 Butler's Shaper wins Gandalf's Stick if you're a dog and runny. The great Steph Cancella. And Jeff Groot, is he up? Jeffy B? No, Charles Johnson. Charles? Yeah? Jeff? Charles. Charles Johnson? Oh, yes, sorry. Okay, so if you guys want to have a seat, our general format is, as you imagine, rule three. So just, you know, about any statements and take your turns as you see fit. I think we need a third chair? Yeah. Did you want to, I thought we were just going to use a podium? Oh, I see. We can bring out three chairs of play. I think three chairs is, that's what we did yesterday. I think that works out well. And remember, the first three rows must tackle. That is the rule. You must tackle. And in fact, under your seat, probably a fruit. Fairly cold. And still, very well. All right, Mr. Butler, if you'd like to take it away, I will see you in the background. We're all set? We're set. So this all turned it all in? I assume. All right. Our panel has to do with the question of the significance of intellectual property. Is it coming out here? Chin up your faces out there. I'm doing moderating, I guess, and giving up to these to find people to do all the substantive stuff. I would like to, at least, start this off with one question, which maybe you can get some response and get this one thing started. And that has to do with whether or not in a stateless society would we have patents or copyrights? And be careful how you answer that question. If it's either yes or no answer, it's going to lead to a sub-question. What do you think? Charles, do you want to start? Since I had a shot at this yesterday. Sure. So my position is no. It's not going to be copyright or patent protections that look anything like the bundle of legal protections that go along with those today. Yeah, of course I agree. I actually think there wouldn't be trademark, trade secret, or any other type of IP as well. What's that? You don't live at home. The reason I asked you, and the reason I asked you in the form of questions for which yes or no might not be a complete answer is, do either of you see a problem with copyright or patents arising out of contract between two parties? Well, so the first thing I want to do here is draw a line for a moment between copyrights and patents when it comes to potential, like trying to collude around it through a contraction mechanism. In the case of patents, of course, you have discoveries are held to be patentable and the monopoly enforceable against other discoverers, even if there's no prior relationship, whatever. So if you have independent discoveries, the patent is still held to give a monopoly privilege to the initial discoverer. And it seems that it's not only that people would be unlikely to come up with contracts to try and recreate this sort of thing, but there's no possible contract you could come up with because it's perfectly possible for people to produce the innovation without having contact. Now, I think it's true that if you buy a manuscript from someone, say, you're perfectly entitled to sign a contract with them that restricts your right to copy what you bought. Property can be entailed under contractful obligations, but, again, so that's not going to look much of an impractice, that's not going to look much of anything like the bundle of privileges that goes along with existing copyrights. It's the contracts that you sign are binding on you and not on third parties. And so, you know, there's not going to be sort of an independent right to the idea that you can assert against anyone who happens to get their hands on it or who happens to be distributing it unless you can point to the specific contract that they signed with the original seller. I agree completely with that. Some might say you could have a clickwrap agreement, you know, but I'm even skeptical of the validity of those types of agreements because they often contain fine print that people don't read and the seller knows that not being read, so I would even be hesitant to say that that's evidence of the terms of the actual contract. Further, I think that it's unlikely anyone would sign such a contract. To buy a $12 book, you're potentially obligating yourself to pay millions of dollars of damages if you use the information you learn from the book in the wrong way. And it's just not worth the risk to most people. So almost no one would sign these books. You would go on to the next publisher that had more reasonable terms. And if the terms are a very small amount of penalty, then it's not going to have any kind of disincentive effect anyway on people reaching the contract. They'll just make a copy and pay their $20 fine and they don't care. Now that said, I would say that I think that in a free market there would be more scope for cartel-like arrangements to arise that could have some kind of dampening effect on types of piracy. For example, in the fashion industry, there used to be like a guild or cartel system where they would police themselves and anyone who was knocking off new designs was ostracized and shunned. But then if I recall, this was shut down by the federal government under violation of antitrust law. So, of course, that law wouldn't exist in a free society. So companies would have more flexibility to try to enter into arrangements to try to deal with this sort of free rider problem and knock off problem. I think that the old common law there was, we're going to get into it today. It's not just the old common law, the common law system. There was something called the common law copyright. And what this meant was that if I write what I consider a great American novel or a great American piece of poetry or whatever and put it in my desk drawer and you come along and discover that and run up for it and publish it. At the common law, I would just have a cause of action against you. The violations, if we have a common law copyright. But that common law copyright ended at the point at which I took what I had written and published it. The common law published does not mean script. I think it's kind of confusing. The public of something means they said it was someone who sets it up in high phase. And prints, copies are written and distributed. But the public of something is only great to make it public. And once I had done that, I had lost my ownership at the common law. Primarily because of the failure to satisfy one of the essential elements of copyright ownership. And that is controlled. How can I own something if I know what would be forward? If I had put that out into the market, out into the world, so to speak. In what way can it be said that I'm still the owner of it? It uses sort of an analogy. The idea of sometimes being able to put oxygen into a canister. And as long as the oxygen is in the canister, you can say they own it. They own the canister. Somebody else who comes along and wants to take a whip with that oxygen. I can sell it to them. 50 cents a whip or whatever. But suppose the valid leaks of my canister of oxygen. And some of my oxygen gets out into the atmosphere. And you run up and you notice that. And you take a strong breath and you breathe in some of my oxygen. Do you owe me any money for that? What do you say? The common law copyright, which I believe has been superseded by the Copyright Act. Unfortunately. It's really similar to trade secret laws. Under trade secret law, the idea is that if you diligently work to keep private information, private, that gives you a competitive advantage over your customers so long as they don't have the information, then if one of your employees, let's say, leaves and is telling the secret to a competitor or threatening to reveal it to a newspaper, then the employer can run to the courts, get it in junction against the leaking employee and the third parties who have learned about it. So long as it's not generally public yet. And actually this is why I oppose trade secret law as well. I think it's totally unjustified to have court force used against the third party with no contractual relationship with the original secret holder. Common law copyright seems a little bit more justifiable. It seems like it's a measure of damages of basically an act of trespass. So I could see it being justified on those grounds. But that's about it. That won't get you anywhere near to modern copyright or patent type legal systems. Yeah, I agree entirely. And I think that it seems to me that insofar as there's a case for damages based on visioned in common law copyright, it is going to be dependent on there being an identifiable violation of concrete property. So if you leave your manuscript on the bench and I find that, it's hard for me to see, given that I haven't broken into your desk, given that this is presumptively abandoned property, it's hard for me to see where the damage to tangible property occurs that would justify inflicting damages on the finder and the publisher. Well, the reason I asked the question is that apart from a common law of copyright, it seems to me that the only copyright and patent protection that people have in modern society is something that arises out of the state. In other words, the state creates it. And I think this raises some very serious questions about whether or not the state is in a position to really create anything. It's a little bit like the question, which I think is a really good question, whether or not the state and corporations, for example, which are also preaching to the state, can be looked upon in person. You know, like, I saw a bumper sticker some time back, I really liked it, so I would believe that the corporation is a person when they execute one of the electric chair. It's hard to imagine that something that has an artificial creation is not created in the same genetic fashion that we think of as other persons. It's an artificial person. The idea that these bodies can have the kinds of interests that we attribute to a sense of personhood, I find very promising. If we are going to consider the possibility of altering or abolishing a political system or doing away with the corporation, can we do that? If these are persons, do we ever decide to do away with the corporation? If we can't do this with our children, as if we probably accepted the idea that just because they're created children, then maybe we can destroy them after we destroy these other organizations. And these are the organizations, the state, that creates these patterns of copyright action. And then I find that trouble. I think that's not enough. I think that the state origin of copyright privileges, patent privileges and other things classed under intellectual property is very important to track and that these ought to be considered by libertarian economists to be treated as part of the same analysis of other forms of force and monopoly and other forms of protectionism on behalf of incumbent interests that the exercise of state privilege in order to create these artificially rigged markets is something that's not an instantiation of property rights, but rather the profound violation of them is something that really needs to be treated in the same kind of breath as we treat government monopolies on energy, government monopolies on roads and other sort of vital services. I would actually agree that of course the state incorporation statute should be nullified. Legal personhood should be given up as a fiction. And I would even eliminate the state's grant of limited liability for shareholders, but that doesn't mean that an organization that has passive investors, the passive investors would be vicariously liable for the torts of employees of the corporation that they've invested in. So I don't even know if limited liability is a privilege because I don't know if it's needed to prevent shareholders from being liable in the first place. But I would say that the effect of IP, for example, is one effect that gives rise to these huge dominant oligopolies and monopolies. I mean, just take Microsoft and Apple. You know, Microsoft made billions of dollars in extra monopolistic profits because of the copyright monopoly the state gives it. Then it uses these extra profits to pay patent lawyers to file patents, and then they use the patents to squelch competition as well and keep their oligopoly or their monopoly up. You know, maybe they can be defended from a lawsuit from Apple. Maybe Apple can defend itself from a lawsuit from Samsung and Google maybe and Microsoft. And then they all just settle. They pay each other a few million dollars or a billion dollars. They go on their way and they have meanwhile they're erecting a walled garden of protectionism where smaller companies on the outside can't even compete with them because they're violating one of the patents of the companies in there or the copyright. And if they get sued, they can't defend themselves because they never made the money in the first place to acquire a big arsenal of patents. So IP clearly has a monopolizing, oligopolizing effect and makes the evil of what evil corporations have, it exacerbates it and makes it much worse. I think that one thing that I want to add to that is that given the increasing role that intellectual property restrictions are playing in propping up sort of the business models of, you know, as sort of a number of the key technology companies also of course other Fortune 500 companies like Time Warner, Disney and so on that it's important to, it's important I think to can flexify some of the discussion of, for example, international trade agreements that libertarians have engaged in thus far. These are sold as, you know, so agreements such as NAFTA, CAFTA, chorus FTA and so on which have been sold as routes to market liberalization and liberalizations of international trade. They do genuinely reduce overall tariff levels which is a genuine benefit to sort of everybody affected by them, but simultaneously these same agreements have included bundled within them massive synchronized increases among the participants in the multilateral agreements to the extension of copyright terms also the implementation of much more draconian enforcement mechanisms. So like the US government standardly bundles into its multilateral trade agreements that the other signers adopt technology control measures like the US's Digital Millennium Copyright Act which restrict technologies that might possibly be used to crack. Which we call computers. Yeah. And so in one sense these agreements offer significant reductions of one kind of protectionism but simultaneously they involve massive synchronized increases in another form of protectionism. And I think precisely because as we've moved into more of an information economy monopolistic control over tangible goods and services has become less central to maintaining monopolistic privileges. And control over information has become more central and more lucrative and so the shift of the focus of state power has shifted more and more towards the new areas that are sort of the most important for them to control. Well we're all in one kind of agreement up here as to our disaffection with copyrights and patents and so forth. I feel that that was an offer or similarity with the defenders of copyrights and patents that provide it. And that is that without the protection that's accorded to these discoveries and inventions and so forth companies or individuals might not have an incentive to incur all of the costs associated with the creation of these new works and as soon as they were created a competitor who had not incurred these costs and kind of a big advantage of those investments that created the item and profit at the expense of those who had created it. How do we reach that? Yeah, so I guess there's... So that's a concern that I think is a serious concern so a concern that's worth taking seriously in the following sense that I think so I don't think that it actually worries about like levels of production of intellectual products actually can have much reason to cut for against the fundamental reasons for opposing intellectual property. As I see it the fundamental reasons for opposing intellectual property are moral reasons having to do with the right to dispose of your own property and the right to control the contents of your own mind and to speak freely. And even if it turned out that we got no decent level of pharmaceuticals even if it turned out that art and literature simply collapsed that would be very bad. But I think people have a right to let them collapse if that's what the exercise of their liberty rights leads to. Now that said, I think that the worry about these kind of cases is I think best answered in terms of trying to think about market mechanisms for resolving the problem. So it's true that there are potential problems with determining good ways to ensure that artists are able to make a decent living off of their labor. There's problems with figuring out good business models for making profits from pharmaceutical research. Although of course there there's a large regulatory structure through the FDA and a number of other controls that make that a harder problem than it should be. But these are problems that I think have to be addressed through entrepreneurial means. And so to take an example of something that so it actually is restricted to copyright law but at the time copyright... Louder? Yeah. So to take an example there's a basic problem about how you can make money from broadcast TV given that you're sending it out into the art for free anyone who picks it up can watch it without having any contact with you and in principle anyone who picks it up could just as easily record it and pass it along to other people. And there are sort of a couple ways that you could try and solve this problem. One is that you could try and solve the public goods problems involved with making money from broadcasting by imposing coercive measures through the state and you can sort of require that people who buy a television pay a certain tax which goes to the content producers is actually something similar to what they've imposed on the audio recording market. On the other hand you could leave it open to competitive processes into entrepreneurial experimentation because I think this is actually ultimately a public goods problem that could be solved by any number of other public goods problems. If you have trouble figuring out how... if you have trouble figuring out how shippers can pay for lighthouses the solution is to shift business models and actually to get consensual payments from the nearby harbor. Similarly if you have a problem figuring out how broadcasters can make money from their watchers well one way you can do that is by selling ads to... by selling ads to advertising space to advertisers in which case the more people watch it for free the better a position you're in rather than the worst position. And so I think in all of these cases so an advertising based model is in many ways reaching the end of its lifetime as a usable model for trying to make money because people are getting more control over the sequence they watch these in and so on so the solution is always going to be to try and engage in an entrepreneurial and competitive discovery process so that you can find out the sort of market pricing mechanism that will make these sustainable enterprises rather than trying to figure out rather than trying to bypass economic population by means of a state measure. I agree with all that and I believe in the UK and in Europe they actually do impose a tax on every television and then the government sends these trucks around with this sensing equipment like around studio dorms looking for TV signals at least in their CRT days and if they catch you having an unlicensed television you know you're in trouble. I would also say that the state imposes so many costs on companies large and small maybe disproportionately on small but an absolute cost on everyone the FDA process is extremely expensive time-consuming taxes alone pro-union legislation tariffs other types of regulations minimum wage all opposed huge cost on business and if you get rid of that instead of trusting the same state that imposed all this on the economy to add another measure to try to make up a little bit of the damage they've done to the companies by giving them the right to charge a monopoly price for a while just get the state out of the way everyone would be so much more wealthy with the extra money there'd be a lot more money for research and development right off the bat so that would be my response to that as far as your original question the way you posed it is really not fundamentally different than the case any business faces that is you come up with an idea that you think can make profit you engage in the business if you make a profit after a while people will notice and they've learned something from what you've done they've learned that you have found something that satisfies consumers and if you have a profit that's obvious and healthy enough you're going to attract competition and they're going to come in and compete with you and gradually your unnatural, temporary profit is going to fall as the free market is designed to do well not designed but as it does and so the fact that in some types of businesses it's somewhat easier for people to compete or they can compete quicker because a large part of what you're doing with consumers is selling some easily copyable pattern of information then it's just a little bit harder to compete but you have to figure that out it's the entrepreneur's job to figure that out not to go to the government and ask for a legal monopoly to protect him from competition I think that the public goods argument too often begs a question or begs a lot of questions that are sort of presumed to be answerable in terms of generating monetary profits and I think there's so many things that individuals do that promote some public good or some public interest without any interest apparently in wanting to make money out of it I'm thinking for example of the early turnpike movement in this country but turnpike should be built by privately owned turnpike companies and these companies were invested in a private party in the United States even though it was understood and the experience played its luck out that these companies almost never made money they were almost always a losing proposition and apparently there were other objectives there were other purposes in mind for creating the Eastern type I don't know if that's going to be social in nature or opening up markets in a general sense between town A and town B but whatever it was the people who invested in the turnpike company very often in fact the money that he said more often than not lost money on it they didn't take anybody yet they kept investing in it that's about this in relation to language how was it to say the greatest invention that we humans managed to ever create was language language is by far a far greater invention than the automobile, the airplane or anything else and yet who created this language or if you want to put it in terms of agricultural products who created the products that we more or less take for granted as part of some sort of hope if you will of goods that are available to people Central American Indians were kind of playing around with various grasses and at some point came up with what we now call Tweetmark I'm not aware of any any particular group that claimed a patent right of a thing or this or sort of traditional treatments that people came up with using natural herbs and things of this sort that took care of various elements I'm not aware that there was that odd where the neighbors or anyone else would have time and exclusive right to the use of this particular substance and yet we presumed that the pharmaceutical company or the case of food food producing companies amongst animals in the world somehow were in hate of that particular creation and modified in some fashion and then they were partly interested in it and I am I am willing to be convinced by anything I'm an agnostic of this but it is something you can imagine so if somebody wants to try to convince me how Monsanto already did somehow or other had a rightful claim to the modification of products which they themselves inherited from sort of a common stock of mankind I'd like to hear it but think of all the great writings who was probably the famous writer of all if you go back and take a look at the books of quotations and so who created this as much as anybody else some no, no, you make me it was a great writer by the name of Anonymous you can go this is by Anonymous, Anonymous, Anonymous why isn't there some refridation of a copyright with this particular writer of the exclusive right to the use of that particular rotation of that poem or whatever it is I don't always do this I've been, I my own right is I I copyright them for one reason, I copyright my stuff purely defensively so that if I put it out there with somebody without copyright and somebody else found it in a home I like that I think I will copyright that copyright then and how shameful it was to reproduce that himself but he might be violating my copyright so I've done that on my own because I don't write this but I let the people know anybody else will take any of the works that I've done and reproduce them and send them out to millions and millions of people without paying me anything please, please be my guest do it, I would love it um, you know other reasons are just making money out of it a lot of it let me just go back to what you mentioned earlier the question of you know if someone, some company sells a good that's easily copyable what's there in Senate to do it if they're going to face competition and I know you're playing devil's advocate and you're right, that is the devil's side, right um, but the purpose of law and rights is not to make sure we have the right incentives in place to achieve some predetermined optimum output of some preordained goal like X, like this many movies or whatever purpose of law and rights is justice protection of property rights reduction of conflict permitting people to live in peace and prosperity and harmony with each other it's got nothing to do with incentives um, and I would also say that if you say what's there in Senate for innovating in pharmaceuticals or producing movies etc, then the IP advocate can argue one of two things he can argue that there would be no if we don't have patent and copyright there's going to be no invention, no innovation no, no one's ever going to write a novel again ever and some of them actually do argue this um, um but that's obviously completely absurd no one in their right mind can believe that there would be none at best they can argue that we have this level of innovation and copyright I mean, creative works now and without copyright and patent it's going to be lower and it's lower than some ideal which they apparently know is higher um they have no proof that IP laws even increase this number, in fact I believe it reduces it and distorts it and scoots it to different types of works different types of innovation and invention and research um, so at most their argument can be led to argue that we need to change the law to increase the amount of innovation well, it comes to some cost how do they know that this the value of this extra innovation is greater than the cost and where's the stopping point why are copyrights limited to 150 years roughly and patents to 17 why don't we impose a death penalty and make it last a million years that would certainly incentivize some inventions that are not happening right now that are just beyond the margin of what's feasible now or we could even go further than that what if the strongest monopoly protection in the world is just not enough to get people to buy enough of this product to give enough profit motive to give it incentive to people to research and develop we need more and more works we always need more innovation, right so the natural result next which some people have advocated such as Bernie Sanders the Socialist from Vermont um and even Alex Tabarok, a Libertarian they say well, let's either replace the patent system or augment it with a taxpayer funded prize system that a government appointed panel of experts doles out every year to reward in recipients and the last proposal I saw was for an $80 billion a year taxpayer funded prize fund for medical innovations alone now in the patent universe medical innovation is one little narrow slice of the pie you have pharmaceuticals you have medical devices you have chemicals gene patents, mechanical electrical software business methods tons of other types of patents so if you're going to apply this logic and scale it up to the entire innovative space of the patent office you're going to need probably $10 trillion a year I mean literally just to do this insane idea of theirs so we bankrupt the entire country so the entire idea that we don't have enough innovation is just like saying the price of milk is too high it's trying to centrally plan the economy and prices and the amount of activity that's engaged in and we need to stand back and let the free market operate to come back to something that you said earlier about about roads and in particular the development of roads by companies that ultimately weren't necessarily even expected to make any money in the end I think that that's a very important observation and it's it's sort of it helps to indicate a way in which the current discourse about intellectual property the political debates about it often involve claims from the advocates of intellectual property that are increasingly divorced from any kind of reality on the ground about how people actually produce creative works simply because in whatever problems there may have been in the past and I think those were also problems that were perfectly solvable through consensual social means but in the age of Kickstarter and in the age of millions of independent comics artists and writers and musicians and number of people doing their work through the internet and being funded through a very impressive array of creative ways of scratching together small amounts of money from lots of people in order to help them make an independent living that sort of the protectionist worries about how are we going to keep how are we going to keep industries sustainable and profitable without intellectual property monopolies just seems I guess sort of increasingly divorced from any kind of actual market reality but these are problems that not only can be solved but already are being solved and it's obvious how these things pose a problem to like Warner Brothers' bottom line but there's no reason there's no sort of there's no a prior reason why the creative landscape has to involve giant corporations like Warner Brothers or Disney or any of the others and similarly when it comes to things like when it comes to like worries about pharmaceutical patents I'm not at all convinced by the standard protectionist arguments that there's no way to have sustainable R&D outside of to have sustainable R&D for pharmaceuticals on a for profit basis without patents but let's just grant for the moment that that's true then under conditions of freedom simply the nonprofits will have to do the research and development and fortunately we have a long history of nonprofit institutions like universities and you know independent research organizations that already have existing models about how you do fundamental research and try to make new innovations available without demanding a monetary profit at the end of the day yeah I absolutely agree maybe we could mention one other thing we talked a lot about patent and copyright those are the two bad ones but maybe I can just mention we should also be concerned about trademark and trade secret although there's not as big of a deal trade secret was used fairly recently by Apple to bust down some guy's door with the iPhone 4s and leaks a year or two ago trademark quality is increasingly bad it's used for suppressing free speech it's used to suppress competition it's used to outlaw cheap knockoff goods like designer purses and things like this there's a part of trademark law that you could argue is justifiable that is to the extent it's rooted in some kind of fraud on the consumer but if that's the case we have fraud law already so I'd say just completely get rid of trademark and just rely on fraud law that's all you need and that would give the cause of action to the defrauded consumer not to the competitor and it would also give a cause of action only when there's actual fraud unlike in the current case where you only have to show a likelihood of confusion which is the trademark standard which is used for example when a consumer buys a fake designer purse for $20 or a Rolex watch for $20 he's not defrauded he actually knows he's buying a knockoff and wants the knockoff cheaper he wouldn't be able to sue in that case and as far as trade secret you don't need the law to keep things secret all you need is to have your house and your body protected standard property law and you can use contracts with employees and if they leak then you can sue them for damages but the injunction part of trade secret law is totally unjustified so get rid of trade secret law rely on contract and property rights and get rid of trademark and you can sue someone fraud law only I think the assumption that creative people need this kind of protection in order to have them set up to continue free is a question I think it works with Edison for example I suspect I obviously didn't know the guy he was a year or two before and high school but I suspect that there are a lot of work so only for the purpose of finding out how to do the work I mean there's various inventions of this that's what people said there's no monetary value to this it's giving you joy and that's about the end of it and I also think of some of the people who are doing some creative work in the area of drug research these are people who in the face of the drug war have come up with alternative kinds of drugs put together and put them on the open market I think I don't know any people but I suspect that they probably were interested in just getting around the problem of the drug war as much as they were anything else and I'm going to give you a full $1,000,000 sum of money to be dispersed by the government and say for personally medical research who's trying to evaluate that I suspect that people are going to evaluate that of those who already have a vested interest in keeping the the ribs and the machinery and the drugs and so forth as they already are sometimes if somebody keep going they're sure of fire perfect the field cancer any that's very important somehow this would not be a recipient of one of these I think they might be a recipient of midnight knock on the door of the their works in their labs and the computers so the idea that this is huge is to encourage fundamentally new research in the face of who it is that's going to be benefited by who is going to be threatened by the new research would make that a minimal consideration on the drug on the pharmaceutical issue I would also point out that you could argue that that although a lot of the pharmaceuticals that have been produced that there is a distorting effect of the patent system in pharmaceuticals in that companies use the government to push onto the medical system which the government controls and the prescription system which the government controls more expensive newer patented drugs instead of older natural remedies that may work just as well or for a lot lower price not to say that that's always the case but I do believe that there's an effect of over medicalizing the nation because there's a financial incentive on the part of the companies that they would rather sell a patented good than one that's not patented because they can sell it for a higher price it must be good one other addendum to what I mentioned earlier defamation which is libel and slander law which is basically based upon this idea of a right to your reputation not traditionally considered to be a type of an old property right but I believe it should be it's very similar in the arguments for it and in the way it works and we ought to lump defamation law in with the big 5 evil IP laws that need to be completely repealed and defamation law like copyright has a tremendously stifling effect on freedom of the press and freedom of speech I think the weakness of all of this as the government is that once once you have something out there defamation is a good example you don't have control over your reputation once a piece of written work or invention or whatever it is on in the world you don't have control so that it's really impossible to make sense to sell the whole country from the absence of the ability to control the ability to exclude and you don't have that but these impacts of government creation and government to enforce so-called property defamation is a perfect example of do I do I have a property interest in my reputation? can I control that? no who controls my reputation? I can try all kinds of gimmicks to make you think that you should like me for some particular reason some people are going through that now in a little process but whether I prevail or not who will be up to you? there's nothing I can do to get you to alter your opinion do you think I'm an SOV from the start? at the end of the story so how come I'm sure that I don't have a property interest in my reputation? I don't see it but I don't know to open up to enough to question that's all a hand go up do we have a microphone down there for people? if you can yell loudly I'll try to repeat it that's the next question that ties in with the profits in the buying and selling of real estate I sell a piece of real work repeat the question Barbara yeah for another licensing agreement that might be binding between the two of us could that be binding upon the third person who did not apply to it? does that basically... on moral or legal or any kind of gun? and you'll comment on the courts I didn't like the idea that you that some third person could be bound by what you and I agree to and so for the longest third of time it took it had difficulty enforcing the so-called restricted problems the rationale being that if you and I agree that we're not going to raise sheep on a piece of property that I sell to you how can we make that of binding upon some third person? what a data down there what? well and all of them all together or un-together but how can we as a philosophic proposition how can we justify that? that's when I agreed to do something now all of a sudden you, by is that just inlet to be bound by the promise as you and I made? let me I don't want to take it too far field here I have some thoughts on this I haven't written about it much yet but I think the restrictive covenant situation is not actually analogous to your high bill I'll explain why but the way restrictive covenants can be made to work I believe is just to treat all the adjacent plots of land as co-owners of all the land but each one having a different ownership right as a resident of one tract they say the 99% owner and everyone else is a 1% owner in the sense that they have a veto right over certain uses of your property so it's actually not even a contract it's more of a division of property among people and I think you could find ways that that could run with the land in the sense that one of the veto rights is I can't sell my tract of land to a new buyer unless he agrees to these terms too you could prevent someone from getting out of the regime but in your case I think I would look at the licensing thing well first of all the word license means permission so in the law you don't need a license or permission unless someone has the right to stop you unless there's a property right so if IP goes away probably 95% of all the licensing activity will just disappear because people don't need permission they don't need a license or a book seller and a buyer which we discussed earlier already now there is one possible argument you could make that the third party is somehow a bad guy whether he's immoral or not I'll let Charles do that, he's the philosopher but the argument is in the law there's something called tortuous interference with contracts or inducing someone to breach their contract and if you look at a contractual arrangement between book seller and book buyer as a type of property right then this third party is sort of aiding and abetting one guy and breaching someone else's rights but I think under Rothbard's title transfer theory of contract a contract is not that kind of property right and there's no such thing as contract breach there's only a prearranged penalty provision provided for that is triggered by certain specified actions of the buyer so if the buyer copies the book to the contract as he would be said to be under today's law which I think is conceptually confused under a Rothbardian system he simply is doing something that triggers a payment of money and the hope on the part of the seller is the prospect of that will incentivize him not to do it because he's going to incur a cost but if he does that he simply owes money to the book seller but the third party who induced him to do it I don't see how it's really libertarian to uphold the current legal theory of tortuous interference with the contract which is all you could really rely upon I think to get the third party implicated which is also an argument for the injunction against the third party in the trade secret case but again I think even that argument doesn't quite doesn't quite work I I'd want to broadly agree with Stefan's answer in terms of sort of the legal mechanisms for addressing the question of justice that's involved here now there may be a question of ethics it's perfectly possible to be a jerk about copying things and I think you shouldn't be a jerk but I think that that kind of question is a question that's not answered simply by appeal to whether you had this pre-existing agreement between the book seller and the person who bought it it's also going to depend on things like what the relationship between the downstream buyer is and the copyist and it's also going to depend on things like just what the you know sort of what the what the what sort of the contract maker upstream has like a reasonable claim to expect and you know I think it's certainly true that we ought to adopt an ethic that people who are doing good work you know should generally be encouraged to be able to make a living at it that you know should respect the work of artists that she value and things like that but I see no you know so I see no legal reason in either case no reason of justice and I see no ethical reason at all in the case of you know works that have have been around for a very long time that the author no longer particularly depends upon there are a number of other considerations that can come into effect of you know sort of why it is that they should reasonably have a claim on expecting to make like a lifetime perpetual income from that kind of work so in terms of the ethical question I think there's there are ways to be more jerky and ways to be less jerky and part of that a lot of that is going to depend on like the concrete situation in the transaction you know the ultimate solution to a lot of this idea of how artists get paid maybe everyone should be their own benefactor and in a freeed market you work five hours a week you make a hundred thousand dollars a year and the rest of the week you paint paintings so you're your own benefactor maybe so much wealthier or you retire at 21 you know and you become an artist for the rest of your life there's no reason to think that that doesn't happen can I tell you my definition of copyright oh property I would say property right is a relationship between a human actor and a scarce resource define property define property well I don't use the word property as a synonym for the object that is owned I think that's a kind of mistake that a lot of people will say my property um property just means a feature of of an entity and it's used to mean you have a proprietary or a proprietary interest in something which gets exclusive legal control so I would just say property means of the ownership of a human actor by a human actor of a scarce resource for some for some reason which we would say it's a social definition if I was the only person on the planet I wouldn't even talk about that and probably the fact that we're obviously crucial story as soon as crucial discovered so it's a priority all of a sudden property became an issue and so this is a question of how can that are going to assert plays to the explicit decision makers over certain parts of the universe that they find themselves in and my own my own view I haven't talked about this since we were once in 7,000 years I think that whatever property rights we have from the willingness of our neighbor to come to the support of our claim that doesn't do with the government, that doesn't do with sound reasoning or anything like that I assert a claim to be exclusive ever something that's boggled for example and then I call upon you to respect my claim in other words if you will not also assert a claim of ownership and try to take my claim of ownership over this this item that you will be willing to come to my defense and I think that's where comes from this is not a human invention property interests are found throughout all life forms plants, insects, fish, animals all identify and defend property claims that are written on them from our great work others who have taken the position based on good empirical research all the other life forms engage in this activity because everything is what I call the shape or principle everything has to be some place I don't know what else to call it but to begin with everything has to be some place that's why you're going to have to exercise exclusive decision making over something everybody on the planet you've got a hamburger and either you're going to eat that or you're going to starve so you're going to eat that describe it that there might be some poor starving soul in front of you who would just love to have a hamburger we need to wrap it up I mean it's not for competing players and you can play around with it all you want all kinds of fun fun examples but essentially it's the form of social metaphysics that we are teaching in law school that's what we're talking about the social relationship how do we decide who gets to make decisions about who begins with yourself do you own yourself what you do with them so I think we're running up against the time limit for this session but if anybody has any follow up questions I'll be down at the ALL table over there I'll be available too thank you all