 And, you know, the funny thing is like, you know, if you imagine a dog, which is a stupid animal, even dogs recognize kind of a temporary, limited property right in their dog bowl. You know, they're eating out of their dog bowl and another dog approaches, they're going to growl and because there's a possibility of conflict, because there's only so much food in the bowl, they can't both eat the food, right? This is a common sense, almost undeniable feature of what property rights are. For some people, that'll be the most objectionable thing you've said so far. Picking on dogs. Could be. Okay, continue, please. Yes, I love my dogs. I'm looking at two smart poodles right now, but they're unintelligent in the sense of conceptual rational beings. Okay. I'm just saying even dogs can recognize, although I agree, I would take my poodles over some socialists any day. There's a line by Mike Maznick or someone else, he says that even birds don't try to copyright their songs or something, you know, they just sing them freely. But when you ask about why information, which is what the idea of IP is, is property rights and information, why information is not ownable, it's not exactly because it's replicable. Let's go back a second. Information as by the way, the proponents of intellectual property often point out, they will often say, well, I agree with you that only scarce resources can be owned, but information is always stored on something physical, right? It's always some arrangement of bits or atoms somewhere. And I think they're actually correct. Information is not a free-floating thing. We don't live in a platonic universe where there's ideas just floating around out there. Information is always embodied in some kind of substrate or medium. You know, even if it's in a signal being transmitted from Mars to the Earth in an electromagnetic wave, it's some kind of perturbation of the EM fields, which is some kind of scarce resource itself, because you can only use the bandwidth so much, et cetera. But usually it's stored and in copyright law, it says that there's a copyright in original works by an author fixed in a tangible medium of expression. This is what copyright law is. So even copyright law recognizes that you have to fix it. You can't just tell a story at a party and claim a copyright in that story. You have to fix it in a tangible medium of expression, which means you have to write it down. You've got to record it somewhere. You've got to store it somewhere, right? Which is how information works. All information is stored somewhere. Even if it's a memory, it's in your brain. It's some kind of impatterning of the neurons in your brain. But typically it's like ink on paper or carving on a tree, right, or a paint on a cave wall, right? Or the impatterning or the way that the pits and the ledges of a CD are put on there by a laser, which puts zeros and ones on there, which some other device can read and get information back out of. Information is always stored, in a sense, on some physical medium. I assume you'd agree with that. I don't think so. Yeah, and you sound very much like a patent attorney. Yeah. Yeah. But the thing is, guess what? These physical mediums are ownable scarce things. Someone owns them already, okay? So the problem I'm getting to is what I call double counting. And you see this in lots of areas of political theory and even libertarian talk. You'll have, for example, to take a slight digression, someone say that they own their labor. Okay? Now, I disagree with this. I understand what they're saying, but to me they're double counting. What they're saying is they own their body, okay? And that's fine. If you want to say you own your body and you want to word it by saying you own your labor, that's a way of putting it, I don't have a strong problem with that. But if you say, okay, I own my labor, which to my mind means I own my body and that gives me the ability to control my body as I see fit into labor as I see fit. You might as well say, I own my actions. I own what I do. Okay. I was just going to say that. I own my free will, right? Yeah. Or you could say, I own my wife because she's my wife. You know, the word my is there. It's a possessive, after all, right? I mean, or I own my memories or I own my age. It's my age. You know, I'm 49.8. That's my age. It is my age. I guess I own it. I mean, there's no end to these metaphorical ways of putting things, right? But my point is if you ask someone who says they own their labor, well, do you own your body? Let's say yes. I'll say so. Do you own your body and your labor? And quite often they'll say, yeah, I own my body and my labor. Now, to me, that's like saying I own my head and I own my brain and I own my thoughts and my brain. I mean, you keep adding these things and you end up double counting and the same thing happens with labor, by the way. So like a Randian will say, I created a new value. So that's the whole theory of rights for Randians is the creation of what they call values, like a noun. They think of things as values by which they mean something that you value. So they sort of skip the Austrian subjectivist aspect of it. Or they kind of bury it and say, well, let's give me an example. Like if I make a new mousetrap, yes, that's a value, okay, but I own the mousetrap because I actually had to own the wood and the metal that I made it from already. So when I rearrange these materials into a new mousetrap, I own the mousetrap because I already owned the constituent materials that went into it, right? Yes. And you created a value and you own that value. Like, no, I don't, you don't say I have to say and I own that value. The value is the mousetrap, but I own the mousetrap because I own the materials that went into it. And if I didn't own the materials, the raw materials that went into it, I don't own it. Like if I'm a factory, factory, factory, worker, worker, and I'm making a mousetrap for this own, I don't own the mousetrap that I make. You see, so they, they, what they try to do is they try to identify features of objects and they try to separate them from the objects and they try to say they're both ownable. So I own my body and I own my action. Well, but owning my body just means that I have the ability and the right to perform what actions I want to do with it. To say I own my body and actions is a weird type of double counting, which can get you into trouble, especially if you use the word value or labor instead of actions. Because now we get to the labor theory of value. I own my, which is what Locke did with the labor theory of property and what Karl Marx and the others did with the labor theory of value. They start thinking of labor as this substance that you own, right? Which they never would do if they keep straight in their minds the fact that you own the scarce resource of your body. That gives you the right, the ability to perform labor as you see fit. That is true. Okay. But it doesn't mean you own your labor as a separate thing that's independently ownable. When you start thinking like that, when you start double counting, you start thinking of labor as a substance that's ownable. And guess what? This substance that you own is kind of ethereal substance with things in the world that are unowned. You acquire this mystical tendril of connections to it. You own it now because you've mixed your labor, which you own your labor. Never see labor. It's never amiable. You can never measure it, right? And then the Marx scene starts saying, well, it's exploitation, right? If you don't pay someone, if you make profit off of one of your employees, because the labor they've mixed, they own their labor and it goes into these products they've made for you. So you're exploiting them. You're stealing from them. You're stealing their labor from them. You're effectively enslaving people by employing them. So basically this convoluted way of thinking, this imprecise way of thinking leads people to come to the exact opposite conclusion that common sense would lead you to that is offering to give someone something you don't owe them if they will do a service for you is stealing from them or exploiting. So it's completely backwards. So I think the way to look at this is step back and say it's not really the fact that information is replicable, which is why it's not a scarce resource, it's not ownable. It's that information just like bitcoins, right? What is a bitcoin? It's just the arrangement of material that someone else owns, right? Information has to be stored on a substrate, on a carrier. Proper property tries to grant property rights and ideas. But what are ideas? Again, ideas are knowledge or information, which is always stored in some underlying owned thing. And therefore, let's just consider an object that most people would uncontroversially agree is ownable and should be ownable. Like let's say a red billiards ball. So here we have a red billiards ball. Let's say it was manufactured in the year 1985. So now we have a 30-year-old billiards ball. It's got a certain size, it's got a certain color, it's got a certain weight, right? It could even have a little, it could have a pattern of information etched upon it somewhere. You could have, you know, it could have the Bible actually etched into it somewhere. So it could have information and pattern into it, right? So we have an object that has an owner. Now this object is describable by many of its features, right? Or characteristics or what you could call properties, right? One of the properties or features of this ball is its diameter. One is its mass. One is its age, okay? One is its composition, right? One is its degree of perfect sphericity, I don't know what the word for that is. One is its color. It could be bright red. These are all features of, another one is the information and patterned onto its outer surface. There could be a nice saying or the Bible or whatever on there. These are features of the object that are owned. And this is why I mentioned the double counting point. It is true that you own the ball and that means you own everything about the ball. But it doesn't mean that you own these features as some kind of separate metaphysical thing. You don't own the color of the ball in some general sense. You don't own redness. You don't own the age of the ball. If you did, that would mean that you have a property right in every other, I guess, thing in the universe that's exactly 30.1 years old or whatever the age is. You would have a property right in everything in the universe that has this exact sphericity and this exact mass and this exact diameter, right? Or it looks like this ball. And that is the problem with intellectual property. And that's the problem with treating Bitcoin as property in my opinion. Okay. But hold on for a second. I don't know anyone who supports IP that would claim that they own all of those things separate. They claim that they own the combination, this unique and original combination of characteristics. Well, not the whole thing though, right? So what they usually do, they isolate one set of features of the object. So let's take a book as a better example. So they'll say that they own the book and they own the way the book is patterned, right? The way the ink patterned on the book. That's where the information has to be stored, right? So what they're saying is any other object that's in patterned the same way, they have a property right in that object. Even though that other object is another physical thing that has another owner, right? So this is the fundamental problem. So here's what I'm saying. Information is one of the features of some owned object. It's not the only feature. It's one of the ones that's more easily copyable. So for example, if I see a book that someone else owns, it's pretty easy for me to make another book using my own resources that has a similar pattern of information on it. So in that sense, information is a feature of an object that happens to be easily replicable. But other features of the book may not be easily replicable. So for example, the age of the book, let's say it's the oldest book that ever we've ever found. 1500 years old or something like that. I can't make a new book that's 1500 years old. I just can't do that. Logically, I guess you could, but I can't see how you can do it. So that's a feature that you couldn't easily replicate. The weight of the book, I guess I could make an object that has the same weight as that book. So certain features of objects are easily replicable and certain features are not. But the point is, whatever the feature is, it's a feature of an owned resource and a property right is not violated by someone else having another resource that has similar features in some respects. This is the very problem of IP is that it all goes back to this double counting and it goes back to a mistaken idea. This is why when people talk about Bitcoin, they say, well, bitcoins exist. They use the word exist. It's like, well, to my mind, it's sort of a recovering Randian who appreciates her epistemology. When they say it exists, what they're trying to say is there is a conceptual term that we found to identify an operation of this phenomena and the term is Bitcoin and that helps us format our thinking. It's a valid concept. It has a reference in reality. It describes something that's actually going on. It's a legitimate concept. It's an accurate way of describing what's going on. So when they use the word bitcoins exist, what they mean is there's really a phenomenon out there. That's the way to understand what's happening. We're going to use this word Bitcoin in this concept, Bitcoin, to format our understanding of what's going on, right? But people get trapped into this, well, I've just come up with a valid concept, a valid way of understanding the way the universe works in this one little area. And so I'm going to attach the word exist to this. That's my grunting way of saying this is a valid concept. It's an accurate description of reality. So I'm going to say blah exist, because blah exist, which is my way of grunting out that I've come up with a useful way of describing what's going on, the blah must be ownable. This is basically the reasoning of these people. They go from conceptualization, the fact that there are legitimate concepts to whatever word I can slap on something that's a useful way of describing reality must point to something out there that is ownable. But the problem is quite often the thing they're pointing to is a feature of an object that is itself ownable. And the thing is already owned. The features cannot be independently owned. Okay, now that's basically the point. Your frustration, does a lot of it stem from the fact that you're having these discussions with people who aren't sort of versed in IP law or just legal concepts to begin with? Are you really having the same discussions to the same extent with your colleagues, for instance? No. Well, okay. So there are no colleagues, basically, is the problem. And the reason is, I know I'm not frustrated at people. I understand their confusion. Look, I mean, I've been struggling with this myself for a long time. And this is the way my thinking wins its way to try to find a way to assemble this stuff that you can see where you can find, you can feel this annoying problem that everyone has and they're not quite getting it right. And the one way you can tell that is everyone uses conflicting terminology. You'll have one Bitcoin advocate say, no, you don't own the Bitcoins. You own the coins. And I'm like, well, what the hell are the coins? And then another will say, no, you don't own the Bitcoins. You own the encryption key. I'm like, well, that's information on your computer and you already own your computer. So how can you own a key? And others say, no, it's because you have an implicit contract with, I'm like, well, where is the contract? What are the terms? So you can see they're going around in circles and I totally understand that. I'm not frustrated really at all. I guess if I'm frustrated, I'm frustrated with mainstreamers because your libertarians are typically not legal experts. They don't understand the legal concept, conceptual framework, which to my mind makes a lot of these errors clear more easily, more easily visible. The people that understand legal theory, they don't have a good libertarian principled framework at all. So in other words, people that understand legal theory aren't principled and don't care. And the people that care are confused about this emerging thing, but partly because they're not libertarian legal theorist experts. So I wouldn't say I'm frustrated with them at all. I am frustrated a little bit with people that are too cocksure about these things. I try to be cocksure about it because this is an emerging thing. It's not easy. I think it'd be fine to discuss things in a rational way, to ask questions, to gnaw on these things around the edges, but for people to just come out cocksure with these statements, which you can tell right away, they haven't thought it all through. And they're just making assertions, which they cannot back up. Or they haven't defined their terms carefully enough where you can even know whether the right or wrong, which is always a sign of someone who is kind of a loose cannon. So I don't mean to sound frustrated. I'm not. I think it's a difficult puzzle, but it's one that's important. And we have to try to solve it somehow. And we can only do it honestly. And by being aware of the nature of what we're really talking about and its implications for other parts of libertarian theory and for intersocial human cooperation. You alluded to this earlier, actually. But I think part of the problem is your comments are being construed as an attack, a direct attack on Bitcoin, where that's not the case. Yes. I think some people think when you say, Bitcoin can be owned. So I think they're thinking in practical terms, like ownership to them means just a practical system that works and they have control over the Bitcoins. And of course, I wouldn't deny that because I've had people send Bitcoins to me and I've sent Bitcoins to others. So I know that there is the way you can use a system to change these ledger entries, right? There's a way to do it, but that's not what ownership means. I don't think they have a appreciate. And partly my fault, because when I say, no, it's not ownership, I'm going back to the legal interpretation of ownership and not just legal. I mean, this is part of libertarian theory. It's important to make a distinction. It's important to make a distinction between right, between might and right. It's important to make a distinction between is and should. It's important to make a distinction between the de facto situation and the preferred, the preferred rightful situation, right? It's important to make a distinction between economic possession and between social cooperation and rights because you need the former to analyze human action per se, like Robbins and Crusoe on a desert island would take action. He would employ or possess scarce means. Now, these people might say he owns, if he finds a, if he finds some resource that he's using, he owns those resources. I think that's imprecise. We need to reserve the word ownership for a social situation. He, Robbins and Crusoe has no need for property rights. And ownership to me is linked in with property rights. Property rights make no sense and cannot exist, whatever the word exists means in that case, with someone alone on a desert island. Property rights are always rights against another person and they always control the legitimate ability to use a particular resource that the two or more people in this small, in this society could potentially have conflict over. Okay. And one more question of going long here. So one more question before I wrap up. Um, if you were going to write your book or revise your book against intellectual property or the, um, I'm wondering, where would, uh, this double counting fit in? Would it be just kind of supporting, uh, commentary or would it be more? No, I don't think it would radically revise it. It would be supporting. There's, there's, I would also be a little bit more, maybe I might, I might revise some of my wording on the word scarcity and make clear to people that it has a deal with rivalrousness, not just lack of abundance. Um, um, I also probably would bring in this negative servitude idea I've used before, which is, which complements what we've talked about today. And I've got a whole blog post on that, but in short, the negative servitude idea is a way of legally classifying the nature of intellectual property rights, which is, it shows that what an intellectual property right is, it's what's what we call a negative servitude or a negative easement. It's, it's basically a legal right for some person to use state or legal force against someone else to prohibit them from using their own resources that they legitimately own in a given way. And that is, um, an accepted legal classification in law called negative servitude, which you would see, for example, in a restrictive covenant, like in a neighborhood where people, everyone agrees that you can't paint your house purple. Okay. That's a negative servitude and a negative servitude is perfectly legitimate if it's contractually agreed to. That's why people do it. But if the government simply announced one day that person A has the right to veto how everyone else in his neighborhood paints their house, the government will be granting a negative servitude to A without the consent of the burden to states. That would be a taking of property. And that's exactly what IP does. Copyright and patent or negative servitudes that the, where the, whereby the government grants to someone who registers some claim with the state saying, I've come up with a new copyright song. I've come up with a new invention and the government says, okay, we're going to give you the right to veto how others use their existing own resources. That is a negative servitude. The problem with it is, it's involuntary. The people who are burdened by it never agreed to that. So this is really the essence of the problem of patents and copyrights, or that's one way to explain it. And I did not have that in my original book. So I would add that and I would add this double counting stuff too is another way to illustrate the dangers of IP. Okay. My guest has been Stefan Kinsella, patent attorney. You can find him at c4sif.org. I believe I have that correct. Is there any other website or, for instance, a podcast you want to mention? Well, I have a c4sif.org is where I put a lot of my intellectual property related material. My general website, Stefan Kinsella.com has all of my books and articles and I have a podcast there too, which I'll run this podcast on when you release it. Okay, great. And I'll link to that on the show notes. Thank you very much for joining me for this in depth and extended conversation. I really enjoyed it. And please visit my website at powerandmarket.com. Until next time, take care.