KOL497 | Debate: Should Free Cities Protect Intellectual Property? Free Cities Conference Próspera

Um, all right. Do we have our next panelist here? Have we found Brian? Do we have Brian over? Wonderful. All right. Then we have everybody. We can start rolling into our next session. Um, as many people know, libertarians have spent uh decades, if not more, arguing about intellectual property rights. It shows no sign of stopping anytime soon, least of all today. Which is why we're wel welcoming up a debate on that very topic. On one side you have the Randians arguing that intellectual property is property. This is something that the government should help protect like any other property right. On the other side you have folks arguing that because property intellectual property is non-rivalous. It's completely incoherent to call it property at all and the the entire term deserves to be discarded with. We are going to get to the bottom of this debate and stop all the arguing today. Hopefully, if this uh debate is successful, um this will be moderated by none other than Alex Voss, whose birthday it is today. Please be sure to wish him a happy birthday. Please welcome to the stage, Alex Voss, Stephan Canella, and Brian Oaron. Awesome. Please come to the stage, gentlemen. This is actually perfect uh that we have a few extra minutes here. We have a lot to cover. Uh the intellectual property discussion is uh obviously one that has a lot of context, a lot of nuance. I want it to be largely a a discussion between these two debating partners and I'm here to sort of steer it. The thing we're going to do different than most debates on this topic is most of it stays very theoretical and I want to cover this. I want to give the groundwork for it so everyone has the theoretical framework to think about this. But in particular, I want to think about how should we in the free cities or the seasteading movement think about intellectual property as we're creating new jurisdictions. Is this something worth fighting for? If so, you know, what exactly are we fighting for? What do we want to enforce? These are the sorts of questions that I would like to uh sort of elucidate. So, we're going to spend about 50% of this time uh laying out the theoretical case. I'm going to let uh both of my uh debate partners here uh have their say to sort of lay out the case and then we'll shift about halfway towards a not so much even a debate because it's very context dependent but a discussion about what are the factors uh that we want to think about. So with that being said um I'm going to ask both Stefan and Brian to uh give a call it a 4-minute uh opening uh thesis statement. What is your position? and are we for or against intellectual property? Why? What are the foundations? Uh and then we'll take it from there with a little bit of back and forth. Stefan, if you don't mind, could you uh kick us off? >> All right, I'd be happy to. Uh hello everybody. Um I'm happy to be here representing Ireland as well as my partner. So there's one and a half Irish guys up here. Um I started practicing law in 1992. I started practicing patent law in 1993. I took the patent bar in 1994 and I wrote my first article opposing patent law in 1995 and my big article opposing patent law in 2000 or 2001. So I've been opposing this this uh this legal system for quite a while and I thought I had encountered every bad argument and every argument for IP and and rebuted it over the years. But actually I read Brian's summary in our pre pre-debate discussions and it's kind of a new argument. Um, I think it's still wrong, but uh, he gave me a new one to knock down. So, I'm really grateful. Um, okay, quick summary. Um, we don't live in the Garden of Eden. If we did, life would be there would be no problems. There would be no action to perform. There would be no scarcity, no want. But we don't live in the Garden of Eden. We live in a world where we face the future and we face uneasiness about what's coming down the pike. And we have control of our bodies. And we use our bodies. We control these bodies to use resources in the world to achieve things, right? We employ means to get things done and those we also use ideas or knowledge to tell us what to do to guide to guide our actions. So all action involves the use of scarce resources which are causally efficacious at achieving our ends and the use of knowledge to guide us. If there was no other people around, you would still do this. You would act. You would use resources or scarce means to achieve ends. But we live in society with other people which has good things and bad things. The good thing is that we have other people to live around. We can trade with them. We can have the division and specialization of labor. But because we have free will, there's always the chance of someone taking our scarce means of action which are inherently rivalous and conflictable. Right? So there's the potential for conflict. And because most of us don't want conflict all the time because it's unproductive and inefficient and unpleasant and we have some empathy for each other and we have self-interest, norms or laws develop which are property rights. So property rights are norms that support the ability to possess and use resources peacefully and productively and cooperatively cooperatively with with others. What this means basically is the core principles of the western private law since the Roman law and the common law and what libertarianism seeks to uh propose in a more consistent form which are four basic principles. Number one, the basic principle is the scarce resource of your body is owned by the person himself. That's called self ownership as opposed to slavery. And then for these external resources in the world which are owned, the owner can be determined by determining number one who started using it first because original appropriation has to be one of the rules so that we can use these resources in the first place or if you acquired it by contract or if you are owed that resource in compensation for someone doing a wrong to you. So those four basic principles are the core of all just private law and all libertarian justice and law. And the problem with intellectual property is that it arose um it arose historically and when I say intellectual property I'm speaking on the two worst parts of it which is patent and copyright. We're going to leave trademarks and trade secrets and boat hole designs and database rights and moral rights and all that alone for for a second. AI rights, newspaper headlines, all these new new fangle rights. So patented copyright arose in statutes not on the common law in England and and Europe uh hundreds of years ago with the practice uh of the court regulating what could be printed that resulted in the statute of an in 1710 which is modern copyright law and the court granting privileges to protect their court cronies from competition in the form of patent granted privileges which resulted in the statute of monopolies of 1623 which resulted in the modern American and then the worldwide uh patent and copyright systems. Both of those systems suppress innovation, impede uh research and development, raise prices, and restrict freedom and property rights. And copyright censor speech and distorts culture. And they're both totally inimicable inimical to just property rights in a private free market order and should not be called intellectual property, but intellectual privilege and should be abolished. >> That was incredible. That was 4 minutes and 1 second. Thank you very much Stefan. Brian please uh four minutes as well. >> I'll try. Um thank you Stephan. That's uh I have a lot of sympathy for this position that is libertarianism. The problem I see with libertarianism is that we live in a world that has largely involved corporate igopies arrogating the vast majority of resources to themselves in pursuit of profit at our expense. Meanwhile, they impose negative externalities on us like pollution and poverty and essentially expect us to live as wage slaves. And fundamentally, I think that the libertarian movement is a reaction to this. It's an inwardlooking turn that says, I'm going to get what's mine. I'm going to coordinate off from uh that which is around me and I'm going to protect it to the hilt. But I think the problem when it comes to IP is that it's based on a number of or at least Stefan's position and those who agree with him is based on some kind of misconception. this idea that there is no way that my IP rights matter because anyone else can hold my IP simultaneously. So just to briefly recap the logic of the libertarians, they say well property rights are there to resolve conflicts over scarce material resources which are only simultane cannot be simultaneously used. And to resolve those conflicts, we look to who occupied them first. And the problem they say is that when I grant you an IP right, that is you controlling what I can do with my material property and that is a limitation on what you can do. I think this this this idea that I'm restricting what you can do with your property because of my IP right is kind of unrealistic. The truth is that patents that Tesla hold do not really affect the average person, right? The average person isn't in a position to build an automobile from scratch. And this is true writ large. We're talking about a world where really most of the resources and the means of production are actually controlled and concentrated in the hands of a few. And that concentration has been facilitated by the collusion of a central banking system and the proflegate printing of funny money. And we say I say that intellectual property is one of the last bull works against this oligopoly. This is one of the last enclaves of human freedom that can resist the arrogation of this uh rapacious elite. And essentially that this is something therefore that we should defend viciferously. What are we defending? It's not just ideas. It is the right and the the the property over your human ingenuity, right? Your intelligence. We're all so obsessed with artificial intelligence. We've forgotten about human intelligence. This is the wellspring of human civilization. And whether it has been granted through uh monopolies in the past is neither here nor there, right? This is just the genetic fallacy because something has a bad origin, right, does not mean that there is no value in it. And I think this kind of argument should appeal to network states which are based upon legal hacking, right? We're going to take whatever we can get because the urgency of our situation is defending the individual against the oligarch oligarchy that would enslave us. >> Also, really incredible job. Just about four minutes on the on the dot. Um Stephan, I I mean I think I'd like to open this up a little bit debate between the two of you. Do you have questions for each other that you'd like to try to poke holes in in particular? You know, Stephan, you just heard Brian's position. where would you push back on that? >> So, imagine that we had a roughly libertarian society, a free market with no intellectual property, uh, no patent or copyright statutes, and someone comes along and says, um, I propose that there's a penalty for someone using their own resources in a certain way um, without permission from someone else who filed, you know, filed a design for this iPhone or something like that with with some office. and you say, "Well, what's what's the reason that you want to restrict the freedom of people to compete and to sell things or you want to impo set a a copyright you want to impose a copyright statute or or legislate that and when before people had the right to copy copy information that's available publicly and they could do whatever they want with their own paper and printing printing press and ink and you want to say, well, we should we should get let the government grant these rights that the the originator of a pattern can use to prevent someone from using their property. And your answer would be, well, the corporations are too powerful and we need to and and and and innovation and ideas are good. So, we need to recognize that somehow like we need we need to give ideas a pat on the back by giving them equal respect with scarce resources, right? But as I mentioned in the beginning, um, we live in the world and we use ideas to guide our actions and we use scarce resources to cause things to happen because there's conflict over those scarce resources. We need to be able to be the first one to appropriate it, which is why we have homesteading or or original appropriation and we need to be able to transfer them by contract. But ideas can be used and copied freely and this is the reason why the human race is richer now because ideas can be copied freely. And finally, I would say that in today's system of corporations, as you mentioned with the Tesla case, although Elon Musk for the use of patents defensively because he knows that he wanted he wanted a a free market. Um, but most corporations have all the patents and have the power. And so patents do not liberate the individual inventor. They are accumulated by large corporations and help form cartels and igopies and increase the power of these corporations. So patents don't help the individual inventor. they help the corporations in the first place. >> I would say that the ills that you're describing are certainly true. The patent system has become ridiculous. Patent thicket and monopolies and patent trolls are all a major problem. However, that's an argument for reforming the patent system and trying to return some of the rights back to the individual. But more importantly, if you essentially abolish IP rights tomorrow morning, what do you think will happen? What will happen is that all of these corporations will suddenly have free reign over every inventor's inventions, over all copyright, over all creations, right? So the counterfactual is worse even than the current system, which is admittedly terrible. Yeah. See, I would see I see that having free reign is freedom. I think it's a good thing that more information can be used by corporations or by individuals for innovation or for remixing or for artistic works. Um, let me ask you a question since you're a fellow attorney and I assume you have some prroperty rights libertarian leanings. >> Um, imagine that you have two homeowners or three homeowners in a neighborhood and they they both want to enter into an agreement to restrict their right to have an ugly house, right? So they agree into a restrictive covenant which is a private contract and they all agree not to paint their house um orange you know so this is like a homeowners association or or we call this a negative easement or a negative servitude in the law I assume you would you would think that's a legitimate contract right >> uh yeah >> right so in my view what patent and copyright do is it grants a negative easement or a negative servitude to the inventor of a design or a copyrighted work without it being consented to by the burdened estate. So this is ultimately the problem with patented copyright is it is a it is an non-consentual negative servitude. It's just like the difference between rape and voluntary sex is the is the issue of consent. Uhhuh. Yeah. It's an interesting argument except that I think this goes to a lot of the issues you raise about uh it being illegitimate because it's created by statute and not by common law. IP rights are still symmetric. Okay. So if I have a patent, I may be able to restrict what you do with your property. The restriction will only apply because I got there first, which is the first occupancy rule except for ideas. And it must be new, nonobvious, useful, something that you wouldn't have otherwise come up with. Right? The point is that I'm being given a a right over my creation. Um, and it would not otherwise exist were it not for me. That's pro protecting the ingenuity. But the more important thing is it's symmetrical. You also have that right over me. If you come up with a patent, if you come up with an invention, you can likewise prevent me from misappropriating that. So, you see, this isn't really um a sound argument, right? and the f the fact that statutes right whatever you think about them in Ireland it's interesting as I was researching this debate right it's true that like you don't really have copyright at common law you don't really have these they do originate with the statute of an and so on but in Ireland we have a case of uh pro the property right and intellectual property being recognized as part of the constitutional rights of the individual so this idea that they cannot be valid because they're stipulated by a legislature I think is a mistake. The reason the legislature has to step in and impose uh some kind of parameters through positive law is because the nature of the goods in question are more ethereal. Right? Inventions can be misappropriated more easily. And therefore to defend property rights like these you do need some kind of constructive approach to defining their parameters. And yes they can be ridiculous. They've gotten it wrong. The fed federal copyright act in the United States is absurd. Lifetime plus 70 years. Patents. You can argue about whether the term is valid there. But when you are given these IP rights by statute, you also promise to do various things in exchange for them. You make a full disclosure of your patent so that everyone can see how you invented the thing you did which enables other people to invent around that patent to see the insights underneath that patent and essentially to continue innovating. So I'd say if we really care about the free market and information symmetry this is a really good way of going about it. On the other hand, if you offer no protection to inventions in this way, then I think that what's more likely is that people will be far more koi about communicating what they create. The truth is that the free market doesn't really exist in that sense. There is no perfect symmetry of information. The stock market is driven largely by insider trading and access. Like if you know this new application insider wave, there's extraordinary alpha you can get by following the trades of politicians. So I think that the role of property rights in the case of IP is to also promote this to impose reasonable limits like time limits on the property and ultimately facilitate the free market while respecting the property rights of those inventors. >> All right. Uh I could care less about symmetry. I care about justice and property rights. Um, as for the genetic fallacy, my argument against patents and copyrights does not depend upon the fact that these rights originate in statutes. In fact, I'm against trademark and defamation law and trade secret law, even though they did originate on the common law. So, sometimes the common law gets it wrong, which is why we have libertarian theorists who look at the positive law and criticize it. um um you know the when the patent laws I'm sure you know does not actually guarantee that a patented invention is unique. It only means that that you're the first one to the patent office. So you could easily have someone come up with an invention that is already patented and you came up with it on your own and then you're prevented from practicing it. That's clearly unjust. So there are just so many examples of the injustice of the patent and the copyright system and the fact that it's symmetric. Yeah, if you have a legal system that imposes a right on on everyone in society, but the right is unjust. It might be symmetric, but it still is a dead weight cost and all these patent lawyers have to be paid to to maintain this system. It's just a dead weight cost on society and it still reduces innovation. So it would be better to get rid of the thought. So if you gave everyone the right to sue each other for defamation, yeah, that would be symmetric, but it would still be unjust. If you gave everyone the right to sue their neighbors for welfare or for support if they get poor or to pay for their uh health insurance, yeah, that would be symmetric, but it's still not just. So being symmetric is not enough for just. >> Brian, real quick, I I want you to respond to this question about justice versus utilitarian view of it. Maybe you can also lay out, you know, you've also mentioned earlier you don't think that the existing IP situation particularly as it relates to the United States is uh right, it's, you know, ridiculous or whatever. how would you do it so that it would work a little bit better? You answered to that, we'll we'll respond just a bit and then I want to turn in about five minutes over to this, you know, more practical free city question as it relates to it. >> Yeah, I think quite an onus. How do you reform the whole patent and IP system? But I I have an idea. So I think that like what really matters um or one of the one of the things that really matters is what is the cost of creating the invention for you. This is like an argument that frequ frequently comes up in the case of pharma, right? Because people companies pharma companies pour millions of dollars into research and development and if there's no IP rights then uh the competitor can just swoop in and copy it at zero cost right or zero marginal cost. Um so I would say that a sensible system would actually segment the economy for IP by sector and look at what kind of costs were imposed on the creator and have a proportional restriction based upon that. Right? So you would say like pharma should probably have longer patents whereas something like software which is already a bit of an aberration in patent law really shouldn't uh because you know it's it's quite it's very easy now with AI. So I'd say that that would be one of the things I think I would take into account like more sensitivity to the types of efforts that inventors are putting in. Um, and yeah, in terms of in terms of this question of justice, symmetry doesn't necessarily equal justice, but it is a big part of it. And I would say that the concept of justice from Roman law is to give each their due, right? I would say that it's fundamentally an individual conception. It's about what are you owed, right? And I think that it is self-evident that if it matters so much that I'm the first to draw an imaginary land line around attractive land. Well, that itself is a kind of idea, right? Like saying that there's this hard distinction between real property and IP. I think actually real property is more like a restriction on IP which I think is the more basic form of property because everything that we have all personal property that we have as George Gilder argues is actually valuable because of the knowledge that has been embedded within it right the idea the design the structure it embodies and he says for instance that if you have a Tesla and you smash it to pieces you still have all the atoms it's the same matter, but obviously it's not as valuable anymore. So, I'd say that this is probably a deeper metaphysical argument that I would get into about um you know, cartisian dualism and the mind matter distinction. And you know, libertarians, I think, are very fixated on this idea of the material, but it's like I think that the mind is in there in the mix. It's just latent. And already we are imposing imaginary lines around tracks of land and and really the line is a lot blurriier than uh I think is admitted. >> Let let me ask a quick question of of Brian. Um a question I asked of Richard Epstein when I debated him on this topic at uh to Soho forum in New York a few years ago. Um you you you sort of seem to recognize that the current copyright system let's say is absurd. It used to be about 14 years in the beginning the founders copyright and now it's 150 or so something typical. Um if you could choose only to either abolish the copyright statute or to have the current one but you couldn't have the 14-year term that's reasonable in your view which one would you prefer? To have no copyright or to have the current fascist copyright? >> Not a loaded question at all. I mean, yeah, it's like stuck between a rock and a hard place. Um, I would say that, um, you know, I would say that it's the current one. And I would say that because there are many authors who could not build a capital structure to get their works published and distributed absent a right to their creation. It would be taken by a corporation who already owns the means of production. And it will be first of all there's no guarantee they would maintain the artistic integrity of their creation because suddenly it's the property of the corporation entirely. Okay. And so I would say that if you look at like I mean like there's obviously abuses. It's obviously not perfect. If you're forcing me to choose I would choose this. And not to be trit but I would say someone like JK Rowling right you have a single unemployed mother who went to on to become a billionaire. I doubt that she would have ever had the chance to do that were her copyright in her work not protected. So yeah, if you're forcing me to choose >> just quickly, I have a blog post about conversation with an author. It's about the JK Rowling case and I come up with an explanation of how she would likely be worth hundreds of millions of dollars even without copyright. So there's there's ways you can operate around the system if you if you have to be creative, if you can't depend upon government granted monopolies. But >> all right, thank you very much. I think this is helpful to lay the the foundations. Um, we keep your question in mind. We we may have time for questions at the end. What I'd like to do now is uh is turn towards okay, you're here in Prosper. We have other free cities that are coming up along the way. All of these work within the sovereignty of host nations. Host nations uh as sovereigns are are party to international treaties. They often have intellectual almost every country on Earth has intellectual property laws. There's what two or three that don't. Um, autonomy is a big important piece for free cities. Is autonomy in IP law one of the core things that we should go for uh and push for? And if so, if we have it, what exactly which piece of it is really important? Should we have our own copyright law or patent law? Is that how we attract builders to come here to Prosper? Brian, maybe you can uh, you know, answer that first and then and then Stephan. Yeah, I think in the case of uh of Prospera, um Honduras is a signary to the CAFTA DR treaty which uh binds them to trips or even a higher level than trips. Uh and so, you know, there's just I think it's important to be pragmatic when you're running a network state. I think like you have to recognize that the wolves are at the door all the time. And so I think it's really important to not do things that are going to compromise the existence of your network state. And probably that is the overall organizing principle in my philosophy for what Prospera and other network states should do. That being said, I also think that you should be opportunistic, right? that you should try to just do whatever maximizes the speed of innovation here and whatever configuration of IP rights that um that requires is what you should adopt and I'm sure there's lots of like details that are missing there but I think like infiniti is a great example where they have managed to speed up development and now are expanding into Montana I think it's wonderful and it's super interesting and I think that that is the proper approach right that really the advantage the network states have is speed of innovation and trying to do whatever uh avail of whatever exemptions there are in IP encourage people to come here if they want their IP protected um and and doing that kind of thing I think is what's going to maximize adoption and growth which is what really matters I I completely agree with that I I do think prag pragmatism is called for we want these things to succeed um what was the acronym I heard yesterday is it Maya >> yeah Maya mosted most advanced yet acceptable. >> Yeah. And so, but then the debate is over what's advanced in this case. So, um I think most investors and most businesses, most outsiders interested in a free city, um they're already sold on the idea that tax lower taxes is better, lower regulations is better. Um unfortunately, because of the pervasiveness of the mistaken view that intellectual property is a legitimate property right, um that's not so obvious to everyone. Um but it is wide it is widely held that the current patent systems and copyright systems are so-called broken and need quote reform. Uh so at least we have that going. So our task is twofold when it comes to IP because there are international treaties that we have to respect or or national laws. Um so we have to educate investors and others that having reduced intellectual property protection is a good thing and to do that we have to believe it ourselves. So we have to educate the libertarians first who are part of these projects. Luckily, I've done all that already. So, most anarchist and Austrian and left libertarians and Rothbartian libertarians in the last 20 years already pretty much agree that patented copyright law are bad. All right, principal libertarians, the utilitarians are are are still we still have a ways to go with them and the David Freemanites, uh, you know, they're not really sure. Uh, but by and large, libertarians understand that patent and copyright are bad. So we have to educate the investors and the and the people that would the customers and the people who would live here. Um in the meantime because there's widespread agreement that the current system is is broken then what I would think is that the free city should adopt as the lightest touch they could on patent and copyright. Enforce it the lightest way possible. Don't have trouble damages. Don't have criminal penalties for copyright infringement. Um have a lower term. Don't have the extra 20-year term that the US is trying to every make everyone else agree to. get rid get out of the burn convention if you can and just go back to the founders copyright of the US beginning things like that u reduce the scope of copyright law so that it doesn't cover software so if you have a lighter touch and you say that we're doing everything we can to comply with international law and municipal law um but in the interest of maximizing freedom of operation freedom of action of of the entrepreneurs I think that's the that's the way to go >> so Stephan let me ask you a question I find your argument that um uh that you can't figure out a business model is not my responsibility. There's this justice aspect to it. Uh and I buy that on the individual level. What I am uh I guess a bit conflicted about is if I'm Prosper and I want people to come here and innovate, Prosper is a small jurisdiction relative to the global market. No one is creating drugs to sell here in Prosper. They're creating drugs to sell them in the US and beyond. >> If we don't protect intellectual property here, >> correct? Do we put at risk uh the very you know successes that that Nick Anzinger and and Infinita and the rest of the builders have come here to to do? H how do you respond to that? >> Yeah. So so that's an easy one because um most people don't understand this because it's arcane. Uh unlike copyright which is municipal or or local but it's governed by uh the treat the burn treaties which means that a work published in one country is enforceable under the copyright law of another country. That's not how patent law works. So patent law covers inventions and patent law is municipal and national only. Um so whether or not Prosper has a patent law is totally irrelevant because like like you say the you're not making the stuff here. You're not selling it here. The customers aren't here. There's nothing in the fact that Prosper say has no patent law that prevents an innovator of an invention here from filing a patent in the US and in Europe and in China and Japan and Canada or wherever they want to do it. So it it would have zero effect on that. So it wouldn't be a hindrance at all. Uh and like by the same token, I doubt any even if you had a patent law here, I doubt anyone would use it because when you file patents, it's expensive to file it in all 200 countries. So most people usually file in the US, Europe, maybe Japan, maybe China, and that's about it because the maintenance fees and filing fees are very exp and the translation fees, they're all very expensive. So Prosper, whether they have a patent law or not, is probably totally irrelevant. Got it. Okay. I I'd like to open it up to the audience if Okay, we do have a lot of questions. So, >> hello everyone. I have a good news for for all of you. Intellectual intellectual property will be disappear very soon. I'm coming from the future and I know so I get lost in this debate. So many laws, so many rules. It's already conflict between laws and I lost the main idea. Should the free city protect Angel property? Not it's already a good example. Popup city already exist. People coming from different part of the world with same idea develop it and create new product and give you. It's actually a lot of um historical examples exist. Sorry, my language I'm still learning. Uh I'm from the future. I >> just give me one moment. I'm coming to this. It's not a question. It's a statement. So anyway, just no just a second. Just I finish. Let me finish. So basically intellectual property inside of the free cities should be based on the protocol. It should be simple. uh we're not thinking the thoughts thoughts coming to us and sometimes thoughts coming in the same time to different people to different part of the world and I truly believe this property rights they are stopping to invention stopping to progress so popup city the best model for the future cities this is a statement >> question >> yeah um so my question is primarily to Brian you know if you truly believe that intellectual property is property. Why is there an expiry date? What other property has an expiry date? And why would property that I truly own revert to the commons after some period of time if it is truly my property rather than just a utilitarian benefit to encourage innovation? >> Well, property isn't always like uh property comes with qualifications in a democratic society. I know this might not be uh necessarily a libertarian viewpoint, but I mean in Irish constitutional juristprudence, we always have a balancing of constitutional rights with the common good, right? It's a side constraint on the overall public welfare. And uh the idea that there's this some kind of absolute hermetically sealed right to your property doesn't even stand ethically. Right? If I see you drowning in a lake on your land, should I not enter onto your land to save you? Right? I just find it kind of like it's a little bit too simplistic. I think that it absolutely should always be a priority and any constraints do need to be rigorously justified and minimal. But the idea that because there's some kind of temporal limits I think uh that doesn't you know I I don't really understand the importance of the absolute chronology though. >> If it's truly property why would I have lo Yeah, that's uh that's my that's my answer. I think we have a different understanding of what of what the definition of property is. >> Uh your your question actually gets at something that many people have noted. Uh the more consistent intellectual property advocates actually do advocate for perpetual copyright and patent terms like Gambos the nut and ran some rand followers uh Jay Neil Schulman uh and Lizender Spooner. So the more consistent IP advocates do that, the ones that don't want to see the human Hello. Hello. Um, yeah. So, and one other point that Brian raised earlier, he said that uh the benefit of the patent filing is that the invention is disclosed to the public. Um, I've got a post on my site c4sifi.org where it's called the myth of uh the myth of patent law. Um, there's been many studies by Judge Easterbrook and others which show that there's a fallacy there and the fallacy is this. Um, you have trade secret law. You can keep it an invention secret if you want or you can file a patent and disclose it. In practice, most companies, if they're able to keep their invention secret, they will keep it secret with a trade secret. And they only get a patent on the types of inventions that they have to inevitably disclose when they sell the product anyway. So, actually, the patent bargain is that you get a 17-year monopoly on your invention in exchange for disclosing to the public something they wouldn't have known that you would have kept secret. It's actually not true because when you sell a new iPhone, everyone sees what it is, right? So it's it's disclosed by virtue of selling the product. So the the patent bargain is a is a gip to the public. Uh okay. So my my question is for for Brian. So um I think Stefan B made a very convincing case uh for the from the point of view of justice against uh intellectual property rights. But I as I understand it your argument is more like utilitarian or consequentialist. So uh how will you respond? Because I think also Stefan has showed not not right now but in in his work. So intellectual property uh that uh intellectual property like it's an obstacle to innovation and doesn't doesn't uh doesn't it damage innovation it damage uh like uh the development of of new ideas. uh he has showed it from an like a priority case but even if you don't agree with uh a priority like economic science there are also empirical cases that's like the investigation from Fritz Masloop and I think every like extensive investigation on intellectual property shows that uh it's an obstacle and it damaging innovation it's not it does not do any good to it >> uh I think I'm familiar with some of those studies like Bodren and Lavine and and learner and stuff and I think what they show is not that it necessarily damages it it's just that patent expansions didn't promote productivity. That's how I've read read those studies. It didn't show a relative increase in productivity, right? Which is not the same thing as it damaging productivity, right? That's different. And if it didn't have a net effect, then it's a wash and you should respect the property rights of inventors to their creations, right? And I think that that is like I wouldn't necessarily say my argument is utilitarian. I would say it's deontological. I would say that as a creator of an invention, your ingenuity should be respected. It's not just labor, which I think is the more common argument and like this this lock in argument that if you look mix your labor with something, it doesn't matter unless you own the inputs. My point is that there is an intelligence and an industrious industriousness and gumption that is involved in creation of things that has been to totally disrespected in the modern economy that's based on alienated labor and scaling and I think we have to get back to respecting the rights of individuals to their creations because you cannot ultimately segregate the two. >> Hello. Hi. Thanks. This is a question for Bri Brian. Brian, what if the person who invented the fire or the wheel decided to copyright their work? Do you think the society would have evolved as it is evolved today? >> The Did you say the fire? >> The fire or the wheel? >> Yeah. Or both. >> Yeah. I mean, well, this is why patent law contains restrictions. You cannot patent laws of nature. You cannot patent things that are obvious. Right. Again, it isn't like you can just patent any idea. Uh the point is that if it's novel, new and non-obvious and somebody hasn't already figured it out, then you are the first there and you have the right to that as its inventor. >> It the wheel is obvious to us right now, but was it always? I don't think so. No, I'm curious. >> But but but then that's that's an argument in favor of of the term limits, right? Because human knowledge and invention evolves and it should have a suns setting clause because things do become obvious. If 50 years from now AI is going to seem super obvious, right? And probably there shouldn't be any patents related to AI at that point. But it's admitting the evolution of knowledge and human ingenuity. And that's another justification for for term limits. >> A fire in the wheel clearly would be patentable subject matter. Um, I guess the utilitarian could argue that back in the dawn of history, humans would have gotten fire 17 years earlier or something if we had had a patent system, but unfortunately, uh, we didn't. Um, so yeah, >> we have two minutes, so we can ask some questions. Keep it in mind as you answer. >> I have one. So, what about the trademarks? I'm over here. Over here. What about uh trademarks? Is there consensus that, uh, they're basically, uh, bull crap or what? Uh I think uh trademarks are interesting like trademarks are something that don't seem to be as problematic uh to libertarians who don't like IP even though like trademark dilution is created by statute. Um it is created over something that is you know uh trade dress and trademarks are almost like uh protection of style. Um, and I think, uh, I guess it's up to the libertarians to let us know what they think about that. >> Uh, a quick answer. Um, most libertarians are with me on patent and copyright. Some are with me on trademark, which should also be abolished. Uh, here's the priority. Patents are the most evil law that we have probably. They do the most damage to the human race. Copyrights are next. Defamation law is next, which is also a type of intellectual property, which people don't recognize because it protects a reputation right, which is what trademark also protects, which is the worst. Next, worst. trade secret law is down there and then database designs and and moral rights uh semiconductor mask work protection those are all fairly trivial but uh trademark is one of the four top most damaging laws because it does not protect consumers from fraud that's that's actually a fallacy it actually gives a reputation right to the com to a to someone who uses a mark in in in in commerce which is why Chanel can seize knockoff purses on that are that are trademark violations. Um, even though the consumer is buying those purses are not defrauded at all because they know they're buying a knockoff. >> Uh, I I have a question regarding medical use of patents for drugs to Stefan mainly because >> regarding what what's your question regarding what? >> Uh, regarding the medical field. Yeah, regarding drugs because we currently have the situation mainly in the US that patents are for 20 years for drugs and they are mostly uh they are mostly known than the drugs. So if we wouldn't have that patent system uh wouldn't we have some kind of objectation which would be lead to the case where it would take uh longer than 20 years for the um for the concurrent uh for the concurring uh companies to figure out a similar drug. >> Okay, quick answer. I I are we getting close to running out of time? >> We're getting very close to time. Okay, this last answer here. Okay, a quick answer. Uh, so just find uh go to my website c4saf.org and look for the post about um uh the FDA, a modest proposal, but the short answer is that um um first of all, you can extend patents that are delayed by by regulatory delays. But the problem there is the FDA system itself. Without the FDA, which forces companies to reveal their secrets during the approval process, enabling competitors to be ready to compete with them, then they would have a faster and cheaper uh process to get to market and the competitors wouldn't know what they were doing. So, they would have a first market advantage like you have in the normal free market. So, without patents and without the FDA, um you would just have a more lean free market and cheaper drugs in the first place. So, most people think you need patents to patch the problem of the FDA. So you have one government system being used as a patch for another which is what MISA says that controls breed controls. So the the right solution is to get rid of the patent system and get rid of the FDA. But even if you have the FDA, you still don't need patents as I explained in that post. >> Okay, a big round of applause for our debate partners.