 Hello everyone, welcome to Triple V, a show dedicated towards advancing the message of a free society. I'm your host, Mike Shanklin. Today I'm joined with a really special guest. His name is Stefan Kinsella. Stefan actually attended Louisiana State University where he earned a bachelor's of science and master's of science degrees in electrical engineering and a jurist doctor from Paul M. Hebert Law Center, excuse me if I pronounce that incorrectly. He also obtained an LLM at the University of London. Kinsella is a registered patent attorney, a libertarian theorist and lecturer and the director of the Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom, C4SIF, and founding an executive editor of the Libertarian Papers and blogger at the Libertarian Standard, a very active gentleman. You can find more of Stefan's work over at Mises.org or at his website, StefanKinsella.com. So how are you doing today? I'm doing great, Michael. Good to be here. Yeah, glad to have you on the show. Before we get into the meat and potatoes, the real details here, I always ask everybody who comes on my show two important questions, obviously I'm sure you know these already. The first one is what is your philosophy and how do you get it across to others? I think that's a very vital question to start with. Sure. Well, as for the first, my philosophy, my political views are libertarian and I can explain my particular variant of that and that integrates into my other philosophy of life, which I don't think is as relevant, but the general idea of being a good person, being a good neighbor, trying to live a good life, all that kind of jazz. But in terms of political philosophy, a libertarian of the sort of Rothbardian, heavily objectivist influence, but I am an anarchist and I am a objectivist in the sense that I am not a skeptic. I don't believe that morals are relative. I don't believe that we can't know reality in the universe. So I'm 47. I've been a lawyer since I was, you know, my mid-20s and I've been a sort of a religious skeptic and state skeptic since I've been about 16 years old, primarily initially because of Ein Rans influence and then later the more anarchist writers like Rothbard and the Hannah Harrells and people like that. So basically I am in favor of peace. I'm in favor of society, civilization, cooperation, productivity, prosperity, and finding a way that people can live together in a peaceful, productive way. I'm totally in favor of capitalism and prosperity and industrialism in the modern age and technology. Nothing against that at all. But I'm also in favor of peace and individualism and of course libertarianism as the means to achieve that. To me, libertarianism is just the systematic, consistent application of the common sense idea that most people have, which is that we should live in that live and live in peace with our neighbors and work things out in a reasonable, peaceful way when we have disputes. As far as how you get the ideas out there, well that's a challenge. To my mind that's more of a strategic issue. I mean there's two fundamental approaches you can take that you can just live your life and try to be a good person and try to be successful in whatever you think success means, family life, career, peace, civil liberties, that kind of thing. You could also try to work as an application or as a hobby or as a side pursuit or even as part of your life project, try to work for liberty, which is what I do to a certain degree and one way to achieve that is to try to live a good life and to try to lead by the power of example. That is if you are a successful person who has their stuff together, the kind of person people come to for advice or for help when they need help and they know that you have your stuff together, you have a good life, you're successful, you're positive, then they're going to be more receptive to your message of liberty when it comes up. I don't think being a boar is the way to do it. I don't think being always in the face of people and intruding on their space and just taking every chance you can get to lecture them on libertarianism is the way to go, although I sometimes am guilty of doing that of course. I think it's just over time people see there's a solid good intelligent person who actually integrates this philosophy into their life and so you're not going to just laugh off their ideas as the way things are some nut when we start talking about getting rid of the fed or cutting back on the police or war. There's a certain sincerity and credibility that you acquire by being a good person integrated into normal life in other ways. Yeah, I completely agree. So basically a consensual based agreement based society that is peace and then living by example to help spread that message obviously you've gone above and beyond that too so congratulations on that. But how did you get to this point really? There's got to, I mean obviously you talked about 10 Hills and Rand and all that stuff. But were you private schooled, public schooled, home schooled, did your parents practice peaceful parenting, were your parents apolitical, political, what kind of environment were you as a child and how did you have to escape it? For me I had to escape a status family, not that I'm not friends and family with my family members but I came from a pretty status family, almost all my family was in the military and we can go on for this for hours but anyway, I came from a status family. I was curious to where your background, how did you get to this message? Yeah, it's kind of biographical and my personal story is personal of course but the basic is I was adopted into a middle class family in Louisiana and I lived in a rural setting, kind of quasi farm area. I went to private Catholic schools all my life until college and I think that in my case, I was also small, like small framed when I was younger and sort of a late loomer and I was a smart ass so I got picked on a lot by bullies, even at private Catholic schools you can't get away from bullies. My parents were sort of blue dog Democrats, conservative Democrats, they weren't that political. I kind of thought I was a Democrat when I thought about it until I think I registered to vote when I was 18 and I registered Democrat just because my parents said we were Democrats but I never had voted Democrat. My first vote was Reagan and after that it's been libertarian and after that I don't vote anymore so that's been my progression but I think that when I was young and being bullied and also being adopted, it made me very sort of naturally individualist and also naturally opposed to injustice. The injustice of bullying and the individualism of being adopted, you don't care about all this sort of anativistic family related crap, you just care about your own achievements so when a librarian at my Catholic high school introduced me to Imran's fiction in like 10th or 11th grade, I just devoured it because I resonated with that message so I became a hardcore and up until that time I was basically agnostic. I mean I knew nothing, I had new opinions on philosophy, I was into science so when I started understanding there was a whole field of argumentation and inquiry about economics and justice, it just appealed to me greatly and it just fascinated me and Imran's sort of individualistic quasi-anti-state, pro-free market, pro-individual rights perspective really appealed to me and at first I didn't read the other type of libertarians because she also said libertarianism is evil, it's not what we believe so I believed her because she made so much sense on other things so I actually didn't read like I saw some libertarian party pamphlets and things like this at LSU when I was first starting in 1984 and I just ignored it because I figured they were just poisoned and confused people but I couldn't help but noticing similarities right like they seem to be saying the same thing that Imran says in her quote capitalist wing of her philosophy so I finally read Rothbard and the Tannehills and everyone else and just broadened my perspective and sort of left the randiness and behind in some senses so that's kind of my story about how I got involved in it but for me it's always been a passion about truth and consistency and justice and wanting to know the truth about things and trying to be a good person and applying those ideas in a consistent societal way. Now good stuff, I'm loving this interview so far so let's get into IP let's jump right into it I'm gonna let you kind of go over the IP thing I don't even know where to start on IP really so go into your spiel on IP and I'll ask a bunch I got a bunch of questions from from my audience that they want to ask and drill you on so go for it. Yeah oh no absolutely so you know I throughout law school and until I started writing my first articles I was always interested in rights theory like how we justify our rights and define property rights and economics and epistemology all these kind of issues Austrian economics these kind of things that a lot of us get into anarchy theory, anarchist theory, private defense agencies that kind of stuff and to be honest there's still my main interest but I started I remember reading Ein Rand had a chapter in her I think it's capitalism the unknown ideal and I think I was in law school when I read that or maybe earlier and it was on patents and copyrights and it sort of relates to her theory of property too about how man has to have secure property rights in his creations because the whole purpose of human life is productive sort of labor or human action and so it's natural that you have to have some kind of legal protection for the output of your product productivity and then she just extends that to the idea of intellectual property and her argument for IP is a bizarre you know it's kind of like utilitarian like she talks about how it makes sense that copyrights only last for 70 years plus after death or whatever it was at the time and patents only last for about 17 years but you can see she's straining to justify these sort of artificial legal systems because if you own a car or a house you don't own it for a fixed number of years you own it until you get rid of it right or until it is destroyed I mean you own it forever theoretically so there's something odd about the idea of IP and her argument for it just didn't make sense to me I was like what was the general case because she was finding a way to I think what happened with Ein Rand came to America from Russia she saw how great this country was compared to the basically the Soviet Union and so she fell in love with it and she thought that the Constitution and the founders were geniuses and they were basically presumptively right presumptively right on anything unless she came up with a good reason against it in fact I heard that she originally was for imminent domain you know state taking private property because it's contemplated by the Fifth Amendment and so she assumed it had to be legitimate and then she finally rejected that idea because she is a little bit too principal for that but she never did get over her accepting of the American tradition of patent and copyright which is blessed by the Constitution so I think Ein Rand was trying to bend over backwards to come up with a way to fit this artificial legal privilege which is in our Constitution into her growing harmonious theory of natural rights which is somewhat overlapping and compatible with the theory of the founders but not completely so I think she tried a little too hard and I think that shows for anyone who tries to read that a little too closely and in when I started practicing law in 1992 I started practicing patent law and so I started thinking harder about this issue and within about a year or two I'd finally admitted to myself you know this is a futile project I cannot I can't rehabilitate Rand's contorted arguments on property on IP she was wrong and then I started understanding a lot more and this is the topic of the day I think IP is one of the top five or six worst things the state does and people are coming to realize that because because of the internet basically the internet reveals to us on a daily basis examples of the abuses that the IP system lets the government foist on people and and business people too and it also magnifies the effects of it like copyright like you know there was no widespread piracy before the internet so now piracy is happening so copyright law would cause the government to crack down on people so I started getting into the topic of IP because I practiced it and I was interested in libertarian theory and although it's still honestly not my main interest it has required me to integrate it into a more coherent and overall holistic view of libertarian property rights so understanding IP I think helps you have a better understanding of the function and purpose of justice and property rights and law in the first place so they complement each other so so you want to that's kind of my overview of how I came to it but you can think of intellectual property as a as a subset of state law which deals with protecting what they call creations of the mind okay and that includes patents and copyright and trademark and trade secret and some other more recent special laws the two main ones are patent and copyright so patents are basically legal monopolies the government grants to inventors of a new invention in exchange for them disclosing publicly in a written patent application document filed with the public or made public to everyone that gives them a protection from competition for about 17 years and copyrights basically automatically grants people who create artistic works like a novel or a movie or a play or a painting or software grants them exclusive rights to prevent people from copying or utilizing in certain ways for up to 70 years after your death so these are I think the right way to look at these laws as are you familiar with restrictive covenants and like neighborhood associations right yeah and things like rights of use or easements yes so let's say that you have a piece of land and your neighbor says look I have all the way around your property to get to the town every day I'd like the right to cut across the corner of your property and I'll I'll pay you something a hundred bucks a year I'll let you graze your cows in my path you know I'll pay I'll give you some compensation but I'd like this right because it will help me so basically you're contractually transferring a part of your property rights in your field to someone else now that's perfectly legitimate to divide up your property by contract or by sale right because you did it voluntarily but if the government just gave your neighbor the right to cross your field they passed a law saying you know former jones has the right to cross against michael's property whenever he wants we would we would regard that as a taking of property rights it'd be transferring part of your property rights to someone else so the problem is not that he has the right to do it the problem is that you didn't consent to it you didn't voluntarily do it so in the law we would call that a negative servitude well actually that that's an easement but a negative servitude is the type of that like in a restrictive covenant or a neighborhood association you might have 10 or 15 or 100 neighbors all sign an agreement saying that none of us will use our homes for commercial use or for a pig farm or we won't paint our doors some garish ugly orange color that will hurt the neighborhood's overall value people agree to this and this is called a negative servitude it means your neighbors have a veto right over how you can use your property in certain narrowly defined ways and again like the easement that is perfectly legitimate if it's done consensually and contractually what patent and copyright do is they effectively give the holder of the patent or the holder of the copyright a negative servitude granted by the state which gives them the right to prevent other people from using their property in certain ways so it's like a negative servitude that was never consented to by the burden the state we call it so for example if i have a copyright in the movie star wars i can prevent you from using your own property to make a star war sequel right or to write a novel i can prevent you from printing on your own printer on your own piece of the paper and selling this to people the sequel that you wrote so it's like a veto right now and i can use that to force you to pay me a license to get out of that right or if i have patent on a new mousetrap i can prevent you from making your own mousetrap with your own property although in the natural state of society i would have no right to do that so unless you agree to it but so the government basically grants these negative servitudes to people without without the consent of the burden the state so this is the fundamental problem with intellectual property is that it basically takes property rights away from owners who already own existing material property and transfers part of that property right to these beneficiaries of patent and copyright that's the fundamental problem with it it's taking its death by the government yeah so it's not just an exclusion per se it's a transfer of property it's the theft i completely agree with you a good analogy right there um actually have pika chan he wants me to ask you if you can define if we can all define intellectual property and copyright laws as artificial scarcity or whether it is objectively something else so i think what he's getting at there is the original basis for property the very reason that there is such a thing as property is because of the fundamental fact of scarcity or you can call it rivalousness in other words we live in a world where there are some usable things right that are useful in our human actions to accomplish our goals but which are scarce which that means rivalrous which means you can have conflict over them in other words only one person can use this thing at a time like um you know if i want to use a um a fishing net to catch fish i only i can use that net if you if you want to use the net to catch fish you have to physically take it from me so that we're going to have violent conflict over it so the purpose the very essence of property is to allocate one owner of a given resource that is otherwise subject to conflict so that it can be used peacefully and productively we allocate it in a way that sets up this kind of visible borders so people know what the property is what its boundaries are and who owns it there's some kind of association between the owner and the thing and that way people at least the people that want to be civilized they live in peace and to respect each other's rights they know what to avoid they know not to step onto your property they know that it's your net etc right so that's the very function of property if we didn't have scarcity the very concept of property would be literally impossible would make no sense it would be not only would it be unnecessary it would be inconceivable to have property if we lived in this kind of magical ghostly realm of infinite prosperity where everyone basically was magical and you just snap your fingers and have whatever you wanted at any time then the idea of property makes no sense because it wouldn't even be possible to take something from someone and even if you did you could just recreate it right away so all these ideas make sense only as a way to deal with the problem of scarcity so what happens is in the field of IP yes sometimes the defenders of IP they they describe what they're trying to do as trying to create artificial scarcity because what they see is that in this physical world there is scarcity and by that I mean lack of abundance like we all don't have enough of the things we really want we don't have enough large houses we don't have enough good new cars we don't have enough plentiful food etc if you could have more it would be better luckily the free market lets us produce abundance in the face of the fundamental fact of scarcity so it's a good thing it's a way of overcoming scarcity because of the division of labor and you know free energy of people cooperating etc but but I think that it's only a method so what happens is people start understanding economics and they say how is it possible that we have prosperity in this world of scarcity and they understand that the free market has incentives and profit motive and all this and cooperation division of labor it lets it happen and so they start thinking like economists or like utilitarians trying to come up with rules that instead of doing justice that has a beneficial result they come up with rules that have the results in other words they're trying to tweak these rules to achieve a result in society so they start thinking like central planners what rules can we the government impose on society that will give the right incentives to do the right things so then they start thinking they start they start thinking about the problem of the commons right when you have the tragedy of the commons when you don't have carefully to fund property rights and you have a waste and they start thinking that when you have privatized an internalized cost then you have incentives to be efficient and all these things and slowly start thinking well that must apply to value in general and certainly knowledge and ideas are valuable and certainly we want to encourage people to have knowledge and spread knowledge and acquire knowledge and develop new technologies so we need to apply similar types of rules there and unfortunately there's no scarcity in this world because ideas and patterns and recipes and information are infinitely reproducible a billion people can use the same fishing technique at the same time or the same cake recipe at the same time so it's not scarce like land is okay so the scarcity of the physical world leads us to have to come up with property rules that allow them to be used peacefully and that has all these beneficial effects like good incentives and tragedy of the commons is overcome etc so you have these people that say well intangible things like ideas are also valuable so let's but unfortunately they're scarce now here's their mistake when they say unfortunately they're scarce because actually it would be great if everything that was scarce wasn't scarce it'd be great if we all had infinite the man is an infinite water infinite clean water infinite energy that would be a good thing and the free market is trying to get us closer to that but it can't go all the way because we live in a physical world so what they do is perversely they come up with a system that says let's take these things that are unscars or non-scars and let's try to make them scarce so that the same kind of incentive effects work on them that work in the scarce world but they sort of forget that the whole reason we need these incentive effects in the scarce world is because they're actually scarce and we have to ration we have no choice but to ration we have no choice but to allocate only one user at a time because that's the way it is if you could have two people use the same bicycle at the same time who would object to that it makes no sense so what they do is they pass laws that try to impose scarcity on ideas now in my view and this is not my view as a political theorist or a libertarian it's more my view as an economist it is literally impossible to have property rights an idea I mean literally and it's literally impossible to make an idea scarce that's just not their nature they cannot be owned what they what they end up so if this goes back to my negative servitude example really what it is it's like a disguised way of transferring property so for example an analogy would be when people say people have fought over religion for millennia well actually that's not literally true what people fight over is scarce resources always so for example if I'm a Muslim and I kill you because you you're a Christian and you won't convert to to Muslim then I'm really fighting over you and I are fighting over who gets the right to control your body right that's the fight that's the dispute now my reason for trying to take over your body is because of my religious views but that's just my purpose or motivation that's not what we're fighting over we're always fighting over a scarce thing so whenever anyone wants a property right in the idea that's literally impossible because you can't control an idea you can't put a fence around an idea all you can do is use it as an excuse to take other people's property so for example Jamie Thomas the woman who downloaded a few songs or uploaded a few songs to the internet a few years ago and now it's liable for a few hundred thousand dollars because of copyright really the dispute is about who owns the money in her bank account so the art r i double a or whichever studio suing her is really using this copyright excuse as a claim as an excuse to go after the money in her bank account okay and if they succeed then ultimately what happens is they get the ownership of her money instead of her so the dispute is over her money but if you go back to libertarian first principles you own her money and you own your property unless you do one of two things unless you contractually give it away which she did not or you commit a tort or a crime and then you invade someone else's property so that you cause them damaging then you owe them restitution she didn't do that either sorry i had to sneeze right then okay now good stuff um so i completely agree with you once again who would have thought moving on actually this is a very important you know it's kind of like we're jumping back into graduate school you and i and we're going to be looking at case law one more time so let's go into a case real quick nathan nathan frazier asks um he wants to talk about adam schwarz he wrote a nice little thing here i'm just going to sum it up here it was adam schwarz what was it eric schwarz erin schwarz yeah erin schwarz what i say adam sorry for erin schwarz yeah so what i want i want to hear your opinion on on some people never even heard about that so let's kind of give this a chance to an opportunity at least spread what happened to him and then i want to hear your reason yeah so erin schwarz who committed suicide recently at the age of 26 i believe he was a brilliant young tech savvy guy who i think he went to college really early and he got involved in a lot of um very important projects like rss protocol and i think reddit things like that early on and he was instrumental in helping to defeat sopa the stop online piracy act from last year so this is a guy but he had this i think he was sort of a one of these kind of tech opens open source civil libertarian types i don't think he was a libertarian exactly he had a lot of good instincts though pushing in our direction he he basically saw from fundamental injustice something wrong with the idea of of information being locked up so one of his early projects was he um he hacked i don't know if he hacked into but he somehow got access to this case database this legal database called pacer p a c e r it's an all caps system that a lot of lawyers use and basically it's the system where they collect publicly reported judicial decisions and cases from courts around the country and they put it into this database that warriors pay to access the thing is under us law all these government documents for public domain there's no copyright in these cases and of course it would be perverse to have a copyright in them if we have the doctrine which we have in the us that ignorance of the law is no excuse i mean if we're going to be held to account for violating the artificial and huge millions of law database of the country of the governments we at least should have access to know what the hell they are i mean if the government could copyright them and put them behind a paywall then that's just adding insult the injury or adding damage to damage or however you want to put it right i mean at least we should be able to look up the damn laws we're supposed to follow right really to know what we have to do to avoid going to their being stuck in a government especially since what is it every every day the average american breaks three felonies yeah and in the copyright case i've seen studies that estimate that every one of us on average potentially is liable for about four point five billion dollars of damages from copyright statutory damages alone just from average internet activities like cutting and pasting an article sending it to your friends that kind of stuff so the law is truly obscene and it of course allows when you have so many laws and they're not rooted in natural justice and there's so many of them it allows prosecutors to have discretion and what they enforce so everyone's a criminal so they can basically turn the screws on whoever they want but in any case so swark liberated the pacer database and i think the doj department of justice was considering pursuing him but they dropped it because he really didn't violate any copyright because it's not subject to copyright well his most latest sort of ampic or whatever you want to call it was he went to mit and he he he took about um or he copied about you know several million academic articles from the jstore jst or database which is a very expensive private database now this is full of material that's largely copyrighted but it's academic stuff that like the professors didn't sell it they just published it in some journal right so it's it's it's copyright but it's it's not really for profit stuff by and large and he took these millions of articles he got them from a mit uh at the closet he stuck his laptop in there and just downloaded he got around the firewalls and all that kind of stuff with his you know his techniques and so of course the department of justice goes after him and uh they basically haven't threatened with three to five decades of life in federal prison now they probably would have used that to extort a plea deal from him maybe six years maybe six months i don't know but even six months in federal prison for a 26 year old guy who and probably probably he would have had to agree not to use the internet for like life or 10 years or something and this is his life so he was despairing and now i think he had psychological problems too because i don't think most people commit suicide even over that but he he did he committed suicide i think he just he was giving a big f u to the government he wasn't going to put up with it if he couldn't live like that and i admire his outrage and his his kind of courage and his sense of justice he he just wouldn't submit uh but it's very sad because he was pushed to that by the government so i view that i think copyright law killed him basically it's it's what in in law we would say that the proximate cause of his death the proximate cause of his death is the federal government and copyright law and so i think every single person especially libertarians who are sympathetic copyright law should take a minute and think about that here's it some innocent guy who gave us a lot he didn't do anything wrong in a libertarian sense all he did wrong was maybe commit a minor act of trespass in a closet of MIT but that the private civil matter between MIT and him has nothing to do with the data he copied um so uh i think that everyone who's in favor of copyright should kind of hang their head in shame because they're a little bit morally complicit in this guy's murder yeah i agree um Wayne Padgett wants me to uh well he actually has a really good topic here he says if intellectual property disputes were handled in civil court instead of criminal court he says he might be inclined to support it more over uh however to define it as a criminal act and to prosecute it in the same courtroom as murder and rape is intellectual dishonesty maybe this comes back i read an article from Rothbard a while back when he was talking about obviously patents are just there's no way you can justify a patent but maybe some form of natural or common law would would have some form of copyright just you know uh in the essence because if somebody writes something and creates it we all know we all know einstein's work right you know i mean we don't have to really go around and somebody else copies einstein's work we still know it's einstein's but you know looking at this and maybe we could move into the ron paul versus ron paul dot com issue here too that's obviously big thing so i'll let you go ahead you're a good speaker you know what you're saying go ahead well first of all patents are enforced by and large in civil courts um and they're totally unjust and copyrights are at large enforced in the civil courts as well i mean if you if you get a lawsuit from um the mpda for uploading a copy of a movie now yes sometimes they're enforced criminally to the copyright law but even even the civil even civil enforcement is devastating i mean um i think jamie thomas thing was civil i mean this poor woman it's victim hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage um and she doesn't pay they can take her house or whatever they can garnish her wages i mean she she'll be paying off the rest of her life perhaps uh so i don't think the civil thing is going to help um on the rothbard issue rothbard listen rothbard uh was just he went down a dead end on this issue i think he made a mistake um me too rothbard was actually if you read his chapter in ethics of liberty on um knowledge true and false he has a really good explanation of why he's against defamation law which is liable and slander or or what some people call reputation rights which in my view is just another type of ip it's based upon the same idea that if you work you put labor or effort in something and you create something of economic value you have some property right in it this is the randian idea and in fact the randians are in favor of defamation law and rothbard explained that look you can't have a property right in in what other people think about you because you don't own their brains um and in fact the austrian view of value is subjective that is there's not like some intrinsic substance or quality inside of an object that gives it value value is a subjective process right demonstrated interaction so you if i own a you know an ipad you know it's it's valuable to me and i could sell it to someone and it has value for that reason it's only because of our actions and the value derives from its objective functionality and property but the property right is only in the physical thing itself you don't have a property right in what its value is in other words it might be worth $200 today it might be worth 150 tomorrow if a new model comes out right my use ipad let's say so i think but my property where it's one invaded just because the value fell because i don't have a property right in value and hapa explains this too you only have the property right in the physical integrity of the objective borders of your scarce resource that you have acquired either by homesteading it from the unknown state of nature or by contract from a previous owner i mean that's that's what property rights are that basically exhaust the entire field of property those two principles answer everything any potential thing that can be contested any scarce resource in the world theoretically or in principle you could answer the question who owns it by asking who got it first or who who sold it to who i mean it's very simple um that answers everything you don't you don't ever have to ask well who who made its value go up or down etc so what rock rub said in that chapter well it was actually if you extend his reasoning it would be against trademarks it would be against patent and copyright now in his other chapter in the man economy state he has a few comments about this too about patent copyright he shoots down patent um and he shoots down state-ranked copyright but then he talks about there being contractual copyright and i think what he had in mind there was this if you own a mouse trap now again he's a little bit confused here because he uses a copyright idea but a mouse trap would be something subject to patent because it's an invention but so it's not really clear what he knit by this but what he said was if you own a mouse trap and you don't want people to copy it then if you sell it to a customer you could make them contractually agree that they're only giving the mouse trap but not the right to copy it now i interpret that to mean if you're a buyer of a product you could enter into a contract obligating yourself not to do certain things with it i agree that you could do that i think it's a very unlikely contract to kept john because i think jeff tucker in a recent um interview talked about suppose you're selling potatoes and right next to you is another guy selling potatoes and he's selling general purpose potatoes for a dollar a pound now i'm selling paid potatoes for a dollar a pound but i have a stipulation or i have a condition that i make everyone signed and buys potatoes for me you can only use these potatoes for for french fries that's the only thing you can use them for right now why would someone pay me a dollar a pound for potatoes that has a limitation on what they can do with it it makes no sense i would have to lower my price to compete with with tucker you know and if i lower my price i'm going to have less profit and if i have less profit then in the long run on the free market this kind of ridiculous practice will get weeded out i mean it just makes no sense more over i either i have to put a big penalty or a small penalty for violating this breach so i say and if you use the potatoes to make potato pancakes then you owe me a penny or i say or you owe me a million dollars now what it is going to buy a dollar's worth of potatoes and potentially obligating itself towards a million dollar fine for using them in my own home in a way that the seller for some bizarre reason doesn't want me to no one's going to sign this and the same thing it's true for inventions or for books or software if you're someone's offering a book you know i won't buy a beach thriller i'm going to florida next week i want to have a book to read and this guy says here's my five dollar book but you got a final dotted line and you got a promise to pay me ten million dollars if you ever let anyone else borrow this book or if you ever write a sequel that anything like it or if you ever learned anything from it whatsoever then you owe me a ten million dollars i mean i'm not going to buy that book i'm going to go pirate the book or i'm going to buy a book from another guy that's a more reasonable seller right so these kinds of terms are ridiculous the only term you would agree to be something trivial like a slap on the wrist like all right i owe you ten cents fine but then that's not going to deter piracy yeah so this whole contractual argument makes no sense but anyway even if you assume it makes sense what what rockford says is okay so the buyer of this mousetrap can't use the mousetrap in certain ways he can make copies of it and he can't compete with his his seller for example but rockford recognizes but this still doesn't get us to any kind of reasonable simulation of what patents are like because it wouldn't stop third parties who learn about this mousetrap because it's on the market now right so what he says is aha but under under property law you only have the right to sell what you own so for example in the case we had earlier if you agree to let me have a right of way over your land like say for for life or forever then you sell your land you have to sell to someone subject to that right of way you can't sell more than you own you can't sell the whole property free of the right of way because now you divided it up so rockford analyzes that to the case of the mousetrap and he says well the the buyer of the mousetrap didn't have the right to copy so if someone else sees it they can't get the right to copy from that so you can see that's the misstep in his argument it makes no sense whatsoever i don't need the right to copy to copy it i gained information in a peaceful way i observed someone's mousetrap i learned something about the world i learned that it's possible to configure metal and wood and springs and things in a certain way that has a certain effect that's just knowledge about cause and effect in the world and there's i have never entered into any just by observing a physical object i didn't enter into any contract with the buyer with the seller with anyone i didn't violate anyone's property borders i didn't commit a tort i didn't invade anything so there's no there's no basis that the seller or the buyer could insist on me not using that knowledge however i see fit yeah let's let's focus on the ron paul versus ron paul dot com argument obviously great stuff on the uh i agree with you on on the uh intellectual property arguments but you know what where's your stance on the ron paul versus ron paul dot com issue um so i think the right way to look at it is um uh we have a internet that is largely free market but has been of course is under government oversight in various ways um of course the government threatening the tax now they they're threatening that there's an agency called ice i see you know invovations and custom enforcement they shut down two three hundred sites a year they just you'll go to these sites they're just shut down with a big scary fascist you know logo up there and that's usually because they they're they have links or ability to sell trademark counterfeited goods or they have child pornography or online gambling or something like that so the government has various hooks into controlling the internet and there's a sys book ci fba coming up which the government is trying to use to control freedom of speech and what people can do so far was a threat to the internet which is probably going to come back under acta the counterfeiting treaty or the the tbp the specific partnership i mean i hate all these acronyms but these guys are relentless so the government has its hooks in the internet and of course one of one of the hooks they have into the internet is their manipulation and subtle fascist control and i mean fascist in a literal sense you know fascism is the idea that you have nominal private ownership of of capital goods and factories and industry but the government basically pulls the strings behind the scenes and we have creeping fascism in the west because we have with with tax law and regulations we have an increasing creeping control by the state of what corporations do like when they twist google's arm to give it a customer's ip address um or what have you so what happened was um in the i think it was in the in the clinton bush transition time of the i can or the the previous agency in charge of assigning names to internet protocol addresses on the internet was transitioned to a private corporation sort of like the fed is private so that's called i can now this is a nominally private agency but it's got like a hundred and eleven governments on its advisory board okay and when they formed the government insisted that i can adopt certain dispute resolution rules designed to protect trademark now trademark is another type of ip state ip which is completely unlibertarian and illegitimate in my opinion uh and so you have basically under our current system there is this background uh ud rp uniform dispute resolution process which everyone has no choice but to agree to to even get a domain okay and what that means is it's it's really just another mechanism for enforcing trademark what it says is that if if you have some kind of trademark claim to a certain name and you can show other things like certain bad faith or whatever on the part of the current domain holder then i can will agree to trend to transfer you know ownership i put ownership in quotes of the domain from the current owner to the new claimant okay so you have a situation that is the total result of the state influence over i can and the internet and the state ip laws which is insisted on weaving into the fabric of these domain rules so uh you it's inconceivable to imagine anything like this happening in a free internet without the state involvement so but we have this system now just like we have in private life you know you have the ability if you have enough clout say you can go to the irs tomorrow and you can rat your neighbor out for violating cheating on his taxes you can get a reward you have that right it's a legal right should you use it as a private citizen i don't think so should would that be the type of right anyone could exercise in a free study no because there wouldn't be a state there wouldn't be taxes or if you have enough clout like your walmart and you want this piece of land to build a new store and the seller won't sell it to you you can go to the city council and get them to take it by in the domain right should you do that i don't think so is it reasonable to expect that if you have them in the domain law people are going to take advantage of it yes uh is it is it you know if you have the irs with bounties being paid to private citizens for ratting out their neighbors do you think some people are going to take advantage of it yes i mean if you have a welfare system or you're going to have people sign up yes so you know is the problem with having a welfare system that people sign up for it no that's not the problem the problem is having the welfare system so to me the fundamental problem is state intellectual property law and state involvement with the internet so in in this case ron paul has used that process to appeal to the the wipe out of the of the united nations body charged as being one of the agencies that can enforce these dispute resolution rules of the ican he's gone to the un agency to ask them to take the domain ron paul dot com and ron paul dot org away from the current owners i'll say and give it to him so whether he should do this ethically or practically or not i can't say i'm not an ethics expert i think it's i think it's a shitty thing to do um but you know the problem is not here doing it the problem is having the rules in the first place that would never exist in a free market well but you know here's one thing um i'm not the only mike shanklin in the world but if somebody else owns mike shanklin even if it's not a mike shanklin i can't just sue them and get the website you see what i'm saying that nobody would you don't have a you would have to show you have a trick according to the rules you would have to show number one that you have a trademark in your name now ron paul in this particular case i wrote the complaint he actually doesn't have a federally or even state registered trademark see there's a process by which you can apply like he he's claiming common law trademark rights and one paul his name because he used it in a commercial way for some period of time so he's a he's a chow he's established a degree of fame and a degree of common law trademark rights now whether he will prevail in that argument i don't know i think that he has to pass two other tests like that faith on the part of the registrant um and i think he's got an uphill battle i think he's probably going to lose um and i hope he loses because i think this this law is wrong this and that's effectively what it is everyone says it's a private contract and everyone agrees to it yeah that's true and you know back in the days of jim crow um i'm sure that a lot of racist and anti-cinematic restrictive covenants were in a way augmented and supported by a state or if not required in some cases right i mean look if the government um if the government says that you know every you know like in let's say nazi germany it says that every real estate rental or every apartment rental contract has to have into it this clause that any jewish tenant can be kicked out by any area and who really needs it more i mean then that would be the condition that every jew is a tenant of the apartment would agree to because he has no choice because the government has made this a universal practice that the free market would never adopt or couldn't adopt so easily at least without some defection so to my not to analogize this to the to that situation but the point is if this is not a private contract situation this is the result of government meddling and intellectual property law and by the way trademark law is even harder to justify than patent and copyright although it does less damage in my opinion patent and copyright do the most damage in a dollar basis or in a civil liberties basis trademark law terrible it is used for censorship it is used for stopping competition but it's not nearly damaging the others but it's even harder to justify because um everyone says well shouldn't fraud be illegal like yeah well they just make fraud illegal and they're like well because trademark law doesn't require you to show fraud so for example you know uh you have the federal government customs agency seizing like shiploads of like fake purses for example like louis become purses or chanel purses or whatever because they're counterfeit but they buy like trademark well who were they purse who were these purses are going to be sold to someone like in a back alley somewhere at the dock in turkey i mean for 10 bucks a bag right these people are not defrauded if you buy a $10 Rolex watch on the street in new york you know it's a fake yeah right there is no fraud whatsoever there everyone knows exactly what they're getting so if you support trademark law you support you know Rolex being able to stop that sale of a fake Rolex from a from a vendor to a to a customer who is not defrauded at all so what's the basis for it what's the libertarian basis you can't say well fraud should be wrong illegal like okay fraud should be illegal well show it prove it there's no fraud in trademark good good stuff that's amazing i love that good good good topics to them hopefully i can have you on in the future i always give all my interviewees a chance to give plugs you know for for the websites and a two to three minute closing statement so if this is the last chance you were going to speak you're under deathbed and you wanted people to hear something for two minutes go for it on my deathbed i'm pledging to say i wish i'd put more time in at the office just to be a smartass because everyone says no one ever says that um well first of all i started a podcast recently um it's at stephanconcella.com it's called concella on liberty so i'm doing that want to wreck fairly regular basis right now and i'll probably duplicate this in our podcast feed so just go to stephanconcella.com um and i am um you can check out if you want to look into intellectual property material go to c4sif.org c that's the number four c4sif.org but other than that i'm just uh working on some a few writing projects not all ip related and um happy to be here and be happy to uh to revisit you know this or some other topics someday no sounds good thank you so much for being on the show today and uh we will have you back on the show soon don't worry about that sure michael enjoyed it yeah thank you guys thanks you thank you so much for checking out triple v as you guys know all of these videos are free if you guys want to contribute or donate go over to voluntaryvirtues.com you can actually find the schedule coming up tomorrow i think i have jeffrey tucker and then i have laurence read from fee and then i have stephan malinu and walter block so the interviews this this week and month are going to be pretty good so uh always looking for for more uh user and viewer interaction i think it's very important for us to have to spread these these videos and these articles and get them out to more people obviously it's uh some topics that more people need to understand and hear about so you guys can also find me and about 30 other admins over at citizen slavery citizen slavery just hit 14 thousand fans we're almost at 15 000 so it's constantly growing exponentially and i want to thank everybody who has helped us in that venture also we also have free anarchy and nyc tickets as you guys know i'm going to be a speaker over in new york city here in april i was actually given the opportunity to give away four tickets and uh actually with with mr panzela he was on my show the other day and i did give away two of those tickets so i have two left so anybody who wants to do those tickets you guys can do a video contest for the best advertisement and uh advertising anarchy and nyc and the winner is and it's obviously uh my my judgment so i'm going to try not to be biased but uh the winner will get uh one ticket each so there's going to be two winners in that so uh head over to that video i'm going to include it right here in this section so you guys can just click on that and go check out that video and uh hopefully you guys are the winners of the anarchy and nyc tickets and i will see you in new york city here in a couple months but thank you guys so much for checking out triple v and as you guys know i will see you tomorrow