 Hi, this is Jeffrey Tucker, and you're listening to the Libertarian Christian Podcast. Thank you so much for listening. You might also consider supporting this podcast by sharing it and even donating. LCI needs your help, so it can continue creating great content. Let's stand together at the intersection of faith and freedom. It's time for the Libertarian Christian Podcast. Welcome to the Libertarian Christian Podcast, a project of the Libertarian Christian Institute. I'm Norman Horn, president of the Libertarian Christian Institute, and today I'm joined by my co-host Doug Stewart. And also by Stefan Kinsella, who is an intellectual property lawyer. He's been a partner at Dwayne Morris in Philadelphia, a former general counsel for Applied Optical Electronics, and is well known as the editor of Libertarian Papers. Author and editor of numerous books on international law and intellectual property, law published by Oxford University Press, Thompson Broiders, West and many others. Now, we have invited Stefan to talk about intellectual property with us today. Intellectual property is something that affects us on a daily basis, but it's hardly understood by the average individual. And so is this something that Libertarians need to be concerned about? Is it legitimate property in the first place? So with that, I'd like to welcome you, Stefan, to the show. Thanks, Norman, from another Norman. Yes, that's right. And if some of our listeners may know out there that Stefan goes by in Stefan Kinsella and his first name actually is Norman. So we're two peas in a pod in that respect. So Stefan, what is actually is your background in intellectual property? Would you like to kind of go through some of your history about how you became considered an authority in this area? Well, I started practicing the law in 1992 and I started an oil and gas law in Houston. But then I quickly switched to patent law because of my technical engineering background. And that's what I've been doing for the last 24, 25 years. So I've been a patent law practitioner and patent law is one of the types of intellectual property. So yeah, I've been doing copyright trademark and patent law, especially patent law for 25 years. And as a libertarian as well, and someone who's interested in Austrian economics and pre-market theory, I've explored this issue given what I know about the way the legal system works. And I've written a lot and thought about the topic from a libertarian perspective as well. So I'm just another student of the field of human freedom. And I've used what I've learned in my career and my profession to try to shed some light on how to view this type of law from a libertarian or a free market or a human freedom point of view. Well, and Stefan, you've mentioned you've been a libertarian for a long time as well. And if I recall right, you've told me before that you were a libertarian even before you went to law school and kind of came to the knowledge of a lot of this stuff via reading about Ein Rand and whatnot. So when you even approached law school, this was already something in your experience at that point, right? Yeah, I was already a libertarian since late high school and then through college and in law school. And I had never given intellectual property much thought because it's a fairly abstract topic and it's hard to understand. But when I became a lawyer and started practicing in the area, my interest in it grew stronger. And I realized that lots of people have lots of sort of vague thoughts about it on the sidelines. Some of them are for it. Some are against it. But almost all of their arguments were either misinformed on the law itself because it's such an arcane area of law or their arguments just were incomplete or didn't make a lot of sense. So I was driven to do it. It's not really my strongest area of legal interest, to be honest. It's just pace of bills. It wasn't my strongest area of interest in libertarian theory. But because everyone I talked to seemed to get it so wrong and I seemed to have like an edge in the, that is, I actually understood what the law was because I practiced it. I thought I would try to figure out the issue myself. And so that's kind of what I've devoted part of my scholarly interest to over the last 25 plus years. So for those who are uninitiated about the topic of intellectual property, I mean, we have a lot of libertarian listeners. We have a lot of libertarian or we have a lot of Christians listeners who call themselves libertarian. But this may be a topic that is unfamiliar to them in terms of like, you know, the inner workings, you know, until I took a Mises Academy class with you five, seven years ago, I didn't really know how it worked. So give the uninitiated just a little picture of what is IP? How does it affect our daily lives? Yeah, I think, and one reason I've devoted too much time to this, not only because I was uniquely situated to try to kind of figure this out. I've become convinced that it's one of the biggest, one of the most important issues in the political landscape is behind the scenes and it's not as visible. I think most people are aware of various aspects of intellectual property, like they're aware of brand names and trademarks, they're aware of copyrights, they're aware of inventions and patents, vaguely, right? And they're vaguely aware that one of these aspects of the legal system that they sort of assume is part of a free market western capitalist private property system. So they sort of assume that intellectual property rights, which would include patents and copyrights primarily, the rights to your invention, the rights to your songs, the rights to your creations, they assume that's part of western capitalism. And they assume that's relatively good because it produced all this prosperity that we have. So they take for granted that there must be, it's a highly specialized thing that only certain people know, sort of like your brain surgeon or other specialists. And they don't really understand the details, but they take it for granted that it's a legitimate thing. And they also take for granted the value of ideas and innovation and creativity, people coming up with new inventions and people coming up with new artworks and new novels and new movies. And in their mind, they assume that the legal system has this all figured out and that the legal system is supporting these generally good things that are part of the western system. Almost all that is incorrect, unfortunately. It seems like, you know, Deirdre McCuskey talks about the rhetoric of innovation and, you know, having a go at things is what really changed the modern world. And, you know, it seems like, you know, what you just described was kind of the nice side of it. So we'll look at all this good that has happened in the last 200 years. I mean, we must be doing something right. And why not protect people's right to innovate? I mean, on a, you know, good faith assessment of it, I mean, you can't blame people for wanting to pursue something. Yes. And so freedom is good, private property is good, property rights are good, innovation is good, being creative is good. So if you put all these things together and you accept the sort of rhetoric that underlies the arguments for this, you assume well. We have property rights in land and in resources that allows us to build factories and houses and cars. It just makes sense by analogy or something that you should have a property right in other things that you create that you put mental effort into that are useful to the human race. So that's sort of the way the general argument works. The general argument is completely faulty, I believe, which I've just discovered by looking into it closely. And, you know, I've come to the conclusion, I came to the conclusion 20 years ago that the patent system and the copyright system, which is sort of the backbone of intellectual property, are completely harmful to the human race and are contrary to private property rights and the free market system and should be completely abolished. So almost every assumption about these systems and the way that property rights should work that supports the argument for patent and copyright is just wrong. And it's hard for people to wrap their heads around that because they think that if you criticize patent or copyright, that you're criticizing the role of the mentality, right, the intellect. They think that you don't give importance to property rights. But, you know, that's almost like saying that if you're morally opposed to prostitution that you're opposed to sex. I mean, you don't have to correlate everything just because you don't think there should be a property right in ideas doesn't mean you think ideas are not important. So this is very interesting, of course, and something we want to delve into this deeper. We'll get to some of the aspects of why the prior assumptions about innovation that happens in the free market may not be exactly accurate. But since we're going on the topic of property rights, I think it's really important here to really elucidate what is this libertarian view on property rights. And I know this is near and dear to your heart. So how would you briefly explain what is the libertarians peculiar view of property rights relative to the way other people conceive of it? Well, and I actually think that I think the common sense and the basic understanding of property rights is very close to what libertarians view. We're just a little bit more consistent or extreme about it. But most people believe that you have a right to your own life, to your own body, that you shouldn't murder other people. You shouldn't take their stuff without their permission. And that's the core elements of a property rights system that you own something that you have a better claim to than other people. And so we don't usually think of our bodies in that way. But that is, that's what it means to oppose slavery is to say that you have a better claim to control your body than some other person does. And if you take that to the extreme, then you have to oppose drug laws and things like that. Because someone is saying who gets the right to decide who ingest a drug into your body, you or someone else. And the ultimate answer is it has to be you. So that's a self ownership type of claim. And if you're getting theft, then you're getting theft because someone who has a resource has a better claim to it than someone else. So the essence of property rights is simply to allocate the control, the legal control or the ownership of a resource over something that could be in dispute by the person trying to use it or other people trying to take it from him. And the libertarian view is simply way more consistent and follows it through to the end. So it takes the common sense rules that we have in the common law. You can't commit theft. You can't commit murder. We just take that to the extreme and we say you can never do these things. You can never violate someone's rights. So the purpose of all law is really to enforce rights and all rights are property rights because all disputes are ultimately conflicts between acting human beings over each other's bodies or other things that we want to use in the world. That's what it's always all about. So the only question is what's the rule that decides these things? And I would just say what's unique about the libertarian rule is that we're very consistent in saying we've analyzed the core of these rules that we all apply in an intuitive basis. And the first one is self ownership. It's ownership of your body. But that means the person who controls their body is the owner. And by the way, that's completely consistent, I believe, with a Western Christian ethic, right? Because God gives us each our own control of our own bodies. You could say God is the ultimate owner. But from our point of view, when we're talking about laws made in this world, we're talking about relationships between people. So you can still think that I own myself compared to the state. I have the right to decide how much money I'm going to keep or give to charity. I have the right to decide what profession I'm going to go into instead of a communist authority telling me what to do, right? I have the right to decide whether I want to do narcotics or not. But you could still believe at the same time that there's a higher authority that says that's immoral. But the question for us in earthly matters is what the laws should be, right? And so the libertarian view is simply that in terms of human bodies, we own ourselves as a default rule. Now that can change if you commit some horrible crime. And during the commission of the crime, someone that you're attacking has the right to invade your body to defend themselves. That's called self-defense. But the default rule is that everyone is their self-owner in the first place. And then for all these other things that we own in the world, like resources, like land and iron ore and cars, then it comes down to a couple of simple rules. And one is the first person who gets it has a better claim than other people. And the second rule would be a contractual assignment. Like if you assign it voluntarily by contract to someone else, then they have to claim to it. And so if you take these kind of core simple rules, which are embedded basically in the private law of all Western history, when it comes to intellectual property rights, if you understand what I just explained, like how we figure out what property rights there are, how we figure out who the owners of things are, how we settle a dispute over ownership of a given thing, then you finally realize that you cannot have things like positive rights. All rights are negative. If you have a positive right, like a right to welfare or a right to tuition, that means someone has to provide it to you, right? The libertarian view is sort of a negative view. Like you have an obligation to refrain from invading someone else's space from taking their property, from using it without their permission. And if you start adding positive rights to this list, they have to come at the expense of negative rights. And the same thing is true for intellectual property. If you have rights already defined over these scarce, tangible things in the world that we have the need to control and to manipulate and to use in our lives, including our bodies, once you have a set of rules that determine who owns them, you can't have another set of rules on top of that that's in addition to it. They have to come at the expense of it. And that's what intellectual property rights ultimately are, and that's what the problem with them ultimately is, that intellectual property rights amount to a type of theft of property rights, a type of taking of property rights, because it prevents you from using your own property and your own resources in the way you see fit. Because someone else has, now they have a government claim that they can stop you from using your property in a certain way that your competitor doesn't like. The objection that a lot of people would have would be like, well, they came up with that idea first, and maybe they came up with the implementation, not just merely the idea. And yet there's still a problem because the other person still can't use their property as they see fit. Right. And so I think the problem with that argument is that it's based upon a confusion about the nature of property. So they're thinking of property, not as a tangible scarce material resource that there could be a dispute over. They're thinking of it by analogy to this thing, which they're thinking of it as the result of an action that creates value or wealth for you. So because, let's say normally, according to libertarian or Lockean or natural law principle, you can go out into the world and you can acquire these resources that no one else is using, like wood from a tree, and you can use your labor and your body to carve it into a spear or a fishing net or a chair, something useful, some useful object. And when you do that, the result of your labor and the result of the ability to have property rights in it is that you have acquired wealth that you have security in. And so the result of property rights is you have some kind of value or wealth in the resources that you have a property right in. So there's a natural tendency for people to associate creative acts with some kind of property right in wealth, and that's the mistake. So you have a property right in your rocking chair that you made because you had the ownership of the raw material, the wood, let's say, right, and no one else had it. So you didn't steal it from anyone and you have a better claim over this rocking chair than anyone else. And it does make you more wealthy, you have more value that you have possession of. But your property right is in the chair and the property right arose because you were the first one to go acquire the resources to do it. But so what people do is by analogy, they think that, well, our labor, our mental effort doesn't only help us craft these materials of the natural world into more valuable arrangements that we have property rights in. It also helps us to come up with ideas and innovations which are also valuable and an important part of action, right? You can come up with a new play or a new poem or a song or a movie or you could come up with an invention, a new way to make power from the steam engine or nuclear power or the transistor or all kinds of things like that. And these are also valuable because these ideas help contribute to the efficacy of human action, right? The more resources we have at our disposal, the better off we are because we have more tools that we could potentially use to achieve our ends. And the more ideas and information and knowledge that we have, the better off we are because now we know what we can do with all these things at our disposal. So both knowledge and resources are essential for successful human action. But only one of them is subject to property rights and that is the resources which people can fight over and have conflict over because there's a scarcity in these things. If you and I both know how to cook a meal, like we can use heat to cook a meal and it makes it more delicious and safer. Or help preserve something or something like this, some technique, some knowledge that we have that we learned from someone else that was passed down or that we discovered ourselves. That adds to the stock of knowledge that we have that helps us survive better. It makes us wealthier. But you and I can both do that at the same time. A million people can do that at the same time. There's no necessary conflict. And because of that, property rights never needed to apply to those things and actually can't apply to those things. For the reason I gave earlier in the example of positive rights versus negative rights. You cannot start giving property rights in knowledge because it's literally impossible to do so. And what it really does is it just amounts to a restriction on what people can do with their existing resources. So it basically makes one person a part slave of the other person because the person that owns the patent or the copyright can use government force, which is physical force of a court, right? To tell someone you cannot use your body in this way. You can't use your factory in this way. You can't use your paper and ink and printing press in this way. And if you do, we will take some of your money or some of your stuff. We'll put you in jail or we will kill you. And so ultimately it's always a fight. Yes, it's always a legal claim, really. That's how lawyers think, right? Everything's... It's always an illegal idea. I think it's important to realize here that we've gone through this extended discussion about why property is the way it is in order to make this crucial point about how these property rights exist in order to resolve potential disputes over resources. And the critical disjuncture, or as you've said, they're making a mistake by analogy, seems to be the notion that the idea can have a conflict in the same way as a physical resource. That is physically impossible. And that seems to be... That seems to be like a real big kind of aha moment, at least what it was for me, to realize how that worked. And it's where the analogy of using an idea as property breaks down because it all of a sudden it cannot... It doesn't live by the same physical constraints. It has none. Yeah, and this is where it becomes important to... Some people think you're being pedantic or you're being a nitpicker, but it's really important to be clear on concepts and terminology because, for example, people will often say that there have been wars over religion. Okay, now what they mean is that a difference of opinion about religion was the motivation for the actors to fight, but what they were fighting over was always a scarce resource. They were never fighting over religion because religion is not a solid object in the world that anyone owns. So basically you have one group A over one group B, and if they don't agree on a religious principle, let's say, or any other principle, then ultimately if they have a fight, then they're fighting over their cattle or their women or their land or they're actually stabbing each other with swords. So in that case, they're fighting over who owns each other's bodies. They were just believed they would both be able to live in... They could both be able to believe it at the same time. Yes, if they simply said we will agree to disagree and walk away if we don't have a... Then they could fight over religion or any other philosophical topic as much as they wanted to, but the point is what they're really fighting over is always a scarce resource. And the same thing is true with these laws, right? So when people talk about you have to distinguish between the actual action that's happening and the motive for the purpose behind it. These are all different aspects of human action, and it's actually very simple, but you have to keep these concepts clear. And so the purpose of property rights is because there do happen to be conflicts because of the nature of the world that we have in front of us, which is that we have a limited physical body. We have a limited amount of time. We're all infallible. I mean, we're all fallible and we're not omnipotent, and we only have so many things available to try to achieve our way in the world. These are scarce means of action, as Ludwig von Mises, the Austrian economist, talks about. And these are the things to the subject of property rights. And this is the mistake that people make. They think that... And so by analogy to what we're talking about, you have to distinguish two arguments. One is, number one, what is the source of property rights? And number two, what is the source of wealth? So it is true that by acting and using your intellect and your creative genius to manipulate things that you have at your disposal, you can create wealth. But creating wealth just means making the things that you have more valuable to you or to someone else. If I take a piece of iron ore and I mold it into a horseshoe, which I can then sell or barter to someone for his hens or something else, I've increased my wealth in the world, but I didn't create ownership in the horseshoe by making it. I already had to own the iron ore to make it, right? And if you don't keep that distinction straight, then you suffer, you veer into the Marxist policy. The idea of the labor theory of value, which is the idea that the ownership of things comes from the labor we put into them. But that's clearly not true because if I am a factory worker on the Ford assembly line and I'm paid to make these cars, then I don't own the output of my labor because I didn't own the input factors. So the only thing that affects ownership is who owns the inputs, right? The things that go into the things you manipulate to make something else. And this is why the Marxists are wrong. It's why we oppose communism. And so actually, if you deviate from the standard account of property that I tried to lay out, and you start saying that you also own things because you created them, right? And you own the wealth that you create, you're basically starting to buy into the Marxist view the labor theory of value. And we know where that leads. Somebody might respond with, but what about things that it does feel like we are actually creating? So for instance, I go on a vacation and I spend, it doesn't matter how much time, I guess. I guess I'm already phrasing it in the labor theory of value way of looking at it, but I create a picture with my digital camera that didn't exist before. It isn't something, I mean, okay, I own the camera and I own the rights to, like, I own the property rights in making the picture that I make, but there's something brand new coming out of that. It's not just a reformed version of something that scares. How do we, and I guess this kind of leads into the larger question, maybe we can, if you're not finished with the property rights discussion and distinctions, it gets into the whole idea of digital technology and things that are created in that world. Yeah, and so, again, this is the mistake people make in, they start equating, you know, what they do for a living, right, or what they do for a hobby or for a passion, and they normally associate it with the fact that you can own certain things in the world and that's usually correlated with your ability to make money off of it, or to have property rights in it. But because of our increasingly technological world, there's more and more ways to make money off of services or off of intangible, producing things that are intangible that are not really ownable, but you don't really, when you're getting paid to do a service, you don't really care if you own that service. If the buyer of your services wants to call it a purchase and people want to describe it as a sale of your labor services, that's fine. They can make that analogy, they can make that metaphor, because really, all you're concerned about is you're doing something that you're getting you paid, right? But actually, the analogy is an imperfect one, right? So I think that, and again, when you have... Also, we have to recognize that we just live through a period that's probably pretty unique in human history, like, let's say the last 50 years, where people could become multimillionaires by selling CDs or album, you know, the Beatles and Madonna, and people in that 40-year period of history, because they were selling something to a mass audience in a large world, which had a lot of free money, and there was no easy way to copy it. So they were able to make lots of money for a while at movie actors, all these guys. But now that period is... And before that, it wasn't like that, because the world wasn't as rich. And now it's not like that anymore either, because anything could be copied, given torrenting in the internet, right? So we have this kind of idea, given by our recent four decades of just a brief period in human history, that you should be able to make tons of money off of selling physical items that are duplicates of your kind of creative output. And that is not going to be reproduced in the future. And I think Corey Doctro, a science fiction author, pointed out that the internet is like the world's greatest copying machine. And starting from today going forward, it's never going to get harder to make copies of things. It's only going to get easier. It will never get harder. So we have to accept this world that copying is easy. And then you have to shift your mind and you have to start thinking, but that's not a bad thing. It's a good thing. It's good that we can copy information and we can learn from each other. Or we can compete with each other. That's what free market competition is about. We can emulate each other. We can notice what other people are doing. And we can copy it or build on it. Everyone builds upon everyone else. So I would say that when someone comes up with a unique thing, a unique idea, a unique pattern, they can keep it to themselves. They're perfectly entitled to keep quiet about it. We call that a trade secret in law. But if you want to start selling your new mousetrap, you want to sell it to everyone. And you want to tell everyone what's new about it. You want to tell everyone, my new mousetrap has a special feature that is better than every other mousetrap. So you're advertising into the world. So you're intentionally making your innovation public. You're telling, you're broadcasting it to everyone. You're suffering the risk that you're going to educate your competitors on how to compete with you in the hope that you'll make a big profit in some kind of medium term before everyone catches up with you. This is how the free market works. And what's amazing is that everyone that has this property idea in ideas basically is against the idea of competition. I mean, they will say things like this. They'll say like, how am I supposed to make a profit if everyone can just compete with me? And they ask this question as if it's a self-evident reputation of the idea of free market competition. Questions are not argument. And the implicit argument built into their question is that people should have a right to make a profit. But they don't have a right to make a profit. And they don't have a right to be free from competition. Hey folks, Norman Horn here from LCI. Would you do us a quick favor and rank us on Apple Podcast or wherever you subscribe to us? High rankings helps us get the word out there. And now let's get back to the show. To me, it just changes the rules of the game. It doesn't abolish the game that they are used to playing. Like it isn't, like you said, it's not a refutation. It's more like, okay, well now, like you said about, I don't know, five minutes ago about, you know, you just have to think of the world that we live in and shift our mind to a different way of, in this case, maybe doing business and not relying on a, you know, however many year timetable of a head start with your patent. Well, I think what they're doing is they're used to hearing these things from, you know, commercials and from movies and from public education. They're used to the idea, this utilitarian idea, instead of a principled idea, right? The utilitarian idea is that the purpose of the government and the purpose of law is to come in and have some kind of wise committee and assess how things are going in society and try to determine what defects we have that are deviations from the perfect ultimate ideal and to try to slightly tweak the rules to improve incentives here and there to shift things around from here and there or to nudge things that some people would say, right, to try to optimize or maximize or at least increase social utility. And part of that argument is the idea that I think there's a background assumption that, and by the way, this is very rarely stated this way because if you stated this clear living explicitly, then the policies and these arguments become more apparent. But the assumption is that we have a certain natural amount of innovation in society. Some people will innovate on occasion. Some people write a play on occasion, but there's an underproduction because of the free rider effect. In other words, if I write, if I spend all my time writing a brand new novel and as soon as I start selling it or making a pharmaceutical drug or or any of these kind of fields that are covered by AP, that as soon as I start selling it, other people can easily copy me because unlike if I start a new say pizza restaurant or I start a new chair factory, it's not quite as easy for someone to just start competing with me right away if I'm successful. They have to start learning their skills. They have to gradually gain speed. So I have a time advantage right in the natural free market economy of natural good in the old tech world. Then you have a natural advantage if you're the first first guy to market because you have an if you have you can have your reputation. And it's not as easy for people to compete with you. They will compete over time and that's where there's competition. And that's why the profit rate slowly falls to the rate of interest and people have to be innovating to keep ahead of people. But the fear is that in a field where the significant part of the value of what you're selling is because of an easy copyable pattern of information like a novel like it's easier to knock off a novel than a rocking chair because you just have to copy the novel especially nowadays, right? It takes a second. The idea is that competition is too easy. It's too easy for people to compete with you. There's too much competition. And so the actual motivation behind the patent system and partly behind the copyright system is to slow down competition to make competition harder or to make competition more difficult to engage in. So it's basically against the free market competition system. So they want you to be able to publish your novel and have a breathing period where you could make as much profits as if it was a potential product where it wasn't as easy for people to compete with you and to knock you off. So they're trying to fight the natural fact that certain types of services and products and things that you do that are valuable to people are easier for people to copy and emulate. They don't like that. But to my mind that's actually the completely backwards way of looking at things. If we had a world where I could make a chair by snapping my fingers and if I made them and it was popular, my neighbor could start making a competing chair factory by snapping his fingers. That would not be a bad thing. It would be a good thing for the world. It would mean that things can be produced more cheaply and more easily with less effort. It would also mean it's harder to make a profit. But according to economics, profit is an unnatural thing that's always being eaten away at by competition on the free market. And we're supposed to be in favor of the free market as libertarians. And so when we try to impose artificial scarcity on intangible things, on ideal things, on things that have to do with the intellect to make them more like the tangible world, we're artificially slowing down the natural rate of production of these ideas and these patterns which are useful for humanity in the name of trying to make them look like the world that we're used to with tangible things. So there's a lot of mistakes that have been made over the years and I ultimately think it's because of this mistaken metaphorical idea that we own what we create, we own wealth, which we don't, that we have a property right in value, which you don't, that you own your customers, which you don't, right? All these mistakes which ultimately are the heart of the labor theory value of the communists. So you have to reject all of it and be in favor only of property rights in the physical integrity of resources that people find are acquired by contract in the real world. So Stefan, one might argue that this understanding of intellectual property could be perhaps an artifact of just the definitions that we started off with. That being this conception of property rights. And so perhaps under a different conception of property rights, it might lead one to different conclusions. And that kind of harkens back to this idea that if you do adhere to this idea of the labor theory of value, then maybe things will look different. But how might you respond to these two such objections that this might be just be an artifact of the definitions itself? Well, so I would say one reason it's important to have clear concepts and terminology is to know what we're talking about and to have an honest discussion about it. I would say the reverse is almost true. The patent and the copyright system emerged from state practices. The copyright system emerged from state censorship of the printing press, basically. They did not want people to print and publish things without government approval or without approval of the church into relationship with the state, right? And this led to the copyright system. And the patent system emerged from the practice of the monarchs granting monopoly privileges to certain people. They called them patents, which just means open. It was like an open order to everyone that this guy has the sanction of a king to be the only one who can sell playing cards in this town. Something like that. They were never considered to be property rights. They were called privileges and monopolies and censorship. And that's what they were. And when they became institutionalized in Western Democratic law, starting basically with the American Constitution, 1789, they came under fire from free market economists in the 1800s who started saying, wait a minute, why is the government of a free market democratic system granting these monopoly privileges to people? And the response by the then entrenched industries who had grown up around it and had become accustomed to their control because of these systems was that, oh, no, no, no, no. This is not a privilege. It's not a monopoly. It's a property right. And everyone says, well, it's not a property right because property rights are property rights in cars and in sewing machines and in animals and in land and in houses. And they said, well, it's an intellectual property right. So they just added the word intellectual to make it sound like it's just another type of property right. And they use that to successfully defend the attack on these incursions into the free market by the free market economists. And they won the day. And everyone now thinks of them as influential property rights. So I do think that it's partly the problem of semantics and by definition, but it's all the way around. It's because people keep calling them property rights. In fact, I get frustrated when the debate is, someone will say something like, are you telling me that an idea is not property? So they think that the argument is to define what the word property means. But that's not what it's about at all. In fact, that's not my argument. I would never say that ideas aren't property. I would say ideas are not the types of things that you can own. You can't have a property right in an idea. Property rights are always the right to control the things that can be controlled, which are scarce resources. These are the subjects of property rights. So the argument against patent law and copyright is not that ideas are not property. The argument against them is that there are property rights in other things and patent and copyright laws undercut those property rights. They take them. They rearrange them. They redistribute them from an owner to someone else. So as somebody who's been a libertarian for at least a decade now, I've really enjoyed this topic. It's kind of one of my hobby horse topics that I love to talk about with other libertarians and with people who aren't libertarians. And for me, in some ways, it's for the most of that decade, it's been like a fun argument to have. And fairly recently, I've started to realize that this actually comes up a lot more in our day-to-day world than I actually assumed, given the line of work that I do sometimes. And there's a lot of good fun and argument around all these ideas and we can debate the nature of property and scarcity and everything we just talked about. And people argue about it. I mean, we still are. But the average person who might be listening and saying, OK, well, I don't argue with a lot of other libertarians about this or with other people. Maybe there's someone who owns a business and part of that business plan is to have some patents. Are there good reasons to hold patents? I mean, the world that we're hoping would exist isn't going to happen anytime soon. There are patents. There are copyrights. We do live in that kind of a world. So what is the person to do who says, well, I can't just ignore this or I could be at risk of losing my entire business? Right. And I think it's sort of like the response would be something like, you know, just because we're against property rights in ideas doesn't mean we're opposed to ideas. By the same token, just because we think the law is unjustified and is doing more harm than good doesn't mean that you shouldn't act accordingly. I think the tax law is also immoral, but I don't argue that I don't urge people to evade their income taxes, especially businesses. And just because the drug war is immoral and does more harm than good doesn't mean that we have to advocate that people should take a risk and pretend like there aren't anti-cocaine laws out there. You have to recognize these things. So that's more of a prudential or practical thing. And by the same token, we do live in a world where there are patent laws and copyright laws. And if you don't recognize them, you're going to get in trouble or you're going to suffer one way or the other. If you run around openly copying movies and distributing them, you're going to go to jail. If you violate someone's patent, you'll get sued and they'll beat you and they'll take your company over as damages. So you have to be aware of what the situation is. And in our system today, people have gotten used to modifying their business practices to be practical and to take these things into account. So they're used to telling their goodwill with their company, which is the reputation rights in a trademark or having trademark rights, right? Which is another type of an offshore property. Or with acquiring patents or using them in either aggressive or defensive ways. So you can't say that recognizing that a law shouldn't exist automatically and necessarily tells you how you should operate in today's world. You have to be aware that these laws exist and you have to be aware of how you have to respond to them. And that's part of what I do as my career, right? I advise companies on how to navigate to and respond to the system. Given that there are things you can do a B or C way and there are certain things that can help you competitively or morally. I just think you should in your mind distinguish. Like why am I doing this? Am I doing this for a moral reason? For a principled reason? Or for a practical reason? Or do I just have to go along with what everyone else is doing but then try to keep my principles high? So I think you have to just distinguish between these things. So one of the things that comes to mind when I hear you respond in that way is, you know, earlier you said that it's a great thing if your neighbor could snap his fingers and we had a lot more chairs. Because that's more physical abundance. And maybe there's more, you know, positive ramifications of that. And so let's imagine there's someone listening who says, oh, well, okay, I can see how this intellectual property thing is really actually detrimental to the free market, it's detrimental to society. I have some patentable ideas. What would somebody do with a certain type of a patentable idea? Should they just get a patent but, you know, publicly say they won't enforce it or they'll use it defensively? What would your advice be for them? I mean, as a practical person and as a libertarian combined, which are not always antithetical but sometimes, I think that you need to do the kind of responsible thing, which is quite often you have to expend some resources to acquire patents. But I also think that you can almost in every industry, you can succeed and survive by adopting a policy either explicit or just internal where you don't aggressively enforce them. You basically acquire these things and use them defensively. So you have these patents to impress the investors, to tell them you have your stuff in order and you're doing the normal things everyone else does. And also to try to help prevent other people from getting a patent on the same thing. But also as a warning signal to competitors that have similar patents or their own patents, if you sue me, I might sue you. So back off. So basically, it's like the nuclear standoff between America and Russia or whatever it is now, where everyone spends huge amounts of money wastefully to acquire these extremely extensive weapons, hoping to dissuade each other from using them. Okay, so that's sort of the best outcome. But you can see even in the best outcome, it's a waste of resources for everyone to be acquiring these patents and spending their money on patent lawyers like me. And in a free market, you just could avoid this whole cost. You could just wipe it out. But it's not just a neutral thing where it just enriches a few lawyers. This is a huge cost. And it seems like a patent- It's a cost of lost innovation, right? Yeah. And so I think that the two main costs of the IP system. Number one is the chilling of thought and expression and the potential government regulation of the internet under the name of copyright, which is not really a tangible, measurable thing. But the loss of freedom is huge. And that's all that really matters for human society. And so in a way, I think the copyright system is worse than the patent system, even though it does less damage in a physical, tangible sense. The patent system, on the other hand, clearly represses innovation over the decades and centuries. And of course that has a cumulative effect. There is no imagining where we would be now if we had not suppressed and distorted innovation for two centuries now with the patent system. We would, without a doubt, be way far ahead than we are now. And that means lives are lost. Like human lives are made worse often lost because technology is wealth and is human success in defeating the environment and making things better off for each other. So it has a huge cost. It's hard to estimate it, but I think it's, I think it dwarfs almost anything else. It might even dwarf the drug war. It's hard to say, or taxation or war itself. And the thing about patent law and copyright, but especially patent law, is that unlike the other things that you and I would all agree with or at least argue, you can even tell a mainstream person. You can explain to them why you think the drug war is bad. You can explain to them why taxation is bad and the federal reserve, right? They might not agree with you in abolishing it, but they can understand your argument that the more we have taxes, the poorer we are. And the more money the government can distort. We have more inflation in business cycles, et cetera. But unlike all those other, and public education too, right? You know, so people, they're not usually willing to abolish public education, but they understand where you're coming from when you point out that it's got some big problems. But it holds your property unlike all the others. It's called the property right. So it flies under the radar as a type of a good thing. It's part of the market system. How can you be opposed to innovation? How can you be opposed to ideas? How can you be opposed to property rights itself and the free market system? It's part of the American way. And after all, the American system had it in the Constitution since the beginning and look how well we've done over the last 200 years. So there must be some kind of causation behind this correlation. And so it's sort of the one that's the hardest to defeat in people's minds because they equate it with the good stuff. They know that there's a problem with the drug war. They know there's a problem with taxation. They're uncomfortable with the idea of people going to jail. They don't pay the taxes. They just think it's necessary. But they sort of recognize all these other things are evil. War is evil. The drug war is evil. Central banking is evil. They know there's something wrong with them. But this one issue, which is one of the worst, they think it's innocuous. They think it's one of the good things the government does that protects property rights. So that's one of the dangerous things about it, I think. You mentioned this notion of suppression of thought due to copyright. And I wanted to ask you this. This may come as a surprise to our listeners here and there. But obviously as Christians, we love the Bible. It's an important piece of historical literature at the very least in the entire world. And to the Christian, it's even more important than that, obviously. But something that's kind of... I did not really realize until I started learning more about the intellectual property arguments is the status of Bible translations. And these translations are copyrighted. And so publishers often have legal right to prevent these translations from being disseminated in ways they don't want. This is a really weird thing when you kind of think about it. And I'm just curious, Stefan, have you ever come across what the legal status of things like translations are like this and what are some of the implications here for how we think about intellectual property in this respect? Yeah, sure. And I've actually... I've talked a lot about this with my friend Jeff Tucker, who has talked with me about it in the field of Catholic publications, right? If you think about natural property rights, they don't expire over time. You could have a watch passed down from grandfather to grandson and so on. And you could have a family house, you could have an antique car, and hell, you even own your body as long as you live. They don't expire. Copyrights expire at a certain time, which should already alert us to something unnatural about them, right? Same thing with patents. Now, when copyrights started, they only covered a limited type of things, and they only lasted about 14 years in the beginning of the US. And every time Mickey Mouse is about to enter the public domain, Disney lobbies Congress and they pass an extension into the point now where copyrights last over a century usually, like the life of the author plus 70 years. It's crazy. And what copyrights cover is not only the raw actual copying of some material, but it also covers the derivative work that is something based upon something else. So even if you have a work that is public domain because it's so old, like the original text of the Bible, which was never copyrighted, presumably in the first place, if someone creates a translation, that's a derivative work. And so they have a copyright in that translation, and if they do it in the modern era, and by the way, they do this every five or 10 or 20 years so they can keep taking advantage of the extended copyright terms if the governments keep passing, right? So now if there's, if there was a Dewey Reigns translation or the Jerusalem Bible translation done in the 70s, these things are going to last for another 100 plus years. Now what I find obscene about this is, you know, for libertarians and for Christians, I would think, part of the reason we're interested in this is we're trying to spread the word. We're trying to spread the truth. We want people to have access to these ideas. It makes no sense that you would use a government system to penalize someone or prohibit them from copying what you think is the truth. I really can't understand Christians. I just have to think that they don't understand, they don't understand how copyright works or what it really means because for any Christian to ever use copyright law to stop someone from copying a translation of God's word seems to me to be un-Christian and against the whole purpose of trying to teach people these things that you've stumbled upon, you want them to learn. Right, and incidentally stuff, and I don't know, I may have told you this story at some point or another, but I discovered that in the, just following the Civil War, there was a controversy in the Southern Church's sort of verses, northern publishers of himnals. And literally the writings that were coming out from certain journals at the time were against copyright in this respect. There's literally a phrase in one of them, and I remember this because I quoted upon occasions, is it, how dare you use the strong arm of the state to prevent the printing of God's music? And it's interesting that this is only, I've seen present in, well, one particular church tradition of the 19th century, that being the Church as a Christ, which is my own church tradition. And it's interesting, and someday, someday, Seth and I will write this paper and I would love to share that with you at some point. I think it's a really interesting story, but it has interesting implications for how we even think about the dissemination of music now in the churches today. And a lot of people have no idea about how this all works. And as you kind of mentioned, this not really understanding how copyright works and what really goes on is probably detrimental to this. And it's gotten worse, right? It's more institutionalized now. Back then it was more sporadic. And like I said, like the question earlier, I think from Doug about what are you supposed to do as a businessman? Well, you know, it's hard to be, I won't say too principle, but it's hard to martyr yourself too much. You have to play the game. But let's say as a libertarian, I'm not doing this for profit. I mean, I was doing this for profit. I would have given up a long time ago because, you know, I'm doing it for a passion for truth and justice and rightness and because I'm interested and think I can contribute. I don't want to stop people from reading my stuff. So I think there's a moral obligation. I think there's a moral obligation of people not to use aggression, which means there's a moral obligation not to use government laws that can attack people unjustly like patent or copyright laws. And I think that translates at least for people like us to a moral obligation to make it clear to people that we would not use the copyright system. So on my website, I have a CC0 or a CCBY license. I say, this is Creative Commons. I'm trying to release this stuff from copyright as much as I can. You can do with it what you want. And I think there'd be even as much of a moral obligation on the part of religious people with work that they engage in, which is there to be congratulated and praised and thanked for doing the work needed to do a translation. But to use the law to penalize people for it, I think it's a moral obligation for them to open source everything, for them to have a Creative Commons thing. I think it would be a Christian obligation to refrain and to make it clear that you would never use the government's copyright system to penalize someone for copying these works. So I think there are moral implications for the intellectual property position. Yeah, definitely. So you heard it here first. Zondervin, if you're listening, put the Bibles that you published in Creative Commons. So that's great. Well, Stefan, we've really enjoyed having you on this evening and I hope you've enjoyed it as well. And we hope all of you listeners out there are enjoying this discussion. This is an important topic, and we're glad to address it here. And I'm sure that we're going to be talking about this again in a lot of different respects. So until next time, we hope you've enjoyed the show. Thanks, Stefan, for being with us. Thank you, guys. 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