 to peace, love, Liberty Radio, confined to all of the archives, as well as all of your listening options. You know, I've got two stories this week that I can't really decide which one to start the show off with. There's a story from reason.com titled Kids. Turn in your federally funded laptops for imminent destruction. And then there is Ann Coulter, who says that the United States needs a president like Benjamin Netanyahu. And you know, there's actually video of this woman who is saying absolutely horrible things. And you know what, I'll just, I'll go ahead and start with the Ann Coulter story where she was actually on the Fox News TV show with Sean Hannity. There's an article here from Raw Story, and then I have a video that I'm going to play a portion of because you know, me telling you what she says, you might think that I'm taking it out of context, but when I play you an unedited clip of Ann Coulter saying essentially that the US government should just, you know, indiscriminately drop bombs in Mexico because that's what Netanyahu does to Gaza, then you know, when it's her words, you can't say that I'm taking those out of context when it's an unedited video. So the story here from Raw Story where they have just a little bit of commentary on this and then I'll get into actually playing the video from Ann Coulter and then I will comment further. But the story from Raw Story says, appearing on Fox News, Hannity, frequent guest Ann Coulter told Sean Hannity that she wished Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was quote, our president. So he could deal with our border problems the way he deals with border problems in his own country. Comparing tunnels found at the US Mexican border with tunnels used by Hamas, Coulter asserted that the US is being invaded. So I have a video here that I am playing and this is, well, yes, it's certainly, you know, a copyright is claimed on it by Fox News. I am playing it in fair use for educational purposes so that I can comment on it as a member of the media. And where I pick up in the video is where Sean Hannity says, you know, he gives an introduction to Ann Coulter and says your number one, two, three, four and five topic is immigration. Well, it's the same thing with the American people. There was another poll showing that by far that's the most important issue. Something like 84% said they were more interested in what's happening with Mexico. And this is going back some time. Then Iran and Syria, then the Ukraine. I mean, this is our border here. And you keep saying, and I mean, I agree. I wish we could have Netanyahu as our president, but you know, how would America react if these missiles were being shot into our country? Well, I'll tell you how America would react to what's happening in Israel right now. More than 100 tunnels have been found on our border to smuggle in weapons to guns. I was inside one. They're invading, they're murdering, they're raping. The head of the DEA said about a year ago that he thinks the surge of homicide in Chicago is a Mexican drunken cartel. We are being invaded. And I just wish people would talk about our border the way at least people like you and I talk about, the way we talk about Israel's border, we need a Netanyahu here. Can you imagine all of these? I mean, yes, sometimes Palestinian kids get killed. That's because they are associated with a terrorist organization that is harming Israel and Netanyahu doesn't care what the religious leaders say weeping about Palestinian children. He doesn't care what the UN says. He doesn't care what the media says. We are a country. We have borders and Netanyahu enforces them. Why can't we do that in America? Okay, so there are several things here from which I can respond. And I have a list on my computer screen in front of me of several of the points that she makes. And first off, to ask why can't we do that in America? And I'm guessing her question of that in the question is just indiscriminately fire missiles and bombs into Mexico. And I would say that and culture the reason that the United States can't justly do that is because the United States doesn't claim that Mexico is properly the territory of the US government. That's the claim about Gaza to where the Israeli government says, no, Gaza is actually our territory and the Palestinians are occupying it. But it's actually, it's territory that is being I would say illegally occupied by the Israeli government. The people in Gaza are essentially locked into this little strip of land. Yes, there is the Mediterranean Sea that's right there, but there are all sorts of embargoes and there's literally a wall around Gaza. The land portion of Gaza has a wall around it. And for people to be able to get food brought into Gaza, yes, they do have to build tunnels. They literally have to go underground to be able to sneak into Israel to get food, to be able to bring that food into Gaza because Israel isn't allowing food to be shipped into Gaza because there's blockades, there's embargoes. The border from Gaza into Egypt is also blocked off by the Egyptian government. So there are reasons that there are tunnels on the border between Gaza and Israel. There are also reasons that there are tunnels on the US-Mexican border and no, and culture, not everybody that sneaks across the border is raping and murdering people as you claim. Her exact quote is, more than a hundred tunnels have been found on our border to smuggle in weapons, guns. They're invading, they're murdering, they're raping. No, and culture, that there might certainly be some people that do that, but there are people that were born in the United States that are doing those exact same things. So to make the claim that we should just indiscriminately fire missiles into Mexico because some people are doing evil things, it shows your blatant lack of respect for humanity. And it baffles me that people can actually take this woman seriously when she says things like that. And her quote about children being killed, quote, yes, sometimes Palestinians, Palestinian kids get killed, that's because they're associated with a terrorist organization that is harming Israel. Now, let me talk about the harming Israel portion. There's something called blowback and the CIA actually wrote a report on this in 1959. And blowback is when one group who is being attacked responds to the attack, and then the attacker then says, well, we're being attacked, we have to keep fighting them. And that's what happens, that's what's happening in Gaza to where the Israeli government is, I don't like using the term genocide, but the fighting is so one sided that you can't call it a war. You cannot call what's happening in Gaza right now a war because the people of Gaza are being just indiscriminately killed. They are trying to fire rockets across the wall into Israel and they're not being very successful at killing people, although they are more accurate in actually killing military personnel. Now, when we come back, I will finish responding to the allegations that it's okay to kill them because they're somewhere near terrorist. I'll respond to that when we come back on peace, love, Liberty Radio, Liberty Radio. And before I get back to responding to Ann Coulter, I wanna make sure that I tell you about a project that I am working on. It's actually a tour across the country that I am planning. It is called Peace, Love, Liberty Radio on the Road. And the plan is to leave New Hampshire on March 8th and return on June 21st. There are currently four cities on the map for the tour. And you can actually help add destinations to the tour. Right now, the plan, again, as I said, leave New Hampshire on March 8th. And the tentative plan is to arrive in Pensacola, Florida on March 10th. And the reason I am picking Pensacola, Florida as the first official stop on the tour is because there are some good people down in Pensacola doing some good work. Robertson Roberts Brokerage, which is one of the sponsors of this show, is located in Pensacola. And Sean's Outpost, which is a Bitcoin-supported, essentially a homeless shelter, but it's not really a shelter. It's basically, it's a homeless camp, more or less, in the woods in the outskirts of Pensacola. So I wanna go down, see what is being done in Pensacola. And then from there, I plan on heading to Austin, Texas for the Bitcoin Conference. Then heading out to Arizona. Definitely spend some time with Ernest Hancock from Freedoms Phoenix. That's Freedoms with an S, phoenix.com. From the BEAUTIFUL studios of Freedoms Phoenix in Arizona, IA is how he says it. So what to, you know, spend some time with Ernest. See the wonderful things that they're doing there. And then I've got some friends up in Sedona who are running a horse therapy area to where, for people not familiar with horse therapy, it's where people with either mental or physical problems can go and the animals are used as a form of therapy. The next stop that is on the map, and of course, these stops can be changed, Denver, Colorado, that's where Amagi Metals, who is another one of the sponsors. Actually, I have an affiliate agreement with them. Amagi Metals is out there. There's a lot of good things that are going on in Denver. And then the Midwest is open for stops. And if you want to wind up adding a location to my map, you can do that. You can go to tour.fppradio.com. That's tour, T-O-U-R.fppradio.com. Donate because I do need donations to be able to make the tour possible. And if you have a Liberty Group, like a Liberty on the Rocks, or a Libertarian Party Group, or some Objectivist Meetup, then you guys can pitch in some money together and any donation of $500 or more gets to add a destination to my trip. And of course, it's going to be continental US only. And please, nothing in South Florida, just because of the timing, I would not be able to make it into South Florida and then be able to also get to the Bitcoin Conference in Austin, Texas, because I've got 18 days to get from New Hampshire to Austin, Texas. And I want to spend at least a week in each place that I stop. So for timing purposes, South Florida is definitely out of the question. Anywhere else across the country, I can definitely make that work. So again, go to tour.fppradio.com. Any donation is appreciated, but of course the larger donations, they also help because you get to add a destination to the map. So back to the Ann Coulter thing to where, and I'm just going to replay a brief clip of what she said so that I can respond to this about indiscriminately killing people and yes, sometimes children get killed. All these, I mean, yes, sometimes Palestinian kids get killed. That's because they're associated with a terrorist organization. They're associated with a terrorist organization. So it's okay to kill children as long as, and this is in the mind of Ann Coulter, not the mind of Daryl Perry. Ann Coulter is saying that it's okay to kill Palestinian children, or actually any children, as long as you can say that they are associated with a terrorist organization. And as I've discussed numerous times on this show, the definition of terrorist is being broadened to basically include anyone who does anything to resist the basically the onslaught of another government. So for example, the people of Hamas are just being indiscriminately killed. So they try to fight back in some means, and while they are not accurate with their rockets that are being basically shot out of mortar cannons, they are being more accurate on hitting military targets. The latest figure that I saw, and this was two days ago, showed that 66 Israelis had been killed since the latest round of fighting began a couple of weeks ago. 63 of those were Israeli military. The number of people killed in Gaza is up over 1600. The vast majority of those being labeled as civilians, children, and women. Very few of the people that are being killed by the Israeli government right now are actually people who are part of Hamas. But again, because they're saying, anybody that fights back is a quote unquote terrorist, that's how they can say, well, it's okay that the kids are getting killed, they're associated with terrorists. Well, yeah, when you label every adult in a country a terrorist, then of course the children are going to be quote unquote associated with a quote unquote terrorist, because you're saying that everyone is a terrorist. And again, it baffles my mind that Ann Coulter could not only agree with what's happening in Israel, but say that that needs to happen in the US to where the US government just indiscriminately fires weapons into Mexico. Because, well, some people from Mexico do bad things. Well, here's an idea. Maybe instead of fighting this horrible thing called the drug war that is causing a lot of the horrible things that are happening to happen, maybe you can actually focus the police on things that actually have a victim. You mentioned rape and murder. Let's actually fight those, but stop throwing people in jail for having a plant. There's a crazy idea. Stay tuned, Peace, Love, Liberty Radio. Back to peaceloveradio.com. So I am done responding to the crazy lunatic known as Ann Coulter, who thinks that it's okay to just indiscriminately kill people because they might maybe do something bad and that you killed somebody else that you've labeled a terrorist, and therefore it's okay to kill a three-year-old kid because they weren't known to associate with the terrorist. And then did you see the video where there were four children on a beach and there was an Israeli missile that came down and blew up the beach and killed three of the kids instantly and then one of the kids is, you know, like, they're all injured and trying to get away from the beach and then another missile comes down and kills that kid. And yeah, the claim is that the people in Gaza are using children as human shields. There was nobody else on the beach. There were four children blowing up kids so that you can claim that, you know, well, they're using children as human shields. Just go randomly kill all the kids so that they don't have anybody to use as a human shield, even though there's no proof that they were using children as human shields. Yeah, let's just kill all the children. That is horrible. And yes, I would say that that definitely borders on genocide. That's it. I'm done for this show talking about Israel and Gaza and crazy, crazy Ann Coulter who just wants to indiscriminately kill Mexicans because well, that's what Netanyahu would do if he was president here. I wish we had president Netanyahu here. Crazy, crazy woman wants to control your life and wants to just randomly kill people she doesn't like. So reason.com has an article here about other people who want to control things. This time it is the school boards of, I believe it's Hoboken, New Jersey where they started giving laptops to children and now they won all the laptops back. The article begins, bureaucrats love to throw fancy technology at schools and expect it to magically improve students' learning outcomes. That's easier than hiring, training and fairly compensating good teachers, right? One New Jersey school district has admitted that it's every seventh grader gets a laptop plan was a dismal failure. And they are preparing to destroy the devices. The school district was able to obtain the laptops five years ago through federal stimulus money. Yeah, remember the stimulus of 09? We're going to restore the economy and give a lot of money to build things and buy roads into the American Recovery Act. That's what it was called. And then all of these street signs popped up, this road construction brought to you by the American Recovery. And then after the project was done, there was a sign that would pop up that said, we did this project thanks to the American Recovery Act. And I was living in Branson, Missouri when one such project was completed, they had a sign. So I put a sign promoting the Libertarian Party beneath their sign. About a week later, we built this little road triangle with your tax dollars. That went away as did the sign promoting the Libertarian Party. Somebody stole my sign, somebody from the DOT that is stole my sign. But yes, it was through the federal stimulus dollars that these laptops were given to children. The article continues. It says the intention was that kids would use the laptops for homework and teachers would design internet involved assignments and lessons. Instead, calamity after calamity ensued according to the Hessinger report. Quote, by the time Jeremy Crocomo, Crocomo, I'm guessing that's how the last name is pronounced, Jerry Crocomo, a computer network engineer arrived in Hoboken school system in 2011, every seventh, eighth and ninth grader had a laptop. Each year, a new crop of seventh graders were outfitted. Crocomo's small tech staff was quickly overwhelmed with repairs. He says, we had half a dozen kids in a day on a regular basis, bringing laptops down, going, my books fell on top of it, or somebody sat on it, or I dropped it. Screens were cracked, batteries dead, keys popped off, viruses attacked. He found that teenagers with laptops are still, da-da-da-da, surprise, surprise, teenagers. He adds, we bought laptops that had reinforced hard shell cases so that we could try to offset some of the damages these kids were going to do. I was pretty impressed with the damage they did anyway. Some of the laptops would come back completely destroyed. The devices were also frequently stolen, and this is what I don't understand. If every student is given a laptop, then why would somebody steal a laptop that they already had? But nonetheless, he says the laptops were frequently stolen and he spent much of his time filing police reports and appearing in court. Students quickly figured out how to crack the security software and spent time visiting unauthorized social networking and porn sites. He adds, there is no more determined hacker, so to speak, than a 12 year old with a computer. Students spent more time playing games on their laptops than using them for school work. Wi-Fi became another problem. So many people in the vicinity of the high school had the password that they could steal it by bringing their own laptops near the school. The internet eventually became so bogged down that it was unusable. In other words, the program was a complete disaster from start to finish. The district is now taking the laptops back and intends to destroy them. The Los Angeles Unified Schools experienced similar problems when administrators attempted to give every student in the district an iPad. According to Allison Powell, Vice President of State and District Services in Ina Cal, that's the, I guess, independent, I'm not sure what Ina Cal stands for, it's the International Association for K-12 Online Learning. She says that such programs are common and commonly end up causing more headaches than they solve. Powell says, probably in the last few months, I've had quite a few principals and superintendents call and say, I bought these 500 iPads or 1,000 laptops because the district next to us just bought them and they're like, what do we do? Bureaucrats in districts have failed technology programs. Typically, or rather, bureaucrats who have failed technology programs typically been molding the results while maintaining that the initiative was motivated by good intentions. And you know what they say the road to hell is paved with. Too bad Hoboken's internet isn't working. Otherwise, they could Google that. But this just goes to show and it's not just schools where they're giving away laptops and it's not working right. And then they say, oh, well, we need all the laptops back. Well, what, I don't understand why they would need the laptops back. If the laptops, especially if they're just going to destroy them, one thing that, you know, here's an idea, maybe if the superintendent of the Hoboken schools is listening or if the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified Schools is listening or anybody else that might be involved in education in some way is listening to my voice and you realize that you're, give every student a laptop program isn't working. Here's an idea. I know you didn't pay for these and it doesn't really make any difference to you whether you bring them back and destroy all of them. But maybe you could try to make a little bit of money and tell the parents, hey, we'll sell you that laptop for $50. If you don't want it, return it. Then you give the returned laptops to some computer guy that knows how to refurbish these things and then sell those and then you can make some money and then here's another idea. You can lower some taxes. Stay tuned, peace, love, Liberty Radio. You know, I don't just do radio. I also have already recorded and produced one audio book. I've been hired to do another one. I started recording that one yesterday, but the one that has already been recorded is available from audible.com. The book is authoritarian sociopathy towards a renegade psychological experiment and I am doing a special promotion to where you, my listener, can possibly get a free copy of the audio book from audible.com. Send an email to book at fppradio.com. Again, book at fppradio.com and just put in the subject, I want a free book. And that's all you have to do. And then I will send you a code. The first 10 people will get a code for a free download from audible.com for the audio book authoritarian sociopathy toward a renegade psychological experiment written by Davy Barker, read by yours truly, Daryl W. Perry. Again, send an email to book at fppradio.com. Put in the subject line or somewhere in the body, either the subject of the email or the body, I want a free book. And if you're one of the first 10 people to send an email to book at fppradio.com, I will send you a code to where you can get a free download of the book. And of course, I would like you to leave a review of the book after you're done listening, but absolutely no obligations on your end. You have to do nothing other than send an email to book at fppradio.com. And either in the subject or the body, I want a free book. So I've got an interesting article here from Politico. And it's not so much the article that I find interesting. It's what the article is about. And down in Florida, and they had this problem in Texas a few years ago. And it's pretty much every 10 years, there's this kind of problem to where political districts get redrawn. And some people aren't going to be happy about the districts, understandably. And I'm looking at the map of the Florida congressional districts. And one of these, it appears that the district begins in Orlando and winds its way up all the way up in Jacksonville. And that's not exactly close by. That's a several hour drive from Orlando to Jacksonville. But somebody decided, hey, we should have a political district that runs from the city to the Silver City. And well, there have been lawsuits and a judge on Friday actually told the legislature, you have two weeks to come up with new legislative boundaries. Otherwise, I will create boundaries myself. And it's not just these two districts that are going to be affected because obviously it's districts that are near these other two that are going to wind up getting redrawn. Meaning that several districts in Florida congressional districts are going to wind up needing to be redrawn. And with it being this close to the election and the fact that candidate filing has already taken place and there's a primary election in like two and a half weeks, then it's not really going to be easy to go ahead and have a general election in November. But let me just read a portion of the article here from Politico. It says, after weeks of nudging from democratic groups and uncertainty for candidates running in house races, circuit court judge Terry Lewis, who previously ruled the state's congressional map, violated the Florida Constitution, on Friday provided some clarity on how a new map could affect the 2014 election. He wrote in The Decision, even if a revised map was in place today, the legal and logical machinations it would take to have the election on November 4th under the revised map is not something justified by law or common sense. There's just no way legally or logistically to put in place a new map, amend the various deadlines and have elections on November 4th as prescribed by federal law. However, it might be possible to push the general election date back to allow for a special election in 2014 for any affected districts. So basically, and we still don't know exactly how this is going to play out, but based on the part of the ruling here, it seems as though they might go ahead and have the regular election with the current maps in place. Once the maps are redrawn, have special elections for any of the districts that are affected and just say, all right, so the person that was elected back in November doesn't actually get to go into office on January 3rd. Here's a special election to determine who is the actual member of Congress from this district. But this opens up another debate and it's a debate that is rarely had or actually a discussion that is rarely had. And that is how to fairly draw political districts, especially for congressional districts or state house districts or state Senate districts. Anytime you're drawing districts and humans are involved, then there will be interest that are taken into account. And I've done a fair amount of research into the independent redistricting commissions that seem to have cropped up in a lot of states over the years. And most of them are basically bipartisan commissions that they're calling independent commissions. The closest thing to an actual independent commission is what exists in California. Although what exists in Iowa is fairly close, in California, voters who are interested can apply for a seat on the commission. And then there's some government auditor who will select it down to a certain number of people and then pick eight of those people. Those eight people wind up selecting the other six members of the commission. Five members of that commission must be Republicans, five members must be Democrats and four members must be affiliated as either political independence or members of a minor party, which means that the Republicans and the Democrats still have considerable influence over the commission. Now in Iowa, they actually have people who work for legislative offices, who like work for the state house that draw the districts and all they are given is population numbers and how many districts are needed. We need 75 state house districts, here's the populations of all the cities, here's the rules you have to follow. So for example, in New Hampshire, the wards or cities must be touching one another and you can't have, there's rules on, you can't have like half of the city of Keen and half of another city. It has to be like either all of the city and part of something else or all of both. And so they're given these rules, they draw up districts and then it goes to the state legislature in Iowa for a vote. And if the state legislature rejects three maps from this commission, then the state supreme court in Iowa draws up the maps. Now what I would love to see, aside from congressional and legislative bodies just completely going away, as long as we have them, I would like to see use of computer models to where the computers will draw the maps for you, where you input into the computer, the same information that's given to the people in Iowa, to where political affiliation is totally removed from the equation. The addresses of incumbents is removed from the equation. So that way, it's really a very unbiased thing that is creating the maps. And it, again, like I said, it takes the human element out of it. It takes the point of, okay, so we need to make sure that Nancy Pelosi gets reelected. So we're gonna draw her district this way. And then yeah, it's okay to have like five swing districts in California, but we can't have more than that. So the, you know, using computer, it totally takes the human element out of it. And that's not something that's really ever entered seriously into the discussion. But I think when you hear more stories about lawsuits over maps, hopefully one day that does enter into the equation. Stay tuned to peace, love, Liberty Radio, interview hour coming up next. Stay tuned online at fppradio.com. Welcome back to peace, love, Liberty Radio, online at fppradio.com. And this is interview hour. And my guest this week is none other than Stefan Kinsella, who is probably one of the most famous patent attorneys in the world who is not a supporter of intellectual property. Mr. Kinsella, thank you for taking time out of your Sunday to come on the show. Daryl, I'm glad to do it, glad to be here. Thank you very much. So I guess the first question that everybody is asking is how does a patent attorney sort of, you know, I guess justify the fact, or rather how does somebody who does not support intellectual property justify the fact of being a patent attorney? Well, there's a few responses to it. I guess one would be, let's suppose that the patent and the copyright system, there's something really wrong with it. Who would you expect to realize that if not for people in the trenches that have learned a little bit about how the system works? And if they do find out there's something wrong about it, should they be quiet because they have actually learned something about it because they came up through the trenches? Doesn't seem like to me that they should. So that's one response. And the other is there's a lot of confusion about exactly what it is that lawyers do and patent lawyers do. There's a wide variety of things you can do. And not every patent lawyer is out there doing the bad side of things. Some are doing what I would say is the good side of things. By the same token that if you found a libertarian who's a tax attorney who is out there defending people accused of tax infringement by the IRS or the federal government, you wouldn't say that they're hypocritical or they're confused or they're contradictory because they are tax attorneys and yet they are defending people from the tax system that they think should really be abolished. So any more than an oncologist who is trying to stop cancer is somehow committing some kind of unspeakable crime by taking a paycheck from people to help them fight cancer while it exists while he really hopes that in an ideal world he could ultimately eliminate cancer. So my goal is to abolish intellectual property. And in the meantime, while it exists, it would be to help people to navigate the system and to survive in the face of this horrible intervention into the free market system. Okay, so you mentioned something there in your answer and very good answer, by the way. You mentioned that there are some people that are working on the good side of IP. So I guess you mean like the good side of patent attorneys. And by that I would guess that you were not talking about Apple suing Samsung because things have rounded corners that they have, you know, like spell check and swipe and some of the other features that are pretty common on cell phones now. So what would be the good side of IP law? Well, I think that we have to distinguish between our capacities as private persons and our personal ethics and our morals and what's prudential to do in society given the dangers out there. And what are the types of policies that we should favor as decent people? So my primary impetus as an IP and a libertarian person is to say, listen, we ought not to have these laws. Now how you exist in the face of that is a different issue. And how companies are going to respond to that is a different issue. Let's take the welfare issue. Most conservatives that are kind of hardcore and libertarians would say that welfare is a bad idea. That is you should not have a system set up where free benefits are taken from taxpayers and given by the government to people for free like wealth, education, health, housing, jobs, et cetera. But we realized that one reason it's a bad idea is that if you set the system up people will take advantage of it. It's unrealistic to expect that if you hand out military industrial complex benefits or welfare of other forms, it's unrealistic to think people will not line up at the trough to do it. Right, it's the same reason that they have the signs in the national parks saying, please do not feed the wildlife because the wildlife will become dependent on you feeding them and then they forget how to find food on their own. Exactly, it sets up a system, it encourages, it sets up incentives that lead to bad results. And if we thought that we could just admonish people with our moral exhortations from PR campaigns or whatever and that no one would ever sign up for welfare even if the government is giving it for free or no one would take advantage of patent laws even if the government is offering these monopoly privilege grants, then it wouldn't be a problem. But the thing is people will take advantage of them. So the question to expect that people won't take advantage of them is unrealistic and unpractical. Companies like Apple or publicly owned, it's run by a group of managers and a board of directors that are obliged to respond to the shareholders' interest. And so let's suppose you're on the board of directors of Apple and you have a patent and you could use it to sue a competitor and obtain $500 million of market advantage. It would be irresponsible for you to throw that away just because you personally don't believe in patents. And even if you did, you're gonna get sued or you're gonna get fired. So the way the system works is it forces people to become enemies of each other and to start fighting each other and to engage in this game where everyone loses but everyone has an advantage. Basically the government sets up a prisoner's dilemma. And so the problem is the government and the state rules and the patent system and other similar legal regimes. So for people that might be listening who are not familiar with the prisoner's dilemma, can you explain what that is? So the prisoner's dilemma is the idea that you could imagine people in a situation where they're in a prison. So they're two prisoners and they're kept isolated from each other and the wardens or the prison keepers play them against each other. And it would be in their interest to both keep the same line and to say the same story. But the warden says, look, if you're the first one to defect and to give up on your friend, then you will reap a lot of rewards. If you both maintain the same story and refuse to cooperate, then you're both better off. But so there's an incentive set up in this situation where you don't know what the other guy's gonna do. And if you just defect, you have a reason to do that and you're better off, but then if the other guy's gonna do that too, then you're both worse off. So that's the classic prisoner's dilemma. And I think the government basically sets that up by making us... See, the thing is we have society, we have people that live among each other in a world of scarcity. And there's a potential for conflict. And the whole purpose of society and civility, civilization and property rights is to come up with rules that we can use to get along with each other. Now the government comes in and monopolizes this, just like it monopolizes the road function and other functions. And everyone gets used to the government running it. And the government says, unless you have the government do this, you won't have law and order in cooperation. But in reality, what the government does is it pits people against each other. And it actually sets up this war of all against all. It sets up these prisoner's dilemmas. It makes people enemies of each other because if I don't go lobby the government for my benefits, someone else is gonna get it. And so it makes us all enemies of each other. Whoever gets the biggest welfare payment or the biggest government benefit is taking it from someone else. So it makes us all start squabbling against each other and going to Congress and relying upon the legislators to be our saviors. And of course, they get the benefit of the bribery, the payments, the donations. So the system is caused by the state being involved in society in the first place. And one thing that's interesting, and I just found an article that you wrote about three years ago, and we'll get into this a little bit more in the next segment where you basically write about the first alleged copyright dispute, which happened in the year 560 AD. And to me, this is just absolutely ludicrous. The story here to where somebody hand wrote a copy of a book and then was sued for violating the ownership rights of the guy who owned the book. Find out more on copyright and IP when we come back. Peace, love, Liberty Radio. Peace, love online at fppradio.com. My guest is Stefan Kinsella, who I find to be a brilliant man and I agree with on a lot of things. And Stefan, I know that it seems like I'm, you know, sort of asking the tough questions in a manner to where, you know, like, hey, maybe this guy doesn't really believe similar to me, but I think it's important that, you know, libertarians or people who are Liberty-minded, that they do ask themselves the questions that those who don't agree with them would ask. And I love the write-up that you do about the first alleged copyright dispute in 560 AD. And it just goes to show that how many thousands of years of human history went by without intellectual property and people think, well, if we just get rid of intellectual property, then Apple's gonna own everything and people are just gonna sell everything as an Apple. Like I'll sell this pen and put the Apple logo on it and say that Apple made this pen and it's gonna be, you know, chaos. But that's not anywhere near the truth. You know, if we take intellectual property to its logical extent as the widow of Sonny Bono tried to do when she was a congresswoman where she wanted to extend copyright to forever less one day, then if we were to do that now, then every time I go down to buy a tire for my vehicle or whenever I go to buy pretty much anything, then I would really just, you know, like have to give some of the money to myself as one of the descendants of UGG, the guy that created the will. And when you show people, you know, that that's the logical extent of intellectual property, then it kind of, in my experience, gets them to rethink that, the whole concept of intellectual property. Am I just going completely off the rails here or is this something that you see as well? Well, so I agree completely with that way of putting it. Look, I have gone back and forth on this issue myself as a libertarian, as a lawyer, as a patent attorney. It took a while to figure this out and I've seen this process over the last 15, 20 years, hundreds, if not thousands of times with people having their eyes opened. And one reason is because the state and the special interests that benefit from the existing patent and copyright regimes will use basically propaganda to cover up what they're doing. And so they will play on the good hearts of people like me and you and libertarians and people that basically believe in property rights and society. And they will say, look, it's an intellectual property right. They will use the word property on purpose to cover up the nature of what is really being done here. A lot of people that are hostile to property rights and people that are hostile to intellectual property have a sort of leftist bent. I don't at all. I'm completely pro-property rights. I'm a libertarian, I'm in favor of the free market, individualism, profit and capitalism. And it is for those reasons that I am against intellectual property rights. And I also know what I'm talking about because I am a licensed patent attorney. I've been doing this for 20 years and I know the nature of the system. And so a lot of times the proponents of the system will just dismiss opponents by saying they're leftist, they're socialist, or they don't know what they're talking about. Well, that's not the true in my case. It's not true in the case of a lot of people that I have spoken with and seen their eyes open over the years. You asked for these examples. There is an example in the early 500s in I think Ireland about the copyright example where people are trying to start using the power of the government to stop people from printing books or distributing ideas that they don't want them to distribute. There's an even earlier example about a millennium earlier, 500 BC in the Greek city-state of Cyprus. And this is more a patent example where the ruling king or whatever he was would grant a one-year monopoly on someone who came up with the best food cuisine. So there was like a contest and whoever came up with the best recipe would have a monopoly on producing that recipe. So no one else could make that food dish for a year. So you see this example crop up over the centuries and it started really coming to the fore with the advent of the printing press. And that's when the government and the church started getting really concerned that people could start spreading ideas without their permission because the scribes before had controlled everything and the government with an alliance with the church could control which books got copied by hand. But with the printing press it was gonna get out of control. And you can see in today's day and age the internet is the modern equivalent of that and it's really threatening the entrenched interest. Hollywood, the movie industry, the music industry, software industry, pharmaceutical industry, the US government, et cetera. So you can see that the ability of people to do things on their own, to transmit information on their own without anyone's permission to each other, to learn, to compete, to emulate each other, that is a big threat to the established interests. And that is really what is going on. Copyright is basically censorship. Patent is basically anti-competitive and protectionist. It protects people from competition. That's explicitly the goal of patent law. And the idea that people that are in favor of the free market, the American idea, individual liberty, capitalism, private property would be in favor of the government coming in and preventing you from publishing a book or making a product because it's too similar to what someone else has done is an amazing accomplishment by the state of deluding the people to participate in their own impoverishment. And I'm really glad that you brought up the software industry in amongst the list of different industries that use intellectual property because it seems to me that the software industry, at least a sizable portion of, has sort of adopted the thought that, hey, intellectual property is bad. You've got the Mozilla Foundation. You've got the Wikimedia Foundation to where they put everything out and they say, hey, here it is. Take it. If you can make it better, go with it. But you're not seeing that in other industries. So is there something specific about the software industry that lends itself to more of an anti copyright sort of thing? No, I think they are just used to relying upon the government monopoly to stop competition. And the bigger players will do that. I think what people don't understand is that since the 1980s when the United States helped to foist upon the world, the burn convention and these other international copyright treaties, which we then adhered to, which now congressmen can use as an excuse for why we can't modify our copyright law. Like we can't reduce the term below 50 years after life or we can't get rid of these, the automatic aspect of copyright, which has been in place since the burn convention. They say, well, we can't do it. It'd be a violation of international law. So congress at the behest of these various special interests. Hold your thought. Hold your thought. We're at the end of the segment. We'll pick up in the middle of this question when we come back on Peace Love Liberty Radio. Back to Peace Love Liberty Radio online at fppradio.com. We'll get back to Stefan Cancella in just a moment. But first, I wanna make sure that I tell you about Roberts and Roberts Brokerage. Since 1977, for those of you keeping count, yes, that is longer than I've been alive, Roberts and Roberts has been a trusted source for buying and selling your investment grade precious metals. They take bitcoins, but not credit cards. Bitcoin, of course, being the stateless, decentralized open source currency, they take it for purchasing precious metals so that you can turn some of your profits into a long-term investment. And if you bought some Bitcoin about a year and a half ago when it was right around 30 bucks per Bitcoin, yeah, you have some profits. It's somewhere around 600 right now. You can turn some of those profits into a long-term investment called Roberts and Roberts Brokerage for knowledgeable advice on investing 800-874-9760. That's 800-874-9760. Back to Stefan Cancella and apologies on having to cut you off mid-answer. The breaks are hard limited. I can't adjust those to finish getting an answer to a question, but the question that I had asked for anybody that wasn't listening in the last segment was about the software industry and the use of some of the more open-source softwares to where the Mozilla Foundation, they put Firefox out for anybody to use. The Wikimedia Foundation, they have Wikipedia, they have the Wiki Commons, and a lot of other things to where they put information out for free for people to use. There's a bunch of open-source softwares, and you were saying that, you think that some of these companies might actually just expect a government somewhere to sort of help them protect the brand of what they put out, and you had mentioned the burn convention, and this is something that I was not familiar with, the burn convention, which is, I guess, an international treaty of sorts that says that the copyright cannot be reduced to less than 50 years after the death of the creator. So go ahead and finish telling us about the burn convention. Well, and so the burn convention is just one of dozens of international treaties, conventions, multilateral agreements, bilateral treaties that these states engage in, and they almost always sneak in some intellectual property provisions, usually at the behest of the West, especially the United States. And honestly, if you want a simplistic view of the world, it is Hollywood, the music industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and maybe the software industry in the U.S. part of it, which has the Congress in its pockets, and they have the government of the most powerful nation state in the history of the world, which runs dominant over the rest of the world, which strong arms other countries, India, Russia, China, Mexico, Canada, South America, I mean, it's unbelievable. They strong arm them into adopting intellectual property provisions, which basically favor pretty much only American industries. It's a huge wealth transfer. It's a huge suck on creativity, productivity. It's a transfer of money from the producer, I mean, from the consumer to the alleged innovators. And so this is our situation. And so what we have is we have a situation where we have national laws, which are bounded by treaties. So every government now, pretty much, is obligated to have a minimum set of standards for copyright, not only 50 years after life, which the United States is trying to raise to 70 after life, which is our current law. We're trying to make other countries agree to that by treaty, but also automatic provision of copyright. So copyright is now granted automatically. You used to have to apply for it or put a copyright notice on your work or renew it every now and then, otherwise it would expire. But ever since the Byrne Convention and its implementation, it's automatic. It lasts virtually forever. And by the way, you mentioned this hypothetical where it would be forever minus a day. That would theoretically violate the constitution because it says that Congress is authorized to protect copyrights for limited terms. So every 10, 15 years, when Mickey Mouse is about to go into the public domain, Disney lobbies Congress and they extended it for another 20 or 30 years. Sonny Bono was a great example of that. The guy that hid his head on the tree when he was skiing on the taxpayer dollar, I'm sure. So, you know, I guess good thing he didn't live longer to extend it even further, but that's probably happening. But it's gonna happen again anyway. Right, because it's about another 10 years until Mickey Mouse comes up for the public domain because back in the 80s, they extended any corporate creation to 125 years after the creation of the thing? Yes, and then this gets into the legal weeds and there are different types of copyright protection. One is for what's called works for hire. That is the alleged author of the work is the corporation if they own it from the outset. And for those works, because corporations don't die, then there's a term specified 75 years, 95 years, 120 years, whatever. If it's a natural person, then it expires 70 years after their death, no matter who owns it, even if they assign it to their employer. So there's a kind of a legal detail there, but the point is copyrights last over a hundred years now in most cases. And this has given rise to a horrible problem, the orphan works problem, which is because copyright is automatic now and because it's not always easy to find who the owner is because there's no requirement to register the copyright or to apply for it, in which case you would know who the owner was at least, you would know who to go to for permission to reprint this thing. There are millions and millions of works out there, the copyright status of which is uncertain and the ownership of which is indeterminable. And you're still threatened with lawsuits from these authors guilds in these other cases, even when they don't know who the owners are. So you have like this huge black hole of works for the last 70 years, which are just totally almost dead now. Amazon, I mean, Google has tried to copy them and try to make them available to the world. The authors guilds, the entrenched interests fight this at every step of the way. Just like the music and the media industries fought the VCR, the cassette recorder, the LP, even radio broadcast, television broadcast, the digital video recorder, they fight every technological advance and they claim that it's going to destroy culture, innovation and it never does. And it only makes them richer. So real quick, what would be your ideal copyright law? If, you know, in the hypothetical, the US Congress said, Stefan Kinsella, we value your opinion and we want you to help us rewrite the copyright laws. We're going to formally withdraw from all of these international treaties. What would you say is your ideal copyright law? Well, that's a good question. I mean, as a practical reform, there are things you could propose, reducing the term, et cetera. As for the ideal law, I mean, maybe we should say that there should be a copyright law, there should be a copyright on every government work ever written so that it's hard to reproduce because these ideas are pernicious and they're horrible. But the ideal copyright law is completely to get rid of it and to basically favor competition, learning, emulation, private property rights and the free market and to say that, listen, if you put an idea out there in the free market in the public, then people can learn from it, they can copy it. There's nothing whatsoever wrong with that at all. So I would completely abolish copyright law. I would completely abolish patent law. To my mind, these are two of the most pernicious, damaging and destructive laws in all of human history. People don't recognize it because they go under the banner of private property rights. Now I've got one question real quick and I'll just throw it out there. Hopefully we'll get your answer in the next segment. What about fraud? How do you handle fraud without IP? We'll find out when we come back. Love Liberty Radio. Stefan Cancella is my guest. We've got him for about 10 more minutes and I had asked the question in a very hurried manner at the end of the last segment. How do you handle fraud without IP? Meaning, for instance, a book written by Stefan Cancella or a book written by Daryl W. Perry, it has on the cover written by and then it's got the author's name and I have to plead ignorance on this, Stefan. I don't know if you put like a Creative Commons or an anti-copyright message in the beginning of your books but I have those in mind. And people often ask me, well, what's to prevent somebody from taking your book, rewriting all of the words in the same exact manner that you have them, putting their own cover on it and then selling it as if they were the author without intellectual property. And I have answers of, well, I really don't care because the reason I write is to get ideas out there but I would really love a patent attorney's answer to this question. So how do you handle fraud in our ideal world where there is no intellectual property, how would fraud be handled? Okay, so first of all, it's a really good question and this gets to the heart of the issue. It gets to the heart of the confusion spread by IP advocates who try to say that if you're for copyright infringement or if you're against copyright, then you're for plagiarism which is a type of fraud, et cetera. First of all, you have to understand that copyright and especially patent have almost nothing to do with fraud. They're not based upon the theory of fraud and they don't stop fraud. So for example, if I copy a movie or a book made by you and I just sell it as a knockoff, there's no fraud because I actually have the author's name on the cover. So there's really no fraud there. So fraud is neither necessary nor sufficient for copyright infringement. Well, if you replace my name with yours and purport it to be something that you wrote, then there is fraud. Well, there could be fraud but then you have to have a coherent theory of property rights, contract theory under, I'd say Rothbard's theory and then you have to understand what fraud means. Fraud is basically theft by trick. It's getting someone's property by misrepresenting the condition of the transfer of the title to the property. That gets into the weeds and I've written on that and people can look it up but fraud is a specific type of action and if you misrepresent your name on the cover of a book and you sell it and you get profit from that, I would agree that's a type of fraud but if it is and maybe it should be, it's already covered by just standard fraud law. We only need contract theory and fraud law which we already have. You don't need to come up with trademark law, patent law and copyright law in addition to that because they always add something extra which is completely unjustified and unlimbertarian. In other words, fraud is already prohibited and it should be and copyright does not stop just fraud. And let me give you just a simple example. There are millions of works that are in the public domain because they came into existence before the edit of modern copyright, thank God. The Bible, you know, Plato's works, Aristotle, Shakespeare. Mark Twain. These things are all public domain now. There is nothing whatsoever in copyright law prohibiting you or me from reprinting those tomorrow. And in fact, if you go on the Amazon store, you will find dozens of free or $1 or 50 cent versions of Cicero's works and ancient works for Kindle, et cetera. I mean, they're just free. None of these are fraudulent because they're just Cicero's works. I mean, it's exactly what it is. I mean, maybe you might like the formatting better of one over the other. You might pay a dollar over free. There's no fraud whatsoever. But there's nothing prohibiting you or me from taking Romeo and Juliet and putting your name on it and pretending to be the author and trying to sell it as a movie or trying to publish it as a novel, you know? I could say Stefan Cancelo's new novel, Romeo and Juliet. I could do that right now and it doesn't violate a single copyright law, okay? But why doesn't, and this never happens. Why doesn't it happen? Because there's no market for this and people would look like laughing stocks. It would be ridiculous. So there's obviously a clear technological and market solution to this kind of deception that is reputation, that is even fraud law. But you don't need copyright law to justify this. And anyone who argues in favor of copyright saying that you have to have copyright law, you have to have patent law, you have to have trademark law to stop fraud is either confused or they're a shield for the copyright and patent and trademark industry, in my opinion. And the question that I always love asking all of my guests is how did you come to the ideas of liberty? And since we're running short on time, I'm going to make it a two-part question of were you a libertarian before you became anti-IP or did those two things sort of happen simultaneously? Yes, I can give a quick answer to that. I was in 10th or maybe 11th grade in high school at a Catholic high school in Louisiana and fairly agnostic on all these issues, but interested and a librarian who knew I liked to read recommended that I read The Fountainhead by Ein Rand. And so it started with Ein Rand for me. So I read The Fountainhead and a bunch of other stuff. And so I became a libertarian very, very early on more of a randian type libertarian. And initially I was pro-IP because Ein Rand has an NSA for IP and most libertarians were roughly pro-IP, but it never made sense to me. And I always had a kind of itching mark in the back of my head about it. And so as I went to law school and as I started practicing IP law, I finally realized I had to look into this further and applying the libertarian principles I had been learning for a decade or so, more consistently and more serially, I finally had to realize that intellectual property had to be Jettison just like I became an anarchist after being initially a randian type menarchist. So you give up the idea in the state, you give up the idea of legislation as the way of making law and you give up the idea of intellectual property as a legitimate type of property right. And that is the step towards serious modern Rothbardian, Hopian, Misesian, libertarian radicalism in my opinion. So one final question, and I'm not sure if you've ever actually been to New Hampshire, but I'm sure you're familiar with the Free State Project, which is a move to get 20,000 liberty-minded people to move to New Hampshire in the hopes of exerting the fullest practical effort to the creation of a society where the maximum role of government is protection of life, liberty, and property. What are your thoughts on the Free State Project? I am totally excited by the idea. I don't know if I will join it. It's possible someday. It's probably unlikely. I'm totally in support. I think there's other projects that are similar, which have merit. I'm a little skeptical of the political approach. There are aspects to the Free State Project, which are not political, which I really appreciate, which is what I like about Bitcoin and other projects where you don't wait for the government to pass laws that are in your favor. You just do what you need to do. 3D printing, Bitcoin, you just make your own money. You make your own things. Torrenting and encryption, you just trade files, share files with information with each other without waiting for permission of the government. So I'm a little leery of the kind of political approach of trying to get influence, but I like the localized approach. I like the people that are leaders of the movement there. I understand the, I haven't been to New Hampshire yet. I've been invited to several of their conferences, the Porcfest and the other one. And I haven't made it there yet, but hopefully next year or the next year or two, I will. And I think they're basically great people. They all seem to be very voluntarious, very anarchist, very Nazesian, Austrian economics oriented and focused on practical solutions that can help us achieve liberty in our lifetimes. And I think there's a variety of ways to do that. Some are political, some are social, some are personal. And so I think they're fantastic and I'm totally in support of these people. And I hope you do make it up for the Porcupine Freedom Festival next summer, which starts June 21st, or possibly come up before that for the Liberty Forum, which happens in March 5th through the 8th. If you show up at either event, Stefan introduce yourself to me, I'll buy you a beer or whatever other substance that you like to drink. And where can people find you real quick? Stefanconcello.com has everything, S-T-E-P-H-A-N, concello.com. Stefan, thank you for taking time out to be on the show and I hope you tune in next week, same time, same place, online in the meantime, fppradio.com.