Ep 423 – We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Intellectual Property, with Stephan Kinsella

LCP Episode 423 – Stephan Kinsella (CF replay).mp3

[00:00:03] Voiceover: Welcome to the show that gets Christians thinking about faith and politics. Get ready to challenge the status quo. Expand your imagination and tackle controversy head on. Let’s stand together at the intersection of faith and freedom. It’s time for the Libertarian Christian podcast.

[00:00:22] Cody Cook: Welcome to the Libertarian Christian Podcast, a project of the Libertarian Christian Institute. I’m one of the hosts. Cody Cook. And before I was welcome to join the Libertarian Christian Podcast, I recorded an occasional podcast of my own called Cantus Firmus. I was able to book some great guests and have some excellent conversations there that are relevant to the intersection of faith and freedom. So I’d like to share some of those conversations for you to enjoy. This is one of them, and I hope you appreciate it as much as I did. Greetings. I’m Cody Cook and my guest today is Stephan Kinsella. Stephan is a patent attorney and libertarian writer in Houston, and I’ve got him on here because I wanted to talk a little bit about intellectual property. So, Stephan, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and why you became interested in this idea of IP or intellectual property?

[00:01:09] Stephan Kinsella: Well, yeah, there’s two sort of simultaneous parallel tracks that got me interested in it. Number one, I was interested in the issue as a libertarian in law school. And even earlier reading the pro patent, Pro Copyright, Pro Intellectual property views of Ayn Rand and others. So I was just kind of interested in it because their arguments were not very good, I thought. I mean, I assumed that they were right, but I thought their arguments were weak. So I thought maybe there was a better argument that I had missed or something. But then I started practicing law in 92, and I started in oil and gas law in Houston. But then I switched pretty soon after that to patent law because for personal reasons, and it was better for a better career option for me. So I got interested in patent law and intellectual property law as a lawyer. And so the law itself and those two things sort of dovetailed. So since I was learning so much about patent law as a lawyer, and I was interested in libertarian theory, and I was dissatisfied with current approaches to to justifying intellectual property. I thought I could I could maybe take a stab at it. So I started trying to find a better argument for IP. For a couple of years, and I devoured the literature, I considered all the arguments.

[00:02:17] Stephan Kinsella: I tried to come up with some of my own, and I kept hitting roadblocks because I couldn’t come up with a good argument for IP, and no one else had a good one. And I finally realized the reason why was because there is no good argument for IP. It’s I was trying to justify the unjustifiable. It would be like trying to come up with a good argument for the drug war or something like that, and or the Federal Reserve. So I finally realized the error of my ways, which was I had been looking at it from the wrong direction. And when I realized that intellectual property rights are completely incompatible with with justified natural private law, libertarian property rights. And I was willing to go that direction even though I was practicing in it. Then everything became clear. So. So I started writing on it, just to clear it up for people who were confused about it like I had been. And the interest is still or the, the, the, the interest in this field is still there. Because libertarians in the last 20 or so years since I’ve been writing on it, have gradually become more and more against IP as they’ve understood how how, how illegitimate and unjust it is.

[00:03:22] Cody Cook: And this is just kind of a personal question. So being somebody who’s a patent attorney but who’s against the idea of patents. Mhm. Yeah. Do you practice patent law like a, like a I do.

[00:03:34] Stephan Kinsella: I’ve written I’ve written on that too. And at first I was, I was very timid in writing about it because I, I was worried that it would affect my career like I thought clients or my employer or my law firm would be upset about it. But I gradually realized no one reads this stuff except for libertarians. And no one cares. No one cares what your policy views are, you know? In fact, the more I wrote on it, even criticizing patents and stuff, the more it impressed potential clients because they they didn’t care what my views were, but they figured I must know my stuff if I if I know enough to write about it. So it never hurt my career. But from an ethical sort of point of view, the way I view it is, well, first of all, patent law is not a monolithic thing. There’s different types of patent law that you can practice. There’s basically patent prosecution, which means helping clients draft patent applications and file them before the patent office and obtain issued patents. So it’s helping people acquire patents. And then the second type of patent law is litigation, which is you actually don’t even have to be a registered patent attorney to do that. You can be any normal attorney who’s a litigator. And these are the people that go to court and they litigate about patents. So they will either sue someone on behalf of their client for patent infringement or they will defend someone who is being sued for patent infringement. Now, of those three types of activity, that is patent prosecution, patent litigation offense and patent litigation defense, two of them, I think are legitimate, actually.

[00:05:03] Stephan Kinsella: So the only one that’s illegitimate is patent litigation offense. That is because it’s like aggression. It’s like you have these patents and holding a patent doesn’t hurt anyone directly, although it can exert a chilling effect. But that’s just because of the system. But holding a patent is akin to owning a weapon like a gun or bullets. How you use it can be aggressive or defensive. So if, if if a company is sued for patent infringement, then one of their defenses or one of their strategies can be a counterclaim where they countersue the the plaintiff for for infringing one of their patents. And I view that as totally legitimate because it’s not an aggressive use of a patent. It’s only hitting someone back when they hit you first. So in my career, I have strived. Tried. I’ve tried never to be part of that. That patent litigation, aggressive side and I never have. So and primarily I help people obtain patents and what they do with them is up to them. So I’m more like a weapons merchant, like I help people buy guns or bullets, and what they do with them is up to you. Them because there are there are legitimate uses and there are illegitimate uses. Now, I also view what I do as like being an oncologist. So like a cancer doctor who gets paid because there’s this unfortunate disease out there called cancer. But his goal in life is to help people navigate and deal with cancer and to minimize its effects.

[00:06:28] Stephan Kinsella: And also, most decent cancer doctors would prefer a world where cancer had been abolished, even though that would mean there wouldn’t. They wouldn’t have a career anymore as a cancer doctor. So they actually work for a world where they’re trying to abolish their jobs. And that’s what I do. So I view like I’m I’m a cancer doctor in the patent field, and I wish we could get rid of this disease of patent law. But given that it exists, companies do need advice from people who know how to help them navigate the system and help them defend themselves by acquiring patents that they can use if even if only defensively. So I think there are legitimate uses, legitimate things you can do as a patent practitioner, although ideally my job would not be necessary because I am a waste. It’s just a waste that’s necessary because just like CPAs and tax attorneys are necessary and defense attorneys are needed because there’s a drug war, right? If there was not a drug war, you wouldn’t have as many defense attorneys being employed to keep people from going to prison for doing something that’s a victimless crime. That’s all that said, I do not. I did find my practice of patents more and more distasteful, personally, because I knew it’s just the whole thing is a big fraud. It’s a big it’s a big sham. And I’d rather be doing something that’s constructive, even though, you know, if someone’s paying you to do something, you are helping them. It’s just unfortunate that we have to help them fight this system.

[00:07:51] Cody Cook: Yeah. So and, you know, I assume people listening are familiar with what intellectual property is, but you’ve kind of started to sort of dance around why you don’t like it and why you wish it didn’t exist. So intellectual property is this is we think about physical property, something I own like like this cup and intellectual property is that I have an idea, a book, a song, something like that. And because I’ve had this idea, I claim ownership in it and I can the government will grant me some protections. Right? So why is intellectual property not real property in your opinion?

[00:08:24] Stephan Kinsella: Yeah. And see, the thing is, it’s a very arcane area of law. It’s very complicated and confusing. Most people don’t understand it. And and like, for example, most people couldn’t tell you the difference between patents, copyrights and trademarks. And that’s why it’s in the domain of specialists like me. And we get paid big bucks to to help people navigate this. But the the way it’s described and all the ambiguities and confusion is, is almost intentional because it helps the advocates of these systems keep people from from really understanding what’s going on and understanding why it’s so pernicious. So, for example, the very term intellectual property is a made up term that was propaganda that was made up to, to to respond to criticisms of, of the patent and copyright system. So a brief overview of all this. The in general you have in the Western societies and, you know, in the West, you have a private legal system, you have the state legal system to what’s called public law, because you always have a state. But by and large, the bulk of the law has always been private. And the private law includes criminal law, but it also includes civil law we call civil law, which means the law of contracts and property rights and things like that. Ultimately, it all boils down to a view of property rights, which means a legal, a set of legal rights and rules and laws that basically allocate ownership of scarce resources in the world, including our bodies and other other resources in the world that we use in human action like tools, land, raw, raw natural resources, raw materials, things like that.

[00:10:02] Stephan Kinsella: So the law is basically a body of rules that whenever there’s a conflict or a dispute among two or more people over who should have a given resource over which there can be a contest or conflict, then the law will give an answer. It’ll say who owns it. And the answer, by and large, is compatible with the natural law, the private law, the Lockean idea that in general, everyone owns their own person, their body, you know? That’s why slavery is not justified. And that’s why murder is wrong. Because when you kill someone, you’re using their body in a way they don’t consent to, so they own their own body. So. So this idea that you own your body is at the root of all private law, criminal law and, and, uh, laws against slavery. And, and then for other things that we use, the scarce means of action, these scarce resources. The basic rule is whoever gets it first when it’s in an unowned state is the is the first owner that’s called homesteading. Or if you get it from someone who previously owned it by contract. So basically you have these simple rules contractual title transfer, original appropriation or homesteading and self-ownership.

[00:11:07] Stephan Kinsella: So those are the core principles of private law. And and you see that. So ownership and property rights are a response to the problem of conflict. And the fact that we live in a world of scarcity and limited resources, and to avoid having to fight all the time with each other, we have these rules that, at least in principle, if everyone follows them and if they’re if these laws are enforced, it allows us to live cooperatively and peacefully and have division of labor and trade and get richer and have have more peaceful relations with our neighbors rather than war and all this kind of stuff. Right? So that’s sort of the core backdrop. But now there’s always been deviations, as I said, public law or state law. The state makes exceptions for itself. Like normally you can’t steal something or kill someone because that’s theft or murder. But if the government does it, like if they take your money, they call it taxes instead of theft, or if they if they kill you because you, uh, sell drugs or if they force you to fight in their wars and you get killed. That’s not called murder, although technically it is. So the state always makes exceptions for itself. So there’s always deviations from this ideal private law system. And one of those deviations in in in centuries past was this were two things that led to patent and copyright, which are the two most important forms of so-called intellectual property.

[00:12:20] Stephan Kinsella: And patents emerged from the practice of of the king basically granting a monopoly to someone to be the only person who could do something in a given region. Like you’re the only guy who can sell wine in this town. Now, why would he do that? Well, he would do it so that the guy would kick back some of the monopoly profits to him, right? So now this guy owes the King a favor. So but of course, everyone else is worse off. His competitors can’t compete with him now, so they’re worse off, and the consumers are worse off because they’re getting lower quality products or at a higher price. Right. So it’s a way of basically redistributing wealth from the average person to the favored court cronies and to the Crown itself. So that’s what patents originated in. And that finally resulted in the Statute of Monopolies in England and in England in 1623, which was the basis of the the American patent system, which now we say is a property right to inventors in their, in their novel and nonobvious inventions. Right. But really it’s the same thing. You see, the government is granting a monopoly privilege to this guy for a reason. And the reason is because he he he patented something.

[00:13:26] Stephan Kinsella: Now, what does the what does the government get in exchange? Well, the guy has to pay filing fees to the patent office. So that keeps a bunch of people employed at the patent office. And in fact, the patent office makes a profit and then the fees are diverted to the government. And not only that, if you want to enforce your patent, you have to go to government courts and pay fees. So, I mean, you know, the government gets their cut anyway. Now, copyright originated because when the printing press came around, then the ability of the court, I’m sorry, the ability of the Crown and the state and the church to censor speech by controlling what the scribes could print by hand. You know, all these monks and people like that. It was easy to it was easy before the printing press for the government and the church to keep forbidden texts from being printed and given to the people so they could control thought that way. But when the printing press came around, that was threatened, and after about a hundred year period of of a temporary monopoly in what’s called the Stationers Company, it was like a guild which was had a monopoly on printing. When that expired, the government passed the Statute of Anne in 1710, which which was basically copied modern copyright. And that’s where the US copyright system came from. So Copyright’s origins lie in the, in the, in the, in the, in the attempt by the church and the state to control what could be what speech could be, well, what, what what could be printed, really freedom of the press.

[00:14:45] Stephan Kinsella: And you see that that’s still the same thing today, except the right has been transferred to authors. But what it means is the author of a book who has a copyright in the book, could go to a government court and get forced used by the government court against someone else to prevent them from printing a book. It’s literally censorship. It’s literally book banning. So copyright still results in the suppression of speech. Now, these practices came under assault in the 1800s with the rise of the free trade movement and the free market economists, and with the rise of free trade among the nations. And the industrial revolution was getting going in the 1800s, and these free market economists started criticizing this insane practice of the states with copyright and especially patents, because they’re There. Contrary to the free market, they basically protect people from competition. They’re anti-competitive. They cause censorship and distorts the market. It leads to reduced innovation, all kinds of bad effects. In response, the defenders and the entrenched interests, you know, the certain inventor, inventor groups, certain industries, certain publishing groups that had needed copyright or relying on copyright for monopoly profits. They defended they tried to oppose the government’s abolishing these rights, of course.

[00:15:57] Stephan Kinsella: And they said, well, it’s not a monopoly privilege grant by the government, which it was, and which it always hadn’t been known to be. It’s a natural right. It’s a common law, right? It’s a property, right, because everyone had a favorable opinion of copyright property, right? People were in favor of property rights and they’re in favor of free trade and capitalism. So when you say, well, this is a property, right? Then people say, well, I guess it’s a good thing then. But then the response was, well, how can you call it a property? Right? There’s no fixed, defined borders. It’s not tangible. And it expires in 17 and 14 years or 28 years. What kind of property? Right expires in 14 years? It’s obviously some unnatural artificial thing by the government. And the response to that by the intellectual property advocates was, well, it’s a property, right. But it’s a special type of property, right? It’s an intellectual property. Right. Because regular property rights protect the products of your hands or your labor, while whereas intellectual property rights protect the creations of your mind, your intellect. So books, inventions, trademarks, trade secrets, all these things that have to do with your intellect. So they basically found this kind of sneaky argument that that bamboozle people because of ambiguities and the way they use the word property.

[00:17:09] Stephan Kinsella: So like even you started out and you said, why is intellectual property not property? Well, first of all, it’s not intellectual property. That’s again, it’s a propaganda term. So the question would be why are patent and copyright not property? But even that’s not the question because the question is not whether something is property. Property rights is just an institution. It just means ownership. So you wouldn’t say something weird, like, why aren’t patents ownership? I mean, what you what you would say is, can you own ideas? Can there be a property right in ideas? And there cannot be, because property rights are always the the legally enforced and enforceable right to exclude someone from a given use of a given resource. And the word force has to be in there because government courts actually use force to to back up a law. Like if you have a right, it can be enforced, but you can only apply force which is physical against physical things like your body or your or your other things that you own. So whenever you have something that pretends to be a property right in in something intangible like information, which is what patent and copyrights pretend to do, it’s just a disguised way of really undermining actual property rights. It’s not really property rights in information, because you cannot have that, all property rights are always necessarily property and other things.

[00:18:27] Stephan Kinsella: So even if you have a system of slavery, for example, if I own this slave, Sally, I mean, her body is a scarce resource and I’m using state force or my personal force to keep her from running away. Right? So I’m using physical force against her body. So I’m claiming ownership of her body. Now, we would say that right is not legitimate because it’s not a justified claim, but that legally it could be recognized. It’s possible to own another person. It’s just wrong. But it is not possible to own an idea, because you can only use force against things that you can use force against, which are tangible, physical, material, you know, real things. So what really is happening in which the IP advocates never want to put it this way, is that what a patent and copyright really are? It’s what I call a negative easement or a negative servitude. So everyone’s familiar with the negative easement in a homeowners association and a homeowner’s association, a bunch of neighbors voluntarily sign a big contract and they all agree to give up some narrow limited rights in their own property, which basically is a negative right? It gives their neighbors not the right to use their house, but it gives their neighbors the right to veto certain uses of their house. So everyone says, okay, there’s going to be no commercial uses of property in this neighborhood.

[00:19:38] Stephan Kinsella: It’s all residential, something like that, right? Or you can’t have a building more than three stories tall or two stories tall, something like that. That means that you can’t build a house that’s three stories tall, and you can’t put a massage parlor on your plot of land without your neighbor’s permission, because you’ve given them by contract. This veto, right, which we call a negative servitude or a negative easement, and which in a widespread form in a neighborhood is called a homeowner’s association or a restrictive covenant. Right. So those are perfectly legitimate because they’re contractual, they’re consented to they’re legitimate because of consent. The whole essence of property rights means the owner of a resource is the one who can grant consent to others or deny consent to others, they can exclude them or they can permit them to use that resource, right? So this is the difference between rape and between normal sexual intercourse or consensual consensual sex, right? If a woman consents to sex with her body, she’s letting a man use her body for a certain purpose. It’s totally legitimate because she’s the owner. She consents to it if he she doesn’t consent, we call that rape. So consent by the owner makes all the difference, right? And that’s the same thing with patents and copyrights and with negative, negative servitudes. A negative servitude that is consensual is perfectly fine, but a patent and a copyright is the government granting to the holder of that right, the inventor or the author? The government is granting them a negative servitude over everyone else’s property, even though they didn’t consent to it.

[00:21:09] Stephan Kinsella: And you can see that because if I own a copyright, I can prevent you from printing a book with your printing press. That’s a negative easement. Or if I have a patent on a on a new laser printer design, I can prevent you from using your factory to make laser printers with your own raw materials. So that’s a negative servitude. That’s an injunction they’re getting against you. But the problem is you didn’t consent to it. So you have what’s called in the law of negative easements or negative servitude. You have a burden to state, but you didn’t choose the burden. You can burden your state. That means you can divide your bundle of rights up if it’s by contract, by contractual consent. So the ultimate problem with patent and copyright is that it’s a taking of property rights in the form of a negative servitude, but it’s not called that, because if you called it that, everyone would see that it’s a naked taking of property and, and they would object to it. So, so the proponents lie and distort to make people think it’s an intellectual property. Right. There’s nothing, you know, if you’re in favor of regular property, you might as well be in favor of this property.

[00:22:09] Stephan Kinsella: It’s very much like the the price inflation issue. The government can tax people and people know what a tax is And they they resist higher, higher taxes because it’s a it’s an explicit and blatant and obvious taking of their resources. And they’ll put up with some. But the more the higher it is, the more they rebel. So the government does a second type of tax. They just debase the monetary supply by printing more money. And then when prices rise, the government calls that inflation, even though the real inflation is what they’re doing to the money supply, and then they blame the corporations like Joe Biden is doing now. They’ll say, oh, it’s just greedy corporations raising the prices and taking advantage of the crisis in Ukraine to screw the to screw the consumer. Right. In reality, when prices go up, that’s a hidden tax by the government. And it’s and it’s favored cronies, the banking industry and others by by taking the purchasing power of the average person away from them. But they don’t call it that, because if they called it that, people would rebel. So the government does lots of things that are sneaky ways of violating our rights and taking our property for their benefit and for the benefit of their of their, of their cronies. And it is one of them. It is one of them.

[00:23:16] Cody Cook: People contribute to their campaigns. Yeah. So, um, and so you’ve given some persuasive arguments for why what we call IP isn’t real property in your book, which I think is just called against intellectual property right about that.

[00:23:29] Stephan Kinsella: That’s right.

[00:23:30] Cody Cook: You give one argument that you didn’t give here, which was kind of interesting, that owning ideas is like owning a universal. Like you can own a red car, but you can’t own the color red.

[00:23:40] Stephan Kinsella: Correct? Correct.

[00:23:41] Cody Cook: Although I think the last time I looked at a bag of Reese’s Pieces, they had trademarked the color orange. Uh, that Reese’s Pieces is correct. But so? So that’s one argument. One argument is one that you’ve hinted at here that IP conflicts with real property. So like, I can have, you know, I can write whatever I want on my own paper, right? But if somebody says, well, you can’t write my ideas on your paper, they’re saying that their intellectual property is more important than my physical property. That that trumps it, right? But the physical property is the thing that’s actually real and the IP is abstract. So, um.

[00:24:16] Stephan Kinsella: Some of the people that argue for IP actually argue. They seem they seem to sense this conflict. And they’ll say that if they have to choose, they’ll choose intellectual property. They’ll say, well, if you believe in property rights, in things in the world, just because you find it and you mix your labor with it, you should believe even more strongly in intellectual property, because that’s purely a creation of your mind. So and but most of them, most of them seem to either deny that, deny the tension, or they say we can have. They say you can have both. Like, oh, property rights are good. The more property rights, the better. So we have property rights in scarce resources and now we can add them to other things. But what they don’t understand is that there’s always nothing is for free. And so just like the welfare welfare state liberals are in favor of welfare rights, which are positive rights. They just say, well, we should support negative civil liberties. Like, you know, you shouldn’t be murdered and stolen from and killed. Let’s also have the right to education and the right to income and the right to health care. But you can’t have them both, because when you have a positive right to to welfare, that money has to come from someone. It has to be taken from someone. So there always comes at the expense. Just like when you inflate money people, if you print more money, you make some people richer, but you debase everyone else. You can’t just print more money because printing money doesn’t create wealth, it just redistributes the existing wealth.

[00:25:36] Cody Cook: A positive right to pay for someone’s education has to be taken from a negative right from somebody else to not have their money stolen.

[00:25:41] Stephan Kinsella: And the same thing is true with IP because rights are always enforced in law. Now the universals argument is one way of wording what I basically just said, and that’s Roderick Long’s formulation. The other way I look at it is it’s like the the reason the word property started being used is because, well, there’s the word proprietary, but that just means like you have a proprietary interest in something. It just means you’re the proprietor, you’re the owner. It’s another way of saying you’re the owner. But another way to think about it is this if you have a body. Now this I’m getting into sort of mises and human action and his theory of what’s called praxeology, which is his idea that the way you understand and evaluate human action and economics is to conceive of us as actors. That is an intelligent, goal oriented, basically a mind with a body in the world who seeks to change things in the future. That’s what action is. Action is always you observe what’s going on. You’re not happy with the way you think the future is going to unfold without your intervention. So you intervene. To intervene means to act. To act means to look around you and see what available tools you have, which are the scarce means or resources of action. What things can you use in conjunction with your body and controlled by your body, to divert and change the course of affairs, to make there be a different future state of affairs? That’s what.

[00:26:53] Stephan Kinsella: That’s what all human action is, is always attempting to change the course of events by employing scarce resources. Right. So when you when you, when you use these resources, you start using these tools. So like let’s say you’re a simple man in the old times, you might have clothes, you might have, you know, fur coat, you might have a spear, you might have a hut. You know, you have these things that that you control to control the universe, the world around you. And they become, you could say they become a property of yourself like they’re. I won’t say they’re the way you’re defined, but they become an aspect of yourself or a characteristic of yourself. Because now I have the ability to throw a spear and kill an animal. So, like you could say, that spear is one of my properties, you know, just like my other properties would be my size or my weight or my height or my age or my strength. These are different properties of me, right? So you could say that, well, my skin color is one of my properties and my my abilities are one of my properties. My, my my memories are my properties. And this spear is one of my properties. So over time, we start calling the spear my property.

[00:28:00] Stephan Kinsella: And we think of it as a noun. So we think of the word property. And I think this is sort of a mistake, or at least people into a mistake, because it’s conflating a casual, informal, colloquial use of property with the more legal definition. So again, people will say, our idea is your property. It’s like, well, it’s a property of me, but it’s a characteristic of me. And this gets to the universals thing. So like, let’s say I have a red car. One of the, one of the characteristics or properties of the car is its color, its redness. Now, I own the car, which means no one can use that car without permission. That’s what ownership means. It’s the right to exclude someone. But does it mean that I own red? Do I own the car’s color in addition to owning the car? No, that’s double counting. And if you say I own the car’s color and the car, that’s akin to saying I can have negative rights and positive welfare rights. You can’t have them both. In fact, if I say I own the car and it’s color red, then that is claiming ownership of a universal. I’m claiming the property that things can have. But if I claim the property things can have and that property is red, then that means I own every other thing in the universe. That’s red. So it’s a disguised way that would give me the right to own everyone else’s red car, even though they’re the owner of that car.

[00:29:16] Stephan Kinsella: So it’s just like a patent. It’s a negative servitude that would. Or it’s even worse than that. It would just take away the ownership of the other thing. So this is why you can’t own properties of things. You can only own the thing itself. That is. And by that I mean specifically property rights are a right to the physical integrity of a resource, not to its value and not to its properties. And so this, this is and this is why intellectual property ultimately fails. It fails because information is never an independently existing physical object in the world. Information is always some pattern stored on some underlying medium. Because information can’t just float out there in the world, it has to. So like if you have a memory in your brain, then it’s the way your neurons are patterned. You know you own your brain, but do you own the way they’re in patterned? It’d be like saying, if you own a car, you own the color the car happens to be, or the or the age of. You know, if I have a seven year old car, I don’t own seven Uranus. You know, it doesn’t make any sense. I own the car. And so and by the same token, if I have a book like the novel “Atlas Shrugged”, the novel is the pattern of information, the sequence of words.

[00:30:27] Stephan Kinsella: But those sequence of words can’t exist in a free floating way. They have to be stored on an underlying physical medium, whether it’s a computer drive or or or or a magnetic tape, or a piece of paper with ink embedded in a certain way. And those underlying things which you can call the media or a medium or a substrate or always ownable things and they have an owner. And again, those things are owned by by the owner, by an owner in accordance with homesteading and contract An outside person doesn’t own it just because they have a book with a similar pattern. Which is why if I write a novel on one piece of paper and then I make, I can keep that secret if I want. But if I choose to make it public by publishing it, like telling everyone, hey, here’s a pleasing sequence of patterns that you might like to read along and follow along and enjoy the plot of this story. If you tell everyone this information, then if they use that information to pattern their own underlying substrates, like if they print the same thing on their own paper, then you can’t own that arrangement, because that would be like owning the color red. You don’t own your the way your book is arranged. You only own the book itself.

[00:31:39] Cody Cook: Yeah. Which is I mean, in ancient times people would copy you. They’d say, you have a scroll of Socrates or the Book of Acts or whatever. Can I copy that? And that was considered completely legitimate for for forever. Right.

[00:31:51] Stephan Kinsella: And by the way, we’ve left this is all so far the principle case, the propertarian Proletarian natural rights, principled view of all this. There’s a second argument that all the IP advocates they keep making. Especially nowadays, it’s all utilitarian and empirical. They’ll say things like, well, without patent and copyright, because of the special nature of the way information products are valuable and can be copied easily on a free market, there’s not it’s not easy for someone who makes these inventions or new artistic creations to recoup their costs, because they would have they would draw competitors really quickly.

[00:32:27] Cody Cook: Who.

[00:32:27] Stephan Kinsella: Would knock them off.

[00:32:28] Cody Cook: So your argument about, you know, that real property is scarce, and that’s why we have to have rules for, for, you know, how you how you determine who owns it does it obviously doesn’t apply to ideas because ideas aren’t scarce. They can I can have the same idea in your mind that you do. And I’m not stealing it from you. I’m not impoverishing you. But but some folks who are in favor of IP would say, well, yes, you do impoverish somebody when you copy their ideas, because then they’re not selling it to you. You’re just using it. And I think that argument is essentially what’s used in the Constitution of the United States, where they argue that the protection of intellectual property. I don’t think they even use that word. They talk about patents is necessary because it advances the useful arts and sciences. And so their argument is not that intellectual property is a real thing, but that we’re going to pretend that it is because we think it will incentivize people to create new things if they get some exclusive use to earn profits on it for a temporary time. So what would you say to people like those, those people that you’re referencing who would object that there’s a useful reason to have this, even if we acknowledge it’s not real?

[00:33:28] Stephan Kinsella: So the proponents of intellectual property are a little bit sneaky and all over the map. So they will they will go back and forth between this, this, this deontological or natural rights argument. They’ll say, well, it’s just anyone who creates an idea should own it, like, you know, so they get this natural rights argument, although you wonder why they don’t want the rights to last forever. Then like they say, well, it shouldn’t last forever though, because that would be unreasonable. So like, they sort of admit that there’s really another argument. It’s more of an instrumental or utilitarian case. And these guys now will a lot of them, like a lot of the Objectivist types who do argue that it’s a natural right, even though they perversely believe it’s just still be limited in time for some arbitrary reason. They will argue that the founders of the US, who put the copyright and patent clause into the Constitution to authorize Congress to pass these laws that we have now, that they viewed it as a common law right and as a natural right. They’re doing that to bolster their own argument that it’s a natural right. But it’s a it’s a complete lie and a fabrication, because there were a couple of occasional scattered comments by people like James Madison saying it’s a common law, right. But it was a complete it was complete bullshit. Everyone knew it wasn’t a real common law, right? They knew it wasn’t a natural right. And proposals to put that kind of language in the Constitution were rejected.

[00:34:45] Stephan Kinsella: And instead they put in a utilitarian thing saying to promote the progress of science and the useful arts, Congress has the power to grant for limited times these privileges to authors and inventors. So it’s explicitly utilitarian. So. So the theory there is that it’s not a natural rights argument at all. It’s that it’s that on a free market you’re going to have an underproduction of intellectual goods because of a market failure, because these are public goods that can be easily copied. And it’s not easy to recoup your costs because competition is just too easy. So the government needs to come in and fix this market failure with a patch. And the market failure is that you have an underproduction of innovation. So you don’t have you have some inventions, but you don’t have as many innovations and inventions as you would have if there wasn’t this market failure. And you don’t have as much artistic work as you would have without this market failure. So we’re going to fix this failure, or at least repair it to some degree by giving people that produce these works a temporary monopoly to protect them from competition for a certain number of years after they start selling it, so they can charge a monopoly profit for a while and be free from because they’re free from competition, because it’s illegal for someone to compete with them and then recoup their costs, and then they have the incentive to engage in the in the research and the innovative and creative activity in the first place.

[00:36:06] Stephan Kinsella: So that’s the theory. Now, the founders didn’t do some kind of empirical study with a bunch of with a bunch of econometric economists. They just they just came up with a rationale to justify what the what had been going on in Britain for a while. And keep in mind also that the people that drafted the Constitution, by and large, were the people that were authors, they were the ones that wrote, they published the books and they were the inventors. Think of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. So the people writing the Constitution were the very class of people that served to benefit. They served to gain from some type of legally enforced property, right, in these intellectual type of endeavors. So it was a little bit self-interested, right? So they put it in there, but it was never considered to be a natural. Right. And so and so anyway, my point is they didn’t do a study, so they just went with what I call a hunch. You know, they let’s let’s assume good faith. Although I don’t think it was really good faith. I think they were self-interested. But let’s assume good faith. They had they thought, okay, this will, this will, this will increase the overall amount of innovation in society and it won’t hurt anyone that much. So it’s a good thing. It’s a one little way we can tinker with the system to tweak and to slightly improve the free market. We can nudge it in the right direction.

[00:37:21] Stephan Kinsella: Okay, let’s give them that. Well, we’ve had 240 something years since then, and we’ve had advanced economics, econometrics and and whole economics profession who can do studies. And they basically started trying in the 50s, 1950s. And, you know, Congress commissioned Fritz Machlup, who was a quasi Austrian economist to do this big study. And he did a huge study. And he concluded, after researching everything, that there’s just inconclusive evidence on the patent system, like there is no solid evidence that it does any good. And he said that if, you know, if we were starting from scratch right now, it would be irresponsible to start a patent system. But he also said, but we also don’t know that it harms because basically there’s just no data. I think he was sensing that data that that that value is subjective and you can’t really measure these things anyway. So that’s why it’s better to go with a principled case and have a solid set of property rights and fundamental principles that you go by. But anyway, in the years since, no one has yet proven this. Every now and then you have a bogus claim made by one of the industry, like the RIAA. The music industry or Hollywood or. Or some. Or the pharmaceutical industry saying some nonsense like like the Commerce Department, which runs the Copyright Office, says something like, oh, Commerce Department study proves that intellectual property contributes $5 trillion to the US economy. Now, what kind of study is this? All they did was they said, okay, the US GDP is about 15 trillion a year.

[00:38:51] Stephan Kinsella: I think this was a few years ago, and about one third of all the industries in the, in the US use intellectual property like they produce things that are subject to copyright, or they make up innovations that they can get patents on. Well, yeah, but but but that doesn’t mean that that’s the cause of it at all. It just means that the government has imposed this huge system, which affects most of the economy, doesn’t mean that it’s the cause of the innovation. So there are no good studies in this, in this, and it just flies in the face of common sense. It’s quite obvious that the patent system, for example, cost tens of billions of dollars a year in the US alone, in cost of patent attorneys like me, lawsuits, not to mention distorted innovation, because, for example, you can’t get a patent on a law of nature or abstract ideas, but you can get a patent on a practical application of that. So this distorts the natural division of of research funding that would go to these different fields. It pushes it in the direction of practical things that can be patented. So that distorts things. Who can say that’s good? Everyone says, oh, it’s better to have more practical. Yeah, but you’re going to have less, less theoretical research than the government always distorts things when they when they intervene. It’s like price fixing. Price fixing always has distorting effects.

[00:40:09] Cody Cook: Well, and I was going to say you give a lot more kind of data on. Well, well, I guess you demonstrate the lack of data in support or for what it does. Right. That it does something beneficial, I should say, in a Soho forum debate that you did somewhat recently, which I’ll link to in the show notes. Abolish copyrights and patents, I think was the name of it. And so I mean, there’s one example that I think of in this, this kind of practical application thing. I have a wife who’s I have I have a wife, I have my wife. I have one wife who’s a type one diabetic. And, you know, patents make her insulin less affordable because there are basically three companies that have this sort of monopoly on this technology, and no one else is allowed to produce it. So they can keep the prices pretty high. And so to me, that seems like a good practical reason to get government out of the IP business. But someone else might object that getting rid of IP might disincentivize technological advancement. And I think you seem to be suggesting that the evidence for that that proposition is not very strong. But it does seem, you know, on when you think about who’s lobbying for these kind of protections, they’re the big producers of of well, not producers necessarily, but the, let’s say the publishers and the manufacturers of, of technologies, of books, of whatever. And it seems that when you apply this to something like medicine, you could see, well, yeah, maybe if they really want these patents so badly, maybe this does encourage them to produce more. And so what? Would we lose some of those advances? Or would that slow down if IP was not protected?

[00:41:40] Stephan Kinsella: So let me give you a few responses. Once more fundamental response is that the way of framing this is in the favor of IP people, because once they get you saying, well, does this encourage innovation or not? They’ve got you already accepting the premise which is hidden, which is that the purpose of government and law is to incentivize innovation or something, or to maximize it or optimize it or something. When did that become the purpose of law? The purpose of law is to identify owners of scarce resources, which are the subject of conflict, by establishing property rules and enforcing them so that people can have they can live their lives free of violent conflict from other people. That’s the fundamental purpose. That’s what justice, the purpose of law, is. Justice. Justice. What does it mean? According to Justinian, the emperor from Rome. Justice means giving someone his due. Now, what his due is depends on what his property rights are. His property rights are the time tested private law rules of you own your body. You own resources, you acquire, you know, that kind of stuff. So the purpose of law is to do that. It’s not to come in and tweak the rules to optimize some, some random factor. I mean, I mean, what if what if we said, well, the goal of law is to, uh, optimize religious observance? I mean, it’s any, any number of arbitrary values other than liberty and justice and property rights you could pick. Innovation is not one of them.

[00:42:58] Stephan Kinsella: And there’s no stopping point to this because. So you could argue that you have this much innovation with the patent system without the patent system. And then you have say twice as much with patent system. Well, there’s still some innovation left on the table because even charging a monopoly price for 17 years is is not going to give you enough incentive to recoup your costs for certain very, very, very expensive R&D projects. So maybe we should double the patent term, or maybe we should impose capital punishment, or maybe we should have a government taxpayer funded prize system where the government awards an additional bonus to people who come up with unique things. If our goal is to maximize innovation, we could basically have a 99% tax rate and just pour it all into subsidizing innovators. It just makes no sense. And even if it did increase innovation on net, which I don’t think it does, but even if it did, it doesn’t mean that it’s worth it because it has to come at the cost of something else, because it comes at the cost of basically an implicit tax on everyone else. Because when you have a monopoly price being charged, then it’s like a tax, because people have less money left over in their pockets to spend on other things. Consumers have less money in their pockets to spend on consumption or investment, so there’s less money left over to engage in other activities, which could have led to other consumer benefits, whether it’s production or new business ventures or even other types of innovation.

[00:44:23] Stephan Kinsella: Right. And second of all, and third of all, if you look at the actual studies, all the studies seem to conclude that the patent system basically is a drag on innovation on net. So I would and so I was going to read you this. If people that are interested, they should go to my my podcast which is on Stephan Kinsella. Com and go to the Soho Forum episode, which I think is episode 364. I collect a lot of posts, different things, but I just had here a quote from Boldrin and Levine. There are two economists who have an empirical argument against patents. It’s called against intellectual monopolies. Their book and I just had here they looked at a poll, the British Medical Journal readers, on the top medical milestones in history, and almost none of them had anything to do with patents. And this includes penicillin, X-rays, tissue culture, anesthetics, chlorpromazine, chlorpromazine, public sanitation, germ germ theory, evidence based medicine, vaccines, the birth control pill, computers, oral rehydration therapy theory, DNA structure, monoclonal antibody technology. Right. And the center for Disease Control has a list of the top ten public health achievements of the 20th century, and many of them came about without patents at all like aspirin, AZT, cyclosporine, digoxin, ether, fluoride, insulin, medical marijuana, methadone, morphine, oxytocin, penicillin, phenobarbital, quinine, Ritalin, and vitamins. So it’s just not true that patents even are the main driver of these types of innovations.

[00:45:55] Stephan Kinsella: And furthermore. Yeah, your wife’s, uh, your wife’s insulin would be cheaper without patents, of course. And so you have you have these, uh, blowhards like Bernie Sanders and these people saying the government needs to fight high prescription drug prices, yet none of them wants to go to the root of the problem, which is the patent system. None of them take the say we should abolish or or reduce the patent term or abolish patents in pharmaceuticals. That’s the real. You can’t if you intentionally if the government grants a monopoly to pharmaceutical companies internationally to allow them to recoup their costs. They’re recouping it by charging a higher price than they otherwise would have. That’s a monopoly price. That’s a high price. And then they complain about the high price. Sure. So it makes no sense. The government is schizophrenic. So the government imposes lots of costs on on the pharmaceutical companies by imposing the FDA regulatory process on them. And then they say, well, these poor companies have such a high cost to recoup, which is imposed on them by the government, by the FDA. We have to give them a patent system to let them charge a monopoly price. But then we’re going to criticize them for having monopoly price. So and by the way, you might be in violation of antitrust law, which the government says you can’t have monopoly price, even though we just gave you a monopoly to allow you to charge a monopoly price. So the government’s completely schizophrenic.

[00:47:11] Cody Cook: Yeah. Well, so good, good answers. So to shift gears a little bit here. So we’ve been talking about, you know, property rights and individual rights as kind of the basis of our argument against IP here, Richard Stallman, who was one of the major figures in the free or open source software movement, argued that the ideology behind proprietary software, which is software whose code was hidden and protected so that it couldn’t be shared or modified, was was antisocial and anti-human. So and unethical. Simply wrong, is what he argued, and that this is really an issue about what kind of society we’re allowed to have. He argued that humans are naturally communitarian and desire to help one another, and so proprietary software inhibits this instinct. And somewhat similarly, as a Christian theologian, I look at how early Christians copied and distributed copies of biblical books like mad because they thought the information was so essential and they wanted to share it with their neighbors, because love of neighbor was the highest interpersonal ethic for them. And so I think that a similar argument that stallman’s making here, and that I would kind of make for, for information sharing in a religious context, could be made against the restriction of sharing any other kind of quote unquote, intellectual property. But these are different kinds of arguments than the ones you make. Like, I don’t think you would go along with Stallman and say it would be wrong for a software company to say, here’s an end user license agreement that you’ll sign saying that you can’t do such and such with the software. You’d say, that’s fine. Right. Because that’s an agreement, that’s contractual.

[00:48:39] Stephan Kinsella: Stallman has a confused understanding of property rights and capitalism principles, so he has some good instincts, but he he confuses it all. Like I think he’s in favor of an internet connectivity tax and alternatives to copyright and all this copyleft. Yeah, but which which would all be meaningless and pointless without copyright. This is what the. So copyleft is sort of a response to the automatic nature of copyright. But I don’t like copyleft because it’s an attempt to it’s it’s still standing on your copyrights and granting a license only on certain conditions. The condition that the guy using it or modifying it imposes a similar condition on their users. In all my writing, and the Creative Commons equivalent of that is CC is cc in CC essay share alike. I don’t use essay, I use just by or zero by means by means. Attribution means like you can use my stuff as long as you put my name on it, and I don’t even care about that. It’s just it’s a way to impose one little, one little condition that will serve as consideration. Maybe so. The contract is a binding. I’m just trying to make it binding because it’s hard to opt out of copyright law. I do CC0 as well. I’m just I’m afraid that won’t be legally effective. But anyway, if you abolish copyright, then software would automatically all be free and copyable. And a lot of these, a lot of these end user license agreements would almost be unworkable in a world without copyright. They they sort of they’re done in the backdrop of a world with copyright.

[00:50:09] Stephan Kinsella: Without copyright, it’d be really difficult to have a lot of these end user license agreements. That said, I have nothing. I have nothing against any kind of freely negotiated, enforceable contract between any two parties whatsoever. Unlike Stallman, I just think that would be impractical in most cases. So, for example, imagine a world without copyright. I write a book and I sell it on Amazon, and I get Amazon to agree to only release it to customers who sign an agreement promising not to ever copy the book. Okay, that’s a contractual agreement that’s perfectly legitimate. But either the agreement imposes a big penalty or a little penalty on them for violating the agreement. If it’s a little penalty, someone’s just going to they’re going to violate it. Pay the fine and put it on the internet and everyone’s going to have it. So the only way to stop copying is to have $1 million penalty. Now what? Who’s going to buy a $5 book from me on Amazon and be subject to possibly $1 million of, of of damages in a contract breach when they can just go pirate a free copy somewhere. So there’s a limit to how these things can really work in the real world, I believe. Yeah. Now, you were asking about. So I’ve actually talked a lot about this with Jeffrey Tucker, who’s a good buddy of mine, who’s who’s been heavily involved with the Catholic Church, and he’s heavily involved with me on this anti-ip kind of mission. And he’s been appalled by and been arguing. Yeah, it’s just appalling that the church, the Catholic Church or other Christian or other religious organizations, whatever, whatever, enforce a copyright in, you know, the word of God or any religious tract that seeks to spread your religious faith.

[00:51:44] Stephan Kinsella: The whole purpose of your church is not to make money, and it’s not to stop people from spreading your message. It’s to spread the word. Right. So it’s completely the whole idea of copyright is antithetical to the idea of now, I’m not saying you have an obligation to go out there and digitize everything you own and put it up on your website for free, but at least don’t penalize people that want to make bootleg copies of something, or cut and paste it and spread it around the world. I have the same view about libertarians, You know, if you’re a a money making author like Tom Woods or Michael Malice and you’re or someone who’s making money, I understand pay walling some of your stuff because your goal is to make money. Part part of your goal is to make money. Most of this libertarian stuff never makes money. It’s just like an academic article or something that that you’re hoping some people will read. And if you pay wallet and you threaten people, they can’t copy it without your permission. You’re intentionally slowing down the spread of an idea that you took a lot of time to develop for. What you’re not making, you’re not going to make money off of, of all you’re going to do is are you going to censor it and slow down its spread? Yeah.

[00:52:50] Cody Cook: Well, okay. So what does your win on this a little bit like maybe to shift from Stallman. There was a documentary some years ago made called “RIP: A Remix Manifesto” that was focusing in on kind of remixing and mashups and music and how intellectual property had kind of slowed down this process. And they make some, some pretty strong arguments, I think. But one of them is that culture used to be shared and belonged to everyone. And now, because of copyright and publishers lobbying for special protections, we think of little pieces of culture as being owned by these different conglomerates.

[00:53:23] Stephan Kinsella: That’s correct.

[00:53:24] Cody Cook: And so that’s not really a a property or kind of individual rights argument. It’s more of a communitarian argument. But I wondered if those communitarian arguments had some resonance with you as well.

[00:53:36] Stephan Kinsella: To a degree. I mean, you know, the problem is when you see the effects of we don’t we don’t really have capitalism now, we have a bastardized monopoly capitalism, or we have a type of fascism in a sense. Right? We have we have a definitely a mixed economy. But then your average person, your average left leaning person thinks we have capitalism. So all these things they don’t like, they they blame it on capitalism because they think we have that. So they start, you know, they oppose exploitation and objectification and commoditization. The excuse me, the commodification of Of everything. Now, a pure capitalist like me. I don’t oppose commodification at all, as long as it is the result of a truly natural free market. Whatever happens, happens. Whatever people want to trade, you might, you might, you might oppose overly materialistic commodification on moral or personal preference grounds. But if it happens voluntarily and naturally, you’re going to have a certain amount of that, and that’s fine. I do think that the existence of IP has exacerbated that, though, and has given some, some, some, some ground to our communitarian allies, adversaries. I don’t know what they are, but but yeah. So I think that here’s here’s the way I look at it, copyright patent is the worst because patent impedes and distorts innovation, technical and scientific innovation. And that does the most material damage to the human race, because the way we survive and prosper and even maintain our standard of living in the face of growing government taxation and regulation, is because we always keep improving productivity by increasing our technical knowledge.

[00:55:10] Stephan Kinsella: That’s what innovation is. And so over, over every generation we get richer and richer because we develop more and more knowledge. And if you believe, as I do, that the patent system slows that process down, then we’re slowing down the prosperity, or we’re reducing the prosperity of any given generation of the human race and literally killing people, lots of people. So patents are the worst. Copyrights are number two. They’re worse in some ways because patents last 17 years, copyrights last about 120 or 30 years. It’s insane. The term is insane. Copyrights don’t do as much material damage, but they do more cultural and spiritual damage in a sense, because it distorts the culture heavily. So who knows what types of artistic creations would be prevalent now if not for copyright threats? Documentaries are just or, you know, are disincentivized or the way you shoot them. You can’t shoot in certain buildings because there’s copyrights. You can’t certain people because they have an identity, right? And you got to be you might get sued for defamation or trademark infringement. There’s there’s a proliferation of certain cookie-cutter sequel type movies, because the studios own the copyrights and trademarks of those characters, and they can stop anyone else from making a sequel. Remix culture itself has been heavily. Yeah, I think it started out like like the rappers and these people that did a lot of the remixing and the sampling, they started doing it ignoring copyright law.

[00:56:34] Stephan Kinsella: But then all the lawsuits started, right? And so now there’s a chilling effect and you can say, well, you should respect people’s property rights. But, you know, we don’t know what we’ve lost is the point. There’s a there’s a really good pioneering, like 70 page law review article I just posted on it on my website, c4sif. It’s about how copyright literally stifles technological innovation, because if you just think of the Napster example like this Napster music service around in the around 2000 came like in the dawn of the internet, like, hey, we can take advantage of of MP3 files and streaming and we can start making music available to people. You don’t have to go buy a CD anymore, you know? And that was popular with people. But of course, the music industry shut it down with lawsuits and that that that exerted a huge distorting and chilling effect on music for, for the last 30 years. Finally, iTunes had success. But we don’t know what we’ve lost. We don’t know what we’ve lost. You know, there was a famous case in the 80s, the Sony Betamax case, where the recording industry was suing the VCR machine, which, if you remember, people used to rent movies on VCRs. Then they they got the ability to record on them. They started recording their television shows, trading, you know, things like that. And of course, there was a lawsuit against that. And in the Supreme Court, it was a I think it was five, 5 to 4 decision in favor of the home user saying it’s a fair use.

[00:57:57] Stephan Kinsella: If you can get a broadcast over the airwaves and watch an ABC show, you can record it for your own private, noncommercial use. Yeah. Now, that’s not that. That wasn’t a given that that decision was going to be the case because the fair use factors are vague and subjective. They’re not objective. And the court the case was 5 to 4. It could have been four. It could have been the other way around, which would have totally killed everything. It would have killed Hollywood video, Blockbuster Video. I mean, you know, it would have killed everything that came after. It would have changed everything, and it has changed it. We don’t know what we would have had otherwise. So copyright distorts and impedes cultural creativity, including the remix culture. So I think it’s a shame you do have some innovations on occasion. Try something, but then they’ll get shut down if they’re too blatant about it. I mean, TikTok has this kind of cool thing where people make these little TikTok videos and you can do a side by side thing, you can have your commentary, video, all these kind of things, but you’ve got to be careful what you do, because if it’s a copyrighted video, then you could be in trouble. But really, what’s wrong with that? This is all. This is the way the culture would work in the absence of the of the copyright controls. Trolls?

[00:59:00] Cody Cook: Yeah, absolutely. Well, Steph, it’s been about an hour. I don’t want to take too much more of your time. I want to reference your website, which anybody watching can see the links on the bottom of your, uh, your image there, but StephanKinsella.com. That’s Stephan with an A. Your Twitter is at Kinsella and you’re the website, which I don’t know if I check that one out yet. The the C4 CF what what is that 1.org.

[00:59:23] Stephan Kinsella: That’s just I created that a few years ago. It’s just it stands for Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom. It’s basically I just kind of offload most of my intellectual property related stuff onto that site. So it’s still my publications and my speeches, but it’s mostly the IP related ones.

[00:59:39] Cody Cook: Awesome, cool. Well, I’ll link to all that stuff on the on the show notes for anybody who’s interested. I really appreciate you taking time to, uh, to join us and talk with us a bit about this. It’s really, really interesting stuff. And I’d imagine a lot of people listening haven’t heard this before. They’re probably intuition was is similar to mine, which is to go I don’t know about this, but I think if they follow it up, it’s going to make more and more sense the more they think about it.

[01:00:02] Stephan Kinsella: Yeah. It’s one it’s one of these areas where it is hard to figure out because of the confusion spread by the people who don’t know what they’re talking about or who do, and they’re sort of malevolent about it. But it’s one of these issues. It’s a one way issue. I have hardly ever seen someone go from my position to the pro IP position, but I’ve seen lots of people go from a mild or pro IP position, and once once you see it, it’s like something you can’t unsee. Once you understand how bad it is and then you’ll start seeing it everywhere like I do. Yeah, like you’ll see IP, IP damage everywhere in society. It’s everywhere.

[01:00:36] Cody Cook: Yeah. Well I think for me the question is, do you want to live in a society that’s more communitarian? Do you want to live in a society with less violence because you don’t have the state trying to enforce these ideas? You want a society that’s more free. And I think if your answer to those questions is yes, then you should be interested in this, this argument against intellectual property. So thank you so much. I really appreciate your time.

[01:00:57] Stephan Kinsella: Thanks.

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