 I'm Walter Block. I'm Jody Emery. This is Adam Kokesh. I'm Jeffrey Tucker. I'm Ben Slom. I'm Tom Wood. I'm Peter Schiff. I'm Eric Voorhees. And you're listening to Ed and Ethan. Soak up the awesomeness. We're listening to Ed and Ethan, The Voice of Liberty in Canada, coming to you from Saskatoon in the province of Saskatchewan for the week of... I don't even have my calendar up. What week is it now? It's December 29th. I know how the calendar works. I know I insist every show that I do. And it doesn't seem like I do, but honestly, I do. My incredible co-host is a guy that's going to say hello. The incredible Ed. Say hello to the world. Ed, show off those talents you've got. Yeah, it's Ed here. Awesomeness. Yeah, very Christmas. No, it's past. Yeah, happy new year. Happy new year. He's coming right up here. Yeah, okay. Yeah, talents. I said talents. We'll come up with them someday. Don't worry about it. You're listening, of course, to us on libertyexpressradio.com. And I should mention that I am your humble host, Ethan, lrn.fm. You can find us there in rotation as well, the Liberty Radio Network and Liberty Movement Radio. Check them out at 2lmr.com. And of course, you can always look at what we have to offer at edneathen.com. Here you can find our RSS feed for your favorite podcasting aggregators, YouTube, Facebook, iTunes, all of that stuff. We spread over the internet like an octopus. Is that... No, I don't like that. I don't think I should have said that. All right, well, anyway, we'll just leave it in there and then I guess listeners will have to deal with it. Yeah, we're not like the NSA's logo on their new spy satellite. Oh, wasn't that creepy? I can't remember what it said, but it's basically this octopus. We see all or something like that. Yeah, something like that. We see all and it was an octopus that had its tentacles around the world and that's going up on a spy satellite or has gone up. Isn't that creepy? Talk about brazen. Anyhow, so, okay, before we get on to our first segment, which by the way is going to feature a fantastic fellow, but we'll get to that in just a second. I want to remind our good friends out there are wonderful, beautiful... We return. You know, I feel like Gandalf today for some reason. I think Morador, Gondor. Oh, God. It's because I told you that stupid joke, isn't it? Now I have to tell the audience, okay, so there's this stupid thing where you look at a picture and it's got an illustration of a door, so that underneath it's captain, a door, and then there's a picture of two doors and it says Morador. All right, so if Lord of the Rings fans will know, and then there's a picture of no door and it says Gondor. That's a real sneeze. I smirked when he told it to me. I'm replete with good jokes. Good, quote, unquote. So anyway, the show, this hour of the show, of course, is made possible by our friends at Regal Assets. If you want gold in your investment retirement or individual retirement account, your IRA, you should visit gold.edandethan.com to see what our friends at Regal Assets do have to offer. Again, that's gold.edandethan.com. Don't forget that part. That's how we get paid. And of course, I really do think it's important if you do have an IRA, if that's the route that you're choosing to go in to preserve your retirement income in the United States, you should be checking into putting precious metals into your IRA. If you look at how deflation has damaged the dollar, look, I've said it before, if you've got stuff in your IRA, like stocks, all that kind of stuff, it's probably doing really well right now, all right? And I'm very happy for you that all that fed money and the funny money that's been pumped into the stock market is good for you. But look, into the future, you may just want to consider just how badly those things will do in comparison to gold. If you want to preserve your purchasing power, precious metals are probably the way to do it. So check out gold.edandethan.com to find out how to put gold into your IRA. Now, all that aside, we have a special, wonderful treat for you. We haven't talked to this guy in a long time. Over a year now, yeah. Has it been over a year? It has. Wow. We're going to, look, that's a mistake on our part, but we'll remedy that today. The person I'm referring to, of course, is Stefan Kinsella. He's an intellectual property lawyer, a patent attorney. And of course, he's described as a reluctant patent attorney. He has some issue with intellectual property laws, the concept of intellectual property. So we'll bring him on the line now. Stefan, are you with us? I'm with you, very glad to be here. Guys, it's been about a while, but I've heard you guys. I heard you're great. I think you had an interview with Stefan Malinu that too long ago. That was great. Oh, well, gosh, we've had... What was that? That was like six months ago, I think, about it. It was Stefan Malinu as a while ago. I know we were co-hosting Michael Dean's show there. That was fun. So we had that. That was good stuff. Peter Schiff, too. That was cool. Peter Schiff, yeah. Peter Schiff, we had fun with him. So, you know, we've had some interviews in the past little while. It's been a lot of fun, but now we add you to the lineup. So, of course, finally, some quality comes on the air. I wanted to ask you about the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the TPP. And this is an agreement that is, you know, it's been, I guess, authored sort of in secret. It's been very difficult to kind of figure out exactly what's going on with the TPP. And there are some pretty nasty copyright provisions that have been leaked by WikiLeaks in this agreement. So, they're doing good work in that respect. So, Stefan, from your perspective, if we step back, can you give me kind of your idea of what the TPP is, what it represents to you? Well, sure. First of all, let's step back and talk about the name of this thing. I mean, do you notice the government, the state has gotten really good in the last 30, 40 years at propaganda and at window dressing. If you remember, you know, 50, 60 years ago in the U.S., we called our defense of establishment the Department of War. I mean, you know, there was no bones about it, right? It's the Department of War. Now it's the Department of Defense. So, over time, these agencies get more into, you know, propaganda and window dressing. And they come up with these innocuous titles like Obamacare is the Affordable Care Act, who's against affordable care. Of course, it's not affordable, but you know, that's the title of the legislation. And so, Trans-Pacific Partnership is one of these terms designed to sound vaguely cooperative. You know, it's a partnership. It's across the Pacific. We want free trade. No one knows what the details are. The way it's worked in the past, say century of international negotiations is that typically treaties between countries are negotiated in a regularly, a fairly public manner. But trade agreements, which are usually between two nations are done in secret. And then they're, you know, they approach their legislatures and then they can approve them. In recent years, there's been an attempt by the states to basically take what's really a treaty, which should be negotiated in public. So that people could have input and be aware of what's going on and to cover it under the rubric of a free trade agreement so they can keep it secret. That was done with the ACTA, which has been temporarily defeated, although I wouldn't count it as dead yet. That's the anti counterfeiting trade agreement, which is very anti free market. Look, when I was younger, I used to support these things called bilateral trade agreements, which, you know, two countries would or even multilateral, they would agree, we're going to all lower our trade barriers, right? So basically, it's an approach towards free trade is what is how they're carried like NAFTA, for example, I went NAFTA earlier. The thing is, of course, the natural libertarian view is just have unilateral free trade. One government should just totally drop its barriers. You shouldn't condition that upon another country doing something. But at least if both countries lower their trade barriers, it's a good thing. But that would only take about a page of text or less. I mean, I could draft it in probably one sentence very easily. But it's usually a thousand pages, which means it's a type of managed trade. They have to accommodate the unions and the socialists and the welfare and environmentalists and everything like that. So these things usually are a mixed bag. But one thing they are is the United States primarily, you know, the big democratic powerful bully on the block basically uses its power to extract free trade concessions from other countries. Well, to grant free trade status, so-called free trade status. But they say that you have to agree to our IP standards, our intellectual property standards. So the TPP, the Trans Pacific Partnership, which has been leaked a couple of times recently by WikiLeaks and related groups. I think your Michael Guy stuff in Canada is one of the heroics. He's like a lawyer WikiLeaks kind of guy. He's not completely with us on everything, but he's at least for kind of openness and transparency and getting information out there that we can review. The TPP is an agreement that has been being negotiated in secret for several years now among about a dozen key nations, U.S. others. The thing is the free trade provisions it would enact are not that significantly better than what we already have, but basically it tries to make uniform certain provisions and to get these other countries to agree to it, they say you have to expand your intellectual property protection. So really it's just an excuse to expand and to export American style intellectual property, which I call intellectual property imperialism to the rest of the world. It's imperialist because to be honest, the only country who it really benefits is the United States. Almost every other country on a net basis term is harmed by the adoption of U.S. style IP law, copyright and patent. But they do it because the U.S. twist their arms and we have the power to influence them at least for now. And it's for the benefit of the pharmaceutical industry, the software industry, the music industry and the movie industry in America. So basically the entire world legal and cultural landscape and free trade landscape has been distorted and is being increasingly distorted because of these three or four industries in the U.S. Oh, isn't that awful? It seems like big government, yeah. But it's a failure of capitalism, I think, Ed. It's really what's going on here, right? That's the problem. It really bugs me because free trade, they put that word in there and then people think that free trade is the problem. And it's like, so what's the alternative to free trade, protectionism? You know, that was our friend Daniel Benoy at Liberty Beat, the Liberty Beat Canada podcast. He described this beautifully. He said, trade agreements just as a notion, don't make any sense because that's not what governments are doing. You know, a trade agreement is when I order a replacement printhead for my printer from Hong Kong and I give them money and they give me a printhead in the post, right? That's a trade agreement. But what governments do is they're agreeing to trade laws, right? We'll trade your law for this law. So it's really a legal agreement. It's more, they're agreeing to change the legal landscape. It's not really a trade agreement at all. It's a kind of a misnomer. And you know, as Stefan, you mentioned how these acts are all called really nice things, the window dressing, like the Affordable Care Act. Don't get me started on the Patriot Act. Yeah, it's usually the opposite. That's a good one, the Patriot Act. Yeah, well, I mean, you know. Or the recent patent legislation under Obama two years ago in America called the America Invents Act. Sorry, could you repeat that? It's called the America Invents Act. That was Obama's patent reform legislation, which basically made patent law worse. And in my view, reduced invention and innovation, but it's called the America Invents Act. And who's against America inventing? Yeah, shucks. I love inventing. And as long as there's legislation out there to encourage inventing, it must be a good thing. Okay, so let's get into, because the Trans-Pacific Partnership, when it comes to intellectual property, is indeed a big scary beast. There's a lot in there that was leaked by WikiLeaks, and you pointed out to us earlier off air that, you know, we don't even know what's in the current draft. I mean, because this stuff just, as you mentioned, happens in secrecy. You know, your accountable elected Democratic representatives, of course, are here for you, even though they're not going to tell you what the heck they're doing. I just love the concept. But anyway, so we get into, there's a lot of IP stuff in the agreement that was, in the draft that was leaked. You mentioned something about a case to me about Eli Lilly, and Eli Lilly was suing a company up here in Canada. And this was because of NAFTA. Could you tie that together with the TPP? Sure. Sure. So NAFTA is a good example of what we can expect to see from the TPP and the ACTA and other things that are coming up. NAFTA, everyone thinks of it as a free trade agreement, and it has been successful in some ways, but it requires each country, you know, Mexico, US, and Canada to respect certain minimum norms of IP protection, which, by the way, go beyond all these treaties that Canada and Mexico have already agreed to in the past decades at the US insistence, like WIPO and GATT and TRIPS. I mean, it's just unbelievable, all the acronyms, but so NAFTA requires minimum protections for patents, and Canada, of course, has a regular, modern, westernized patent system, but it's not going to be the same in application as the US or other countries. And Eli Lilly applied for a patent on one of their pharmaceuticals and was denied the patent, which happens from time to time. And normally what you would do is if you apply for a patent and you're denied, you can go through the local appeals process, and you basically either get your patent or you don't. Well, they were denied the patent, although I think they got a similar patent in other countries, and what they said was Canada, the Canada Patent Department's denial of their patent, even though it followed Canada's rules, was in violation of the NAFTA agreement and therefore the Canadian government. So they sued the Canadian government for $500 million of lost profits that they could have obtained. So in other words, you didn't give us the tool to extort our competitors in Canada, so you have to make it up to us. So because you have this regular ability to extort the taxpayers, just take the taxpayers' money and give it to us. So that's just an example of what we can expect if we start. So let me just give you a snapshot of what the TPP does really, okay? It doesn't really increase free trade that much. The main thing is the IP chapter. And by the way, this thing may be passed pretty soon. We don't know right now what they're going to do, although there's hope that with the increasing skepticism of IP and the way that SOPA was defeated, maybe there's a, and with WikiLeaks exposing what's going on, maybe there's going to be a chance to slow this thing down or stop it. But so it does a couple things. Number one, it seeks to increase copyright terms by another 20 years to meet the US standard or even further. So for example, in the US, we adopted the Sunny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act about 15 years ago, which is called the Mickey Mouse Protection Act by some people. And by the way, that extended the protection that's required by the Burn Convention, this international treaty that Canada and other countries adhere to by 20 years. So we're like life of the author plus 70 years. So we're talking a good 100 plus years. Canada, I think it's life plus 50 right now. So Canada is more similar to the other countries who adhere to the minimum burn convention standards. The US wants to use the TPP to get everyone to agree to extend copyright by another 20 years. Some people speculate that this is because of the Beatles, because the Beatles work is starting to fall out of copyright in England, you know, their home country, whereas it's still covered in the US for another 20 years because of the Sunny Bono Act. So basically, this is an attempt to twist the arms of other countries to extend their copyright terms by 20 more years or more. So that's one provision. The other would be to extend these US rules on anti-circumvention technology, which is called the DMCA, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. So one effect of that would be that it's actually a federal crime or a state crime to unlock your cell phone, okay? Even though the Library of Congress in the US had just had our arm twisted recently to try to temporarily relax those rules, but it's going to revert back to what it was a couple of years ago where if you buy a piece of hardware and you use it as you see fit, even if it's not a violation of copyright, even if there's a fair use exception for you to use your property in that way, it would still be a violation of these anti-circumvention provisions and be a crime punishable with jail time, which is the case right now in the US and which they're seeking to export to Canada and other countries by the TPP. Another one is there's been a long ignored provision of copyright law where after like 35 years there's a way that authors can seek to renegotiate the assignment of their rights that they gave to publishers and get their rights back so that they can free their books and their screenplays and things like this. That will be scrapped under the TPP. I mean there's just a litany of things like this that are just basically ratcheting up. Also the worst thing to be honest is this. Let me explain quickly about a quirk of the US law which gave rise to the internet, which was the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. There was a compromise done, this was like 1995, 1998 before the Congress and the lobbyists and all these critters realized what they were doing. They negotiated this thing called a safe harbor, which is that if an ISP, basically someone who has a channel like YouTube or a blog engine, if someone is using their service to post content that ends up being defamatory or having a copyright infringement, the host is not liable so long as they take certain reasonable measures to respond to complaints. This is called the DMCA takedown system. But the point is it gave a safe harbor and it didn't make the host liable. If not for that little quirk in the law, which by the way, the entire entertainment industry in the US now is fighting and they want to get it repealed. So do some free market think tanks like the Fraser Institute in Canada and other so-called free market groups. It's incredible. If not for that, we wouldn't have had what we see now, Facebook, YouTube, they would be totally unviable business models. So the SOPA Act that was defeated, seek to overturn that sort of safe harbor or reverse the burden of proof and to make the ISPs the copyright police, which basically is much of an undue burden on them. So the TPP seeks to extend that to both the US and the rest of the world. And it is just the first step or one of the first steps in basically shutting down internet freedom and giving the basically the police in every country the right to go in. In fact, Italy just passed a law a couple of days ago saying that the government has the right under its regulatory agencies to just go in and totally shut down an entire website with only 12 days notice and no due process review if there's a suspicion of copyright infringement. So basically, we have an increasing amount of chilling and quashing of internet freedom in the name of copyright. And this horrible agreement is one of the is one of the chief threats to ratchet that type of state control of the internet up. This is I have a question that's kind of off topic of the TPP. But did you hear about this? Patent rolls trying to go after podcasters? Because we've got we've got a commercial. You've heard about this? Yes. Could you just kind of talk about that a little bit maybe? Absolutely. So a patent roll is a derogatory term. Ironically, it was come up with by the guy that founded Intellectual Ventures, which is now one of the biggest patent rolls. So this guy was I think Peter Detkin, if I'm remembering the name right, if not, I hope it's not a problem, but we can research this. He was with Intel or someone and he was like defending companies from patent assaults. And he started getting upset with all the assaults his company was being hit with and he came up with the term patent roll. Later, he formed Intellectual Ventures and acquired tons of patents. And all they do is go around asserting patents. And that's the classic patent rolling thing. A patent roll means someone, it's like the idea of a troll, someone who a big monster who sits at a bridge and takes it home before you can pass. But if you think about it, basically that's just what the IRS is, right? That's what taxation is. It's just a tax on innovation. It's a tax on the free market. And it's bad. I don't like it. But honestly, it's not the problem. And it's not as big of a problem as the regular patent users like Apple, Samsung, these companies that actually are not trolls because their patents cover their technology and they use them to stop competition. So their goal is not to get a royalty from someone or to just take a little tax to wet their beak, as the mafia might say, right? They actually want to use the power of the courts to get an injunction to stop competition. And this is what creates oligopolies and cartels and walled gardens and barriers to entry and reduced competition, higher prices for consumers, reduced innovation, etc. So everyone focuses on these little issues that they can maybe fix a little bit instead of the fundamental issue. It's like saying we should switch from an income tax to a sales tax or whatever. The government never wants to lower the damn rates. That would be the solution to any tax is lower the rates, but they don't want to do that. So they just distract you by saying we're going to change the form of the tax. Well, this is what they do with the patent system. They don't focus on the main issue, which is that the patent system reduces competition. They say, well, we need to reduce the abuse of the system by patent trolls. So there's a recent bill introduced in the US Congress to, I forgot, and it's another one of these euphemistic names, which sounds good, but it's ridiculous. And the purpose is to promote innovation by slightly reducing the abuses of the system by trolls, like making them pay the lawyer's fees if they lose a case, a few cosmetic changes like that. And by the way, this is what's disheartening to me. Like Richard Epstein, who I admire, who's a great free market advocate, who's a Kato scholar. He has an article in some recent Forbes or something saying that this law would totally ruin innovation. So you have these pro-pharmaceutical patents. By the way, the Kato Institute and Richard Epstein and Doug Banda, some of these guys years ago, they were against the free trade, what's called drug re-importation. You guys may have heard this, Bayer and these other companies sell pharmaceuticals in Canada, let's say. And they sell them at a lower price than the monopoly patent price in the US because the Canadian government, although it grants a patent, also has price controls on drugs. So it's sort of like a socialist K.O. They sort of let you charge a higher price because of the patent monopoly, but then they don't let you abuse it. In any case, people would buy the drugs and bring them back to the US and they satisfy the FDA regulations because they were already approved. They're not a knock off. They're actually made by the US manufacturer. They're not a patent infringement because there's an implicit license if you buy a drug made by them. But so the only thing you do is go get the FTC to block it on free trade grounds. And you had Epstein and other guys opposing free trade, opposing what they call drug re-importation because it would undermine the patent monopoly. I mean, it's just incredible how this whole IP issue corrupts people that otherwise are liberal or free market minded people. I got off on a little tangent there. Well, that's okay, Stephen. It was a beautiful tangent. I mean, it's funny because you're throwing all these things around. Trips, Acta, NAFTA, of course. I mean, I'm expecting Unicorns and Gummy Bears Act 2.0 or so. I don't know what's next. But I think that what you're touching on here is something that does deserve a little bit more conversation. We don't have a whole lot of time, but let's go after it anyway. I've never been one to respect the clock. Let's talk specifically about that innovation and its supposed protection by patent and intellectual property. I think a lot of very libertarian folks have a deep respect for patent law because you have somebody that, say, makes their living from snapping pictures, right? And they sell those pictures. And somebody like me could just rip it off the web and use it for my own purposes and not even credit them perhaps and use it for whatever I want. I may even make money with it. So I guess some people have a real problem with that concept. I personally don't. I don't mind if somebody uses any of the stuff that we produce here at Ed Neath and if they want to use it for profit. I don't have a problem with that, but a lot of people do, especially if it's their livelihood, what they're bringing home to feed themselves, their family, whatnot. So how do you, in a more broad sense, Steph, and how do you deal with those objections when somebody says, look, this is my livelihood. It needs to be protected. Right. How do you address that? It's difficult because people have a different mindset now because of the system that we're working in that we're used to, right? It's like saying you're against welfare or you're against socialized medicine. People think that they think that you're saying you're for people dying in the streets because they're so used to that being the way that you solve these issues. And they've been told for over 100 years that part of the free market, well, the free market is good, property rights are good, and that patent and copyright are intellectual property rights, right? But if you think about it, anyone who starts a new business is afraid of competition. The more successful you are, the more of a profit signal you're going to broadcast into the market and let people know, hey, I found a way to satisfy consumers. You should come compete with me and try to do the same thing. And when they do that, when they respond to these Hayekian, Austrian free market signals, then competition increases and it becomes more difficult to make a profit and your profit erodes and you have to keep innovating. This is actually what we free market people used to be in favor of. It's called competition. But for some reason, people have a blind spot about IP because of propaganda and the fallacious notion that you can own information. I mean, you used the word rip off earlier. Rip off is a synonym for theft or tail taking or stealing or robbery or piracy. But these metaphors and these ideas have to do with real conflict in the world where someone literally removes one of your resources from you without your permission and makes you worse off. But that's not what happens when someone copies something you've done or they emulate you or they compete with you. By the way, on a quick aside on these acronyms, and I won't go into detail here, but I'm a lawyer, but I hate trying to rely in my arguments on some kind of arcane expertise, although it's my experience that basically only patent lawyers understand what I'm talking about in details, which is fine and which is good. But people that favor IP should at least know what they're talking about and they usually don't. I have a post on c4sif.org from a year or so ago and I call it death by copyright IP fascist police state acronym. And I just collect, I don't even collect the laws that don't have a good acronym. I just leave those out. And there's like three dozen here. There's like, just look at them. It's unbelievable is NIR, PRCC, IPEC, ACTA, CIDA, SOPA, PIPA, IPPA, the OPEN Act, the RWA, which is the Research Works Act, the TPP, the PCIP, the ITU, the SISPA. It's DMCA, the Patriot Act, of course, that's an acronym, the NED Act. So they use these acronyms all the time and it's just unbelievable how they want to baffle people with, I don't want to use a curse word, but baffle people with BS and make them think the experts are the ones who are going to take care of this, just trust us. Sure. Well, I mean, that's something that really always struck me as odd too, is you get all of these, you get this myriad of legalese terms. It's incredibly overwhelming you get the avalanche of law and then you're told, you know, this is a community standard communication. This is the government working out how we communicate normally. Oh my gosh, how on earth can that possibly be called community standards? It's ridiculous to even think that that's something that is just normal communication between people. And, you know, when it gets right down to it, I look at intellectual property, I really do respect the feeling of some people who are trying to use it to defend what they do, but when it gets right down to it, this is a sort of right that cannot possibly exist without monopolized government control of law. And if there is a right that exists by virtue of being granted in the face of monopolized government control, I don't think that's a natural right. If you're looking at a right and you're saying the only way for this right to exist is for the government to have a monopoly of law and that it cannot exist in a competitive free market environment, I think you're looking at something that's not a natural right. I don't know, Stefan, would you say that's an accurate and apropositional? I think that's exactly right. In fact, so what I would say is that the proponents of IP are sort of schizophrenic or dishonest or dissembling on this issue because they want to call it a right and a property right because that's their propaganda technique. They've been using this for the last 70 years. Originally, these were just called privileges. I mean, the copyright law we have now basically originated in modern form in the US Constitution and the original US Copyright Act, but that was based upon the statute of Anne in 1709 in England, which was a response to the stationer's guild, the stationer's company, which was an explicit church state mechanism to censor Protestant thought or whatever. And the patent system originated again in the US Constitution, but that had its origins in the statute of, wait for it, monopolies of 1623 in England. They explicitly called it the statute of monopolies. What you had happening was you had mercantilism and protectionism. You had the king, the crown, the granting, basically monopoly privileges to favored court cronies, usually to induce them to help collect taxes. So I'll give you the monopoly on sheepskin. You're the only guy that can export sheepskin at this harbor because I'm the king. I own the country. I can use my harbor. So I'll give you a monopoly. That's gonna, you can make tons of money. If you're the only guy people can buy sheepskin legally from, right? But in exchange, you're going to have to help me collect taxes. Or there was, you know, you're the only guy that can sell playing cards in the stores in the city of London. And on occasion, we will help you enforce this by sending the king's goons just to march into people's businesses, like violation of the, you know, not the Fourth Amendment, but private property rights and just search their playing cards and make sure they have the king's seal and stamp on them. So this is pure, pure, complete mercantilism and protectionism. And it was literally called the statute of monopolies. Now the statute of monopolies actually improved matters because it wanted to get rid of the king's arbitrary authority to grant all these just random monopoly privilege grants. But that statute made an exception. They said, we're going to get rid of all these monopolies except for inventions. The king and still grant those. So now we have, and that morphed into the modern patent system. And it's just bizarre that libertarians are praising and worshiping the modern remnants of mercantilism and censorship and praising them as the heart and root of capitalism, which on Rand and the objectivists do and a lot of utilitarian libertarians. It is really in a way the one of the worst of the libertarian mistakes because, you know, unlike the drug war or regular war or taxation, which most libertarians, if you think about it, can recognize as there's a little tension there between that and private property and liberty, right? They at least know there's a tension. But when you call something a property right, then they sort of think, well, I don't know how to reconcile these things, but the experts can do it. So I agree with you, by the way, to get back on the track. There's nothing wrong with creators and entrepreneurs having pride in their intellectual creativity and what they've created. And I won't say there's nothing wrong with it, but it's understandable that people don't like competition and they want to take advantage of whatever legal protections they have to stop people from competing with them. But that doesn't mean that that's what the law should be. Yeah. Yeah. No, I thank you so much for drawing out and illustrating these points. It's fascinating to have your perspective to inform us, because like I said, I really do respect that a lot of people do, as you say, stuff and take pride in their intellectual works. But using this language to obscure where it is we're deriving rights from, to say that this idea is me mixing my intellectual labor with my work and this kind of thing to try and make it into a right, I don't buy it. And with with due respect to those out there who do make a wonderful living from their intellectual works, I don't think that just because you make a living from something means that you then get a right to make it exclusive. That seems to me very wrong. Stefan, listen, we've long ago we ran at a time, but I appreciate you taking the time today to be with us and we need to do this more often. It was it was a lot of fun to have you on. I'd be happy to. You guys are great hosts and I've enjoyed your show and I'd be happy to be on any time and Hey, listen carry on. Absolutely carry on. I appreciate the praise and from such a wonderful source. Thanks again, Stefan. We'll hook up again soon. It's great to talk to you. Thank you. Stefan Kinsella is the founder and director of the Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom, C4SIF, or you can find him at StefanKinsella.com. That's S-T-E-P-H-A-N Kinsella, K-I-N-S-E-L-L-A.com. An absolute pleasure. It's been a crazy awesome show with Jeffrey in the front and we've got we got, you know, I could talk to Stefan for ages. Yeah, man, because he goes off and it's everything he says just as like it's brilliant. Absolutely makes total sense. So all right, that's everything that we've got for you today right here on the Liberty Express Radio Network on the Ed and Ethan show. So continue listening for more great content. Yeah, I pulled out my Tony the Team Tiger impression there. You can visit us at edneethan.com, tweet at us at Ed and Ethan on Twitter, feedback at edneethan.com. If you want to write us, as I say, stay tuned. This is Ed and Ethan.