KOL080 | Adam vs the Man: “Understanding Intellectual Property Law” 2011

Join me now from Houston, Texas is Stephen Kinsella, a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute with over 17 years patent law experience. He taught IP law as an adjunct law professor at South Texas College of Law and is the author of several books, most relevantly, Against Intellectual Property. Remember when the Earth was thought to be flat? Saying it was round seemed silly, but now we laugh at people who say that the world is flat. I don't know of any, but if I did, I would laugh at them. Similarly, it has become common knowledge that intellectual property is necessary somehow, that government violence is an essential part of creating new ideas. But Stephen disagrees and has spent years in the trenches defeating the silly arguments behind IP. Thank you so much for joining us tonight and I can't believe that I screwed up your name three times already in the course of this episode, but Stephen Kinsella from Houston, Texas, thank you so much for joining us tonight. I'm glad to be here, Adam. Outstanding. Now, you've got a lot of experience. You've been in the trenches, you've been dealing with these arguments. So, I would let's let's just go through and hit these here. Uh what do you say to people who say that intellectual process intellectual property is necessary for inventors to innovate and artists to create? Well, that's a propaganda line put out by the pro IP interests, obviously. Uh it's quite obviously false. The modern IP law is only a couple of hundred years old and before that, we of course had plenty of innovation and artistic creation. We had Shakespeare, the classical works of art, we had um the great classical music. Um Yeah, funny how history just kind of blows that one out of the water right off the bat, doesn't it? Yes, clearly not necessary. In fact, uh the government is good at doing only two things that I'm aware of. It's good at destroying and it's good at bamboozling people into thinking it's necessary. It's not good at doing anything else, so it's surely not going to be good at encouraging innovation. Okay. All right, so what about people who say that this patent system is necessary to protect the small inventors, the individual creators from the big corporations out there that would that would take that intellectual property and and and exploit it and use it for their own profit? Well, that's just simply false. I mean, most small inventors and and small companies Well, most small inventors are employed by large companies and as part of their employment agreement, they assign all of their intellectual property over to the employer either work for hire or under a similar doctrine like that. So, the employer owns it anyway. Um, and what actually happens as a matter of fact is these large companies acquire large arsenals of patents. And then what they do is they pretend to sue each other and then they they rattle their sabers and they back down and they sign some kind of big cross-licensing agreement. So, you'll have two large companies will sue each other or threaten to sue, and then they'll sign a deal where they can each use each other's patents. So, basically they have these patents that they never really use except to get permission to use the other guys' patents. But the little guys on the outside don't have any large arsenals of patents to bargain with. So, basically the patent system erects barriers to entry, helps companies grow larger, and it makes it much more difficult for smaller companies to enter the playing field. Okay. So, I know this goes back to maybe endorsing some kind of property concept to ideas in the first place, but a lot of people in the in in the world today in America, even libertarians, are are still kind of stuck on this concept. And and they they would come to you with the question, but property rights, capitalism, essential. What you're doing here by saying that we shouldn't have intellectual property is socializing ideas. How do you respond to that? Well, calling something property doesn't make it property. I mean, most people nowadays would think you have a property right in your social security payments or in your welfare income or in a right to an education. Actually, the word property is only a fairly recent innovation used to apply to patent and copyright um, for propaganda purposes. This is explicitly admitted by even defenders of IP. They used to be called what they were. They were censorship, and they were monopoly grants of privilege. Patent originated in the 1609, uh, Statute of Monopolies, and, uh, copyright originated in 1710 in, uh, in the, uh, in a copyright statute in England as well, when the purpose was censorship and the impediment of the spread of ideas. Now, I I know the answer to this next one for myself, at least, but for for the We have a lot of creative people in our audience. We have a lot of young people. We have a lot of people that are making music, that are making videos every day, that are out writing stuff on the internet, various levels of claiming intellectual property, but without the government protecting intellectual property, how are they supposed to make a profit? Well, there's a few things here. First of all, government doesn't really protect intellectual property that well. There's a lot of types of intellectual creativity >> point. that are left out, you know, mathematical algorithms or physics ideas or fashion designs or perfume smells or even certain business methods and models, which are all creative and help create wealth. Um, but, you know, but the the basic idea is that the government comes in, and they assume this role to to to regulate this area, and they make people rely on it. And but but the truth is, you know, it's not the government's job to tell you how to make money off of an idea. Uh, one way you could do it is to petition the government for a monopoly grant, which protects you from competition, but that is not the free market. Uh, basically, the government should, at the most, regulate private property rights and let people come up with ideas. Okay. We heard about the, uh, Protect IP Act Senator Leahy just introduced. Kind of scary, the ability that the government might be taking on to help other people shut down websites on on pretty tenuous grounds. You know, a lot of people are saying that with the internet, because it's raising so many issues about intellectual property, when the the cost of copying an idea, the cost of of replication is is is approaching zero here. How do you think we that intellectual property rights are meeting the internet? To me, it seems like the internet is is literally killing the notion by simply overpowering the ability to stop the free flow of ideas. What do you think of that? What do you think of Google's response to the Protect IP Act? I think Google's response to the Protect IP Act was great. I wish more companies would come come in defense of it. We need to realize that uh stopping the use of IP to you know, to constrict the flow of information on the internet is important to keeping the internet free. The internet's one of the most important tools of freedom in our lifetime and we have to keep it free of government regulation and that includes all these um outrageous, insane, and in unjust uses of copyright law and other government laws like gambling and child porn to as an excuse to regulate what people do on the internet. Well, it seems like it's a losing battle anyways, fortunately. And I really appreciate you coming on tonight. Thank you so much. Thank you. That was Stephen Kinsella, a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute.