust results like that because you could have cases where someone does exactly the same thing. Someone could, you know, go, I need a carburetor. I'm going to make, you know, this. All right. Now mind you, if someone did that. I mean, I don't think any court in the world. I mean, I guess, I guess, see now you're hope you're hoping that there'll be a pressure relief valves that, that saved you from the consequences of this stupid system. You're in favor of, I mean, you can't just punch. Hold on. I'm saying is, I guess a court could technically. If, if I as the creator of the carburetor. Right. Yeah. Found out that you made an exact copy of my carburetor and, you know, are using it for your own, you know, benefit or whatever. I guess I could technically take you to court. Yes. And request and request damages. You can even, or you can request an injunction. You could ask the court to give me an injunction ordering me not to use that carburetor. I can do it. I can go to jail. I don't, but that's the thing is, I don't think you don't favor that. Now you don't favor injunctions. I know I don't think any court in the world would, and I don't think any. You're wrong. Would, you know, take someone to court. You're totally wrong. Some patent holders are in it for money, but some are in it for other reasons. Like there's like, there's this company called in chain. They've been acquiring lots of Bitcoin related patents and they're threatened, you know, they're threatening to sue competing block chains because they want to be the only one standing. They don't, they're not doing it. I mean, they might do it for money, but there's lots of things that could be existential threats to people. How about a better example? Someone advanced anti-lock breaks or the seatbelt. Okay. They invent the seatbelt and they won't let any other automaker put seat belts in their car because they want to be the only car that can sell seat belts. So you have Ford, Chevy, you know. Okay. So only, only Ford said only Ford's have seat belts. And so wrong. Basically you're killing people because they're going to be buying Chevy's without a seat belt. Wrong. Not, not in the, not in the IP world that I, I, you know, that I Why? If you invent a seat belt, if you invent a seat belt, can't you stop other people from, from making seat belts? Other competitors? No. No. What the hell? I'll explain. How many seat belts out there? Do you think there are? Millions. Tens of billions. No, how many seat belt types? Well, there used to be lots of types, but nowadays they're pretty standard. They used to be the automatic ones, but they've all gone away. Right. It's pretty. Okay. There's probably several types. Sports cars have one type, but. Right. And then there's the, there's the five point harness. So what? So what you're talking about is, so I'm for it. I create the. I don't know what it's called with the lap belt and the shoulder belt, right? Yeah. Right. Say again. So I create the, the, the, the over this shoulder. Yeah. And lap belt seat belt. I'm for it. Right. The common seat belt that we mostly use nowadays. Yeah. Yes. So I'm Chevy. I'm like, okay, seat belt. Okay. I can't use it over the shoulder across the lap seat belt. Right. So in the IP world that I'm envisioning where basically you can, you can only patent. You know, this thing, not some. A restraint system that stops someone from going forward in the case of an app, you know, whatever. You're trying to fight the hypotube. You're assuming there's always an alternative. There's not always an alternative. That's bullshit. I'm saying there's always an alternative. You cannot guarantee there's always an authority. Right. I can't, you're right. I can't guarantee what I'm saying is, is there's options general. All right. What about any luck? What about anti log breaks? Someone invents anti log breaks that saves lives. You know that, right? Yes. Now Ford is the only company that can do anti log breaks. Every other car manufacturer is legally prohibited from doing anti log breaks. That's life saving feature in their car. Why? But there's other way. There's other break systems out there. There's other anti lock break systems. There's an anti lock break system other than anti lock breaks. It doesn't make any sense because you can, you can modify it. You're assuming there's always another way to do it. That's bullshit. And by the way, that's not how patents work now anyway. So I mean, I understand why, why don't you, why wouldn't you, why wouldn't you tell me, Stefan. I think there should be some kind of IP system. I'm not an expert and I'm just trying to come up with this on the fly. So I don't really know why I'm a favor of. No, I would agree. I would agree with you that the patent system that we have now has so many horrible features. I would agree with you that it's better to have nothing than that. Because I don't. How do you know, but how do you know, how do you know that the patent system we have now with all of its problems is better than having no patent system? How do you know that having no patent system is better than having the system we have now. Because patents are evil. I don't, I don't have this. That's subjective. No, it's not. That's subjective. It's completely not. It's, it's, it's, it's follows directly from my libertarian principles and it should follow from yours. You just don't see that. I miss, I miss, that's not, it's not, it's, it's a, no, no, it is subjective. You know, you believe that it's, that it, that it's evil. No, that's not just a feeling. This is, this is the consequence. This is the, this is the conclusion of a chain of reasoning policies based upon the nature of these systems and these rights and how they necessarily conflict with, with legitimate property rights. Now you could say that the only, the only argument for intellectual property is to abandon libertarianism. You could say, well, you can say, well, you're right that intellectual property rights violate libertarian property rights, but I don't give a fuck because I'm not a libertarian. You, you're perfectly free to do that. And then we, then we're debating libertarian principles. But you said you agreed with those. Listen, let me give you another way to look at it. If, if you own a house with a beautiful rose garden and your, all your neighbors love to look at it because it's pretty. And let's say it even enhances the value of their own homes because the view from their windows is nicer. Now, if you chop down your rose garden, does that, that does lower the value of their property, but does that violate their rights? Is that a trespass against their rights? No, no. And if you are a neighbor and you paint your house an ugly orange, does that violate your neighbor's rights, even if they don't like having the house like that? No, no. So quite often in a neighborhood, you'll have a restrictive covenant, you know, or are you, are a homeowner cessation with restrictive coverage? Are you familiar with these? Yes. You don't like them. I don't like the HOAs. A lot of my libertarian friends hate HOAs. I love them. But anyway, Wait, hold on. Wait, you like HOAs? Absolutely. They're private. I've never had a bad experience with one. They've always been great. Oh God. I know people have had bad experiences, but in any case, then how could you, how can I mean, I'm sorry, but with an HOA, I mean, yes, they're, you enter into the agreement, you know, everything like that. Yeah, absolutely. Yes. But at the same time, they, you know, it's, it's so massively. Arbitrary. It's not it's the rules are specified in the charter. Basically, HOA basically requires you to pay some dues and it, and it gives you some benefits and it puts some limitations on what you can use your property for certain certain things you cannot use your property for like commercial uses or things like that. But so for example, if you and I are neighbors and we have a beautiful little neighborhood and we just don't want anyone building a high rise or we don't want people painting their house really ugly colors, then we could all come together and we could sign an agreement between each other where we all agree. No one's going to paint their house orange without the permission of all the neighbors. Do you do you agree that that's a legitimate type of arrangement people can make? Yeah, I mean, yes, people can enter into into contracts and things of that nature. The problem with it with HOA is the fact that they sit there and will use, you know, say something like, you know, you cannot put signs in your front yard, right? Yeah. And if you put a flag on a flagpole on your, you know, on your porch, I've seen where they're like, oh, that's a sign. You can't do it. And it's like, no, that's not a sign. It's a flag on a flagpole. They're like, no, it's a sign. No, no, I know. I'm not arguing favor. I'm just, that's irrelevant to this point. I'm just, I'm, and you can forget about HOAs. I'm trying to talk like, let's say you have two, just two neighbors, A and B, they live next to each other. And let's say one of them has a driveway right next to the other guy. And let's say A has a driveway and B needs a driveway. So instead of building his own driveway, he asked, hey, can I, would you mind selling me a limited usage right to use your driveway? Like we can both drive on the same driveway and then I can, at the end of it, I can go into my property. Like you could see property rights being divided up like that. Like A might say, sure, give me $10,000 and I'll give you lifetime usage rights of my driveway to access your property. You can see something like that, correct? Yes. That's like an, it's in a sense, it's an easement, which is a dividing up of your rights, right? Right. Now, you could also have what's called negative easements. So, which is like what a homeowner's association does, like the covenant might say no one can pay their house orange. Okay. That doesn't give your neighbors the right to use your house, but it gives them the right to prevent you from using it in a certain way that normally you would have the right, right? Right. Like you could have like the rose example I gave earlier, you could have a covenant saying, if you have oak trees on your property more than X years old, you cannot chop them down without permission of the association. Right. Because it destroys the beauty of it. You know, you could have things like that. So you could have two landowners who live next to each other. And one of them could grant the other one a negative easement, like for money or something, you know, like A and B could both agree. Look, I don't know. Let's say they're both raising pigs and they don't want the, they don't want the other one to raise some other animal that might harm the pigs, you know, I don't know, alligators or something. So they both, they both agree. Let's, let's agree to a negative easement each. I'm going to grant you a negative easement and you're going to grant me a negative easement that you can't use your property for anything commercial except for pigs. Right. You agree with that. That's a negative easement. Yes. Now, the reason we, you and I both agree that that's compatible with libertarianism is because it's just the owner agreeing to a limitation. He's consenting to it. So it's just, so it's just like, um, if, if some guy has sex with a girl, if she consents, it's not rape, but if she doesn't consent, it's rape. Like the act looks the same, but it depends upon. So there's nothing wrong with a negative easement on property, as long as the owner consents to it. But if the government passed a law saying, hey, cancella, you can't, you can't, uh, you can't paint your house orange without your neighbor's consent. That's the government giving my neighbor a negative easement on my property, which I didn't consent to. That's the problem. Do you agree with me on that? I, I, I mean, I see where you're coming from, from, from that angle. Okay. So the point is generally we're free to use our resources however we want, as long as we don't commit trespass, unless we voluntarily or consensually agree to a limitation like a negative easement. But if the government grants a negative easement on our property, they're taking our property rights from us. No, I, and I, and I see where. I see where I'm going. I know I see where it's. So we're going with this. Now what the patent system in the copyright too, but let's just stick to patents. The patent is a negative easement. Because the patent basically says. If I own a factory, I can use it for lots of things, but I can't use my raw materials to make this carburetor. That isn't, that is a negative easement. Now, if I can send it to the negative easement, it would be legitimate. But if I don't consent to it, it's a violation of my property rights. And that's what patents are. And that's what copyrights are. And that's essentially why they're unjust. They are unconsensual, non-consensual negative easements imposed by the state. This is ultimately the principal problem with patent and copyright. They're, they're negative easements, which are not consented to by the people who own the property that's affected by the easement. Except they're not called easements. They're called property rights to confuse everyone and to help, to help, to help the propaganda in favor of them. They're not property rights. What's your. What's the way she Lee with, you know, Yes, you have a factory. You cannot. I can't make carburetors. Make that particular. Correct. That's a limitation on my, that's a restriction on my property rights because I'm not, I'm not committing a tort or a trespass. And I'm not in violation of a contract when I make that carburetor. But you are in violation of the contract, you know, there is a contract. There is a contract. What is it? You know, your continued existence in this particular society, the social, the social contract. I mean, the, what do you call it? Yeah, the social contract, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now you're not sounding like a, you're not sounding like much of a libertarian here. You're sounding more like a fucking Democrat or Republican. It says, you know, if you live here, you agree to buy, buy or loss. I mean, by that reasoning, you, you know, the drug war doesn't violate your rights and the tax system doesn't violate your rights because after all you chose to stay here. But that's, that's the whole point of this is, this is the whole point behind the, you know, reforming the, the IP system. No, no, no, but you just, you said there's a contract. There's no, come on, you know, there's, I never agreed to the patent system. Yeah, I know, I understand that the whole idea behind, there is the, the, the libertarian, you know, theory behind, you know, I didn't agree to, you know, I was born in this into it. I didn't do agree to any, any of this when I was born into this country. Well, do you believe that the drug war violates rights? Do you believe taxation violates rights? Hold on, the drug war? Yeah. Yeah, you're threatened with prison. If you don't, if you don't, if you're threatened with prison, if you don't obey those laws, you're threatened with prison. If you don't obey the tax laws, that's a violation of your rights. You know, it's called assault and battery or it's assault. They're extorting you. I mean, you're threatened with prison if you do, if you do a lot of things. You know, I mean, well, it's okay to threaten someone with prison for violating rights like murder or rape or something. But it's not okay to threaten someone with prison for doing something that doesn't violate anyone's rights. I mean, don't you regard the state as criminal? No. The current American state, you don't think it's criminal? I, you said earlier, taxation is theft. Right. I mean, I do, I do believe that, you know, that the whole, you know, income tax and everything like that. You know, I believe that yes, that is, that is, it's way overboard. No, no, no, it's, don't say it's overboard. It's a violation of rights. It's, it's theft. This is why I'm a minarchist. But you said you thought taxation is theft. Yes. I mean, I, I, in the, in the current sense, in the current sense that we have taxation right now, it is. And when the state puts someone in prison for, for, for, for selling marijuana, don't you think that's a violation of their rights is basically enslavement and kidnapping. I see this, this is where, this is where I guess we differ as I do believe that there is a. Are you not against the drug war? I think it's, I think I said, I think it's. What about conscription for a war? What would the government put, puts people in prison if they, if they refuse to, refuse to fight in a war when they're conscripted. I know, I don't believe, I don't believe in, in, I don't believe in the draft now. I'm not saying believe in it. Do you think it violates someone's rights when they're conscripted? Yes. Even though that's the law. I think that any being put into a situation where death is a potential and not just a potential but highly likely situation. You mean prison or war? War. You know, well, they go to war voluntarily. Yes. Because they're, they're threatened with prison. But they don't go to, no, that's a thing. They don't, if you're, if you're threatened with prison, you're not going voluntarily. No, it's, it's, it's voluntary. It's just not consensual. They're being coerced. You know, if someone says, give me your, give me your money, give me your wallet or your life, and you hand your wallet over, you're voluntarily handing it over. It's just that you were coerced. It's just, it's just, it's just a, it's just a definition. Yeah. That's why I don't like to turn, that's why I don't like to turn voluntarious. The problem is not. Well, listen, if you're driving down the road and you have a seizure, you, you twist the handle, the steering wheel, that's an involuntary action because you didn't intend to do it. So voluntary usually means you chose to do it. It doesn't mean you weren't coerced. You were offered a horrible alternative. Yeah, I mean, I mean, I just look at it yet today. It's just, it's just a, it's just some antics. Yeah. But anyway, I'm, so I'm, I'm. So are you now saying that, that, that. Because we live here. We're sort of consenting to everything the state does to us, including the patent system and the drug war. No, no. This is why I said, this is why I'm a men. Argus. I believe that there is. There is a role for the state. Most men are because believe the state should only have courts and a military. And it should, it should only. Use the police to, and the jail system and the courts to stop aggression. That's it. And some of them believe you can have a. A small tax to support those core functions of government. That's called a night watchman state or the minute or the minute state. And, but what they say is so the government is justified in monopolizing. Law and order and justice. But they only have the right to. So that's basically it upholds property rights. Defend property rights and criminalize aggression. Right. Yeah. So then they could, they could, they could, they could use force to compel people to. To obey those laws, but they're basically you're saying you can use force state, the force of the state system to compel people to follow libertarian law. Right. Yeah, I mean, that doesn't mean this. That doesn't mean anything the state does is justified like a drug war or extortionate taxation rates. Or redistribution of wealth or. I don't, I don't believe it. Drug war because I believe that if someone wants to fuck in. Shoot five pounds of heroin into their body. That's their right to do so. Yeah, that's that every libertarian believes this. This is. This is, you know. Are you sure you're a menace? Like I said, I believe that if someone wants to shoot five pounds of heroin into their body, they're more that's their right to do so. But why it's because that action is not invading the borders of anyone else's property. That's why it's not a crime. It's not a crime because it is not a crime. It's not a crime because when I put something into my own body, I'm consenting to it. So I'm not being. My rights aren't being violated. I can't violate my own rights. And I am not by ingesting the substance. I'm not using your property without your permission, which is the only thing that libertarian law prohibits libertarian law only prohibits using other people's property without their permission, including their bodies. I can't use your body and I can't use it. Say, say, say again. But at the same time, like I said, you know, I think we can both agree. That most that most. Hard drug users. They're not going to be doing harm. They're going to be doing harm. And they're going to be doing harm. They're going to be doing harm. Wind up. You know, Doing harm to their community. Well, first of all, that's a vague term. It's it's legit. It's, it's, you have the right to do harm. You just don't have the right to, to, to admit trespass. If I chop down my Rose garden, I'm harming you because I'm lowering the value of your property, but I have the right to do that. If I compete with you and I steal your customers. I'm harming you, but I have the right to do that. I have the right to do that. Right. But you know, I'm so what I'm talking about is like, you know, A lot of crime, but, but hold on. So, but these, these hard drug users do, they do things other than your harm. They do commit crimes, but. Right. A large part of the reason for that. Is the drug war has raised prices of these drugs. So that you have to steal to get enough money. I mean, if they were, if it was a free market in drugs, they'd be very cheap. So you wouldn't really need to steal as much. You wouldn't need a resort to, you know, to, to that. And there wouldn't be an underground, you know, drug kingpin kind of drug drug lord thing. Associated with crime. Like the crime would fall drastically. Of course, if the drug war was abolished. Yeah, I mean, I, yeah, I mean, I can, I can see that. But at the same time, I mean. I mean, you can, by the way, you could, if you're really going to go down that road, you should, you know, the risk for alcohol prohibition is alcohol is the most dangerous of all the drugs by far. And the, you know, having alcohol readily available leads to tons of drunk driving and people being killed all the time. I'm in drunk driving accidents. And so. I mean, you know, having the availability of dangerous resources in the world means that the risk that we all face is somewhat increased. But that does not mean you can out you can outlaw, you can outlaw these things. You cannot law steal because people can make a sword or a gun with it. You cannot law guns because people can misuse them. No, and I agree. And like I said, I just think that, like I said, there's a lot of things that, you know, that need, that need reform and, you know, and but like I said, we're getting off track. The point is I'm just, I'm trying to explain that if you understand the nature of patents and copyrights by their nature, even under your reform system, they are essentially negative easements because or negative servitudes in the civil law. That's what they're called. They, but they're just simply decreed by the state in response to someone filing a patent application, right? Someone files a patent up there. Someone basically is saying, hey, government, would you please grant me a negative easement over my neighbor's property? And the state doesn't say, well, did he consent to it? The state goes, sure, here you go. So it's, you know, it's a non-consensual negative easement. And you can't, you can't justify by saying there's a social contract anymore. You can justify the drug war by saying there's a social contract. No, I'm what I'm, what I'm saying is, is, you know, we, you know, we live in, in, in, in the society. Okay. There are things that we get out of this society, you know, by, you know, by participating in it, you know, with, with the, the IP, you know, I mean, you're saying that, you know, somebody else owns a factory, right? They can't make that carburetor, right? That doesn't mean that they can't make wrenches. That doesn't mean that they can't make screwdrivers. Yeah. But, but it violates their property rights if they're not able to use their property as they want to, and it makes them poorer. If they want to make carburetors, that's their, that's their highest valued use for their property. And you're making them go to a second, a less valued use. You know, there's such a thing in economics is called opportunity cost, right? And not only that, you're making, you're harming customers because customers now have to pay higher prices and have limited supply and reduced, reduced choices because they have to go to that one manufacturer now. They're effectively a monopoly. Monopolists have inferior quality products and they have higher prices. No, because like I said, I mean, with the IP, you know, situation where I'm talking about, right? Say you get, you say, I make the carburetor, right? And you get a hold of one of my carburetors, right? And you visually go, oh, I can change this to do this and move that around to there. And I can do this to that. But that's, that's, that's, you're basically, you're using a more, a less, a less efficient design just to get around someone's patent. How do you know it's a less efficient design? Because if it was a more efficient design, you wouldn't need to force me not to use your design. I mean, I would, I would use a different design anyway. That's what I'm, that's, that's what I'm, that's what I'm saying. So you get my, let's say you get my, get a hold of my carburetor, right? Right, you get a hold of my carburetor and you figure out that if I, if you move this to there and that to there and change that around to that, right? That's fine. But, but I still can't make the exact same carburetor. You're saying I'm prohibited from doing that. What if that's what I want to do? Why do I have to make a change? Why? In fact, this is horrible. I mean, have you ever tried to, have you ever had a laser printer? You know? Yeah, I believe so, yeah. Yeah. Or any kind of printer with a cartridge? Yeah. Have you ever noticed that the cartridges like from Epson and Brother and HP, they're not, they're not, they're not interchangeable. They're all different. I mean, sometimes, sometimes having a similar, you know, you want, you want uniformity sometimes so that parts are interchangeable and you don't have to keep all these things stocked and, you know, it might be nice to go to a harvester, go buy a carburetor, the standard carburetor that everyone uses instead of having 17 different models. Right. But it's the same thing with, you know, what's it called? I mean, with, you know, with cars, I mean, with anything really. Yeah. And a lot of times these things are different because one company has something so called proprietary, which whenever you hear proprietary means they're using intellectual property to prevent people from using something similar. I mean, fucking Apple sued Samsung for having a flat touchscreen smartphone with rounded corners. I remember that. And that was ridiculous. They're all ridiculous. This is the thing. They're inherently ridiculous. See, I could, I could literally give you thousands of examples of things you would agree are ridiculous, but they're just examples. Every patent that has ever existed is ridiculous. Everyone. So let me ask you this. What fucking, what reason, what I have, like I said, to go out and spend 20 years and millions of dollars to create, you know, transparent steel, right? If someone can just come along behind me. They can't just, they can't just come along behind you. It's not easy to compete with other people. Really? Yeah. So you're saying that. What I'm saying is whatever you invent a new product, you have some advantage because you're the first to market. And so you can sell it for a higher price than normal in the beginning. And then if it's successful with customers, people will start competing with you either with a similar product or a competing product or the same product. And they will start drawing some of your customers away and your profit margins will fall. So you can't rest on your laurels. And then you have to keep innovating to stay on top of the market, but then you have reputational effects. I mean, you understand it. Let's say I invent transparent steel and I've got this lifetime monopoly that you're in favor of. I don't need to innovate anymore because no one else can make transparent steel. So my innovation stops because I don't need to keep innovating to stay ahead of the people that are nipping in my heels. And by the same token, by the same token, none of my competitors are innovating as much either because they can't sell transparent steel so they don't bother to innovate. So the innovation that would come from competitors goes down and the innovation that comes from the original patent guy goes down. So patent system actually reduces innovation? No. Because with the patent system that I'm talking about, where it's for this specific thing, right? This is why you have to add. If you would ever read an actual patent, you should actually read an actual patent. I know I have. I understand what you're talking about. And then you would understand what you're proposing makes no sense. It's just not possible to say specific. I mean, there is a reason that we have a claiming system is because it's the only way to implement this patent idea. It's the only way to do it. The patent system was written by all these experts and they know this is what it means. You have to have experts like me, lawyer, engineer, guys that talk to the engineers and they describe the invention in a certain way that enables it to someone skilled in a person having ordinary skill in the art of Zeta. And then you claim it with a very precise run on, long sentence, which describes every functional element of the invention. That's what it means to get a patent. And when you say you would change it to the specific embodiment, that's what it is. I mean, that's the way the system works now. But you said earlier that the patents are as broad as can possibly be. They are. And in your system, they would be as broad as possibly, they could possibly be too. Every patent lawyer is going to make, follow the law and the rules of the patent office and try to craft a patent that is as broad as he can get away with. That's why there's 20 or 30 claims in a patent. You start with the broad one and you go down to the narrow one so that if in court the broad one gets knocked out as being too broad, you can go to the narrow one. Hopefully the narrow claims of the patent are what you're imagining the patent system could be. But all that means is the broad claim is just narrower than it is now. You still have, you would still start with the broadest and go with the narrowest. That's just the way it has to be. But you would get rid of all the broad claims. Let me say something to you. The way it works is this. To have a patent, you have to define the elements of the thing, right? Right. They're usually functional for an apparatus and their steps for a process or for a procedure. But for an apparatus, it's got a certain set of functional elements that connect to each other in a certain defined way to produce a certain effect. That's what tools and machines are. You have to have someone describe in legally sufficient and technically sufficient language these things. Anything with those elements is that thing that you have a patent right on. Something emerged in the law called a doctrine of equivalence. That is inherent to a patent system. In fact, there's statutory equivalence as well. But the doctrine of equivalence says if someone, let's say a patent has four elements, A, B, C, and D. Someone tries to copy my invention, but they don't want to get super patent infringement. They take element D and they tweak it a little bit. They make a tiny change, but it still does the same function. Let's call that D prime. Their product is A, B, C, and D prime. Well, if D prime is a functional equivalent of D, then they're still infringing on a doctrine of equivalence. Now, I guess you can also say, well, I would get rid of the doctrine of equivalence. But that arose on the court. The courts came up with that. The reason they did it was because otherwise you can just make a tiny trivial change to something and not infringe the patent. And then the patent system would be worthless. So that's what I say. You're trying to have it both ways. You're trying to basically take out every bad feature of the patent system that leads to the results you agree are outrageous to avoid those results, which you don't understand would basically neuter the whole patent system. And we would have basically no patent system. But you still want to claim that you would have a patent system. Let me put it this way. Every patent attorney and every tech company that depends on patents, every patent attorney that's in favor of the patent system, which is 99% of them, they would all scream bloody murder at your proposal. Because they know that what they know that what you're proposing is effectively get abolishing the patent system. So what you're really favor of is not really a patent system. What you're in favor of is something like a very narrow design patent or a petty patent. What's called a petty patent is some jurisdictions, except you want it to last for life for some reason. But a design patent. No, it's not for some reason. It's not for some arbitrary reason. No, but what I mean, yeah, but it's like you're trying to blunt the edges, the harsh edges of the natural results of the system that you favor by chopping them all off. So you want to make it better in most ways, but you want to make it worse by making the term longer. So you're sort of, you know, the reason the reason why I want to make it listen, the reason why I want to make the term, you know, the life, you know, and like I said, and I thought I explained that pretty well, is the fact that, you know, once, you know, basically, it is protected for as long as the light as a life of the person who created it exists. It's why it's not transfer, you know, you can't transfer it down to your descendants. You know, that's why the whole idea behind the, you know, oh, should we give money to the first person who made coffee? No. I mean, because the descendants of the first person who made coffee had nothing to do with it. Yeah, the other problem with your life term is that competitors will have no idea when they're going to be free to start using the information. That is harmful too. A fixed term, at least a fixed term, they know, okay, in seven years, I'll will finally be able to do this. They can start gearing up and be ready, but they won't be able to do that when someone... Then wouldn't that improve the innovation? No. Why not? Well, why wouldn't taxing me to give a prize award to the best inventor of the year? Why wouldn't I incentivize innovation? It would incentivize innovation, but it wouldn't be worth it because it has a cost. When you take resources from the public to form the taxes, you reduce the amount of capital they have that they can invest in factories and things. So it's just a shift. It's a redistribution of wealth, and the patent system does that too, except it doesn't do it by taxes. Well, no, because basically with the innovation, like I said, with the patent system, at least I think would be a much better one. It is simply, like I said, if you create something, right, and I see that thing, and I can go, I can make that better. If I make it better... You keep assuming there's always an alternative embodiment of an invention. There's not. If there's nothing... Your system, like the patent system, would literally kill people because, especially in the case of pharmaceuticals and safety features and automobiles and things like that, it is completely outrageous to support any system that would limit the implementation of life-saving technology in vehicles. It's outrageous. It's completely un-libertarian. If you're supporting a system that results in that, you better rethink what... It's like there's something wrong, something went wrong somewhere. If what you're supporting would actually kill people. Murder is not what we're supposed to be a favor of, it's libertarian, you know? I wouldn't say that that's... You ever heard of RSS, like the technology behind podcasting, really simple syndication? No. That's what RSS is. It was invented by a co-invented by a guy named Aaron Swartz, this brilliant young college student. He also helped us, some other things he came up with, who's a brilliant young guy, and one day at... I'm bringing this up because it's not only patents that kill people, copyright kills people too, because this guy, Aaron Swartz, he was at Columbia or something like that, and he was one of these kind of information wants to be free kind of guys. He downloaded tons of the academic papers behind all these paywalls, like journal articles, and he uploaded thousands of them to the internet from a computer in a closet at Columbia or somewhere like that. And when he got caught by the feds, he was sued for copyright infringement just for uploading scholarly articles to the internet, and he was facing like, I don't know, 50 or 40 years in federal prison, so he committed suicide. Brilliant guy. Life ended because he was facing a lifetime in federal prison for not violating anyone's rights, for uploading articles to the internet. So that's just an example. That's just an example. Copyright kills. Now, I guess you say, well, I don't think copyrights should have criminal penalties. I don't know why not. If it's trespass, why shouldn't it have criminal penalties? I mean, I don't I don't think it's like, I think maybe, you know, monetary penalties. Why? Why should anybody in the world do anything anymore then? Yeah, but see, your question is, first of all, your question is not well-founded. There's tons of actually psychological and other studies and history alone shows that people people innovate for lots of reasons. And there's no reason to think it would. So take the take the field of the copyright covers, which is, you know, creative works like novels and other books and music and movies. You are aware that piracy is widespread today, right? Oh, yes. So there's copyright copyright law is evaded a billion times a day right now, right? If you come up with if you put out a new movie or a new a new song or a book or or images, if you put that out, it's going to be pirated instantly and available on all these pirate sites right away. And that's happening now, right? So we effectively have no copyright right now because it can't be enforced. And yet in a world in a world with almost no real copyright, we have more books and more movies and more music than ever. So obviously, people find a way to do it for either internal reasons or for profit reasons and make a profit, even though copyright can't be enforced. So how can that be? How can that be? Because at this time, you know, people still, you know, do buy, you know, they do buy books, they do go to buy books. But wait, without copyright, they would buy books too. Why do you need copyright to sell a book? Because if you if you didn't have copyright, right? Yeah, yeah. I could go and take your work. Yeah, right. And slap my name on it. No one does that. First of all, that's bullshit. That's that's not what copyright protects. Copyright protects me from copying your book and keeping your name on it. It's not about slapping my name on it. You're saying that's plagiarism. Hold on. You're saying copyright law. Yeah, does not protect the name. It's not it's not about attribution. It protects prevents copying of the work has nothing to do with whose name is on it. Hold on. So here's, but at the same time, if there was no copyright law, yes, right, I could take Harry Potter. Yes, slap my name on it. Yes. And start selling it. Who would who would first of all, who would buy a book, a Harry Potter book with a fake author's name on it? Because they're going to think, well, we all know that JK Rowling wrote Harry Potter. So if if Dennis from from Las Vegas says he wrote it, and we know he's lying, what else did he change in the book? I'm not going to buy the book that he might have adulterated. It's just stupid. Listen, do you think Romeo and Juliet, do you think Romeo and Juliet is protected by copyright? No. Do you think Moby Dick is protected by copyright? They're all public domain, right? Because they're too old, right? Do you think you can go on Amazon and find Moby Dick written by someone who is not Moby is not Herman Millville? Do you think there are fake copies of Moby Dick out there with fake author's names on them? Why don't people just slap their name on Moby Dick and publish Moby Dick under their name? I'm asking you. I because it doesn't fucking happen. So it doesn't happen. It would not happen. It doesn't happen. Copyright has nothing to do with the fact that people maybe not with great maybe not with great works. Okay, let's let's take the great works out with it. Not with any work that is already published and people already know who the author is. Once you know someone is is lying about their name, you're not going to want to waste time reading through the book because they might have changed something else in it. But let's say let's say it's, you know, I've been reading, you know, hold on, give me two seconds here, grab my Kindle. I've been reading the Freehold series. If you know, what's your name? What about it? Get back there. I think we should close up. Wrap it up in a little bit, too, in two hours. All right. Michael Z. Williams, right? Not a well known author, right? Yeah, but his authorship of this series is apparently public fact by now. People know who wrote it. It's been published. Someone copies that book and they copy the book and start selling it, then someone's going to finally realize that, hey, the exact same book was already published several years ago by another author. So this guy's fucking lying. Right. But by that time, they've already bought the book. I'm sure Michael Z. Williams would care. Where are they going to buy the book from? Amazon. Why would Amazon want to put plagiarized books on its site and get a bad reputation for not offering good books? Wouldn't Amazon take it down as soon as they found out that guy's lying? If you go to Kroger and you buy toothpaste, how do you buy Crest toothpaste? How do you know it wasn't fake Crest made in China? Do you think Kroger would sell fake Crest toothpaste made in China and take the risk that someone's going to find out and then they're going to lose their customers? Because you know what I mean? It's a non-problem. Let me ask you this. Do you think you could go buy a copy of Moby Dick right now if you wanted to? Could I go buy a copy of Moby Dick if I wanted to? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, how can that be? It's not under copyright. Why would anyone have an incentive to sell the book? How is it possible to sell a book that's not copyright? When you read my book, did you read a paper copy or did you read an online copy? I read it off of misers.org. Well, they sell paper copies. Amazon sells paper copies. I don't have a copy right now. It's in public domain. Guess what? A few people have translated my book without my permission. Well, I gave them permission because I put a CC license on it. That didn't hurt me. Some guy took it and he published a large text, a large print version for people that can't read well. On paper? Yeah. He sells it. I don't care. You don't care. Not only not only you don't care, I thanked him. And I gave him permission by putting a CC license in it. Okay. I mean, and guess what? My book still sells. So what? Okay. But you're missing out on those sales. Really? I was going to do a large print version for the blind. I was going to translate it into Romanian. And you don't think anyway, I don't have a right to those sales. No one has a right to sales. And anyway, I'm not doing the profit, so I don't give a fuck. You're not doing it for profit, but other people do. Yeah. So let's take an example. Imagine a copyright-free world that is a freer world than we have now. And JK Rowling is some kind of welfare mom who's writing these books in her spare time on a train ride, which she did. And she writes Harry Potter has no idea it's going to be a big seller, which she didn't. And let's say she goes to a couple publishers and they're not interested. So she goes, I'll just self publish it. So let's say she puts it on Amazon, which you can do right now. But there's no copyright. So no, but by the way, just because there's no copyright doesn't mean everything's going to be pirated because people, you don't pirate everything that's out there. Like, I'm not pirating movie. Yeah. So you have to wait when new books come out, you have to wait and see which ones are successful to see which ones are worth pirating. Right. And so when you wait, that means there's an initial period of time where the original author has basically a semi-monopoly for a while so they can sell it for a reasonable price for a while until people realize, oh, I need to get it on this game. But anyway, so Harry Potter puts, Rowling puts Harry Potter number one up on Amazon and it starts selling a lot on Kindle and paper copies. So let's say she makes a million dollars and there's millions of kids around the world who love it. And then right away, pirate copies are going to start appearing, right? Like online and paper copies by guys in India and China. So her profits drop precipitously, let's say, although some people would still buy from her because they know they're getting the authentic original book, right? But let's say her sales drop. So what's that? Some people care about that. Some do, some don't. So some people pay twice as much for Tylenol as they do for the generic acetaminophen, right? Even though it's twice as much and sitting right next to it. Some people care about reputation and all that. Anyway, so her sale, let's say here, let's say she makes a million dollars and then her sales go away. Well, then guess what now? She has, you know, she has like 10 million fans around the world. So she puts on her website, hey, Harry Potter number two has just been completed. I'm going to release it on Amazon as soon as I get 10 million advanced orders for $10 each. Okay, so she gets $100 million in pre-orders. Then she sells it and then she starts to get pirated right away. So she makes 10 million and that's she makes 100 million. That's it. Well, now she's got 101 million. All right. And then she does that with the other five books and she's up to like half a billion dollars, right? Without copyright. And then because there's no copyright, no one needs her permission to make a movie. So someone starts three movie studios start making a pirated movie version of the first novel. But one of them approaches rolling and they say, hey, listen, we're going to make a Harry Potter movie. But if you will consult on it and give it your official approval, we will give you 10% of the box office receipts. And then we can tell all your fans out there that there's three movies coming out, but ours is the one that you endorse. So we'll get more, we'll sell more tickets than the other guys because your fans would prefer to see the authorized version of the movie, right? One that you had an input in the creative process. So the movie makes, you know, $300 million and she gets 30 million in consulting fees, right? So now we're up to, you know, $531 million of million dollars. She's half a million. I mean, the point is, it's possible in a copyright free world to sell shit and to make money. It is, you know, but at the same time with those three, those three movies, right? Let's say those, you know, those three studios because of copyright law each had to give J.K. Rowling. No, no, no, no. Under copyright, there would only be one studio in the copyright. There would only be one because she would only sell her rights to one company. Okay. I mean, that's why we had the, have you ever seen the shitty Atlas Shrug movies, by the way? Have you ever seen that? Okay. Yeah. You know why it's so shitty? Because the state of Iran would not grant permission to anyone until, until, you know, that time, but if there had been no copyright, someone by now might have made a good Atlas Shrug movie, but they had to get permission of the fucking state. And, you know, if someone could just do what they wanted, but that's the thing though is, okay. There might have been a good Atlas Shrug without copyright. Right. But there, that's the thing though is, is maybe they didn't give permission because they saw that what they were doing with it and said, fuck no, I'm not gonna allow and rent, you know, name to be put on that. No, they didn't give permission because their control freaks and they wanted to be done a certain way. Because they wanted that's why they're shitty, you know, Atlas Shrug movies. I'm just saying that we don't know. We don't know what would have happened without copyright, but other people could have tried and maybe they were a big good one and we wouldn't have had to wait 50 fucking years. Or no, it's over there, right? Atlas Shrug was 56 and the movie came out what 2010? So like 60? It's crazy. 60 years, yeah. Crazy. But you know, wait, when did Anne Rand die? 1982. Oh, shit. So that's what another 40 years until someone can make a... Yeah. Leonard Peacock. Leonard Peacock was all that. But that's the thing though is, I mean, they still made an Atlas Shrug movie even with copyright law. I know. And it sucked. What would have been any different if they would have... I mean, they'd got the books. I don't know. Why don't we try a free market and see? How about that? How about that crazy idea? That's like, you know, you sound like a fucking Russian who says, I don't want to privatize the market because how many brands of toothpaste would there be? Right now we go to the government store and there's one brand of toothpaste. How many brands would there be in your system? I don't fucking know how many brands of toothpaste there would be. There might be seven. I don't know. So why? I'm sure you understand. I don't believe in centralized shit like that, like communism or socialism or anything like that. But you keep asking the question, what would freedom look like? And the government has distorted it and made it impossible to know, but we can have some guesses. But it's like you want to guarantee, it's like you're saying, it's like the welfare liberal. If we say, you libertarians want to get rid of welfare and replace it with charity, but can you guarantee that there would be enough charity for every poor person? It's like, and if I say, well, I can't guarantee it because it's not a right, we'll say, well, then we're going to keep our welfare system. And by the way, the answer is, well, you can't guarantee your welfare system is going to be around forever either because it's fucking bankrupt. You moron. Social security is bankrupt. Everyone knows it's not going to be around in 20 years for us when we retire. And you're doing the same thing. Because they keep stealing from it. Your assumption is that the patent system incentivizes innovation, which is false, it does not. In my view, it actually impedes innovation. And number two, I already gave examples. The patent system is now. Yeah. And your patent system would incentivize innovation, would impede innovation maybe less, although it could be more because it lasts longer. So I don't know if you're saying, because it's better in that the claims are narrower, but it's worse in that it lasts longer. So I'm not sure if it's better or worse on balance. But what you're saying is, you assume that the patents help innovation now. And if you got rid of patents, there would be almost no innovation or significantly less innovation. Because why are people going to put fucking? And when I say there would be innovation, you're demanding answers, just like the communist says, how many brands of toothpaste would there be? Or the welfare liberal who says, you need to guarantee that charity would be enough to replace the welfare system. You want to guarantee that in a free market, there's enough innovation. So you are a central planner to a degree because you think what you're doing is what the Chicago types do, like Richard F. Stain, basically, you have a market failure argument. You're generally in favor of the free market, but you think sometimes it breaks down. In fact, you have to believe that because you're a menarchist. So you think that the free market breaks down for law and order and security. That's why you favor the state because you think there's a public good there and there has to be a state. So all you menarchists believe in market failure to some degree, you just think there has to be a state for certain things the market can't provide. That's why you're not an anarchist. But you also believe that in a free market, let's say we have a menarchist free market where you have a minimal government just stopping theft and murder. That's all it does in protecting property rights. That's all it does with their order. Let's just tell you, stop theft and murder. That's the thing is, that's one of the generalities is it doesn't stop. Nothing stops theft and murder except for the person, the victim. Well, they help to enforce rights by trying to minimize rights violations by having police, by having an army, military, and by having courts that can redress things after they happen to try to dissuade that kind of stuff, right? And anyway, it never stops, it only punishes it. Well, but when you punish it, you disincentivize people doing it in the future, trying to reduce the rate of it, right? So what you're saying is, in a free market without patents, people wouldn't invent as much as I think they should invent because some would be inventors would be afraid to engage in the research and development because they think that they fear having competitors compete with them too quickly for them to make enough monopoly profits to recoup their cost. So they would never engage in that innovation in the first place. So in a free market, there's a market failure because the possibility of copying and emulation and competition results in a suboptimal amount of innovation. And we can intervene with the government to fix that market failure by granting these temporary monopolies to the inventors to give them protection from competition so they can make more monopoly profit which hurts the consumer because they're paying a higher price and it reduces innovation sometimes, but it makes more innovation happen. So you think there's a market failure and the government can come in and fix it. So that is a market failure argument. That is the same thing that status and socialists argue all the time for all the interventions they favor, like education and roads and post office. Hence again, why am I a monarchist? Yeah, but monarchists only believe in a narrow set of market failure. I guess what I'm saying is you don't have to be an anarchist like me to be against intellectual property. There are several independent reasons to be against intellectual property. Number one, it's legislation and libertarians should oppose legislation as a way of making law. We should only be in favor of the common law and patent and copyright cannot emerge on the common law. It's a statutory scheme. Number two, the utilitarian argument, which is kind of what you're trying to make, is not ever been proven to be true. There's no evidence that's ever shown that the patent system has benefited the country at all or resulted in... I don't think it's possible to be proven. That's correct, which means it's a market intervention, which is based upon your assumption that it does improve innovation, but you can never prove it, so you can never meet your burden of proof. But you can also never disprove it either. The point is I don't have the burden of proof. You're saying the government should grant intrusions into the free market and protect people from competition they would normally face, which violates their property rights, and you're saying it's justified because it produces more innovation. Okay, well, you have to prove that. You've never proven it. No study's ever proven it, and there are studies that indicate that it impedes innovation, but they're all guesses, basically. Everything we're doing right now is guesses. You're guessing that no patent launch would improve innovation and would stimulate the market and so on and so forth. It's a pretty informed guess, and not only that, that's not my main argument. My main argument is that it's unjust. It violates property rights. It's the same argument that libertarians have against antitrust law and the minimum wage. The primary argument against the minimum wage is that it violates property rights, and the primary argument against antitrust laws that violates rights because it uses the force of law to harm people for doing something that doesn't violate rights, and we should be able to free to do anything that doesn't violate rights, and offering someone a dollar an hour for a job doesn't violate its rights, and colluding with a businessman to set prices doesn't violate any consumer's rights because they don't have a right to any given price. Secondarily, we can say, and we also think that a minimum wage law is harmful, and it's not necessary, and we can say that antitrust laws really are harmful to the economy and are not necessary, and that there would be no real monopolies on a free market even without antitrust law, but that's a fallback argument. It's not the primary argument. Just like for being intellectual property is primarily a matter of justice. Once you understand the nature of our property rights and what their function is, you'll see that IP rights are contrary to that, and they violate property rights. Basically, you should not be able to prevent someone from copying information that you make public. If you want to keep your ideas to yourself, keep them to yourself. Okay, so in that particular sense, if you did that, you'd have to do everything behind fences. No, the point is you can't keep things secret sometimes. I mean, it's not possible for most inventions to be kept secret if you want to sell the product, because most products with an innovative feature, the innovative feature is pretty apparent or can be reverse engineered. So you have a choice. When you come up with a new invention, if you want to be able to sell it, then the price you're paying is that you're telling people how to compete with you. And if you don't want to do that, don't do it. And here's the thing, I was reading in your article about IP's contracts and stuff like that where A. writes a book and sells physical copies to numerous purchasers with a contractual condition that each buyer is obligated not to make a copy. That was Rothbard's attempt to justify a version of copyright and patent. Yeah. Right. But in that situation, that would become massively burdensome because each person to buy a physical copy of the book would have to then sign a contract. I agree. I agree. But that's an argument that some people say that patents and copyrights are justified because they're really contractual. Or they'll say you could do it by contract and this is just a more efficient way of doing that. But the fact that you could never do it by contract shows that it's not a form of contract. You could. You could technically do it by contract. No, you couldn't because you couldn't buy in third parties. You could only buy in your customers. Right. Contracts only buy in the parties through the contract. Exactly. So if I sell you a book and I make you promise not to copy it, but you copy it anyway, you put the copy online on the internet and everyone in the world can see it, those people are free to download that information because they never signed a contract with the seller. But then basically you're putting, wouldn't the author then be able to go after the buyer for damages? Yes. For every single. Some guy that bought a book for $5 is not going to have a billion dollars in damages, dude. But, you know, and then there comes in the, by the way, by the way, the fact that by me buying a book from you means you might sue me for millions of dollars means I'm not going to buy the book from you. I'm not going to take that risk. So guess what I'm going to do? I'm going to get a pirated copy of the book. So no one is going, no one's going to, no one's going to take that risk of buying a fucking book. What happens if every, every author, because there is no copyright laws, every single author now requires a contract for someone to buy their book. Then they would, they would, they would sell less books than they otherwise would, because they're, look, it's hard enough to find a customer willing to part, hand over some of their money to buy your book. And now you're making, you're adding a cost, you're making them sign a contract and take on some liability. So if you could sell a book for $10 without restrictions, if you add restrictions to it, now you can maybe only sell it for $8. So you're reducing your profits and you're reducing the sales too, because fewer people are going to to buy it under those conditions. So you're just shooting yourself in the foot, which is why not every author would do it. Some authors would say, hey, come, come to me. I, I, you know, it's like, I don't know, you're seeing Louis CK, you could go on his website and you could buy one of his like comedy shows for $5 and he just gives you the PD, he just gives you the MP, the MP3 file or the, or the movie file. You just download it. He doesn't sign a fucking contract. No, of course there's copyright law, so he doesn't need to sign a contract. But he doesn't put, he doesn't put, he doesn't put DRM and he doesn't make you sign and he just sells it to you and people buy it. If he was selling for $100 and asking you to sign some contract with an arbitration clause, no one would do that. But they, but they would. They would pirate it. No, they would. If they, you know, if everybody was doing it, that's the thing is this, everybody did it, right? If every author demanded that their customers sign this agreement and the agreement, and the agreement made the agreement made every customer agree to a universal convention that said, you have to respect the private equivalent of copyright in every author's books. Yes, that, that could be, that could, that would be legitimate and, but it still wouldn't be copyright. It would be a private, a private attempt to simulate it, but it's totally unworkable. It would be, it would be exactly, exactly. Well, people are free to try. But that's the thing is that's why the whole copyright, the whole copyright thing exists is because the other way is so massively burdensome to not only the author, but also the consumer. Yeah, but yeah, but that's like saying that, you know, on a free market, maybe we wouldn't have landed on the moon in 1969 because who's going to waste billions of dollars for no purpose whatsoever. So we need to have a government to have NASA. That's because that's the only way we're going to get on the moon. You're, you're assuming you're assuming that the goal is to get on the moon. I thought the goal was property rights and justice and freedom and prosperity. But here's the thing though, is is what do we have right frigging now? Patent law. No, SpaceX. Yeah, but we landed on the moon in 1969. I don't think we would have had a private industry land on the moon in 69. No, because we didn't look at it as a, as a priority. It should not have been a priority. It's ridiculous. It's a waste of money. What are you talking about? No. Or does your Minerkey include NASA too? No. Good, good man. No. All right. I think we, I think we've exhausted this now. I think, I think you, I think you could agree with me that I'm right and that you, you, you concede your case against IP. No. No. You knew, you knew that was not going to happen. It happens. Sometimes I've made a lot of converts. No, I guess that I'll give you, I'll give you six months. You'll come around. No, because here's the thing is, like I said, I think the IP system, as it is right now is, is the same with any fucking government is massively overloaded. You know, is, you know, I think the IP system as it is now does strangle innovation because it's too broad. It doesn't, you know, it basically, you know, like you said, you know, if someone takes a stool and creates a patent for a stool, if someone creates a fucking chair, you know, that it's, you know, completely different than the stool, then the patent person with the patent with the stool can then come and sue them, even though they created something absolutely different than a fucking stool. If you think the patent system right now impedes innovation, why wouldn't you prefer to have no patent system to the one we have now? Because I think that no patent system would impede it more. So you think the current patent system impedes innovation relative to what Dennis's made up patent system would do? Yes. Okay. I think that, you know, if we narrowed the focus of patents, made them, you know, it's just like with drug companies, you know, patent expires, they change the formula a little bit and create a new fucking patent. Look, okay, all libertarians are entitled to one deviation. So I'll allow you this one. You don't have any others, do you? I don't think so, no. Okay. You know, I just, like I said, my big thing is, you know, I believe that in the idea that, you know, someone's labor of, you know, of their mind should be just as protected as the labor of their hands. You know, I understand, you know, a lot of libertarians, it's all about physical property. I think that a creation of the mind. The thing is, you can't have both. That's the problem. You can't have both. If you believe in physical property rights, which you do, then you can't have the other because it's like having positive welfare rights and negative rights. You can't have both. One comes at the expense of the other. Hey, let me ask you a question. Do you happen to know Adam Haman? No. He's in Las Vegas. He's a Libertarian Party guy. Hey, wait, Adam Haman. Haman, H-A-M-A-N. Oh, yeah, yeah. Haman, Haman, Haman. Yeah. And his wife, Jen. Haman, yeah. Yeah. You know, I know Adam. Yeah. He's a good guy. Yes, he is. No, I was actually a delegate. I was an alternate at the Reno Convention. Oh, I was there too. So I was there. I was the one that was running. I don't know if you saw me, but I was the one that was running around on a little fucking scooter. Excuse my language. I don't remember. Yeah. I threw my back out and had to rent one of those little, you know, hover around scooter things. Are you in the Mises Caucus? Yes. Oh, good man. Good man. I don't know if you see the... Oh, okay. Cool. All right. Let me let you run. We'll get you out later. Yeah. And like I said, I mean, I think, I, you know, I just think it's one of, this is one of those impasses where, you know, both of us believe something passionately. You know, like I said, I went to the trouble of, like, the trouble of, you know, reading your... Yeah. I'll give you that. Your article. And, you know, I had a lot of people, of course, in that thread going, read this article. Yeah. Yeah. At least you got to read up on it. Hey, do you know the differences between an anarchist, a menarchist and an anarchist? What's that? About six months. Same thing between, you know, what's the difference between the conspiracy theory and the truth? What? About six months. At least in this, in this, in this day and age anyways. Yeah. All right, man. Hang in there. Have a good one. Yeah. No, I, I, I, I'll have to say I, I enjoyed the conversation. I enjoyed the, you know, the, the mental, you know, exercise. Like I said, I just think we both believe in something passionately. And it's something that we, you know, just, I, you know, one of those agree to disagree things. Well, if you talk to, if you see Adam Heyman or in your other buddies in the caucus, run this by them. You'll, you'll, you'll start getting... Oh no, I already, I, yeah, trust me, there's, there's plenty of just pure anarchists, you know, in the Las Vegas, you know, Libertarian area. Yeah. I'm one of, like I said, I'm one of the, the, the holdout menarchists. Yeah. All right. Well, good luck. All right. You take care, sir. Yeah. And thank you. Bye.