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March 29, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
45:32
166 Intellectual Property Rights Part 3: Solutions
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Time Text
Good afternoon, everybody.
Hope you're doing well.
It is 10 to 5 on a Wednesday, the 29th of March 2006, and we're going to start off our third round on the problems of intellectual property with some honest-to-goodness facts.
I know it's hopefully not going to become a trend, but I have a little bit of time before I get into the car, so we'll start with facts and we'll end up with the car and the honking and the ranting.
So this is from Against Intellectual Property by N. Stephen Kinsella, and this is from the Journal of Libertarian Studies, volume 15, number 2, spring 2001, pages 1 to 53.
Interestingly enough, it's copyright 2001, Ludwig von Mises Institute, and I'm going to just read a couple of excerpts from it.
I'm sure he wouldn't mind since he's against it, but the guys who published it I have copyrighted it so I won't read too much.
So I'd like to just talk a little bit about the sort of facts.
Let's have a quick summary of IP law.
This is in the US.
Types of IP.
Intellectual property is a broad concept that covers several types of legally recognized rights arising from some type of intellectual creativity or that are otherwise related to ideas.
IP rights are rights to intangible things, to ideas as expressed, copyrights, or as embodied in a practical implementation, patents.
Tom Palmer puts it this way, quote, intellectual property rights are rights in ideal objects which are distinguished from the material substrata in which they are instantiated.
Well, that guy must be fun to have at a dinner party.
In today's legal systems, IP typically includes at least copyrights, trademarks, patents, and trade secrets.
Copyright.
Copyright is a right given to authors of, quote, original works, such as books, articles, movies, and computer programs.
Copyright gives the exclusive right to reproduce the work, prepare derivative works, or to perform or present the work publicly.
Copyrights protect only the form or expression of ideas, not the underlying ideas themselves.
While a copyright may be registered to obtain legal advantages, a copyright need not be registered to exist.
Rather, a copyright comes into existence automatically the moment the work is fixed in a tangible medium of expression and lasts for the life of the author plus seventy years, or for a total of ninety-five years in cases in which the employer A patent is a property right in inventions, that is, in devices or processes that perform a useful function.
A new or improved mousetrap is an example of a type of device which may be patented.
A patent effectively grants the inventor a limited monopoly on the manufacture, use, or sale of the invention.
However, a patent actually only grants to the patentee the right to exclude, i.e.
to prevent others from practicing the patented invention.
It does not actually grant to the patentee the right to use the patented invention.
Not every innovation or discovery is patentable.
The U.S.
Supreme Court has, for example, identified three categories of subject matter that are unpatentable, namely, quote, laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas.
Reducing abstract ideas to some type of, quote, practical application, i.e., quote, a useful, concrete, and tangible result is patentable, however.
U.S.
patents since June 8, 1995 last from the date of issuance until 20 years from the original filing date of the patent application.
The previous term was 17 years from date of issue.
Trade secret.
Now, a trade secret consists of any confidential formula, device, or piece of information which gives its holder a competitive advantage so long as it remains secret.
An example would be the formula for Coca-Cola.
Trade secrets can include information that is not novel enough to be subject to patent protection, or not original enough to be protected by copyright, e.g.
a database of seismic data or customer lists.
Trade secret laws are used to prevent misappropriations of the trade secret, or to award damages for such misappropriations.
Trade secrets are protected under state law, although recent federal law has been enacted to prevent theft of trade secrets.
Trade secret protection is obtained by declaring that the details of a subject are secret.
The trade secret, theoretically, may last indefinitely, although disclosure, reverse engineering, or independent invention may destroy it.
Trade secrets can protect secret information and processes, e.g.
compilations of data and maps not protectable by copyright, and can also be used to protect software source code not disclosed and not otherwise protectable by patent.
One disadvantage of relying on trade secret protection is that a competitor who independently invents the subject of another's trade secret can obtain a patent on the device or process and actually prevent the original inventor, the trade secret holder, from using the invention.
Trademark.
A trademark is a word phrase, symbol, or design used to identify the source of goods or services sold and to distinguish them from the goods or services of others.
For example, the Coca-Cola mark and the design that appears on their soft drink cans identifies them as products of that company, distinguishing them from competitors such as Pepsi.
Trademark law primarily prevents competitors from infringing upon the trademark, i.e.
using confusingly similar marks to identify their own goods and services.
Unlike copyrights and patents, trademark rights can last indefinitely if the owner continues to use the mark.
The term of a Federal Trademark Registration lasts 10 years, with the 10-year renewal terms being available.
Other rights related to trademark protection include rights against the trademark dilution, certain forms of cyber-squatting, and various, quote, unfair competition claims.
IP also includes recent legal innovations such as the mask work protection available for semiconductor integrated circuit designs, the sui generis protection similar to copyright for boat hull designs, and the proposed sui generis right in databases or collections of information.
IP rights and relation to tangible property.
As noted above, IP rights, or at least for patents and copyrights, may be considered rights in ideal objects.
It is important to point out that ownership of an idea or ideal object effectively gives the IP owners a property right in every physical embodiment of that work or invention.
Consider a copyrighted book.
Copyright holder A has a right to the underlying ideal object, of which the book is but one example.
The copyright system gives A the right in the very pattern of words in the book.
Therefore, by implication, A has a right to every tangible instantiation or embodiment of the book, i.e.
a right in every physical version of the book, or at least to every book within the jurisdiction of the legal system that recognizes the work.
Thus, if A writes a novel, he has a copyright in his work.
If he sells a physical copy of the novel to B in book form, then B owns only that one physical copy of the novel.
B does not own the, quote, novel itself, and is not entitled to make a copy of the novel, even using his own paper and ink.
Thus, even if B owns the material property of paper and printing press, he cannot use his own property to create another copy of A's book.
Only A has the right to copy the book.
Hence, copy Right.
Likewise, A's ownership of a patent gives him the right to prevent a third party from using or practicing the patented invention, even if the third party only uses his own property.
In this way, A's ownership of ideal rights gives him some degree of control—ownership—over the tangible property of innumerable others.
Patent and copyright invariably transfer partial ownership of tangible property from its natural owner to innovators, inventors, and artists.
Well, there we go, ladies and gentlemen.
I'm safely ensconced back in my car.
Far away from seedy and terrible things like objective opinions and facts.
Ah, what a relief.
You people.
You know, it's like when I promise you a topic like intellectual property rights, that you expect it to be more than my ramblings about Napster.
I just, you know, it's shocking to me.
People, I mean, haven't you learned by now?
It's all unsubstantiated.
So, anyway, we'll continue on.
I did pick up some stuff from what I was reading a little bit after, and there are a couple of issues that maybe I can be of use in adding my two cents worth to, and maybe not.
But the first, of course, is that intellectual property rights currently are really negotiated between Mostly two groups.
Two groups of people.
The people who make stuff, and the state.
And there's really not a whole lot else sort of in between.
And that sort of, to me, is a problem.
Because I guess one of the questions I've always had with intellectual property rights is, well, Who exactly is representing the consumer in all of this?
And that's something that I don't like.
I certainly do understand the argument that it creates a legal monopoly, that you have a legal monopoly over, say, this podcast, or I have a legal monopoly over this podcast, for instance.
And so, if I own that, then I'm telling you how you can deal with your computer hard drive and your mp3 player, and I have little scraps of ownership all over.
Now, that doesn't bother me as much, because when I produce this, I mean, I'm paying something to Dell for the computer, I'm paying something to GoDaddy for the hosting account, I'm paying something to Microsoft for some web-building software.
No wait, sorry, I'm writing it all in Perl and raw HTML, because I'm an open-source guy.
Yeah, that's it.
But I mean, I don't mind splitting up the division of property to this, that, and the other degree.
It just sort of seems that that's the way the modern economy goes as things get more and more complex and we rely more and more on stuff that we could never invent ourself.
You know, if that's something that doesn't bother me, I could be wrong.
But generally, I certainly do understand the argument against the intellectual property rights.
So there's some arguments for it, which I sort of mentioned in one email today that I'll sort of mention here, and we'll look at the arguments against it, and then I'll sort of tell you which side of the fence I lean towards.
And the argument for intellectual property rights is that people have a right to be paid for their labor, of course.
I don't think anyone has a problem with the fact that if I write a novel, it's a product of my mind and my body, and therefore I should be entitled to some compensation for it.
The question is, of course, how?
Now, the other argument for it is that if you don't reward people financially for their creativity, then there'll just be less creativity.
And I can certainly understand that argument as well.
I don't find it particularly compelling, because it's an argument from effect.
And that is really, to me, it's a substandard argument.
It's to say, well, we'll get more creativity, so we should do it X. Well, who's going to judge what's creativity?
Who's going to judge what creativity is valuable?
And so on.
So I just don't think that's a particularly valid argument.
But to take the opposite view, the general argument, and I think Jefferson came up with this, or at least expressed it in this way, where he said, if you light a candle for my candle, you get light, but I don't get any less light.
And that sort of idea That there is a very generic kind of reproducibility to intellectual capital, intellectual property, is pretty significant.
So, to copy an mp3 file takes all of five seconds, and it's not like the original owner of the mp3 file is now without an mp3 file, because it's a copy.
So, if I write a book, and you copy the book, from me and I let you copy it and you pay me five bucks or whatever, and then someone else copies it from you, you don't have that book out of your possession.
It's there, it's a real thing, and everybody's sort of...
it's a multiplicity, right?
So the basic argument for property rights is that property rights are essential when goods are scarce, and they're less essential when goods are multifarious.
When goods are all over the place.
See, it could be easily copied.
And so the idea is that you need property rights in a lawnmower, in sort of Kinsella's example.
You need property rights in a lawnmower because there's only one and it's sort of hard to get a new one, hard to make a new one.
But if you could sort of snap your fingers and instantly create another lawnmower, then property rights in lawnmowers would be sort of less important or less relevant.
I'm not sure I really follow that argument at all.
I mean, I don't really understand how the prevalence or reproducibility of a particular item of property, or whatever you want to call it, I don't understand what impact that could conceivably have on whether or not property rights should be applied to it.
I would agree that property rights are often more important when a resource is scarce.
So, if you are in a desert and there's like one bottle of water and ten people dying of thirst, who gets control of that bottle of water is fairly important.
But if you all live by a lake where you can just dip your head and drink the water anytime you want, the ownership of a bottle of water probably becomes somewhat less important.
But I don't see how that has anything to do with whether there are property rights in it or not.
Whether you choose to exercise or the importance of exercising property rights is different than whether those property rights exist or not.
I mean, everybody has the right to podcast.
It doesn't mean you have to podcast.
So, in fact, I'd be a lot happier if you all just got out of the way, if all the other podcasters got out of the way and got people to where they really needed to be, which is freedomainradio.com.
Absolutely.
So I don't really quite understand that argument at all, but that's because I come from the argument for morality approach, which is sort of something like this.
If everybody owns the products of their body, then I absolutely own these podcasts.
When I create them.
I mean, nobody else.
Nobody can force me to post these podcasts on the web.
Nobody can force me to hand them over.
I absolutely own these podcasts when I'm completed, because it's my voice, it's my equipment, it's my property, and my intelligence, and my brain, and everything that goes into creating or producing these podcasts.
So I absolutely own them.
Now, once I toss them out into the wild sea of the Internet, I would say that I don't own them particularly.
But if I do decide to start charging for them, I absolutely retain that right to charge for them.
And I absolutely can put within a contract, and this is sort of where the DRO system, I think, works a lot better.
If I create a contract on my website that says, you can have access to all of my podcasts for one single penny, but if you take these podcasts, you cannot reproduce them and copy them all over and put your own site up hosting them because I really want that penny.
Because I'm not very good at finances.
And I'm living in 1812, when a penny could buy you a month of room and board.
So, if you then click the I agree, I mean, there's a contract between you and I. You pay me the penny, you get the podcast, and you can't copy and reproduce it.
I mean, that doesn't seem that complicated to me.
Now, the problem of a state handling it, I certainly understand.
I mean, I think the state is bad at handling everything, and so I fully understand that having the state manage intellectual property rights is a very bad idea.
I have no problem with that whatsoever, because the state is bad at everything it handles.
Now, the great thing about being an anarchist is it really doesn't matter.
Really doesn't matter who is handling what, because there is no state in an anarchist society.
So, how would a DRO handle it?
Well, I would have a DRO, like a good DRO.
And again, somebody on the board said, well, why are you sort of saying there has to be DROs?
I mean, there doesn't.
I mean, this is just... DROs are ways the state could be replaced.
I never meant to imply that they should be replaced, or that the state should be replaced by DROs.
It's just a possibility.
I think it's a good one, and I think it answers a lot of questions, but hey, that could just be me.
So, a DRO should honor any contract that two people enter into voluntarily.
I mean, that would be sort of one of the things that I would sort of suggest.
Now, a DRO, I'm just sort of going to make a guesstimate.
If I'm running a DRO, I don't want to investigate every single contract in order to figure out how expensive it's going to be to patrol it, right, to enforce it.
So if somebody writes up some 1,200-page unbelievably convoluted document with this, that, or the other, or maybe even stuff that contradicts it from one end of the document to another, then the DRO may say, no, I don't think we're really going to enforce that contract for I don't think we're really going to enforce that contract for Good luck with it, but that's not really our thing.
Or they're going to say, sure, we would be absolutely perfectly happy to enforce this contract for you.
It's going to cost you about a million dollars a year for us to represent you to the nth degree as far as this contract goes.
So coming up with your own kind of off-the-wall contracts Unless there's some radically innovative way that you can reduce the overall costs of a contract, or the possibilities of reneging, DROs are going to say, if you come up with your own contract, there's kind of like a premium.
It's the same thing that happens with lawyers right now.
If you want to come up with your own specific thing, then it's more expensive.
What DROs will have, of course, is masses of templates, right?
So they will have a template for a podcast for Hamana, Hamana, Hamana, right?
Lots of different ways of paying.
Maybe you pay by the quality of the podcast.
Maybe you pay by the numbers of podcasts or some combination thereof.
And maybe this and maybe that.
Now, if I choose to go with the DROs template for whatever, and of course these templates will be developed as new situations occur, then it's going to be cheaper, right?
So there's going to be this pressure to conform, and DROs are going to want to make contracts as cheap to deal with, as cheap to mediate as possible, right?
So they're not going to end up with what you have right now, which is all of this horrible legalese that the state and the lawyers have put in place In order to keep people from using the state justice apparatus and to keep lawyers in business.
You know that old joke of what do you call 200 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?
A damn fine start.
First thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
Actually, the Shakespearean character who first said that Was a villain, right?
Because lawyers were considered to be a whole lot better than armies back in Shakespeare's time, so killing the lawyers was a villainous thing to do, but now it sort of seems to be a prerequisite for civil society.
Not killing the lawyers, just suing them until they no longer want to live.
But I can certainly see that DROs are going to want to keep the costs of mediating contracts down as much as possible.
Because like a fully private health care organization, a health insurance organization, it's only going to make money if you don't use its services.
So it wants to make its contracts as simple and open and objective as possible.
They can be resolved with a phone call.
Like, tech support, except that you can actually get through.
And so I can see DROs making up that kind of stuff.
Now, the question as to whether or not you're going to agree to another contract or not sort of makes sense to have it open as a template in the same kind of way.
So if you decide that you want to buy all of my podcasts for a penny, Then there's going to be a little end-user license agreement or whatever that comes up.
And most of us don't exactly read those open with the legal dictionary on our lap.
We just click them and say, OK, well, I assume everything's kind of copacetic or whatever.
And so the way that you would do it is you'd have a sort of DRO logo or something like that and say, this license agreement has been vetted by such and such, and here are the terms in two paragraphs, and so you understand, and blah, blah, blah.
And they would then further, I mean, the best thing you want to do is to prevent rather than cure, so there would be a way of dealing with these kinds of files such that my mp3 files, you would download them, they'd work on your computer, there'd be some digital rights management, you know, all this kind of stuff.
So prevention, right?
And then if you did end up reselling all of my podcasts without my permission and not giving me any royalties, that would be against the agreement between us and blah blah blah.
Now, it also seems to me that if I own my podcasts, then they're just property.
They're just property.
It's like I've painted a painting.
Well, what can I do with a painting?
Well, I can will my painting to my heirs.
I can will it to charity.
I can do whatever I want with it.
And it doesn't expire.
Like, I don't paint a painting, own it for 20 years, and then that ownership expires.
There seems to me no logical or moral reason why you would have an expiration date on ownership for any form of property.
If you own it, you own it.
There's no magical moment wherein 19 years, 364 days, 0.999.
It has one particular kind of ownership structure.
Bing!
After midnight, it turns into a pumpkin and everything changes.
I mean, that's just not logical, right?
I mean, ownership is a product of a body, and it is in perpetuity a product of a body, and until the heirs die out and there is no possible way of interpreting the wishes of the person who's died, where it's supposed to go, it's never in a state of nature.
I mean, unless you will it to be in a state of nature, I guess, by throwing it off the back of a truck with a note saying, if you want it, it's yours.
I mean, that would be a state of nature, and then it has a very short amount of ownership before it passes over to somebody else.
So I might be missing something about this whole intellectual property thing, but it would seem to me that I own these, what, 167 podcasts.
I mean, I don't own them right now, because nobody has assigned any kind of... I don't have any... Like, in a GRO society, I wouldn't own them if I just left them lying around and people picked them up, because I wouldn't have any contract with them.
Now there is an implicit contract here, like I know that I own these now because I've created them and they're in the public domain and I've got dates on them and all this and that.
So there's no question that I own the source, I own the original WAV files and so on.
So I know that I own them now, but even in a DRO society, the ownership doesn't seem to me that it makes any sense as to why it would suddenly revert to the public domain.
Now I know that originally, and Ayn Rand was sort of keen on this idea, that you would have things revert back to the public domain, Because you should be paid for work that you do, and therefore, if I write a song that makes the whole world sing, and then my grandchildren still are making money from that, in this sort of about-a-boy scenario, then they're not really working, and they're getting the money, and I don't really understand that at all either.
It doesn't sort of make any sense to me.
If I make a lot of money and I buy a house, And then I take that house and I will it to my children.
Well, they get a house.
I mean, and their grandchildren get a house until you get the drunken recessive gene that blows all the money, wine, women and song.
So I don't really understand how the rights to a piece of digital whatever is any different.
And I say this with an extraordinary hatred of libraries, right?
So I mean, please understand that, whether you consider that bias or not.
I think that this is another reason why I find that the record company's hatred of copying is somewhat problematic because libraries have been doing this for thousands of years, right?
Taking an author's book, one person buys it and everyone else gets to read it.
Well, I'm not really sure why, if I spend two years writing a book, and I can tell you by God it is hard to write a book.
It is emotionally exhausting, it is exciting, it is Debilitating at times, it is a real rollercoaster to hammer a book into something that shows and approximates what it is that you're trying to get at.
I mean, I must have rewritten the ending to Revolutions like three times just to find something that worked well, that was just right.
And it's tiring, and it's thousands and thousands and thousands of hours.
to write a book.
Maybe not thousands, but it's definitely a lot.
It's a lot of work.
And what has been produced there, like a manuscript and so on, is something that you hope to gain money by reproduction.
I mean, there's no way to make money off a book if you hand write it and rent it to people for 50 bucks a day or something like that.
Then there's no way, really, to make money on that book.
So given that people who work very hard on something like to get paid for it, It has to come through the reproduction.
Now, the reproduction is absolutely impossible without the book.
I mean, photocopying paper is not going to sell for 20 bucks a copy.
So, somebody has to provide that initial content.
And the initial content, which is the sequence of words upon the page, is absolutely the product of a mind and a body, right?
It's a mind thinking and a body typing.
I'm not sure that I would understand when somebody would say that I don't have the right to the product of my labor because it's easy to copy.
There's no objective way to draw a line down that, even if I were to accept the premise.
I mean, how hard does it have to be to copy something?
In order for it to be... So a lawnmower obviously has property rights over because it's hard to rebuild another lawnmower.
But suppose it only took an hour to rebuild another lawnmower.
Would I still have the right to it?
Suppose it only took a minute.
Suppose it only took a second.
I mean, there's no objective line that you can draw which says, well here, by golly, you have something which is reproducible and therefore doesn't have real property rights and here you have something which is not reproducible and blah blah blah.
Now, I do understand that a copyright, or like a trademark, can be protected.
I mean, I don't know whether a DRO would do that or not.
I imagine that it would.
But that a word cannot, right?
So maybe I could copyright free domain radio, but I doubt I'd be able to copyright the word freedom.
And of course, even if I were able to copyright the word freedom, I might want to trade it in for despotism, which seems to be gaining a little bit of currency these days.
So, I do understand that there are certain grey areas around, well, there's a sentence called, Hello, he said, which occurs in thousands of novels, or in modern feminist novels, Hello, he lied.
So, it's hard for me to understand, like, okay, so that word, that phrase, you can't copyright, but then two sentences or three sentences in a row you can copyright, so I understand that all of that is quite complicated, and I don't have any particular...
solution for it that is going to be objectively workable for all situations because the free market is continually optimizing.
I think that the expense of non-standard agreements is going to be so high that a number of standard agreements are going to be hammered out come hell or high water.
a number of standard agreements are going to be hammered out because going through non-standard agreements is so expensive that it's only in very unusual situations, like 99-year leases or something, that you're going to end up doing that kind of stuff.
So a DRO is going to have a template which is going to balance a number of things around ownership.
Now, there is the property rights of the person who has created the novel.
There is the property rights of the people who are using their printing press and this and that to create the novel and the distribution and the trucks and the bookstores and everyone who has a stake in it getting it from the writer's mind to the reader's hand.
Everyone who has a stake in it is going to have some sort of property rights and be able to take a sliver of the pie and eat comfortably.
And all of that is going to have to be pretty balanced with the need for publicity.
So, if nobody is even able to reproduce the title of your book, it's going to be rather difficult to publicize it.
It's going to be trying to refer to Prince in the late 90s, when he became that symbol that looked like a bug hitting your windshield.
If you're not going to allow anybody to take excerpts out from the novel either, it's going to be rather difficult to publicize.
So there's going to be balance.
But the balance is around maximizing the rewards to the person who has created it and to everybody else.
So, maximizing rewards is a long way, is why you generally tend to not copyright certain things.
So, Hollywood doesn't like it if you put a movie on your website that people can download, but Hollywood does like it if you put a trailer of their movie that people can download.
The reason being that the trailer is enticing people to spend money, it's maximizing their income, and blah blah blah.
And so, there is some balance.
What is the balance?
Who knows?
It's going to be something that's going to be worked out by all parties involved.
By the writer, by the distributor, by the reviewer, by the bookstore, by whoever, by the media who want to cover it or don't.
It's all complicated.
And the consumer!
And the consumer.
Because, of course, in a free society, in a free society, there is going to be a wide array, initially, a wide array of contracts regarding intellectual property.
So if you want to buy this book, you can do this, you can do that, you can do the other.
And it's all going to be printed in pretty simple language along the back.
And there will be, of course, repercussions according to your DRO if you break it, and all of this kind of stuff.
And there'll be competing ones.
So, there'll be some writers who'll say, you know what?
You can just have the whole damn thing.
I mean, this is what I'm doing with the podcast right now, right?
I'm putting the podcast up on the website and saying, enjoy!
I'll pay everything.
I'll pay for all of the equipment.
I'll put the time in.
I'll convert it.
I'll upload it.
I'll update the XML.
I'll pay for the bandwidth.
I'll pay for the website.
It's all yours and it's all free.
And there's no conditions.
It's yet about listening to these podcasts.
Wonderful.
All enjoy.
Have a great time.
Totally open source.
It's open source brainstem.
Okay, maybe that's not the best phrase in the world.
I can't even think of the logo of that, but it would probably be an animated GIF doing something fairly unpleasant.
But that's sort of where these podcasts sit, and then at some point I may choose to do something like, okay, 8kHz are free, 16kHz cost this, 48kHz cost that, and if you want CD quality, then I'll come over to your house and talk to you as you get to bed.
So... Sorry, that would be live.
Steph live!
So, there's going to be a lot of competing ways of balancing all of these preferences.
I mean, we like property because it gives us good things.
It gives us goodies, it gives us income, it gives us pleasure, all that kind of stuff.
And so, the maximizing of happiness is what's important.
Now, in something as complicated as a novel, where you have the writer, the distributor, the reviewer, the bookstore, the guy who drives the truck to deliver the book, whatever, in something that complex, there's lots of people who all want to be happy.
And if one of them is happy at the expense of everybody else, then that doesn't seem to me such a good thing, right?
That's sort of why we don't like force, right?
So if the writer gets 99 cents and everyone else has to split a penny, then the writer is not... well, actually, the writer is going to think like he's happy when he gets the first... when he writes up the contract.
Unfortunately, when he puts it out into the marketplace, he's going to find himself fairly far down on the list of writers that bookstores want to work with because it's like, yeah, okay, so this other guy is giving me 30 cents on the dollar and you're giving me a tenth of a penny.
Yeah, I'll be in touch.
Don't call me.
I'll call you.
So finding a way to balance all of these competing requirements I think is a very interesting challenge and it's something that the GROs and bookstores and everyone else are going to sit down and try and figure out to the best of their ability.
And then as new medium comes along it's going to have to be tweaked and it's going to have to do this and you have to do that and so on.
And there's going to be lots of ways of making it easy for the consumer to figure out.
Now, it could be that the idea that if I own something, and you borrow it, and then I say, you can't copy it, right?
So, if you buy my book, and you have a photocopier, and I say to you, I'm so sorry, you can't copy my book, you can only own one instance of it, but you can't copy it, then I am actually I have control over your property and so I have control in little nefarious ways over other people's property and I can sort of tell them what to do and what not to do with their own property blah blah blah.
Again, I don't really have such a problem with that.
I'm not sure that I understand what the issue is because that seems to me just kind of like morality, right?
I mean, I can sell a whole bunch of knives and And I can sort of have little instructions which say, please don't plunge this into your cat.
I mean, unless it's one of those yowly non-petable cats, in which case, you know, well, still don't.
But you can understand the impulse.
And if then the DRO also is going to have some say over how you use that knife.
So if you stab someone with it, then they're going to say, no, we're really not so keen on that.
If you remember your DRO contract, and it wasn't even in the fine print, we were fairly keen on the whole no stabbing thing.
So, simply entering into any kind of civilized society or civil interaction with somebody is going to have some effect on how they are going to control their property or your property.
So, I mean, it just seems to me kind of obvious that any civil society is going to exercise some control over people's property, right?
It's not an inhibition on my right to use a knife to say, I can't stab you, nor is it an inhibition of my right to use a car to say, if the road is private, it would be nice if you stayed in the lane and didn't drive into oncoming traffic, and if you sort of followed the road sign.
I don't consider that to be a big infringement on my right to drive a car, to not drive into oncoming traffic.
That could just be me, maybe it's your thing, in which case Oh, I think I see you up ahead.
So, you know, maybe I'm mistaking something there, but a restriction on the right for other people to use their property seems pretty, you know, pretty reasonable.
I mean, it's a thou shalt not, which is kind of important.
I mean, if I sell you a book saying that you have to copy it a thousand times and hand it out in your neighborhood, that seems like a kind of onerous thing.
But if I sell you a book saying, you can't photocopy this and hand it out to everyone in your neighborhood, all I'm doing is preventing you from doing something.
Saying, thou shalt not, which is nothing, right?
I mean, it doesn't mean anything.
Because, I mean, you'd only be doing that because you wanted to reap some sort of profit from it, which, what had you done, right?
You bought a photocopy, you were walking up and down the street, but you didn't write the book.
You'd have nothing to sell without the book writer, the novelist.
So, saying you can't use your photocopier to copy my book and hand it out for free because whatever whatever...
You know, I don't think that's particularly unreasonable.
I mean, DROs may also sell you knives, as I mentioned, with the rather strong warning or request to not plunge it into other people's necks or whatever.
I don't particularly have any problem with that, but of course maybe I'm missing something, this is a complicated topic, and so on.
Now, if you take the argument for morality and sort of drape it over this kind of thing, then we're really talking here not about property itself.
I mean, if I handwrite a book, it seems pretty obvious that I own that book.
I mean, I don't think anyone is going to be able to come into my house and take my book and walk off with it and not be violating some sort of basic moral principle around property.
So, without a doubt, you own the book.
I mean, there's no question of that.
Because it's a product of your body, product of your mind, and blah blah.
We've already talked about these property rights before.
So, if you own the book, then surely you can enter into a contract with anybody, voluntarily, on how best to distribute that book or what rights they have.
And that seems to me entirely sort of fine.
I mean, that would sort of make sense to me, that that would be a reasonable thing to do.
If you own the book, then obviously you own how it's used.
I mean, you can give it away, you can rent it away, you can sell it away, and so on.
And so I don't really see how in digital versus non-digital, how that has anything to do with the basic fact of property rights.
Clearly you own the book that you hand write out of your own head.
And then if you choose to enter into a contract with someone that says, yeah, you can take it, but you can't copy it, but you can do this, but you can not do that.
Well, that's fine.
You don't have to buy the book, right?
I mean, if you're the consumer, you can just say, ah, you know, that's like a, The novel is 200 pages long, and the EULA is 300 pages long, so I think maybe I'll give it a pass, because it could be one of these things that's like, yeah, buy this book, and then in fine print it's like, we now own your children, or something, you know?
Like, you don't want to take those chances, right?
I mean, let's say, you know, you don't like your children.
But hey, let's say you do, and you want to keep them.
So, they're going to have to be simple, let's just say, these user agreements.
But if you have the ownership of the book, then you can, it seems to me, pretty seriously make a strong case for the idea that you can rent it out, or loan it out, or do whatever you want with it, and people sign a contract in return for it, and so on.
I mean, we don't really have a problem with this when it comes to renting lawnmowers, right?
So if I own a lawnmower and you want to come in and borrow it because, I don't know, maybe you've got back hair or something, so you want to come in and borrow the lawnmower, I don't think people mind this thing where you sign a little contract that says, I'm not buying it for good.
I'm borrowing it and you can come and get it back and this and that.
We kind of accept that as a reasonable thing, right?
I mean, we can live with that as a pretty comprehensible model for dealing with this sort of stuff.
And again, maybe DROs will come up with something else, who knows, right?
But that seems to sort of make sense to me.
So if you can have a conditional sort of loan of a piece of property, like I can't go and rent a lawnmower and then go and sell it on eBay.
I mean, I can, but they cannot be too pleased with me.
So if you can have a conditional sale, or a conditional transfer of property in the form of rentals, I'm not sure I understand why it's so different from intellectual property.
And whether it's easy to copy or hard to copy, or whether creativity is going to be enhanced or diminished or what, what, what, what, it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter at all.
It really doesn't matter whether things are easy.
I mean, the real principle is, does somebody who produces something have a right to own that thing?
And if they have the right to own that thing, then surely they have the right to enter into voluntary contracts with other people about how that thing gets used.
And I can understand that the libertarians are not so keen on the existing government system.
It's like, well, yeah, because it's a government system, so of course it's gonna suck.
So, I mean, I think we're all on the same page as far as that goes.
And so, in an anarchist system, you can do whatever you want.
Of course there's going to be something in place which is going to maximize the pleasure that people get out of property.
So, I mean, I love music, and if people never got paid a penny for making music, then I'd only get to see sort of Fairly sucky garage bands, right?
I mean, hobbyists, right?
But you wouldn't get to see real professionals, because there would be no such thing as professionals, so I wouldn't be happy with that, and I would rather pay some money to get better music than to listen to some karaoke bar where there wasn't even any background music, because you can't buy that either!
So...
That would make me happier, so I'm going to pay.
If Freddie Mercury comes back from the dead and says, Steph, I'll absolutely release you another album.
Why don't you write me some tunes?
I'll sing you the theme song for Freedom Main Radio.
All we hear is Freedom Main Radio.
Still working on it.
Still working on it.
It's going to sound better in the final version.
Also, there's an old song about Nelson Mandela.
Free Nelson Mandela.
I've sort of been thinking about this.
Free Freedom Radio.
Still working on it.
Maybe I'll get some cuter backup singers.
We don't know.
In fact, maybe I'll get a real singer to sing it for me.
I'm still working on it.
So be patient.
It's all coming.
The rap version will never happen.
I just... You know, if it wasn't for the accent, I could absolutely do rap with complete credibility.
But unfortunately, the pan-Commonwealth accent just doesn't really work with the gangster thing as well as I'd like.
Although I do hear from the board that my philosophy is the bomb and that it might be good to get thugged out once in a while, which I do believe.
Anyway, sorry, I'm layering an enormous amount of white over an intense amount of urban hip-hop funkadelic-ness, so I will stop doing that and return to a proper white topic, which is abstract property rights.
So that's sort of my solution for it, right?
Yeah, okay, of course the state system sucks.
We're all in agreement there.
But why on earth do you need to come up with a universal system?
I mean, isn't it to maximize pleasure?
If someone comes back from the dead and offers me a bunch of albums, yeah, I'll pay him some decent cash for it.
I'll trade him some podcasts, saying these might help you in the afterlife.
You know, I'm sure it's pretty boring up there.
But that would make me happy.
Now, if there was a situation where patents were like three minutes and nobody produced records, that wouldn't make me happy.
If it was $600 for a CD and there was no other way to get the music, that would not make me happy.
So, you know, it's a balance.
It's a complicated balance.
And wherever you have a complicated balance, you need a free market.
I mean, that seems to me fairly obvious.
You need a free market because there is no clear answer.
What is the absolute optimal way to get copyable property distributed among a wide variety of people?
Lord knows.
Lord knows.
It's like saying, how many marbles do we need in Scandinavia next year?
Well, it's complicated, and it's going to take a lot of tweaking, and you're going to need to be responsive, and you're going to need some just-in-time manufacturing techniques, and so on.
So I don't really think there is an answer.
I don't think there's a state edict that can say, we need 20,000 marbles in Scandinavia next year, on this day, in this place.
And so I don't think that there's any more truth to that idea Sorry, I don't think that idea would be any more valid than the idea of what is the one way that we need to manage the distribution of reproducible property that's enforced by a central state agency that's not going to listen to consumers in any way, shape, or form, and is just going to be under the influence of people who have political power, and people who have money, and people who can bribe, and all that kind of stuff.
You know, again, I sort of might be missing something, but it's a complicated situation with no clear answer, and it's going to be an answer that, even if you come up with a clear answer, even if you came up with something that we all got behind and agreed on today, well, tomorrow there'd be some new medium that it might not work in.
So, just kind of seems to me that there's quite a lot of tweakiness in this kind of stuff.
And it's all about voluntary transfer of property anyway, so why not just let the DROs work it out in conjunction with the consumers and every interested party, and have it constantly tweaked for new mediums, and have people constantly coming up with better templates about how to manage this stuff.
You know, I could see that being a sort of productive and intelligent solution, and not something, sadly, that's available in the realm of the state.
So I hope this has been helpful.
I think it has.
It has been for me.
And I guess I hope that if it is for me, it is for you too.
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