 Welcome back again to the Bad Quaker podcast where Liberty is our mission. Today is Tuesday, April 16th, 2013. This is podcast number 302, and my name is Ben Stone. And on the line with me, on Skype, actually, is Stefan Kinsella. If you don't know, Stefan is an author and a practicing attorney with Kinsella Law Group. Stefan, that was, first off, welcome to the show. Thanks very much, Ben. And that must have been quite the random coincidence to get hired by Kinsella Law Group, considering that's your last name. That's a wild coincidence. Yeah, and I'm just tall enough so that my feet just reached the ground, too. So it's an amazing coincidence. My height is just right for my feet to hit the ground. Before we really get into the meat and potatoes of today's podcast, I wanted to mention that this is completely off of our main topic. And I'm throwing this at, for the listeners, I'm throwing this at Stefan without warning him ahead of time. But Stefan, you're a good friend of Jeffrey Tucker's, who a person I really like a lot. And I find that interesting because, correct me if I'm wrong, Jeffrey is a very devout Catholic Christian, and you are not. Well, I was a real Catholic, and so I know a lot about it. But I would not call myself a religious person in that sense, no. But no, I think we all have our own interests and beliefs. I mean, we're not only libertarians, so it's never surprising to me that people I'm interested in and close to have some ideas that are different than mine, or interests that are different than mine. Would you consider yourself a skeptic, or atheist, or agnostic, or how would you classify yourself? Oh, I'd say since I was 14 or 15 years old I've been a pretty hardcore outright atheist. And I really, and that's really the, actually I knew that, that was a baited question. And that's really the part that stuns me because Jeffrey is such a devout Catholic. And you are what might be considered a devout atheist, and yet we, all of us together, and you know me as a label myself as a bad Quaker, we're all pretty much walking arm and arm in the same direction with the same goals. And it, you know, there's so many anarchists that believe that if you're not this, or if you're not that, then you're not fighting with them. But here's three very wide spectrums of the battle that we're still moving in essentially the same direction. Well, I think we all care about truth and liberty, and we understand that liberty in a free society is a good thing, independent of the reasons we believe that, although I think they're similar. But it provides a framework that allows us to all have our own interests within that framework. So that's not a bad thing. That's actually a good thing. And I'm not hostile to religion, and I'm not anti, I wouldn't say I'm anti-theist, or even anti-Christian or anti-Catholic. I'm just not persuaded by their positive claims. Let's put it that way. Now, let's get to the real reason that I wanted to have you on. Your book Against Intellectual Property is less than 60 pages. Of that, probably, just wild guess, maybe 20% of it is footnotes and references and so forth. So literally a person can take this book, and you can buy it if you want. It's on Amazon or it's over at Mises.com. But you can also get the download of it for free. So we've taken away every possible excuse not to get your hands on this book. That's right. It's so clearly and simply lays out, first off, you do a wonderful thing in your book. You define terms. And I think this is where the failure of almost everybody I've spoke with about IP, almost everyone I've spoke with has no clue of the terminology that you're using. And most people that I deal with don't really even know what the actual laws are involving IP. And they have this imagined thing in their mind that they believe what IP really is. And you just hit right to the heart in your book and you just clarify it all and you say, look, this is what it is. And then you make your argument. I think it's just for such a small little book, it's just an absolute, almost a work of art. It's so beautiful. Well, thanks. I appreciate that. I wrote it in a fit of passion. Coming from a law review background where we have a very analytical sort of framework for the way we lay articles out, but also from an Austrian anarchist and libertarian perspective as well, where I thought, you know, this is not my favorite issue. I actually was a patent attorney at the time and I still am. But which is why I started saying I've got to write something about this because everything I read is so mangled, you know. It's still not my biggest interest, although it's dovetailed into a lot of other areas, but I still prefer myself as my personal interest, rights theory and epistemology and economics and, you know, that kind of stuff. But this does tie into it and you have to get this issue straight. But as for definitions, yeah, I don't think we want to be too picky about things and pick on people for using the right wrong words. And I've never tried to say that if you're not some IP law expert, you don't have the right to have an opinion on this issue. I hate credentialism. I hate this sort of situation where the people that are the guardians of the gate, you know, they can say who's got the right to have an opinion on this. Look, you have a perfect right to have your own opinion on this, but when you start making positive claims about these very complicated areas and you really mix them up, you mangle them, you don't really know what you're actually claiming. So, yeah, I think if you're going to oppose the abolition of patent and copyright and trademark law, let's say, then you should at least know what they are if you're going to oppose it, right? So you shouldn't be mangling patent and copyright. And this gets to another issue that I've been increasingly focusing on, which is the necessity for being very clear in our terms. Even if you're of total goodwill and you have the best of intentions, if you're not clear in your definitions, you're going to be led astray. You're going to engage in unintentional equivocation or something like that. So when we talk about property, when we talk about intellectual property, we talk about justice, we talk about law. We need to be clear on what exactly we're talking about. And I mean, just as an example, someone will say something very sloppy like, well, are you saying intellectual property doesn't exist? And that's not the argument. The argument is not that intellectual property doesn't exist. I mean, if you define the term intellectual property to mean a legal system that includes patent and copyright, it does exist. I mean, you know, during an 1820 slavery existed. So the question is not, does it exist? So we need to be clear whether we're asking a moral question or a factual question. So like, is it illegal to sell cocaine in America? Yes. Should it be illegal to sell cocaine in America? No. So we have a clear distinction between should and facts, between the descriptive and the prescriptive realms. So if we keep clear what we're talking about, I mean, because if you tell some libertarians, you know, you're actually a slave to the system because you have to pay taxes and you can be conscripted or you can go to jail if you sell marijuana or cocaine. They will bristle at that because they have such a natural law mentality that they think that by using these words you're sort of defining reality. You know, they think that you're justifying it. But I think we can as libertarians be open and honest and recognize what the system is and then we can judge it as good or bad and then we can hold up our ideal model that we want to compare it to. I was having a discussion with someone not all that long ago and the discussion was about a person who was accused of a pretty bad crime and it looked like, you know, from all outside evidence it appeared that this person was guilty and they were going to be going through the so-called criminal justice system. And my comment was in reference to there's no possible way. We call this criminal justice but there's no possible way that actual justice can take place in this person's case. Whether they're guilty or not is not even the point. There's no possible way that actual justice can take place and the person I was speaking to was a libertarian but they were extremely offended because they took that to mean that I felt this person should just be allowed to walk away. I tried to clarify it. No, let's talk about what justice is. If a person does something you feel is wrong, they have harmed another human being, you have a natural desire for justice. But is justice defined as the government comes, picks this person up, the government charges you and me to haul them in, keep them captive for a certain period of time? Will they capture another 12 people and force them essentially at gunpoint to be slaves for a time period while they listen to this case? And then the judge who was paid by the state and the police who were paid by the state and the prosecutor that's paid by the state and the defense attorney who's paid by the state are all going to argue back and forth and if they decide that this person is guilty then they're going to incarcerate him at your expense and at my expense. Well, he essentially does nothing. And then at some point they're going to either kill him or turn him loose. How is that defined as justice? And I tried to use exactly what you're saying there about defining terms. I tried to use that point to show that when we throw out a word like justice, you might have an idea in your mind of what that means, but that doesn't really mean that's what that means. Well, this is an example of the state co-opting things, right? The state co-ops and takes over institutions and practices in society that have a natural basis like roads, like law, like language, even like language, right? Communications. And then people start associating these things with the state. So it's almost inconceivable to people that you could have roads without the state. It's almost inconceivable to people that you could have justice or law or even quote-unquote government, which really just means governing institutions of society, law and order or something like that. So if you say you're opposed to the state, they think you're opposed to the government or to government. They think you're opposed to law. They think you're opposed to justice. They think you're opposed to roads because they associate these things with the state. So I believe the state has done such a good job of corrupting even people that are on our side that they have become essentially legal positivists. That is, they believe of law as the commands that emanate from some authorized sovereign. And they sort of bristle against that in an intuitive sense because they're libertarians, but they still are thinking of law as emanating from a sovereign. And so the problem is that when you start using words and you try to distinguish the meanings, they have a disconnect. They can't grasp it. They can't grasp that you're against the state and yet you're for government in the justice sense. They can't grasp that you're for law and order and yet you're against the state because they see these things as so inextricably bound up. So it's a challenge, but it's a challenge because the state has succeeded in dominating even the language and the whole conversation about this. And look, I mean, I get criticized from people that are really less radical than I am in a sense. I'm an anarchist, total IP abolitionist, you know, free thinker. And I'll hear someone saying, well, why do you use the state's words intellectual property then? I was like, well, because I have to communicate with people. So every time I do it, I have an implicit asterisk and I say, just because I'm admitting that the government treats this as a property right doesn't mean that I am agreeing that it's legitimate or justified. Just like if I admitted that someone was a slave during the antebellum south or US, doesn't mean that I'm admitting that they should be a slave. I mean, we can recognize reality and criticize it without endorsing it. I think you've hit on something else here that's really important. And it's something I learned from Robert Higgs. I was talking to Robert Higgs one time and we were talking about the inefficiencies of government. And he said, keep in mind that, you know, you think of things like the law and roads and all these things that people in security, people think this is what government's job is. And it's horrible at all those things. It seems like everything the government does, it fouls it up, it makes it worse. But like Robert was telling me, you're missing what the real government, what the real job of the state is. And the job of the state is to empower itself and perpetuate its existence. And it does that with blinding efficiency. The thing that the state really does, that it really cares about, if you can imagine care into this non-entity of the state, the thing that it really thrives on, it does with blinding accuracy and that's to perpetuate itself. And stealing words is one of the things that it does. No, it's like a disease. I mean, look, remember Harry Brown when he ran for president? His little message, his meme was, the government just doesn't work. Now, I know what he's doing. He's trying to counter their propaganda that they used to put up this patina or veneer of legitimacy to justify their actions. But if you discard the propaganda and you understand what the state really is, then the state does work. The state's very good at what it does. And that's one question I've always had. I used to say the state is good at nothing except destruction. It's not good. It cannot create anything. It can only be parasitical and destroy. But then the question is, well, why would it even be good at destroying? Like, why would the army of the government be a good demolition? I mean, that's actually not an easy task. I mean, it's easier than creation. That's probably the reason. But I think there's another thing they're good at and they're good at propaganda. Now, I don't know if they're good at propaganda because they just step into a society that's ready to receive this sort of message because everyone is sort of paternalistically minded and they're looking for someone to fill the vacuum or because the state actually tricks them with government education and with the king's message that I'm going to protect you and be your father figure, et cetera, or maybe some combination of the two. So I would say the state is good at two things and not to its credit, but the state is good at destruction and the state is good at deceiving people as to its legitimacy. I think that's a really good way of putting it. I was kind of, I don't want to bring up, you know, there's a phrase that kicks around the internet, a pod beef, where one prominent person takes on another prominent person and then it ends up getting kicked back and forth. And I don't want to turn this into something like that, but I was very disturbed at, oh, the guy's name escapes me. There's a prominent libertarian and an Austrian. Bob Winsall? Yeah, Bob Winsall, yeah. Well, that's actually apparently not his name, but that's one of his names, but go ahead, we'll respect whatever, you know. I did not know that. Yeah, it's apparently a suit on them. Well, I was very disturbed that he takes the position that he takes with such gusto, but it doesn't seem, me just listening to him, it doesn't seem he actually has thought through that position. He just throws out one series of attacks after the other without really even substantiating them. And I almost couldn't resist having you on the phone. I just couldn't resist saying, how does a person think that way? How do they not step back and analyze the argument they're making and say, look, I'm just appealing to authority over and over and over. And if the person doesn't have respect to that authority, it's a meaningless argument. Ben, I don't know. I mean, look, I'm sometimes blunt. I'm a very fierce guy and I try to be civil and polite, but I'm also blunt and I'll be honest. And I think actually it respects people to be honest with them and to tell them, you know, if you ask me a blunt question, do you agree with me? I will say no if I don't. I mean, I'm not going to kick you out of my house or throw water on your face. So I think there's nothing wrong with having a blunt conversation sometimes and being honest because it kind of cuts to the chase, reduces time. I, you know, you've seen the phenomenon. People get to a certain age or they have a certain investment in certain ideas and they just can't change your mind anymore. They're too invested in it. It would be too embarrassing or they're making money off of it. I don't know. So Bob Wenzel and I or whatever his name is, we had a debate because he had been like this libertarian Austrian guy and he just started getting popular and started kind of taking potshots at Jeff Tucker and myself because of our IP criticisms. And he, you know, I've gotten this a thousand times. I mean, he's one of just another one of a thousand people out there who just takes potshots. But he claimed he was at a book in the works. He's said this three or four years. I don't think he's serious, but he, I finally said, if you want to talk about it, I'll agree to have a debate with you. But the debate turned into it. It was just the debacle. It was just horrible. I mean, it was not civil. It wasn't reasonable. He didn't want to discuss ideas. So the question is, why didn't he want to discuss ideas? And I'm not assuming I'm right. I mean, because, you know, I was actually trying to discuss ideas. And if you can prove to me that I'm wrong, I'll listen. That's fine because I'm interested in truth and justice and what makes sense and what works. But he was just taking potshots. And I think he was just trying to get traffic for his sight or he just, he had been called on his, you know, he knew that he was going to be exposed for his boast that he was going to come out with a book proving IP, which was nonsense. I mean, it's just nonsense. If everybody's writing, I mean, look, I've seen everyone who knows anything about IP and I know the two or three or four people who have some semblance of an argument for IP and they're trying to come up with it and they're trying to make it work. And my prediction is they won't because that's what happened to me. I was trying to do this too for three or four years as a young lawyer, libertarian patent lawyer trying to find a way to justify my own career. That's why I got so interested in it. And finally I gave up and I realized, oh, now I see why I keep running into roadblocks because there's something fundamentally incompatible with this and the idea of private property rights and individual freedom and the free market and competition and the idea that you can compete with people and you can learn from people and there's nothing wrong with spreading information or learning from other people. And if you want to go onto the market and for whatever reason, whatever motivates you, if you think it's necessary to reveal to the public some information by selling a new product that has a new feature or by selling a book, then you think it's worth it for whatever your personal reason is to reveal this information to the world. Well, but once you reveal information to the world, you cannot expect people to not act on it, incorporate it into their brains and their minds. And you know what? You don't own their brains and their minds and you don't own their property. So if they want to print copies of the new Harry Potter novel and compete with you or if they want to sell a mousetrap that's similar to yours, hey, it's a free world. Get over it. Figure out a way to deal with it. Figure out a better business model if it doesn't work for you. So that's kind of my attitude and why people can't adapt. I don't know. Although I will tell you in a way, I'm not a big promoter type. I'm not a big politician type, political activist type. I believe in recognizing reality and realizing that in some ways we're kind of doomed. In some ways there's hope. But I do believe that like in the case of IP I'm actually been heartened by the fact that so many people have instantly fairly quickly adapted to and learned from this, from this IP idea. So I would focus on the fact that, I don't know, let's say 70% of all radical libertarians get what we're saying. Some of them get it right away. They get it within a paragraph. They go, oh, I see I've been misled all my life. So the fact that there's 5 or 10, 15% people out there that are fighting this and they're maintaining the old generation's mentality view about IP, which is quasi-statist or quasi-pre-internet age ideas is actually not that bad. I mean, I think we've made a lot of progress. So yeah, there's a few outliers out there. There's a few people. I think that as time passes, the generations will wash them away. All the young people are with us. All the left libertarians are with us. All the technical savvy libertarians are with us. All the Austrians are with us. All the anarchist libertarians are with us pretty much. So I think that's actually very encouraging and heartening. I think, you know, when I was young, my dad was sort of a little inventor and a tinkerer. He was basically a natural engineering genius. And when I was about, I guess I was about 14 or so, he encountered a problem among certain orchards that were infested with a particular disease. And he just, in his mind, he saw the machine that could fix this problem. And so he went to the machine shop and spent probably, oh, I don't know, maybe five or six months developing from scratch the machine that he saw in his mind when he first encountered the problem. He got it all done, took it out to the fields and started testing it, and it worked flawlessly just like he had imagined in his mind. And we started making a lot of money very quickly because his machine was the only way to kill this particular disease. The disease is called verticillium wilt. It's very common in cotton, but it doesn't harm the cotton because cotton is harvested very quickly. But in an orchard it will kill trees. So then we got a notice by a chemical company out of Michigan that a cease and desist order that he couldn't do this because years earlier nobody had the machine to do this with. My dad invented the machine just out of his brain. But they owned the rights to the process even though they didn't have a machine to accomplish the process. So I'm like 14 or whatever it was, and I thought this is stupid. And even that young I realized this is people who have and see by them owning that and shutting my dad's machine down it cost farmers in the San Joaquin Valley hundreds of thousands of dollars as their fields, as their orchards died and they could do nothing about it. So not only did it kill the invention that my dad had created and you can say well you're twisted because you had the loss of money in the situation. Well yeah, but still I'm observing this and I'm seeing it. Not only did it kill the invention, my dad literally pushed it out behind the shed and let it rust to death. Well that's actually a heartbreaking and perfect example. Look, I get criticized. It's amazing what I get criticized for. I am a principled property rights libertarian. I am for the right to engage in collusion with other competitors even if it's not efficient. So that's my principle approach to antitrust law for example. Although I understand the empirical arguments for it. But in IP it's also property rights based. But because almost everyone gives these utilitarian or empirical or wealth maximization arguments for IP I try to say listen, if that's your argument you need to be aware of what's really going on because your argument is not shown by the evidence. And you'll give examples like the one you just gave which needs to be written up probably. So then let's say well now you're being a utilitarian. I'm not being a utilitarian. I'm trying to talk to you on your own terms and to show you the actual consequences. The human devastation that comes from these laws. I mean you guys say that we need these laws because we need to encourage innovation. Can you even show a single invention that was come up with because of the patent system? And they really never can. But you can show many examples of these inventions and innovations that are scuttled because of the patent system like your father's. And it's probably heartbreak. Now look I don't blame people for using the patent system. I mean like if your dad, if you had told me your dad filed for a patent on it and you had to use it this is the system we're in. I mean that's a more practical or moral or tactical question. How do you live a life in a society that's not perfect? I mean I drive on the roads, you know I probably will get social security payments someday, etc. None of that means the government should own the roads or there should be a social security system just because of the actions of a given person. But no it's horrific and if you can point to some examples of clear violations of property rights brought by the patent system like in the case you just described. The problem that I see then is that when you talk to people that have these kind of ad hoc scattered views about IP they never have a systematic approach to IP. The ones that do have a systematic approach to IP are virtually insane. Like they basically think IP is the only property that exists and it should last forever like Galambos or maybe even Spooner in some of his days and some of the Neorandians. If they had their way then the world would cease to exist. I mean we would all just literally die. There would be no innovation. You'd have to get permission from everyone to perform anything you wanted to ever do in your life with your own property. Human life could not survive. The only reason they get away with these IP schemes is because they blunt the edges of it. So what's frustrating is when you talk to a fairly reasonable libertarian who has strong opinions about IP even though they know almost nothing about it which is what's frustrating. My view is you should kind of be a little bit humble and a little bit tentative about this kind of stuff because it's obviously dangerous and if you don't know a lot about it at least have an open mind and reserve your judgment, right? So you tell them an example like your father's example and what's the obvious response? They'll say, oh, well I'm not in favor of that. In other words, you can mention one abuse after the other. I could give you 50 abuses or consequences of a patent or copyright system and almost every libertarian who is allegedly pro IP will say, oh, well, I'm not in favor of that. So everything you can mention that's a consequence of the system that's obviously unjust, they will just back... In Louisiana, we say they'll crawfish. They'll back up and say, well, I'm not in favor of that. So finally you say, well, what in the hell are you in favor of? You tell me that you don't want to abolish the patent system but you're not in favor of it because you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. What the hell is the baby? What's the good part that you're in favor of? And then the response is, well, I'm not an expert in IP. Don't ask me. So it's like, well, then what in the hell are you in favor of? Why do you oppose abolishing the obvious injustice of IP? And they don't even realize that if you could pass an amendment to the Patent and Copyright Act tomorrow in Congress that would get rid of these outrages that they agree with you or outrages, it would basically neuter the whole system. It would go from like 100% IP system to a 2% IP system. And all the IP advocates, Mont Santos and the recording industry and the movie industry would be going completely ballistic. And they would be calling these alleged IP supporters, friends of ours who want to reform the system, they would call them abolitionists. They would say, you're trying to get rid of the incentive to invent and create. So it's really frustrating. I almost would rather battle a hypocritical Hollywood mogul who doesn't even pretend to have any morality behind their stance. And we're trying to reconnect. Are we reconnected, Stefan? Yeah, I'm here. Oh, okay. The Skype dropped us for a moment there. Sorry. I'm just saying that in particular cases like your father's, there's no excuse for justifying that whatsoever. The libertarian has to step back and pause and say, I cannot support this. This is a clear outrage. It's a clear, I mean, what's the purpose of libertarianism if it's not to make people's lives better and more free and more prosperous? And if you have a case like this where someone is, they're not harming anyone. They come up with something useful on their own, you know, merit. And now their dreams are dashed and they're impoverished or they're just complete waste. It's a tragedy. It's horrible. We cannot support this as libertarians. Let me break and save this file in case Skype crashes on us again and come back right on the other side of our commercial break with more with Stefan Kinsella. From June 17th through June 23rd of this year, the Free State Project will celebrate its 10th annual Porcupine Freedom Festival, PorkFest. My wife Cindy and I plan on attending and Bad Quaker staff members Hannah and Matt are trying to raise enough money to attend as they did last year. Considering fuel, campground fees, and PorkFest tickets, we estimate it will cost BadQuaker.com a little over $2,000 for Cindy and I to attend. For Matt and Hannah to attend, it should cost an additional $700. If you'd like to take part in sending the Bad Quaker crew to PorkFest 10, here's how you can do it. Go to BadQuaker.com. You can click on the donate button on the right-hand side of the page. You can give us Bitcoins with our Bitcoin number located right below the donate button, or you can use our Amazon button to shop at Amazon. If you'd like to support BadQuaker.com on a regular basis, you can use the link to our forum and become a supporting member for only $4 a month or just $25 a year. Thanks, folks. Thanks for sticking with us through the break. Ben Stone from BadQuaker.com with Stefan Kinsella. And you know what I was thinking of when you were talking a second ago was Murray Rothbard made a statement about economics. You know, economics is called the... What is it? The dreary science or something like that? I can't remember what it's called. The dismal science. Murray said there's nothing bad about being ignorant of economics. There's no dishonor in that. Just don't have a solid concrete opinion about it if you don't know anything about it. And I think that's the problem with IP is that so many people have this solid opinion that they've created and they don't necessarily... they haven't necessarily thought it through. But like you were saying a minute ago, in one way or the other they've got something invested into it, whether it's their own emotions or, you know, I was talking to a gaming software writer once and he couldn't stop and analyze what he was saying because the only thing he could think of is if I didn't have IP people would copy my game and I'd be broke. And I'm like, dude, they're copying your game one way or the other and every time they copy it it makes you more famous. Right. Well, yeah, I mean we have piracy anyway so it's like you can't stop it anyway. But you know, the way I think of... I think most people... look, most people are not libertarian, legal or property theorists. So to the extent they're intelligent and they thought about this a little bit they sort of have an intuitive or a rough understanding that there's no conflict between the practical and the moral which is what I ran emphasized, right? I mean, so they assume that what makes sense in terms of incentives, like property incentives, I mean we talk about the tragedy of the commons, you know, if the roads are publicly owned people go throw trash on the median but you won't throw trash on your own front yard everyone understands the tragedy of the commons idea. So they understand incentives come from private property but they also understand a sense of justice about it. So they sort of think they're linked and I think they're right but they don't have it all worked out. So they sort of assume what they've heard is that we have these property rights which the government has come up with like property rights in land and cars governments also come up with a system to protect property rights and ideas because we need to give people incentives to innovate or create or whatever. So they sort of just absorb this idea without thinking a lot about it into their background and they blend it together with justice, right? Because they think that they're not separate. They think justice and practicality are combined or united or dovetailed together. And when you start saying that there's something unjust about X, Y, and Z you have set the whole balance because they don't have a whole theory worked out and now you're basically telling them you've got to abandon what you previously counted on before it's not as easy, it's not just some rule of thumb you can't just count on what the government tells you about what property rights should exist and you've got to make a choice now between justice and pragmatics or something like that. And they get all freaked out and now they're like, I'm not a philosopher I haven't read a lot in this area I don't have time to go figure out whether I'm going to be in favor of results or do the empirical studies to figure out the results or whether I'm in favor of justice or what this all means and I think they just rebel and they just say, you know, screw it you guys are trying to upset the natural order why can't you just be in favor of letting it be as it is let's let authors have a copyright in their novel let's let people that make movies have a copyright in their movie let's let inventors have a copyright in their inventions but let's have reasonable controls on abuses let's have a better fair use exception to copyright let's have the ability to challenge bad patents let's improve the quality of the patent office maybe we need to reduce the scope of software patents maybe we need to choke back on patent trolls but the basic system we need to keep in place because we need to keep incentivizing innovation and creativity so I think that's the approach it's almost, I won't say it's an anti-intellectual approach it's like an anti-intellectual approach spawned by laziness spawned by complacency I mean, these people are settled in their opinions they know they can't figure out the right system it takes a radical, you have to have a radical new approach to property which is the Austrian anarchist approach to kind of have a good handle on this and once you do it's actually pretty easy I think you can explain the IP case in about three sentences I mean it's really easy but it's mind-blowing to people that are just encrusted with these statist ideas I really think you're on the right track there and you know in many ways what you were describing is the way that a monarchist holds on to those last hopes of the state somehow doing good things sure we need to reduce government down to this size we need to get government down small enough that we can hold it in a box and make it obey this little paper that we've got and they keep falling back on it's almost a blind faith well it is a blind faith that somehow something that maybe they don't know about is so important that we have to continue having a state for it at least a tiny little state that's the shape and size that they imagine in their mind but really they're just taking they're doing that rather than thinking it through rather than facing the realities that you can't shrink this down to the size that you imagine because whatever size you imagine the state is being when you get it down to the perfect size it's still going to be trampling on somebody and IP is that way well not only that what you mentioned earlier about the state's natural the state itself has the interest in perpetuating itself and being large, whether large or not, I don't know about but perpetuating itself so the idea that if we can think of the right constitutional blueprint or model to make the Obamacare administer more efficiently or whatever the state is not interested in that that's not what they're doing the state wants to control us they want to keep control, keep their power and they will say whatever they have to to keep their power but they're not really interested in that so I think there's a really close analogy between the sort of IP breakthrough and the anarchist breakthrough it's like the people that are menarchists although I'm not saying that you have to be an anarchist to be anti-IP, I think even if you're a menarchist you can understand why IP makes no sense but still I think that there comes in a libertarian's life moments when you have breakthroughs and that is you finally give up the ghost on menarchy and then there's, you know, you increase your understanding over time and I think the same thing happens with IP you go, oh, the whole thing is just completely bogus just like the state but it's a breakthrough moment, I agree and how you get people there, I don't know that's an interesting question I think for me with IP I had that early experience that I mentioned before and then I didn't really think about it in any way that much for years and years and years and then, you know, about the time and I think this was the case for a lot of people about the time that the file sharing and Napster and all that kind of stuff started to come up it brought it back to my attention that there is something fundamentally wrong with the current system and it's not just a matter of tweaks it's a matter of this thing is designed backwards from the very beginning and I got to thinking about it I hate to fall back on this all the time but I always go back to what would happen on an island with two guys and now there's a third guy and how would IP develop in a natural market setting without an aggressive government there to inflict it and I can't and now we're stepping backwards what, 10 or 15 years I couldn't imagine then how IP could develop in a natural market setting I just couldn't figure it out and therefore I had to reject that it had any legitimacy but I couldn't put that together in, you know in a practical argument until I read against intellectual property and then I was like well, now I don't even have to think about it anymore it's done for me all I have to do is just point at this book and say, you know, go learn stuff and leave me alone Right, right Well, you know, I'll say that even when I wrote the book in 99, 2000 I was still thinking that maybe there were contractual mechanisms people could come up with that would protect their ideas and all this so I sort of had an intuitive reflex like, you know there should be a private way to do something but my view now has totally changed I've actually changed my whole attitude I think we have to change our attitude about knowledge and competition there is nothing wrong with someone keeping information private nothing wrong, if you want to do that that's fine I wouldn't say information wants to be free you're not doing anything immoral it may be moral to do it, I don't know but if you reveal information to the world there is nothing whatsoever at all wrong with other people reverse engineering you learning from you, copying you competing with you, emulating you the spread of knowledge is not a bad thing it's actually what makes society what society is I mean we would not have human history human society, human culture without the accumulation of knowledge and techniques and scientific knowledge and amazing art works and novels and paintings and you know the use of medium to convey feelings across generations this is what makes us an amazing thing in the universe it's not a bad thing, it's a good thing so when people say for example look, if you sent me your private manuscript by email tomorrow then and we have a private relationship it would be immoral for me to just publish it because we have sort of a private agreement with each other but let's say you published your first novel tomorrow on Amazon and I get an EPUB of that now is it actually wrong for me to send a copy of that EPUB to 10 of my friends now some people say yeah you shouldn't do it, it's bad manners actually my attitude now is I completely disagree with that I think there is absolutely nothing whatsoever wrong in fact I think it's a good thing with spreading information unless you have some kind of private moral or contractual obligation with someone not to do it then to spread information is what life is about and we need to recognize this and I think the way to do that is to recognize that the whole purpose of property rights arises because there are some things in the world that are not infinitely reproducible that are exhaustible that are scarce these are the means of action so for these things you and I can't both use the same thing at the same time or if I use it I run out of it earlier so I have to economize I have to economize, I have to decide when I'm going to use it because if I use it now I'm not going to have it later if I use too much of it now I'll have less left this is why we come up with the concept of economic goods or scarce resources things that you have to economize on but luckily we have other things that inform human action that guide human action which is knowledge knowledge we've accumulated from other people we've learned from our teachers, from our family from the cultural inheritance of mankind and so when we have this body of knowledge we can draw upon and believe me it takes skill and knowledge just to know what knowledge to select from I mean you've got so much now to select from it takes a little bit of a knack or a skill or knowledge to know which one to ignore which one to use but the knowledge is not exhausted when you use it you consult upon it someone else can consult upon this knowledge at the same time so property rights are for the scarce resources the economizable goods they're not for knowledge so we should be as libertarians as maybe thick libertarians we should be completely in favor in my opinion of the widespread copying, reproduction storing, dissemination of ideas emulation, competition all of it there's nothing immoral or bad whatsoever about it to the contrary back in the days when I was in the aerospace industry and I would try to explain these ideas to my coworkers one of the examples that I used I said do you remember back in school back in government school you would get in trouble if you looked over at your neighbor's paper and copied off of your neighbor and of course everybody remembers that from school that's against the rules you can't copy, that's cheating you can't cheat yes and I would say okay now here we are in business now and all in the particular business like I say I was in the aerospace industry and in engineering and everything we did was copying off of each other you constantly looked over at your neighbor at the cubicle, at your neighbor's cubicle what are you doing, what are you working on what are your results of that test what is going on because without copying each other's work there would literally be no airplanes period there wouldn't be any and especially not to the level that we have them today everything, all the knowledge that involves in the aerospace industry is gained by people copying each other's work and that was something that I could show in an industrial setting like that and for so many people you could just see the lights come on like you know that's right cheating is not you know a copying off of your neighbor is not cheating that's survival, that's how we figured out what berries are good and which ones kill you you know it's so fundamental to human existence that yes we should copy off of our neighbor we should cheat if that's what you want to call cheating then we should cheat we should all see what everybody else is doing because it'll save you work and it'll move us all ahead advancing civilization no absolutely and I mean the problem is people conflate two things here they conflate plagiarism and cheating and lying and dishonesty with copying I mean these are two different things of course we're all against dishonesty and if you're going to take a test at a school where you have an implicit contract to do your own work to show what your mind can do on its own in a certain contextual setting then you're breaking the rules and you're being dishonest but being dishonest is actually not illegal it's just immoral and it's not the same as copyright infringement and you will have the defenders of copyright say that well you're not against you're not for plagiarism are you and like well I'm actually not for plagiarism but I don't think plagiarism should be illegal as a general matter but in any case copyright infringement has nothing to do with plagiarism because in most cases you guys want to put people in jail who have copied someone else's book or novel or movie or song even though they didn't they never lied they never said they were the author but some guy that uploads the Wolverine movie doesn't say he wrote the movie so there's no plagiarism whatsoever so they're using an example that everyone agrees you shouldn't lie they're trying to get you to buy in on this you shouldn't lie you shouldn't be dishonest and once you agree to that they say well then you shouldn't be for copyright abolition and I'm like well wait a second but infringing someone's copyright does not involve lying there's no dishonesty there's no plagiarism so this is again the reason to have clear definitions and concepts plagiarism dishonesty cheating lying they all have a fairly you know coherent meaning and they are not the same as copyright infringement and if people understood the law they would understand that so yet they're in favor of this law even though based upon the idea that they're against plagiarism even though they wouldn't make plagiarism illegal if they had to complete intellectual confusion and mess Stefan let's talk about your websites a little bit I know stefanconcella.com is your primary website right? yes and then you don't you also have libertarian papers isn't that yours as well? yeah I found that that journal in 2009 and that's at libertarianpapers.org and I'm the executive editor now and another guy is the manager, daily editor on a day-to-day basis everything is linked from stefanconcella.com including my my podcast which is called Concella on Liberty on which this will appear what are you gonna copy this? oh no oh no I'm gonna copy it there'll be two copies out there or two times whatever you know and then I have a site that's focused upon intellectual property and innovation issues because I didn't want to clunk up my site and other sites with IP issues and that's called c4sif.org Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom so that site basically is in favor of policies and rights that promote innovation technology, innovation freedom of innovation and so that basically means anti-IP so that's my main sites I also blog at the Libertarian Standard which is LibertarianStandard.com I believe I'm typing this out so I can put it in the show notes for later okay I can text your email you too if you need it now I hesitate to bring this up I think some of the people in the Liberty movement in general would be I know that you've done classes and stuff over at Mises you've done several courses over there over time but I think people need to invite you out to some of these events like pork fest and Liberty Forum and some of those I don't know if they've approached you and asked you that already or if somehow you've just not been on the list but they do they've been very gracious I know well let me take a stab at it I think I know where you're heading look I was I was originally in the Randian stuff early in law school and then I of course quickly grew beyond that and then I became heavily involved with the Mises Institute and I was heavily involved there for a good 15 years and I think it's a great group but lately what I've been doing is my hub has evolved and different blogs come up and different avenues for transmitting your ideas come out there like podcasts and teaching platforms I've been experimenting with different things plus my career has changed too I'm now an independent attorney with my own law practice so I'm just trying different things so I have been invited to many of these things but given my just current career I can only go to so many of them I would love to go to all of them but I just I'm fairly young and have a family and you know there's just issues like that so I've been to Libertopia I've been to Property and Freedom Society and Turkey several times I've been to Mises and Auburn many times and other things and hopefully some of the things I'll be able to make it to as well I just went to Nagadoches Texas about three weeks ago for what's called Liberty in the Pines which is sponsored by the Koch Foundation and Young Americans for Freedom and that was a fun event so Stefan Maligny was there Jeff Tucker was there other people were there so I do as much as I can I can't be traveling every two, three, four weeks because of just my personal schedule I've been invited to Porcfest and the other New Hampshire things but it's just a travel issue right now at this point so hopefully this year or next year I can make it up there the reason I brought it up is mostly selfishness on my part because you're one of a very small group of people Hans Hermann Hoppe is another that I really I check every one of these different lists and say are they going to be there is this guy going to be there is that guy going to be there Jeff Tucker is another one that's a big factor for me I would love to be able to hear you live and all that so it's purely selfishness on my part that I want you to drop everything in your life and show up in the places where I happen to be so that I can watch you well you sound like an ex-Randy and you're not against selfishness actually I never really bought on to that I kind of this I was I came in through what's it called normal national organization reform and this was in the late 70's and that with my father's experience with IP I had pretty much come to the conclusion that government was at least an evil and I wasn't convinced it was unnecessary so that's how I came into my childhood and then went from there I didn't really get any intellectual background for any of my thoughts until I bumped into Rothbard and it was just like turns out I'm not crazy you know somebody else thinks this stuff too that's amazing marijuana and patents as the on trade libertarianism there are so many paths into this that's incredible though patents that's a unique combination put it that way and I should mention for my listeners too that I don't partake in any illegal drugs or anything like that currently I haven't smoked marijuana in probably 30 some years so that's not my bag or whatever but I still I'll be honest with you I personally I'm not opposed to it I can't stand it so I'm in favor of legalization but I used to think I wish it would legalize it so I could on occasion have it at the house or whatever but now I'm thinking like you know what I just don't enjoy it I'm sorry I don't like soot in my lungs but hey people who do no problem with it that would be the same argument with heroin so if a magic pill were taken tomorrow and we lived in a world where no one was sold in drug stores like you know out of a little machine where you drop in a quarter still wouldn't buy it wouldn't have any desire for it right although I think if I had to choose between a joint and a heroin I think smoke a doobie you know but either one whatever that's not my point my point is I think you could be a principal pro legalization libertarian without doing it for completely I want to say selfish reasons but for completely you know unprincipled reasons yeah well Stefan I would really appreciate you coming on the show with me today give me an hour of your time like this and you know we I didn't bring it up but we did try this a couple months ago I was on the road with the motor home at the time and due to technical difficulties I completely failed to to be able to do this so I really appreciate the second shot at it and I do hope to see you in person sometime at some some event or something or other I think we'll make it happen and I appreciate the time too and I enjoyed it thanks a lot Stefan and folks thanks for listening today and remember to visit badquaker.com where liberty is our mission thanks a lot folks