 My live, Gene, can you see me? I had to improvise here. I had to get on my iPhone because my MacBook would not work with Justin TV. So this is my iPhone. I hope it works fine. Can someone just confirm that you can hear and see me? Okay, good. All right, good. Let me start. And I apologize for the technical issue. I've never used it before, but I have a quick fix here thanks to my iPhone. Okay, let me take a look at the questions in the Facebook here. Please begin by explaining how people profited from their writing, artwork, inventions, and other creations prior to the advent of IP and patent laws. Okay, so here's how I look at it. I don't know if anyone here needs an overview of the sort of modern free market approach to intellectual property, but let me get a little closer so that... And let me mention, by the way, before we get off track here, let me just copy this into the Facebook feed. Okay, so I will be actually in about three or four hours teaching a Mises Academy webinar tonight at, I think it's five o'clock Central Time, six o'clock Eastern Time, on the new patent reform law which Obama passed on Friday. So I've got an hour and a half webinar on that. So Gene was asking, how did people profite from writing, artwork, inventions, and other creations before IP and patent law? So let me give a brief overview, and if anyone wants to interrupt me or ask questions, feel free to all monitor the Facebook feed here. So, I mean, the Industrial Revolution started around 1800, modern patent and copyright law really started around 1900, but in the two or three centuries before that. They started in a kind of spotty way and basically copyright law control of the printing press. So it was a form of fault control and censorship. Patents originated in the practice of monarchs granting monopolies to favored cronies of the court, explorers, privateers or pirates. So the crown grant to one company, the exclusive right to sell playing cards in England, for example, which of course wasn't their invention, but they just gave them the right to sell it. And then of course the crown would use their police powers to search and seize competitors of this playing card company, and they would then use this power they have over the monopolist to get them to help with taxes and duties and things like this. So the origins of the, that's copyright, the origin was in censorship and the origin of patents were in basically mercantile court. Over time these laws were streamlined and democratized and institutionalized to their modern form. Of course before these laws were, as they are now and as they've been for about 200 years, you basically didn't have any institutional form of intellectual property. So the way people profited from their ideas was the way they would do it in a free market, which is they would face the situation that any entrepreneur on the free market faces, which by the way I'm having a little bourbon today in my Mises glass if anyone's interested in that. Trying again. Can anyone see me? Hello? Okay, I'm back. Sorry, sorry about that. I don't know what happened. I think you have to look at it as this. Any entrepreneur has to think of a way to make a profit off of his good or service. Now in some case here for people to compete with him and if a large component of the value of what you're selling could be easily copied, then it may be difficult to stop people from more easily competing with you or it may be more difficult to profit in the face of free riders. But this is always the situation faced by any entrepreneur. So let me give an example. In the 1950s in the U.S. the drive-in movie theater became popular and originally it was an outdoor screen publicly visible to anyone that could see it from outside the premises. And they used loudspeakers originally behind the screen just like we use in indoor movie theaters now. And now our current system of the per car speakers will not have the current system because drive-ins are largely extinct. But for a while they had these little speakers next to each car. So speakers. Now this costs a lot of money to install. Probably didn't sound as good as a loudspeaker would sound. Why did they do this? Well one reason was the loudspeaker had some, there were free riders. And so the movie theater owners instead of going to Congress to ask them to pass a law saying crime for people to watch our movies from neighboring houses or hills for free, they just came up with a way to exclude free riders. This is the task faced by any, I mean if you didn't have to worry about, let's say an indoor movie theater, if you didn't have to worry about free riders walking in, say honestly, and just walking in and watching the movie free, you wouldn't need a locked door. You wouldn't need a door at all. You wouldn't need a teller. But instead businesses have to hire, well they used to take a ticket, they have to hire, they have to install locks and mechanisms like this. These are the costs that an entrepreneur has to undergo to make the business profitable. And it's up to the entrepreneur to figure out how to do that. Now we're seeing in today's landscape that are still the law, copyright especially is getting more and more difficult to enforce because of the internet and encryption and torrenting and digital communications. It's really easy for a lot of people to get around it. So if someone's making a movie now or someone's writing a book, they have to recognize that there's going to be some possibility of pirating. So they have to think of ways to make money around that. And so people are using their entrepreneurial creativity to come up with ways to, hold on a second, someone says they can't see me. It looks to me like I'm there. See we have 28 people here, so let's just make sure that you guys can all hear and see me. Could someone confirm that I am there to figure something out? I'm assuming I'm here and not enough people are on the Facebook chat to give me feedback. So let me just keep going. Okay, thank you Angel. So what we see is the beginnings of ways people can come up with analogous to what movie theater owners did in the past driving movie theater owners. Even in a free market, in a free market there would be even more need to do this and you'd have even more creativity, more ideas, etc. We're seeing a lot of them now like you have all kinds of techniques being used. Now, in a way the burden is unfair. It's almost like asking close to communist Russia, Soviet Russia in the 70s and says listen, we should abolish the state and have a free market. And you have someone who's used to the providing toothpaste, mouthwash, whatever. And they say, well how would this, who's going to provide toothpaste? What if you have, you know, 10 brands of toothpaste? How do I know which one to choose from? These kinds of questions are fine to ask in the policy in place. And it's not really incumbent upon the person who is pointing out the flaw of the current system to justify or to explain or to predict what would happen. It's hard to predict exactly what would happen. If you had a world government and one brand of toothpaste, you know, it might be difficult to predict that you would have Colgate and Crest and the other competing brands emerge. Although we can take some stabs at it. So we've seen emerging already in a quasi-free market or in the gray market or in maybe quasi-aggress fashion. Consider some ideas. Number one, maybe people would distinguish between their career and, as Gary North calls it, career versus calling or your passion versus your job. Not everyone's going to be lucky enough to get paid to do. Strong with, you know, waking up at five in the morning and spending two or three hours on your screenplay because you want to get it out of your novel. And then you go to work and your regular job and it pays the bills. This is how things have been in the past. Or there have been patrons. And there are a lot of patrons even now. I mean, you have tens and hundreds of millions of dollars given by wealthy people as benefactors or patrons of arts, museums, things like this. There's no reason to think that this wouldn't continue and be even more vigorous. We libertarians would say that we have an amazing amount of charitable donations now, given that the state has co-opted the field of helping the poor, et cetera, and given that it taxes us and impoverishes us, even with our reduced income and with a reduced need for charity. So we often argue that, well, absent the state, absent the welfare net, safety net, absent taxes, people would have more money to give the charity and there would be more need for it. There would be less need for it in the sense that there might be less poor people. But the point is there would be less public provision of charity. And so likewise, we could expect that benefactors and patrons of the arts would continue. There's also, especially in the modern age, tremendous ways that you can bundle services. You know, if known as an author or a photographer or a painter, if your works are made available for free, then you acquire a reputation. And then you can use it in other ways to get a job, to get a contract to take a photograph of someone's child, to do a portrait of a company for their lobby, whatever. One idea I've had, and we had a copyright free world, and if you published a novel, people could knock it off. Well, if you're selling it for a dollar or two on Kendall, on Amazon, you know, you're making it convenient and I don't know if people would want to knock it off. What's the incentive for me at the time to knock it off and to sell it? I mean, I'm going to sell it for $0.20, and if I'm selling it for a similar price, why would people buy it, the original author or his authorized chain of distribution, which they trust as being the legitimate and most recent version, et cetera. So number one, there's a way the middleman, and this is what's happening with technology. The publisher's becoming less important. People are able to – so you have different private reputation or quality control mechanisms like a quality seal of approval arising to let people choose which of the self-published books are terrible, which ones are actually good. You could have – there's a phenomenon I've noticed right now with books. By the way, Gene asked about Chaucer. I don't know about Chaucer, that particular case. I imagine it was easier to sell books back then because they were physical copies, so you would arrange for a publisher to make a printing run and sell it, and you could make some kind of profit himself. I do believe Shakespeare borrowed heavily from previous stories that were well-known or modeled for aspects of his plots, of his famous plays, and he borrowed freely from the culture and from selling his plays and getting patrons and things like this. But anyway, back to the examples I was noting from Amazon, you will have an author who has a series of books, and if they're not well-known, they will take their – and they will put it up on Amazon for free as a kindle free kindle book. It doesn't really cost Amazon or anything, so it doesn't cost them anything to put it for free. Go to Amazon Kindle and search by price. You'll see dozens or hundreds of books starting at zero and trying to get a fan base. They have a new book that's about to come out or just came out, and that one they'll sell for three or four or five dollars. So the idea is give away their first book for free because it's two or three years old and sales have tailed off anyway, and they hook some new fans, and those fans want to buy the latest thing. They'll buy it that way. Another idea that I had was that, let's suppose you're J.K. Rowling. Now she's made billions of dollars from Harry Potter, and let's say she sold the first one for free because she had a passion for it, and she wanted to hook these millions of kids onto her world, a little money at first, maybe some, through creative ways. But let's say she made nothing for the first one or two or three books. Well, by that time she's got a huge legion of fans to put out a notice to the parents or to the public. I've gotten number four ready, and as soon as I get a million people around the world agree to pay $10 each for this book, I'll release it. I think she could have gotten that, so that's $10 million. I mean, she could make lots of money that way. Now let's say she publishes the entire Harry Potter series, and in the copyright free world there will be no preventing someone from making a movie based upon Harry Potter. It might have been made a lot sooner than it was. You might have three or four different versions of the first Harry Potter novel being made into a movie, and they wouldn't have to pay her royalties at all, J.K. Rowling. But one of them might say, listen, by getting an endorsement from the author, because the fans would rather see if there's versions of the movie, the fans would rather see the one that the author has been a part of, approved the script on, been a consultant on, is valued to the movie studio in getting the author's cooperation and endorsement. So she could say, you're going to go, and even if there was piracy, movies could make money because they would just sell them. They would show them in the movie theaters. It's a different experience than the DVD market. In the DVD market or the streaming market, you could make something, you just sell the service. It's just that it's easier for people to compete because they can knock you off. You just have to make money at an earlier point or make a lower profit later on, or deal with the market, or come up with ways to profit despite the fact of company people emulating you and doing what you do. Okay, so that was sort of a take at the answer. As far as invention, there's always been innovation. There's been continual innovation and increasing innovation in the last couple of centuries. There is no reason whatsoever to think that wouldn't continue, especially because there's every reason to think that patent laws now heavily distort and impede innovation. For example, let's take the smartphone market. You have now a small group of carriers and players who are very dominant, and they have these patent wars with each other, Google, Android, I'm sorry, Google's Android platform, Rem with the BlackBerry, Apple with the smartphone, with the iPhone, sorry, Microsoft with the Windows phone, etc. These guys are suing each other left and right. They're spending tens of millions of, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars on patent lawyer salaries and patent lawsuits and settlements, etc. And it seems like it would hurt them, but really it just raises costs for the consumer, and what it does is it creates an oligopoly. It creates a small number of players, excuse me, who are entrenched large interests. Oh, Gene asked for an example of someone who wrote prior to IP protection. Well, Shakespeare is a great example. I mean, probably the most famous writer in the English language is Shakespeare, and he didn't have copyright. In any case, so on the patent front you would clearly have innovation still. You always have innovation. They have to invest in R&D now. They have to invest in R&D to try to keep a leg up on the competition. In fact, there's every reason to think these oligopolies I was mentioning, they can sort of rest on their laurels. They don't have to innovate as much as they would because the smaller newer companies cannot afford to compete with them, because they don't have a defensive patent portfolio that they can use to cross license with or to defend themselves from these patent suits. So, you know, Google, they recently did to purchase Motorola Mobility primarily to get their patent. So they can spend a couple of billion dollars licensing or buying some period. The price is a speculation, but knowing what I know, I suspect that they've paid, they've wasted 13, 14, 15 billion dollars to acquire 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,000 patents, well 20,000 including Motorola Mobilities. But thousands of patents just so that they could have a defense against these lawsuits coming against Android from Apple and Microsoft of others. Just imagine what they could have done with that 15 billion dollars. They could have returned it to the shareholders or they could have invested it in further purchases. They could have invested in R&D. So there is innovation that is not going on now because of the patent system. So if you get rid of the patent system, companies would be freer to innovate. Right now a small company that wants to get into smartphones might not even try because they know that they would get sued. So they don't even want to innovate in that area. So there are lots of people that just don't even try to get into an area and therefore they don't. So there is a lack of innovation. So we can see that removing the patent system might remove some of these so-called incentives for some companies but it would remove some impediments to innovation that exists now. So of course you would have innovation. You would have innovation to always stay ahead of the competitors to hire the best people, to have the best reputation for being cutting edge, etc. So there has been innovation since the dawn of human civilization. There is no reason to think that there would be no innovation and no creativity without IP law. The only argument that patent and patent proponents have is that there is some optimal level of innovation. The state coming in and setting up and granting these artificial state grants of monopoly privilege called patent and copyright. Then we go here's what we have in a free market. Here's what we would have if the state comes in and tamper with the market. Of course this is nonsense as any can see because it's based upon the idea of market failure. It's based upon the idea that the government can create wealth. Of course the government cannot create wealth. All the government can do is destroy wealth. At most even in a menarche system and that sets a playing field for people to generate wealth based upon an institution of property rights. But patent and copyright are grants of monopoly privilege by the government. They are not property rights. In fact what they are is a way to allow certain favored or privileged to avoid competition. I mean the proponents of intellectual property admit this. They will say that about proponents of intellectual property and they'll say that absent intellectual property we would have a regime of what they call unbridled competition. Yeah that's right which is what we call the free market. So they don't want unbridled competition which means they want to bridle competition. They want to limit competition. They want to make it harder if I'm selling a product like a book or a mouse trap or a computer. Of course I as the seller of that item don't want people to compete with me. Well this is the reason for protectionism and mercantilism in the first place right. People that are connected and they would use their influence with the state to get the state to pass regulations or rules or laws that benefit them with respect to states and mercantilism. And this is with IP. In fact I think of it as the new mercantilism. And again for people that are just joining in there was a new patent law passed a significant reform of America's patent law signed into law on Friday just seven days ago by President Obama. And I have repaired a I think a 50 page PowerPoint presentation replete with which I will be giving tonight Eastern time on the Mises Academy. So anyone who's interested in this go to academy.meses.org. I'll type it. Let me take let me look at the comments now on Facebook. Jean says are there any opponents of he who are not strictly libertarian like Woody Guthrie or folks on the Marxist progressive left. I don't I don't really know I do know that you you do see some opposition among the hardcore lefties to patent and copyright. But it's sort of crude and from what I've seen they their opposition is because they accept the same mistaken presumption free market proponents. They all believe that patent and copyright are types of property rights. So you'll have remarket patent and copyright proponent and they say well it's just a property right. Well you have some lefties who agree with that they say it is a property right and we disagree with it for that reason. The conservative or the right libertarian says I agree with it for that reason. They're both wrong in their assumption. They assume that prop patents and copyrights are part of capitalism part of property rights but they're not actually. In fact patented copyright were never called property rights originally. They were called monopolies. In fact the first patent statute was the statute of monopolies in England instead of forgetting the date 1623 I want to say. But when people started opposing these laws in the West in America and Europe in the 1800s I believe they oppose these monopolies. They knew that they were problematic. And so their proponents which were favored special interest groups which are benefiting from these things and the legislators who were in their pocket. Excuse me started calling these it's an intellectual property right but it's a property right because everyone believed in property. So they were trying to associate it with something that had a so it was pure propaganda. They're not property rights. So the hardcore left and the pro IP libertarians and right assume that patent and copyright are part of property rights. And then the right likes it because of that and the left dislikes it because of that. Just opponents of IP that I've seen outside of your strict Rothbardian type of libertarian like I am. Who opposed patent and copyright on strictly and purely principled non utilitarian property rights grounds. I mean our opposition is rooted in the fact that favor property rights in a principled way. And we see that well I'd say the next best or even as good as this opposition would be that of left libertarians who I wouldn't call he was asking about. Not Marxist but like Kevin Carson mutualist left libertarians like Sheldon Richmond of Roderick long. These guys have a hostility to the state and they have they value the free market and they realize right off the bat. Easier than most plum liners normal libertarians you might you might say see it. No unless you're a kind of a Randian type conservative libertarian or utilitarian. Most libertarians that are just Rothbardians or hardcore Misesians or anarchist anarcho capitalists. They can if you point out to them this problem they get it. They realize that patent and copyright are completely incompatible. But the left libertarians that I'm talking about have seen it even easier I believe. Listen to the question here from Mama Liberty Callaway. I tend to agree that IP laws and patents are not the right answer. You've talked to this with a number of artists most of them fear the possibility of theft of their designs. They have no desire to give their work away. Elnil Smith and Kathy Smith are the most vocal proponents of some sort of IP. Neither they nor I want state monopoly but I'm not here with the free market alternative might be. Well I mean look Elnil Smith I admire him. He's written great stuff but I think he just he hasn't devoted a lot of theoretical or good thought to this issue. He doesn't have a good argument for it. He just repeats a few things he's heard from Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand was very confused about this issue. Ayn Rand wrote in some passages something that was similar to what Rothbard. We really don't as human actors create anything. You can't metaphysically create something. There's matter out there as actors is rearrange it. And when you take something that's not owned some resource out there. Land or a litter you know whatever. Wood. Apple. Food. You know. If these things are unowned then we all libertarian Smith Rand etc. We all agree that the person who first uses this thing that's unowned now becomes its owner. We might disagree on why this is. We all agree on that basic principle. And so the idea is that once you own a resource then use your intellect, your creativity to rearrange it. Reshape it. Rand said this. She acknowledged this. Right. And the central problem of Rand and those type of libertarians is the idea that when you create something you own it. This is not true. What you do is you create a new shape which means to rearrange the shape of something that you already own. Now you might make it more valuable to you or to a potential consumer that you might want to sell it to. And that's what wealth is. So if you rearrange your silicon you know into chips, computer processors or patterned CDs that have information that's valuable and usable by humans. You've created wealth. But you didn't create something new that's owned. You didn't create new property. To rearrange an object to make it more valuable. To rearrange an object and to create wealth requires that you already own. So you can see that no new property rights are generated by the act of creation. The act of creation is the act of an owner. The act of creation is the act that someone has their property rights in scarce resources recognized and engages in. Property rights allow creation to happen. And creation is just the reshaping or the rearranging of things that we own to make them more valuable to us to make wealth happen. So this idea that you don't want your past stolen is question begging. Because to say steal means to take something from someone that they have a right to. So in the case of your artist friend or yourself, if you're asking for yourself, if you have a pattern or whatever, a painting, a logo, a picture, whatever. Look, you can keep it secret if you want to. But as Benjamin Tucker, a great left libertarian anarchist thinker said, if you want your ideas to yourself keep them to yourself. But if you want to try to get some profit, I don't mean monetary profit, psychic profit, monetary profit, whatever. If you want to release your ideas to the world, if it benefits you to do this, like, you know, if I want to sell my photographs or my paintings, I need to release them to the world. If I want to let people know I'm a good writer, I have to show them what I've written. That's the price of getting this benefit that I want. Well, then that's the price I pay. I mean, if you release information from it and then they may implement it, they may copy it, they may compete with you, et cetera. And so it's faced by the person possessing talent, skill, knowledge, innovation, information. If you world, then do it. But realize that one cost of doing that is that now you're not the only person who knows it. And the nature of information is that it can be spread easily, people can learn it, and it might make it easier for someone to compete with you. I mean, this is the choice faced to a different degree by anyone. Let's say I have a grocery store and I'm, you know, an A&P, a Piggly Wiggly, and I'm competing with Kroger. And I said, you know what, we're kind of the same. Customers don't see us as that different. I'm going to have really nice clean stone floors around and I'll make the aisles three feet wider so people don't bump into each other because they get annoyed by that. So I spend the time and the money. Maybe this will be a waste of money. But let's say it pays off. I spend X dollars on modifying my stores to widen the aisles and do these other enhancements. And I get more traffic because of that. Well, if I get more custom because of that, more customers, then that's going to give me higher profits temporarily. And that sends a signal in the market by the price system to everyone else, hey, this A&P has a good idea. Let's like that. I mean, I took the risk first. They come in second, but then sooner or later they're going to have wider aisles too. If this is a, you know, I've discovered something that works better for consumers. I profited from it at first, but then slowly over time the profit goes down as people compete with me. This is the nature of the market and there's nothing wrong with it. It's really, really, really easy for someone to compete with you. I mean, if I'm selling an MP3 file of a song forever, you know, it's easy for someone to copy that one time and sell the identical copy for 99 cents, maybe too much. You have to take these things into account. There's nothing wrong with that. All right. Let's see. Jean's replying to Mama Liberty here. I agree with that. I agree with Jean here. Let's see if there's a question. I see enemy of the state. Enemy of the state. I get it. Anybody see this post here? I see it. Book, paint a picture. If anyone can take it, put their name on it and sell it as their own work. There has to be some way for the creator of an idea to benefit. Well, okay. Look, there's so many problems. That's a short formulation, but I think you're making so many mistaken assumptions there. Number one, it's not theft. If you write a book or paint a picture or make a song, and if I copy it, you still have it. So it's not theft. I'm not taking it from you. So you've got to stop calling it theft. That's question-begging or it's equivocation. You're equating things that are not similar. If I take your car from you or your bicycle or your wallet, you don't have it anymore. That's the reason you object it. You know, if I could see the car you're driving and blink my eyes and create a duplicate on my own property of the same car you have, it doesn't take away your ability to use your car. And presumably you wouldn't object as much unless you're a misanthrope and just don't like people having what you have, but it wouldn't be stealing. So it's copying. And you say there has to be some way to benefit. Well, I don't know if it's law to make sure that artists have a way to benefit from their work. I mean, look, what if I like to play video games, benefit from that? I mean, look, if you want to do it, find a way to do it. Either turn it into a leisure activity or a hobby, or find a way to make a partner. You start off with, why should I write a book, paint a picture, blah, blah, if anyone can put their name on it and sell it as their own work? Well, let me say this. It's fine to have questions, but questions are not arguments. Just because you're confused about how a free market would work, just because you're curious about how a free market would work, doesn't mean we shouldn't have it. It's fine for you to not know. It's fine for me to not know. And second of all, ridiculous. I mean, you're confusing a lot of things. You're doing what people do that confuse plagiarism or discipline. The most copying that most content creators object to is not fraud. It's not plagiarism at all. For instance, I distribute copies of the latest CD of some pop album, some pop rock group, or the latest John Grisham book or whatever. I might do it for free. I might do it for a dollar to make a quick profit. I mean, if you go to Pirate Bay, you see copies of the latest Hollywood movies and they're free. Why do people do this? Well, there's various psychological reasons, but they do it. But the point is, they put these movies up there. Does the pirate... Let's take Avatar. You could probably find pirated copies of the Avatar right now. You could buy a copy for $10, $15, $20 if you wanted. Does the guy... No, he just makes a copy. And if he did put his name on it, would you download it? Or would you think, ah, who knows what else to think? I mean, would you buy Stephen Cancelo's Nickomaki in Ethics? Or would you think this guy's a moron, Doc? I mean, it's not going to be a problem people putting their names on other people's works. They're going to look like frauds. They're going to hurt their reputation. They're not going to get anyone who's going to want it, even if it's free. So that's not the issue. It's got nothing to do with people putting their name on it. The problem that content creators talk about is people copying their works. So let's not confuse it with plagiarism. Okay? And so if you get back to the question, why would you do it? I don't know why would you... I don't know who would do it. Maybe you wouldn't. Maybe there's a lot of work being generated now that wouldn't be generated in a copyright free world. I mean, so what level of innovation and creation is? All we know is there will always be some amount. And we know that the pensions and the artistic creations that are generated now are heavily distorted by the state laws. We do know that. And we know that people are harmed by these laws. And we know these laws aren't justified. Okay. If I miss any questions, feel free to retype them, but I'm trying to stay up at the top. Mama Liberty Callaway. I don't agree that it isn't theft or that it isn't important. Well, I didn't say it wasn't important, but it's not theft. We have to distinguish. If I take something from you that you own, that means you don't have it anymore. That's why people object to it. That's why we have laws against it. That's not what happens in this case. Let's be clear here. You paint a painting. You put it on the internet for some reason because you want the attention of the publicity. I guess you put a high quality version on there because I copy and I sell prints in my shop. Or maybe I just make it available on my site. Now why you're not happy that this gives you publicity? I don't know, but let's say you're not happy about it. And let's say you argue that you would have sold $10,000 worth of prints if you would have had a monopoly on those. But if I'm able to, you can only sell it $1,000 worth because the price has to be lower because you're now competing with me or because I stole some. Clearly, I didn't steal your painting. All you can argue is that I stole your money. But it's not your money. It's argue that I stole your money. You're really arguing I stole your customers. And for you to say that, it means you have a right to your customers. But do you? Is that what libertarianism is about? You have a right to certain business that you have a right to customers? If you can make that argument, then you can stop all competition. For example, you have a mom and pop drugstore that's been in business in some little sleepy town in Ohio for 50 years. And all of a sudden, a nice big, clean, Wal-Mart or something opens up across the street. Now, don't you think that they're going to lose business to the Wal-Mart or the mom and pop or their kids that own it now going to gripe and grumble and say they stole our... Is that a misuse of a metaphor? Yes. Were the customers really stolen? No. Did the mom and pop store own the crack to their return business? No. So people, when they use these metaphors, it trips up their reasoning and leaves them because you cannot seriously maintain that copying an artwork or something you came up with is stealing it. It's not stealing it because you still have it. So the only thing that can be stolen is the money you could have made if you had a monopoly on it. But that means you have a right to that money. But it's not owned by you. It's owned by your customers. That means you have a right to your customers' money, which you don't. They have the right to change their mind and deal with someone else. So you need a better argument. I'm putting words in your mouth. Look, you're free to clarify and try to think about it, but I've seen these arguments thousands of times and that's the implication of what you're saying. I mean, if you want to clarify, I'll be happy to take another stab at it. You say it's vitally important to convince artists if I want to have any leg to stand on. Well, that's a tactical issue. I mean, look, we libertarians, how are we going to persuade social security beneficiaries now that we should abolish social security? Maybe we can't. What has that to do with the legitimacy of our artists? I mean, I'm probably not going to persuade James Cameron that we shouldn't have copyright. I'm probably not going to persuade Barbara Streisand or Steven Spielberg or George Lucas or Steve Jobs or Bill Gates that we shouldn't multi-hundred millionaires or billionaires based upon copyright. What does that have to do with the legitimacy of our critique of IP to keep it in place because it disproportionately benefits them? I think that's irrelevant. Now, if you want to ask me how can strategically question, so let's focus on that. The answer might be maybe we can't. Maybe they're too economically illiterate to know, self-interested and biased to be objective about it. Maybe they're too stupid. I don't know. Maybe we can. I actually think we can because I think that as I see, they want to express. A genuine artist wants to express. And they want to reuse things that they see in the culture and yet they see that they're prevented from doing it in a lot of ways. A lot of them probably feel uneasy or seedy about joining in actions by their studios against their own fans. It's ridiculous. I would say the Grateful Dead was an early pioneer of letting it out there, although even they are not completely free. Let's see what else we have here. Mama says it is very easy for someone to put their name on things they copy or if they change your name and it gets easier. It is easy, but who does it? Go to Amazon right now. See if you can find Plato's Republic under someone else's name. See if you can find Aristotle's, Nicomachean Ethics under someone else's name. See if you can find Romeo and Juliet under someone else's name. Why is this a problem? If someone does it, who cares? I don't care if some guy copies the text of Les Miserables by Victor Hugo and puts it up another name. I'm not going to buy it because there are more on it. I mean, why is there a problem? I really don't see the problem here. I can understand the problem of copying. I can understand why copying would have set off a problem at all. That's just a private contractual thing for educators to worry about. This is a non-problem. This is another... All right, Lucifer back. Mama Calloway, we have four minutes left by my calendar. I think I'm going to have to stop soon, I don't think I'd get to all your questions, but let me look at Mike's question here. Mike Musseri forms any different than a rearranging matter into discrete forms. Why assign property rights to the latter and not to the former? Well, because information, their purpose of property rights is to permit people to use gift resources productively in human action without conflict or fighting over them. The nature of our world is that there are some things that cannot be used by more than one person at a time. And unless we want people to fight over them all the time, the only way to use them productively is to have rules about who can use them. That's what property rules are. So the reason property rules is because of the fundamental fact of scarcity in the universe. For things like information, information is not a means of action like scarce resources are. They are information that informs our actions and helps us choose what to do. There are guides to action. As a simple example, I think I might have one minute to go into this. If you wanted to make a cake and you had a recipe for a certain type of cake, you would need your own mixed eggs, spoon, body, etc. And no one else could use those things at the same time, but in type of cake at the same time. If they had their own scarce resources, property rights allowed that to happen, but they all use the same recipe or information at the same time. So that's why we don't need property rights and scarce resources. Not only do we not need them, but the only way to assign property rights and non-scarce resources like information, think about it. When you assign a property right, it means it's enforceable. Enforce is a physical thing in the real world. Enforce and enforceable rights are always enforced against physical things. Letting my recipe right. I don't really want the recipe. I don't want to just chastise you and say, bad boy, I court order a physical force telling you, you can't use your own mixing bowl and eggs to make this cake. You can't sell this cake to those people. It always comes down to ownership of rights in scarce things. So you can't avoid this. So the question is who owns it? And the libertarian answer is the first user owns it, and that's it. Not someone else who comes up with a way to use it. If you come up with a way to use your own property, that doesn't mean you have the right to help me not to use my own property in the same way. I think we're out of time. I'm happy to go further, but I think the schedule has someone else coming next. Gene, if you want to contradict me on that, I will go on further, but I believe I'm out of time. And I've enjoyed it. Good questions. We had a large crowd at one point. We have 44 people right now. A webinar this afternoon. I'll put it here again. I'm discussing Obama's pattern reform on the Mises Academy, and I'll go in detail into the good, the bad, and the ugly. Or as I call it, the good, the meh, and the ugly. All right. I'm going to sign out. Thanks, everyone.