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Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 272.
This is my appearance on the Ernie Hancock “Declare your Independence” show for Aug. 21 (Hour 2). We discussed defamation law and reputation rights, and some related matters.
Grok shownotes:
Introduction and Anti-IP Stance
The interview begins with host Ernie Hancock introducing Stephan Kinsella, a libertarian patent attorney and author of “Against Intellectual Property,” discussing how his practice led him to oppose IP laws (2:00). Kinsella explains IP justifications as utilitarian market failure arguments, noting patents’ temporary nature contradicts true property rights, lasting 17 years versus copyrights’ 100+ years (3:00). He critiques government-granted monopolies that stifle innovation, sharing how libertarian views shifted over a decade to recognize IP’s disadvantages (4:00). The conversation ties into “Letters of Captain Mark,” focusing on “pattern monopolies” as intellectual colonization by the state and privateers (4:52).
Reputation and Its Relation to IP
Transitioning to reputation, Kinsella links it to IP categories like trademarks, which protect brand value built on reputation, and defamation laws, akin to libel (written) and slander (spoken), allowing suits for false harmful statements (7:00-9:00). He argues reputation isn’t owned like physical property but exists in others’ minds, per Rothbard, rejecting value-based rights (9:00). After a break featuring a Captain Mark letter on IP (10:00), discussion resumes on reputation residing in evaluators’ minds, not enforceable via law, as negative campaigning or lies aren’t crimes unless violating physical integrity (11:00-12:00). Kinsella notes his anti-IP writings from 1995, still practicing defensively (12:00-13:00).
Practical Reputation Systems and Identification
Post-break, topics shift to IP lobbying by Hollywood, music, and pharma industries, with treaties like TPP exporting U.S. standards (14:00-16:00). Reputation examples include eBay, Uber ratings as crowdsourced, privately handled without government (18:00-20:00). Hancock explores pirate ship reputation via crew votes on rehiring, emphasizing blockchain, biometrics for unique ID despite aliases (21:00-23:00). Davi shares a name confusion anecdote, stressing verification for bona fides (23:00). Kinsella agrees on private mechanisms, noting guilds or social media for reputation without state intervention (24:00-25:00).
Private ID, Privacy, and Libertarian Principles
Fundamentals of private ID are debated, akin to historical letters of reference, ruined by defamation threats chilling employer feedback (26:00-28:00). Kinsella views identity as knowledge problem, solvable via insurance requiring DNA or biometrics (28:00-29:00). Facial recognition isn’t libertarian violation if private, as no trespass occurs; anonymity costs credibility, like pseudonyms reducing trust (30:00-32:00). Discussion covers nuisance laws not applying to “photons” from unsightly properties, blurring faces as IP distortion (36:00-38:00). Evading IP via torrenting, 3D printing foreseen; blue check marks as private verification (39:00-41:00). Ends with guild models co-opted by state, market for private credentials (41:00-43:00), wrapping at farewell (52:00).
Related links:
- Rothbard, Knowledge, True and False
- Block, Defending the Undefendable, ch. 7 “The Slanderer and Libeler”
- David Kelley vs. Nat Hentoff on Libel, Youtube
- Kinsella, Reply to Van Dun: Non-Aggression and Title Transfer, Journal of Libertarian Studies, Volume 18, no. 2 (Spring 2004)
Initial Youtube transcript as cleaned up by Grok (Grok may have used the wrong names in places, I have not checked yet):
[0:00]
[Ernie Hancock]: And now live from the studios of Freedom’s Phoenix, Ernest Hancock. Believe me when I say we have a difficult time ahead of us. But if we are to be prepared for it, we must first shed our fear of it. I stand here without fear because I remember. I remember that I am here not because of the path that lies before me, but because of the path that lies behind me. I remember that for 100 years we have fought these machines. And after a century of war, I remember that which matters most. We are still here.
Let us make them remember we are not afraid.
[1:00]
[Ernie Hancock]: I’m here and declare your independence with me, Ernie Hancock. Davi Barker sitting in, last day before he has to head off tomorrow. We might do a little bit of show tomorrow. Stephan Kinsella, Donna’s getting him on the line now. He had the time wrong, so we’ll get him on in just a second here. She’s calling him now. Now, Davi and I are going to be talking about reputation with Stephan Kinsella. Now, the one thing, we’re done with Captain Kid. I was thinking, the Emancipation, could we make him an airship? Can we make the Emancipation an airship?
[Davi Barker]: Oh, yeah. He needs a ship. I’m just wondering, like in the pirate cove where we have the shiny badges and the Freedom’s Phoenix airship. You want to put him in there?
[Ernie Hancock]: Well, I was thinking that we do a graphic. I don’t really want to show his face. It’d be like you’re looking at him from behind, like directing something, like pointing a sword at his ship there, and that’d be the graphic or something.
[Davi Barker]: Yeah, I guess we got to decide what kind of ship it is.
[2:00]
[Ernie Hancock]: Yeah, it needs to be an airship. I got to go rescue. I was thinking of flarecraft, but then you can’t get in land lovers and go rescue and stuff. So, we’ll talk about that. We got Stephan Kinsella. I got you there, Stephan?
[Stephan Kinsella]: You got me, Ernie.
[Ernie Hancock]: There we go. Okay, we got that taken care of. Yeah. All right. This is what I’m gonna let Davi go ahead and do this because let’s go ahead and introduce. I’ll introduce Stephan and then we’ll get right into the meat because there’s a lot to talk about. We got a short time here. Stephan Kinsella is a libertarian writer and registered patent attorney. Mr. Kinsella is a leading anti-intellectual property libertarian theorist, author of “Against Intellectual Property.” Now, this is, you know, go ahead and give your bona fides a little. A patent attorney. How did you get to be a patent attorney and be anti-IP? Did you see what was happening? What’s up?
[3:00]
[Stephan Kinsella]: Well, that’s exactly how I started practicing patent law, realized, started understanding the system, realized how horrible it is and that it can’t be justified.
[Ernie Hancock]: Well, what was their justification? You know, nobody will make anything unless they get to say it’s theirs forever and always. I mean, what was their rationale?
[Stephan Kinsella]: Yeah, that’s… there’s a bunch of justifications and I had heard them and none of them made sense to me because they just didn’t have the type of rigorous argument for them like other property rights do. Because they expire after a certain while. What kind of property right is temporary? Right? Patents last about 17 years and copyright lasts about 100-plus years, but they’re temporary. What kind of real property right is temporary? And then the arguments were utilitarian. They were basically evidence-based. They were saying that there’s going to be an underproduction of innovation and creative works in a free society because the market will basically fail.
[4:00]
[Stephan Kinsella]: So we need to come in with the government and give these patent and copyright monopoly privilege grants to people to protect them from competition so it’s easier for them to make money so they produce more works. So it’s kind of a market failure argument which I never bought that either.
[Ernie Hancock]: Yeah, I’m… you know, I think it was like ’09, ’10, ’11 around in there that we first came across you, had you on, and there were a lot of libertarians like, “Hey man, I make this and I do a book and I got…” and “Stephan’s wrong.” And then as a decade has passed, they’re going, “Nah, Stephan might be right.” It’s becoming more and more common to see the disadvantages of intellectual property. Now what we’re focusing on is reputation. There is a letters of Captain Mark. I don’t know if you’ve read any of them. Remember we did a one on intellectual property. We called it pattern monopoly, you know. So that was a good letter. And then now we’re looking at reputation as first off, you know, whatever you’re saying who owns what and who… you need to know who is, you know, and of course they want it to be the government facial recognition of your permanent record of we know everything and here’s your search terms.
[5:00]
[Ernie Hancock]: But I would like to, as a pirate captain or an employer, you know, the first thing I want to know, I don’t care how many 15 billion names that you use. I just want to know who you are. I can call you whatever you want, but I want to know who this person is that I’m hiring or doing business with or what. And we have reputation as being a big thing now in like eBay. You’re selling stuff, you’re offering things, somebody wants to know your bona fides kind of deal, but I just don’t need the government to tell me you’re certified for something. I’d rather go and have the people tell me. But when we went through this, this is what we thought of you. And Donna had already had you scheduled for today, a couple days. I’m going, “Woo, serendipitous.” I’m going, “This is working out great.” Because what Davi did, tell them what you did and how you were looking for this and came across them.
[6:00]
[Davi Barker]: Yeah, this is kind of like a spooky feature of Google search results. I was looking for, like what we always do with these letters is who are the best writers on this subject, right? Who can we grab like the best material and use that to boil down… steal their IP? How we pirate their IP so that we can produce a better letter? No. So, I’m looking for Rothbard and I go searching for things like Murray Rothbard, reputation, stateless society, like that kind of search thing, right? And I’m getting nothing. I’m getting nothing anywhere by Murray Rothbard. I’m getting the search results are like other people named Rothbard and it’s like, this is… I know there’s no way that he’s never written anything about reputation. Why isn’t this happening? So I give up and I go looking for something else. I just, you know, reputation in a stateless society, dispute resolution in a stateless society, like anything without Rothbard. And then an article of yours comes up and there’s huge quotes from Murray Rothbard. I’m like, well, he clearly wrote about it if he’s being quoted in this other article. So, why didn’t this come up as a like original search result? Well, then I suggested he do… I go to Mises. I guarantee there’s something. Boom. There you go.
[7:00]
[Ernie Hancock]: Yeah. If you go to Mises and search Mises directly, it comes up. But like the stuff, I’m feeling some search engine manipulation. I just feel it. Can you feel it? I feel it. That’s what it felt like to me. That’s what it felt like. So, when you do the research on this and so on, where did you go? What kind of results? Well, of course you might have done it months ago and it’d be totally different but tell us what your resource material on reputation was. Why would you even write about it?
[Stephan Kinsella]: Well, so here’s the way I look at it. We were talking about IP earlier and intellectual property is usually considered to be four types of property rights: patent which is inventions and copyright which is like creative works and then trademark which has to do with your brand names and marks and then trade secret which is just things you keep secret. But trademarks are in a way a type of reputation right because the idea is that customers should be able to rely upon your name and it has a value because you build up a reputation. They’re not typically called reputation rights but that is sort of the underlying basis of it. But when you come to defamation law, which is not typically considered to be a part of IP, although I think it should be because it’s very similar to trademark, defamation law is the idea that you have a reputation right, a right to your reputation. If someone defames you or says something false about you that harms your reputation, you can sue them. So, and in the written form, that’s called libel law. And in the spoken form, that’s called slander. So defamation is a broad term and slander is the oral form and libel is the written form.
[8:00]
[Stephan Kinsella]: But you can see that’s similar to trademark because in trademark if you so-called tarnish someone’s trademark, that is you do something by selling something misrepresenting your product to look like theirs that hurts their reputation in their goods, then that’s a trademark violation too. So both of these ideas are based upon the false idea that you have a right to your reputation and this is based upon the false idea that we have a property right in the value of our property or ourselves which is not true. You don’t have a property right to value. You only have a property right to physical integrity. So when people say, well, if you harm someone then you are liable. That is not true. You’re actually entitled to harm someone as long as you do it in the right way.
[9:00]
[Ernie Hancock]: All right, we’re hitting a hard break here. When we come back, a lot to talk about.
[Ad/Letter]: From the fourth letter of Captain Mark, land lovers are conditioned to believe that the originators of an idea deserve exclusive rights to it. But these innovators are nothing but privateers granted a monopoly by the crown. Potential inventors are restricted from using their own property and forced to navigate a wilderness of prohibited ideas. These pattern monopolies are intellectual colonization. This alliance of means between the crown and the privateers is not an alignment of ends. Both collude to establish a permission culture in which everyone second-guesses their own thoughts, never sure which ideas are permissible to develop, but their objectives are different. The crown aims to [__] dissenting opinion. While privateers will only be satiated when all new ideas already fall under their monopoly. This scheme does not protect our information but seizes it and denies us access. The future belongs to individuals who think, speak, and act freely to create and share without reservation. Join the conversation at pirateswithoutborders.com.
[10:00]
[Ernie Hancock]: Well, that came at the right time. You know, that was our intellectual, you know, kind of a 60-second of the whole letter. So, it kind of skips to the end. Now, when we come back, you know, I really want to focus on the reputation part. There’s all the other stuff and we can get into that a little bit to help us define it. But one of the points that Davi, when we come back on the live show I want to make this point. He goes reputation is not really yours as much as it is in the mind of the person that has it. You know, no, you got the wrong reputation. It’s my reputation evaluation of you.
[Davi Barker]: Yeah but it’s wrong. And hey man, I can have whatever I want. What are you going to do? Suck it out of my brain? You know, which is kind of how negative campaigning for politicians work. They just say as much negative crap as they can and whatever sticks, you know. It’s also kind of how intellectual property works. It’s people making a claim on the stuff inside your brain.
[11:00]
[Ernie Hancock]: Yeah. Absolutely. You know, so I’m but the reputation thing is I want to discuss that because that concept that Davi, you know, kind of dig reputation is in the mind of the other. That was Rothbard’s central point.
[Stephan Kinsella]: Oh, really?
[Ernie Hancock]: Yeah. Okay. This is as we’re doing, we’re going to finish this letter up today. It’s very fortuitous that we are talking to Mr. Stephan Kinsella. So we’ve had a lot of intellectual property discussions on this and from what I remember started what ’10, ’11, I you know when was it that you really started doing interviews and this becoming a thing?
[Stephan Kinsella]: Oh well I wrote kind of a book that in around 2000 so 18 years ago I’d say. Well, then “Against Intellectual Property” was ’08 and I think you and I first it was ’09, ’10 around in there and it was at a time that I needed this kind. I’m going man I’m not digging this. This is not… there’s got to be a reason that’s better than what the hell they’re saying because they keep changing it all the time.
[12:00]
[Ernie Hancock]: Well I think Mises republished it ’08 but it was an article in the JLS at first around 2000. Oh okay. And then I had an earlier article in 1995. So I started writing about it as early as 1995 as a patent attorney.
[Stephan Kinsella]: As a patent attorney and are you still a patent attorney?
[Ernie Hancock]: I’m still a patent attorney. So you’re like patent. You make your money doing patents. You privateer.
[Stephan Kinsella]: Okay. Only defensive. In other words, I only help people acquire them and I won’t help them enforce them for aggressive reasons. Only defensive purposes.
[13:00]
[Ernie Hancock]: Yeah. That’s a lot of times people get a patent so they can do their own idea and somebody says they can’t, you know. Defensive. That’s just jacked up. All right, we’re coming back in about 10 seconds. Here we go. To be a part of the show, call 602-264-2800.
602-264-2800.
And now Ernest Hancock defying the laws of gravity. Maybe a couple of other laws, you know, just cuz they’re a law, you know, are they good laws? Do we want to enforce all the laws and kind of you want to get rid of a bad law? Strictly enforce it. You know, that’s yep. Here we go. Well, the intellectual property. We can go on and on and on about how Mickey Mouse is going to be the owners of for, you know, ever and ever. So, I never got even as a kid when we were studying the Constitution, you talk about copyright. And so, I thought that was interesting that they would be so specific about something like that because copyright, it was a right to copy or it was granted by the crown literally. You know, you have a permission slip to something and this evolved here. Who’s the special interest on this that would lobby Congress for this kind of stuff? Where’s that come from?
[14:00]
[Stephan Kinsella]: Well, it comes mainly, I think, now from Hollywood and the music industry in the realm of copyright. And also the pharmaceutical industry is a big lobbyist in terms of the patent system trying to keep that strong to protect the patents that they get on their new drugs.
[15:00]
[Ernie Hancock]: Well, is there a crack? I mean, are people is it starting to go the other way? Is there any hope for yeah, we’re and we’re done.
[Stephan Kinsella]: There’s increasing awareness that it’s… people say it’s broken, but when people say it’s broken, they just mean that it’s gotten out of hand and we need to adjust it. No, almost no one says that the whole system is corrupt and needs to be abolished. And over time, the laws keep ratcheting up, mostly because of the effect of the United States because it’s lobbied by these special interests pushing IP on other countries by means of these trade treaties we negotiate sticking in…
[16:00]
[Ernie Hancock]: Yeah. Well, or like this TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership that Trump pulled out of basically it was an attempt to force other countries to increase their patent and copyright laws to be more like the US. So, it was horrible. It wasn’t a trade treaty at all. It was an intellectual property treaty. Yeah, there’s so much we can go on. I want to focus and that’s why I called and talked to you and I just I apologize interrupting you getting in your mood. I appreciate you taking the call because I wanted you to be prepped on, you know, this is what we’re going to talk about. And the one thing that you know Davi said Rothbard was going on about is that reputation is really in the mind of someone else about you. It’s not like you can go in and… they want to be able to they want you they propagand the crap out of you and oh Hillary’s so hot I want her to be my mistress I mean my president I mean you know whatever the hell they got to do you know to make you think something but it’s in the other person’s mind. So how do you take care of or charge or sue against a reputation that somebody else has and other people have or other how does that work?
[17:00]
[Stephan Kinsella]: Yeah. So that and that’s Rothbard’s argument and Walter Block has a good chapter on this in “Defending the Undefendable” his book about libel. The basic idea according to Rothbard is that reputation is just what people know about you or what they think about you, their opinions about you. So it’s just knowledge about you but that knowledge is knowledge held by all the people out there in the public. And you can’t own their brains. They own their brains. So they have the right to believe whatever they want. Now, the law gets around this by saying, “Well, you can sue the person who is lying, who is spreading false information to these other people in the public.” That’s why defamation requires an act of publication. You have to say something to and communicate it to another person. And then if it’s false and this other person believes it and spreads it, then that damages your reputation in the minds of all these other people. And of course, the problem with that is that lying is not per se a crime. It should not be a crime, right? Lying is just telling a falsehood. And everyone listening to the lie has the right to listen to that lie if they want. If they want to take your reputation for truthfulness into account when they judge whether you’re telling the truth about some other person, they have the right to do that. But basically, there should be no law preventing people from uttering their opinions about other people or preventing people from holding whatever opinions they want about other people.
[18:00]
[Ernie Hancock]: You know this is… you have the reputation of the person giving the reputation. I give you an example. eBay starts and I remember there was an Andy Warhol four-panel picture on the front page of Time magazine and it said “Trust Us” and it was talking about Airbnb and Tinder and Uber and all this other stuff you know that you… this generation is like eh man it’s an app on my phone it must be true. So, you know, they go, “Oh, he’s cute. Swipe right.” I mean, you know, whatever. So, this is you let people go into your home, walk your dog, the keys under the mat, you know, give me my money, and they have a reputation like Airbnb or, you know, eBay. Now, if that reputation was found to be invalid, that they were allowing certain things or they were weighting it and kind of doing like what Amazon does, you know, you can kind of mess with the algorithm or search engines or whatever and they’ll promote one product over another for no other reason other than they make more money, you know. So, then that eats away at your reputation. The same thing with things like Netflix. Netflix would push one thing over another and try and program us. So once you get to the point where the reputation of the person giving the reputation goes, then what does their reputation scores mean? You see my point?
[19:00]
[Stephan Kinsella]: Absolutely. And I mean just think about Uber. I mean your Uber driver has a numerical reputation rating which has been crowdsourced effectively and even you as a customer as a rider have a reputation. Reputations are definitely useful things but they can be handled privately. That’s the point.
[20:00]
[Ernie Hancock]: You know when we do an Uber you’re done and then of course you can either give them a cash tip or you can tip them on the app and then you give a ranking to the driver and then they give a ranking to you and I remember… yeah, we’ve had some bad experiences and you know, they couldn’t find something and then some guys are better than others and you do that and it only goes one to five or something. So, I’m wondering if they have some kind of a bonus thing or something and then how is it gamed and all that and a lot of times these reputation scores if you don’t know how they do it, it doesn’t really matter, you know? I really like… So, what we’re coming up with is how are we going to do pirates are going to do reputation. Now, this is one thing that scares a lot of people, including me, is that as an employer, the only… It used to be you’d call the other boss and you’d talk about him and you know, blah blah blah and you hire or don’t. And then they would start getting sued because well, you slandered me. You said something that ah he’s such a character. That guy, yeah, he’s a character. Well, I don’t want characters working for me. You said the word character, whatever that means. So, you get sued. You didn’t get the job. So now it’s gotten as an employer the only thing human resources will say and you ask is this person eligible for rehire? Uh yeah. Okay. That’s what we need to know. So the as we do on a pirate ship or something, we go, you know, who would do the reputationizing? You know, the crew and would you and what would the question be? You know, they have a bunch of them, but the only one that really applies is would you serve with this person again on another ship? You know, would you want them to come back? Do you want to associate with this person or something like that?
[21:00]
[Ernie Hancock]: And then you have the whole crew, the precariat, our pirate ship. This is our reputation on this guy. But he could buy another name. He could go by more different ID. But what happens if you have an index that is blockchain fake facial recognition DNA scanned of eyeball fingerprint, you know, would a private company be allowed, you know, to do that and still be libertarian? Probably. And what about sharing it with the other crew? Well, if that was one of the conditions, probably. Reputation, credibility in the future is going to be everything. Media, politicians, everything. This is a special alert. So that’s what we want to talk about is we didn’t want to get too specific on the method that we might use or even the questions we might have because then you get too cuz you want the freedom to do whatever the hell is important to you. Only blonde blue-eyed babes from Sweden get to be on my massage team or something, you know. So you could do whatever you want. It’s just that what are the traits of such a reputation system? That’s what we’re looking for. So what kind of mechanism or traits would you have and to keep it important and valid for people and then the ability because my thing was I kept hammering on there needs to be some way to first prove it’s you because you got to have a reputation on… we came across I mean it was just you know again another god hand off. David is looking for a guy you know about your age maybe a little younger his name because your name is David Barker. He goes by Davi because his roommate in college was David. So I’m Davi or whatever. Well, this other guy is David Barker and he writes a lot of books kind with titles and freedom of and whatever the heck like he’s writing about the Federal Reserve. He’s writing about aliens. He’s writing about nightmare horror stories. He’s writing about surveillance. He’s writing about like all the topics that I write about this guy. Is he a professor or something somewhere?
[22:00]
[Davi Barker]: Yeah, but he’s a professor at like American University and he works in he’s the director of the department of government. So like he’s like the opposite of me. But you know, so this is the first thing I want to know is I want to know it’s you. I want to know, you know, it’s the same. You can go by 15 gazillion different names. It doesn’t matter, but it still goes to your permanent record, you know, or your index or your search or your, you know, whatever.
[23:00]
[Ernie Hancock]: So, I’m looking it’s already happening, Steph. And so, I want to know what the criteria would be in your head of something like this. Now, we talked about it yesterday. We had some blockchain guys, you know, sending us, oh, you could do this and tie it to a wallet of blah blah blah blah blah. And it goes on. I’m going, yeah, you know, maybe. I’m not sitting here trying to determine or dictate a certain technique. It’s like with the second and third letter of Captain Mark, one was on cryptocurrency. Well, it better do this. It needs to be anonymous. It needs to be uncensorable. It needs to be secure. It needs to be. It needs to be. It needs to be. And I go, when you find one that does all these to our satisfaction, crap, we got our pirate money, man. We’ll be all over it. We’ll endorse the crap out of it and use it. But got to wait on that. Then the next one was pirate communication. Hailing frequencies invisible to the crown. Now there you may want to be anonymous, you know, but you still could be tied to a reputation of even being anonymous or unless you’re 15 gazillion different people, whatever. So with that, I’m as an employer or someone that I’m going out on my spaceship and long journey of, I’m wanting a little bit more information and I want to make sure it’s you, you know, so privately, how would we do this? That’s what I want to focus on. You got any ideas?
[24:00]
[Stephan Kinsella]: Uh, yeah. I mean, no, no, no. Tell me now. No, no, no. We’ll come back in, you know, like 40 seconds. But I just wanted to, you know, I’m going to hit you with that. So, I want you to be ready. Okay.
[Ernie Hancock]: All right. Yeah. Be back in just a little bit. Love what we do. Please help support our international satellite channels at patreon.lrn.fm. That’s patreon.lrn.fm.
Freedom’s the answer. What’s the question? You’re listening to Ernest Hancock down the highway and you rush it head out of control. Oh, head into the wind. Oh, the resistance of and the man says when you got it and you can’t and you’re always and the conflict resolution is they win. You know, I’m going. So, we’re just bypassing. I don’t want to try and fix it. You know, you want to lick the boots that rule. You be my guest. Peace out. So, we’re going over here. Now, over here, we still have some of the same needs as to why government does a lot of different things. Well, you got to have not for ID social security number. So, this is, you know, even as a kid, I’m going, well, that’s a number to me, right? And the government has it. I don’t know. Sounds like they’re branded me there. I don’t know what the hell you guys doing. Oh, we passed the law says it’s not for ID until it is and everybody requires it. So I’m like uh so I’m looking for fundamentals of IDing something. You know, first you got to have the question, is it a freedom-oriented task to be able to because it used to be letters of reference. You know, somebody they travel across the country and there would be some letterhead from the cousin what’s his face to his cousin in from New York to San Francisco and this guy is cool and do him. You had this has been an issue since forever. So, I’m just going how what are the basis criteria, some foundation we would build some system on for us to use as our anarchist pirates out in the space of who we’re going to hire and stuff. Help us out, Stephan.
[25:00]
[Stephan Kinsella]: Well, so the first thing I would say is that the current system like you mentioned of like an employer giving a reference has been largely ruined because of the threat of defamation law. So defamation law has put a chilling effect on that type of reputation providing information. So the defamation law which is allegedly meant to protect reputation, it hurts it because it doesn’t allow some people to use some techniques they could otherwise use. So without defamation law they’d be able to call the employer. I would think that the idea of identity, the idea of knowledge is just a general problem of human existence. Like part of living is to figure out things to know is this berry poisonous or is it healthy, right? Is that bridge safe to cross or is it not? Will this technique work or not? Is that guy who he says he is or not? So these are all just general problems of how we get around in the world of having to figure out things and then to rely upon them. And reputation is sort of a knowledge-based thing in society which is a useful thing and we can improve it with modern social media and things like that. But the point of trademark and defamation law does not is not to prove someone’s identity really. You could have someone faking their identity in front of the government system too. So none of this is a panacea. I could see something like insurance playing a big role. Like if you want to be insured, the insurance company is going to have an incentive to have systems figured out where they…
[26:00]
[Ernie Hancock]: Oh, they want DNA sample. They’re going we definitely when we want to make sure when this one dies, we pay off. I mean, you know, I’m hip to that. So, I want to talk about the IDing part. I know you’re saying that’s not really an idea. No, that’s what I want to focus on is that the you know, if you don’t know who you are, you could be a bunch of different people. If you don’t know who you are, then your reputation on what… I mean, you have to know. I mean, what does it mean to know who someone is? You have to… I mean, they have to be a human standing in front of you able to do something. If you have the guy sitting there on a lemonade stand selling you lemonade, you know his identity enough to know that he’s selling lemonade and you might want some. That might be enough for that transaction. You don’t really care what his real name is or where he was born. That might not be the essential aspect you’re looking for. So it depends on what you’re looking for. But I think over time societies tend to find ways they have signaling mechanisms. You have to know enough people. I mean this was the function of a lot of these groups, these networking groups in the older days, right? You have a connection. You have a reference. You had a shiny badge from the fraternal order of something.
[27:00]
[Stephan Kinsella]: Yeah. Well, that’s what guilds are.
[Ernie Hancock]: Yeah. Right. And so over time, the people that are basically frauds or counterfeit people, they tend to get caught out. And every now and then when they do, their reputation is ruined and everyone knows not to deal with this guy. So you can cheat sometimes just like you can people can violate the rules of murder and rape and commit those acts sometimes. So nothing is perfect, but reputation works very well actually and you just don’t need it to be legalized is the main point.
[Stephan Kinsella]: No, no, no, no. I’m not I don’t even care about that. I’m actually looking I give you an example. I hate the government. I want to get away. They’ve done nothing but bad to me. You know I’m going I’m tired of ID and everything. I’m tired of being at checkpoints. I’m tired of going through TSA. I’m just tired. Screw you guys. I want to change my name to Freddy Dolphin. I mean, you know, whatever the hell I want to do. And I go out and I’m like, “Yep, I’m on this island. I’m on this ship. I’m applying to get on your pirate ship and take me away, Calgon.” Okay. So, I do that. Well, of course, that person’s going to go, “Yeah, who the hell are you?” You know? So, if there was some… Do we walk around with QR codes on our chest with our public reputation or something? I’m just… there’s needs. This is a need that’s going to happen. I guarantee it. And the thing is is that that freedom-oriented people, hey, man, I’m not getting in your cattle branding operation. Okay. Well, fine. You don’t have to come in. You don’t have to be part of our… I would think that it would be something that would be the that you would ID someone because the reputation that somebody would put out on different things. Did it even go to that person? Is it even just because you know a guy has the same name as Davi and writes similar titles of whatever doesn’t mean it’s him, you know? So I’m I can’t get past this IDing of someone before you even get to the reputation part. You see my point?
[28:00]
[Stephan Kinsella]: Oh yeah. I mean, look, my Apple iPhone, if it looks at me, it IDs me by pointing little dots at my face and assumes that it’s me within a reasonable degree of certainty. I imagine that in the future, there will be more sophisticated technical biometrical techniques where just you can identify someone’s body by its history, where it’s been moving around the earth and what it’s done and what its biological character.
[29:00]
[Ernie Hancock]: Yeah, the state is definitely doing this facial recognition thing. Is that in and of itself that somebody does it privately? Is that a violation of some libertarian principle?
[Stephan Kinsella]: Well, I would say absolutely not. But a lot of libertarians don’t like that because they basically are more libertine or more into so-called freedom than into liberty property understood. In a free society, you’re going to have lots of infringements on your freedom just because of the necessity of things. I mean, you might not be able to move into an area unless you have insurance because your neighbors won’t tolerate living by someone who’s uninsured. And to get insurance, you’re going to have to comply with the insurance company’s requirements and so on. You could say that’s an infringement on your freedom, but it’s just the way the world’s going to have to be.
[30:00]
[Ernie Hancock]: Yeah. I’m I want to get past this. I don’t know how much we need to reference it in the letter that we’re doing on reputation. As we were looking at this, I kept hammering the point. I’m going it doesn’t matter if you don’t know who it is. If it’s a confusion, if there’s, you know, kind of so and so said this and we started, Davi starts getting a little bit more elaborate with, you know, it has a log, an incident report, a whatever the heck it gets. I’m going go, whoa. I don’t want to get too speculating. Yeah, I know, but I don’t want to get too detailed. I’m trying to get to with Stephan’s help the fundamental reasoning and justification for ID so that you can build a reputation that would be outside of government. It doesn’t mean they don’t want your pirate list of everybody. I can guarantee that. Well, okay. So, I think that you can have a reputation without having a hard and fast official identification profile or card. People there are still some people who know who you are and your reputation follows you around. But, you know, right now, how do we do it? We all have a passport or a driver’s license issued by the government. Yeah. There’s no reason in principle that if these agencies did not exist, you couldn’t go to some private company who issues you an ID card because it might be useful to have. We have a laminating machine. They take they take on the risk of doing that. What’s that? We have a laminating machine right here. Boom. See, I got I can put little nice little holograms on it, make it all QR code, and you get the private key. And I get a lot of, you know, responses from blockchain aficionados want to explain it to me, but I’m going, yeah, that’s… I’m not interested in the details. I’m interested in the philosophy of you walking around with your ID because you already are with facial recognition. Hell, I remember my kids, God, when was this, you know, middle of 2000s, all of a sudden you put a picture up on Facebook and they’d go, “Is this so and so?” They had facial recognition. Might get, “Oh, yeah, yeah, that’s so you got that right. You’re good. Let me give you some more.” I go, “Whoa, this is whoa, it’s happening anyway. Should we have our own?” You know, should it be separate from the man to where they can’t go in and change it? I mean, some criteria for identifying so you can have a reputation.
[31:00]
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[32:00]
[Ernie Hancock]: Okay, we got one more segment and am I being too obtuse? I’m not understanding what you’re saying. I’m looking for the fundamental justification for a private ID. If I have my own facial recognition on whatever I got it on my lapel, you know, that’s one thing. Captain Mark wears an eye patch and it’s a hashtag. So, you know, it’s always hashtag a pirates life for me hashtag scallywag hashtag which we can put reputation in like here are the scallywags hash scallywag of politician day whatever right so in his eye patch is a camera so we found out that pirates a lot of times even though they could see out of both eyes during different circumstances they would have an eye patch so that their eye one eye was adjusted when they went below decks they could see so you’re going okay that seems kind of cool. So, an eye patch might be standard issue, you know, on a ship, but you put that eye patch down, it has a camera in it, and it could be facial recognition in everybody, you know, it could be a report inside the eye patch. You got your own little screen there and you’re watching kind of ID, ID, unknown, unknown, then known and you categorize and you’re doing that. Whoa, man. You’re surveillance little. Now, of course, the crown can surveil and do any and everybody, but you can’t. We’re not allowed, you know. Yeah. I’m guess I’m not really sure what problem it is you think you see. I don’t see a problem with because people, you know, you’re violating my freedom. It’s kind of like tribes. No, you’re not. No, that’s not… See, that’s… Well, I need you to say that. You know, some tribes go, you take my picture, I have to tear up the picture, bust the camera. You took my spirit away. I mean, people got opinions, you know. I’m just This is IP. This the whole idea about IP. Information is not property. Is this the whole point? Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. The old deal. Help me out on air. All right. Here we go. There are those that just want to be left alone and those that just won’t leave them alone. Which one are you? The Ernest Hancock Show.
[33:00]
[Ernie Hancock]: Okay. There we’re beating in on it. We’re getting zooming in. Zooming in. Zooming in. You know, the idea that, you know, Captain Mark has an eye patch that has a camera in it. So that, you know, what we did is he blind in one eye. Well, pirates would put, you know, it was like standard issue to have eye patches so that one eye was accustomed to the dark. When they would go down below deck, they could see. You’re in battle and you go down and you got 30 seconds for you can see what the hell’s going on. That might not be advantageous. So certainly timely. So you’re going, “All right, uh, an eye patch might be standard issue.” Well, on there we have the hashtag. I hashtag scallywag, hashtag pirates life for me, hashtag whatever. And you can build on reputation. Hashtag somebody. They’re always doing that on social media anyway. But, um, it has a camera. If you look at the avatar, you zoom in in that eye patch, there’s a camera lens. And that is so you know I can do facial recognition you know the pirates got a database of scumbags and bad guys and it could be added to that he’s a patrolman for whatever representative privateer the king or something. So if I’m categorizing everybody I know if I’m putting them into categories if I’m doing my own database that gets added to the big pirate database of the blah blah blah. Well that’s what’s happening now but it’s the privateers and the crown doing it. What if I do it? And what if I got, you know, where’s my line when you got liberty guys going, “Hey, you’re violating and it’s a tribal member of some you took my picture, therefore I got to bust a camera and kill you because you took my spirit away or something.” So, I’m just going, what is the principled argument for individuals having their own private facial recognition database thing go?
[34:00]
[Stephan Kinsella]: Well, the principled argument is that we have the right… We’re libertarians here. You have the right to do anything you want unless you violate the rights of someone else. So, you have the right to do anything. You don’t need permission to do every little thing. So, the question is, does my recording public things like people’s faces in public or storing data on my own private database, does it violate their rights? I can’t see that it does. It doesn’t trespass their property. It doesn’t invade their border. They don’t have a right for you not to have some kind of collection of data that includes information about them in it. So the justification is just that there’s nothing wrong with it.
[35:00]
[Ernie Hancock]: Okay. Well, they make the argument. They’ll say, “Hey, man, what are you doing? Turn that camera off, boy. You can’t be filming. Hey, man. I can film a police officer out in public doing whatever whenever I want.” And they go, “Well, you have no expectation of privacy.” Then it was like public servants. Then it starts with celebrities. Then it starts with anybody on the street. What’s the progression of that?
[Stephan Kinsella]: Well, that’s all because of state laws, right? So you have police and then they say you can’t interfere with a police operation so you can’t record them and then they make exceptions if it’s in the public interest. So these are all just legislative exceptions to legislative law in the first place. Has nothing to do with free market or private property rights. I mean you go some places like a concert or you know the men’s dressing room or the ladies dressing room at a private spa and they say please no cameras because they want the privacy of their guests protected. And that’s a social norm or a private contract. But if it’s on public property, no one has a right not to be… If you expose like if you have a house and you have your draperies open to the road and you walk around naked in your house, someone across the street might grab a telephoto lens and take a photograph of you naked. That’s your fault for exposing that information to the public. You sent the photons. There’s no violation of private property rights that’s happening by people capturing those photons bouncing off your slick chest.
[36:00]
[Ernie Hancock]: You know, this has a good point in the peaceful and quiet enjoyment of my property. Do I have that expectation? And a lot of people, they’ll go, “Yeah, when the noise it’s late at night and I got noise. I got hog farm that you moved in and it’s against our homeowner association and the smell and I don’t like it.” But, you know, a lot of it they’ll go, “Ah, it’s unsightly and I don’t like his junk this and car that and on the fence and how many RVs he has and they start complaining.” I’m going, “I don’t know. Do you have a property right to not have photons enter your retina?” You see my point? Where’s it?
[Stephan Kinsella]: Yeah. And I think there is nuisance law, which is if you’re using your property in a way that disturbs my ability to use my property, like you have explosions going off. Yeah, but photons, I mean, it just looks bad. You got purple house. I mean, where does that go? Just photons. I would say no. People have the right to do whatever they want on their property unless there’s a restrictive covenant, some kind of agreement among and people tend to do that because they want to have nice neighborhoods and live around nice neighborhoods. So they make everyone who joins it agree with these certain rules, but unless they took the time to do that, they don’t get the benefit of it. I mean, Ernie, another good example you could think of is when you look at these movies in these films from documentaries and from reality shows, when they go out onto the streets, you notice they blur people’s faces out a lot, right? Because they didn’t get their permission. Even that idea is an intellectual property idea that you need someone’s permission to show their face in public. Why should you need to do that? If their face is in public and you take a picture of it, you should be able to show it.
[37:00]
[Ernie Hancock]: Yeah. Who is that? They’re doing that. I mean, you might do it out of courtesy or it doesn’t matter. You just don’t care, you know? I don’t mind that they do it. It’s just some people do it, some people don’t. And I’m like, where’s the line on this? What’s the intellectual line on it? What’s the principal line?
[Stephan Kinsella]: This is a type of IP law. This is like personality rights and things like exploitation rights. So, all these things are caused by distortions in the market. And it gets even worse in the sense that in copyright law, the photographer owns the photo. So if you’re on vacation and you hand a stranger your camera to take a picture of you and your family, theoretically that stranger owns the copyright to the image in your camera, and so if you were to use that image going forward, theoretically you’re violating the copyright of this unknown stranger out there. So there’s all kinds of bizarre things because of copyright and IP law.
[38:00]
[Ernie Hancock]: God, I don’t even want to talk. It’s gone. It it’s just see that’s one thing. You think they’re going to get meaningful reform because I think they never get enough meaningful anything and people just abandon the concept just in their heads.
[Stephan Kinsella]: I think instead of modifying the law, people are going to just evade the law. So BitTorrenting and encryption is helping people pirate massively and violate copyright law. So copyright law is basically unenforceable on a widespread scale. And patent law, I think something similar could happen to it when 3D printing matures, right? Because then you can just get an encrypted file for a design of a machine and just make it in your basement. No one needs to know. You don’t need anyone’s permission. And you’re not selling it and screw them, you know, and you might even sell it. I mean, nothing wrong with selling things either. I see nothing wrong with competition. We’re free marketeers here.
[39:00]
[Ernie Hancock]: All right. So, as I’m looking at this issue and I’m going, “Yeah, I considered it. I don’t mind people that want to be anonymous, you know, be anonymous all you want. I just may not want to buy something from you, you know.” So, I mean, the right of anonymity online and so on. Touch on that a second.
[Stephan Kinsella]: Well, some people use these pseudonyms, right? They’ll make up a name like Howland at the Moonboy. And you know when they comment on a comment thread or something, people tend not to take them as seriously because they don’t know who they are. So they know that this guy might be lying because if he is lying, he won’t be hurting his reputation. Exactly. He might be hurting the temporary reputation of his little nim, but he can just move on to another one. So you pay a price by not being willing to identify yourself or verify yourself as having a full… I mean look Facebook and Twitter have a blue check mark now which annoys some people but it’s a way of a private company saying we have looked into it and we believe that you are the person you claim to be. So that is like a private certification thing that this person is actually who he says he is. He’s not just some guy saying he’s Sylvester Stallone. It is actually the Sylvester Stallone. So there are private mechanisms already to do this.
[40:00]
[Ernie Hancock]: Now we had talked about this Davi and I it was on… I remember Nick Sarwark he you know he’s moving to New Hampshire as a matter of fact but yeah here in the valley come in one time he was in studio and he go woohoo I got my Twitter blue check mark or Facebook or something you know and I’m going you know um and that they still doing that what Twitter used to verify people they used to they used to try and protect celebrities or politicians from having dummy accounts out there claiming to be them by having verify. Not putting the real Donald Trump.
[Davi Barker]: Yeah. Um but they don’t do that anymore. Bizarre kind of status thing where you had to both be famous and be on Twitter years ago when they started doing this. And so there are verified accounts, but they decided they didn’t want to be in the business of verifying identities because they probably didn’t have a way to do it.
[41:00]
[Ernie Hancock]: Yeah. Donna, I think if I understand what happened was they dropped the program where you could apply. But they still do it on occasion, but it’s up to them. So they on occasion…
[Davi Barker]: Yeah.
[Ernie Hancock]: Okay. Well, I want my own private verification. It’s going to come. I bet you they already have it. There is no doubt in my mind that the insurance industry has a list of everything. You know, you know what kind of claims you’ve made on stuff? They go, “Oh, your house insurance is going to be double because you’ve had three claims for the tune of $750,000, right?” you know, and yeah, I’m this thing I’m really really really really seeing and then it’s linked to a reputation and then the reputation of the people giving the reputation. Has there been a model that you’ve come up with or you’ve seen that you think worked or some old way of doing it, Stephan?
[42:00]
[Stephan Kinsella]: Well, yeah, I do think so. Like the guild system as Davi mentioned and even what Facebook is doing now but it’s largely been co-opted by the state because the state has assumed the role of giving authorized or authenticated verifications you know passports and driver’s licenses so I think they’ve stunted the market so they can delete your account this guy’s on the list China credit score do you know the difference between… Thank you yeah this is um I don’t know I just want… Now, since you did the reputation thing, and you studied Murray and so on, I’m going all right. There is a market for a private ID. I remember in the mid 90s, there was a guy in Tucson that had it was the first time I saw two gigs of memory. I’m like, “Woohoo, man. Woo, man. You the man.” And they were, you know, had a lot of data in there and it was a corruption thing. He and his father just had it with the University of Arizona trying to take their property to expand and they didn’t want to sell and then of course they send in the fire guys and the police guys and it’s just, you know, strong arm of we rule you. And so what they did is they started this thing called the People News Network and they were giving out press credentials to anybody. They made this nice laminated thing. They put you in a database. They got a we got a list of the people news network. There’s my press pass. Bite me. I can go wherever I want. And I’m like I don’t need a stinking badge. I don’t give a crap. I just, you know, I challenge the whole thing. But you know they were creating their private database and I’m sitting I’m going good bad man I’m going you know it’s getting to the point that there’s a market for that is there a provider of we are certified of and we got signed up you know golden state insurance company of all state uses our database cause hey Ernie let me ask you a question so are we done though with the show yeah yeah yeah we’re done okay I got to go my brother’s here I need to say tell him goodbye so let me visit but I’ll be happy to talk to you more later today or any other time.
[43:00]
[Ernie Hancock]: Yeah. Well, we’re going to have this done. We’ll send you a copy of the letter and in the discussion it’ll hit in the forums and it’ll go on and on and on. I’m just trying to make sure I’m I sound smart as you. You know what I mean?
[Stephan Kinsella]: All right. Sounds good.
[Ernie Hancock]: All right. Peace, brother. Thanks.
