StephanKinsella.com

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 235.

This is a short video produced by the Federalist Society (Feb. 6, 2018), featuring me and IP law professor Kristen Osenga (I had met Osenga previously, as a co-panelist at an IP panel at NYU School of Law in 2011). I was pleasantly surprised that the Federalist Society was willing to give the anti-IP side a voice—more on this below. To produce this video, Osenga and I each spoke separately, before a green screen, in studios in our own cities, for about 30 minutes. The editing that boiled this down to about 5 minutes total was superbly done.

see also James Stern: Is Intellectual Property Actually Property? [Federalist Society No. 86 LECTURE]

Transcript below.

From the Federalist Society’s shownotes on their Facebook post:

Why does the government protect patents, copyrights, and trademarks? Should it? Kristen Osenga and Stephan Kinsella explore the concept of intellectual property and debate its effect on society as a whole.

Kristen Osenga, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law, and Stephan Kinsella, author of Against Intellectual Property, explore the concept of intellectual property and debate its effect on society as a whole.

Differing Views:

• Libertarianism.org: Libertarian Views of Intellectual Property
• A 21st Century Copyright Office: The Conservative Case for Reform
• Mises Institute: The Case Against IP
• Law and Liberty: Why Intellectual Property Rights? A Lockean Justification
• The Constitutional Foundations of Intellectual Property
• Harvard Law: Theories of Intellectual Property

[continue reading…]

Podcast (kinsella-on-liberty): Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:31 — 12.6MB)

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 234.

Related:

• Craig Wright: You Don’t Own Your Digital Stuff. NFTs Could Actually Fix That — Without Intellectual Property

This is a debate on IP between me and a noted Bitcoin expert, Craig Wright, hosted and moderated by the Vin Armani show.

Transcript below along with Grok shownotes.

Debating Wright

I was in London to attend the inaugural 2018 meeting of Mises UK and to hang with my boys Lee Iglody, Jeff Barr, Doug French, and Hans Hoppe, and had challenged Wright to a debate during a few twitter run-ins (still on-going); I accepted and since I happened to be in London, Wright set it up and we did it at a local studio, with Armani moderating from Vegas.

After the debate

Further comments appear on my Facebook post and also on the Youtube post (below).

Update [7/17/19]: I had my buddies Jeff Barr and Doug French in the room watching, and after the debate, invited Craig to drinks in the hotel bar. We had an interesting, if a bit bizarre and intense, discussion for an hour or so. But in the ensuing weeks, things between us devolved on Twitter. Wright had promised to produce “proof” of patents stimulating innovation during the debate, and apparently, like with many of his promises to produce something, never came through. I pointed that out on Twitter and he eventually ended up blocking me, as well as the podcast’s host, Vin Armani, who at the time was, with Wright, a fellow BCH advocate (Vin is still a BCHer but Craig has split off again with his BSV). Of course, in the meantime, Wright has amped up his risible claims to be Satoshi and has been involved in a number of controversial issues in the bitcoin/crypto community. What a character.

Also: during the debate I referred to him as Dr. Wright, since he claims to have several PhDs, but now I am not sure he has any legitimate PhDs, other perhaps than one in “theology”, so I should not have called him “Dr.” ¹ That was too deferential. On the other hand, he did pay for the venue and related costs, so I was being polite.

Grok Summary

The debate on intellectual property (IP) law, hosted by Vin Armani on January 27, 2018, featured Stephan Kinsella arguing against the resolution that IP is a legitimate and useful institution for blockchain and cryptocurrency, while Craig Wright defended it. In his opening, Wright emphasized the scarcity of good ideas and their implementation, arguing that IP protects individual creators’ rights more fundamentally than homesteading physical land, as ideas are created from nothing. He cited natural experiments in countries like India, where reintroducing IP laws allegedly led to a 60% increase in patents by startups, not large companies. Wright contrasted IP with alternatives like trade secrets, using the ZeniMax vs. Oculus case to illustrate how trade secrets create market uncertainty and slow innovation, while patents provide disclosure and clarity. He framed opposition to IP as “intellectual communism,” forcing creators to share against their will.

Kinsella, in his opening, defined IP as government-granted monopolies (patents for inventions, copyrights for artistic works, plus trademarks and trade secrets) that infringe on genuine property rights in scarce, rivalrous resources. He argued that property rights arise from homesteading or contract to resolve conflicts over physical goods, not ideas, which are non-rivalrous and essential to action but not ownable. Kinsella rejected creation as a source of ownership, noting that transforming owned resources (e.g., iron into a horseshoe) creates wealth, not new rights. He claimed IP hinders innovation, distorts culture, and censors speech, prioritizing justice over utilitarian goals like spurring creativity.

In response to questions on legitimacy, Kinsella expanded that IP is unethical and un-libertarian, as it transfers property rights without consent, akin to theft or slavery. He criticized IP’s arbitrary expiration (e.g., 17 years for patents) as evidence it’s not true property, and argued it violates free speech by restricting expression, such as banning sequels or hyperlinks to content. Empirically, he asserted no clear proof IP boosts innovation net of its costs (e.g., patent thickets stifling research), citing economists Boldrin and Levine’s work showing patents correlate with filings but not actual productivity gains. Kinsella highlighted his experience as a patent attorney, observing inventions arise from market needs, not IP incentives.

Wright rebutted by calling Kinsella’s arguments circular and false, insisting IP aligns with Lockean rights and societal agreements. He claimed over 2,000 studies from natural experiments (e.g., IP reductions in India and China leading to innovation drops, followed by surges upon reinstatement) support IP’s benefits for small innovators. Wright traced IP to ancient precedents like Roman judicial law and medieval letters patent, rejecting the idea it’s a modern monopoly. He argued creators have rights to control their work, and without IP, theft via trade secrets proliferates, as in Google Waymo cases, creating uncertainty that deters investment.

On utility, Wright explained IP’s mechanism: patents reduce uncertainty by disclosing inventions publicly, enabling due diligence for investors and preventing costly secret thefts, unlike trade secrets that led to billion-dollar disputes (e.g., Oculus). He advocated updating outdated IP models but insisted communities can agree on rules, aligning with individual choice. In blockchain, Wright argued IP prevents fragmentation (e.g., Bitcoin splits), fosters certainty for scaling against incumbents like Visa, and protects costly innovations his company developed, countering claims that open-source drove crypto growth.

Kinsella rebutted Wright’s evidence as anecdotal, pointing to his compilation of studies showing IP’s net harm, including trillions in lost innovation. He labeled IP socialist for interfering with private property, per Hoppe’s definition, and dismissed historical precedents as mercantilist monopolies antithetical to free markets. On free speech, Kinsella cited cases like the banned Catcher in the Rye sequel, Nosferatu film destruction, Aaron Swartz’s suicide amid copyright charges, and threats against yoga poses or tattoos as direct censorship. He argued trademark creates “reputation rights” implying ownership over others’ thoughts, while trade secrets unjustly target third parties.

In closings, Wright defended IP against misrepresentations, clarifying Swartz’s case involved physical trespass (not just copyright) and the Apple iPhone incident as theft by finding, both violating physical property. He promised to compile real-world studies countering Kinsella’s “computer models,” emphasizing human action over simulations. Kinsella reiterated IP’s injustice, burdening proponents to justify it amid historical injustices like slavery. He agreed information needn’t be free but opposed restricting learned knowledge, urging libertarians to favor competition and abolish IP for true free markets.

Wright’s arguments lack coherence and systematic structure, often jumping between philosophical claims (e.g., ideas as scarcer than land), empirical assertions (e.g., Indian patent surges), and historical anecdotes without clear linkages or definitions. His rebuttals frequently digress into unrelated critiques (e.g., equating Swartz’s actions to house-breaking) or unsubstantiated boasts (e.g., “over 2,000 studies” without citations), making the case feel scattershot rather than logically progressive. While he invokes libertarian concepts like individual rights and anti-communism, the arguments are not consistently backed by verifiable evidence; claims rely on vague “natural experiments” or personal company experiences, ignoring counter-studies Kinsella references. This contrasts with Kinsella’s methodical breakdown of property theory and empirical critiques.

Furthermore, Wright’s positions are inconsistent with core libertarian private property rights, which emphasize non-aggression and ownership of scarce resources without state intervention. By advocating state-enforced IP monopolies (e.g., patents in blockchain to prevent “fragmentation”), Wright endorses government grants that restrict others’ use of their own property—precisely the interference libertarians like Rothbard and Hoppe decry as socialist. His dismissal of open-source success in crypto as suboptimal ignores libertarian preferences for voluntary agreements over coerced disclosure, and his creation-from-nothing rationale contradicts Lockean homesteading, which ties rights to mixing labor with unowned resources, not ideas. Overall, Wright’s defense prioritizes utilitarian outcomes over principled non-initiation of force, undermining libertarian consistency.

Youtube (with captions):

Original Youtube (which contains a large number of comments; see below):

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TRANSCRIPT

Intellectual Property Debate: Stephan Kinsella vs. Craig Wright

Stephan Kinsella, Craig Wright, and Vin Armani

Vin Armani Show, London and Las Vegas, Jan. 27, 2018

00:00:00

VIN ARMANI: Welcome everyone to today’s debate.  We are debating intellectual property.  The two opponents are Stephan Kinsella and Craig Wright.  Stephan Kinsella is an attorney in Houston, director of the Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom and editor of Libertarian Papers.  He is one of the foremost libertarian experts on intellectual property.

00:00:23

And Dr. Craig Wright is an inventor, computer scientist, and businessman who is one of the earliest minds behind Bitcoin.  He’s the chief scientist at nChain research and development company involved in Bitcoin and blockchain technologies.  So today what we are going to be debating is the following resolution resolved.  Intellectual property law is a legitimate and useful institution that belongs in the emerging global sphere of blockchain technology and cryptocurrency.

00:00:54

Craig Wright will be arguing for the resolution, and Stephan Kinsella will be arguing against.  This debate is going to consist of a series of five-minute statements and rebuttals, a series of rounds.  The first round is going to be an opening statement from each of the debaters.  We are going to start with – did we say we’re starting with Craig Wright?  So we will start with Craig Wright who is arguing for the resolution.  Dr. Wright, if you will.

00:01:26

CRAIG WRIGHT: Thank you. So basically what we’re looking at is the idea that intellectual property has no value from other people. Now, I would argue it does, not because of the common constraints and whatever else people put about scarcity and what they think about copying but for a number of reasons first as the scarcity of good ideas.  There are many ideas out there in the world, but good ideas there are very few.  And then implementing those is another thing altogether.  Why not everything?  Well, very simple.  If we have every single algorithm, we can just create everything, and we have no actual application.

00:02:06

The reality is that, contrary to what many people say, we have much evidence actually benefiting the implementation of intellectual property.  We have a number of natural experiments around the world such as in China, in other places in Asia, everywhere from Singapore right up to India.  And in all of those places, when intellectual property laws have been removed and then when they’ve been added again, we have a lot of evidence in support of what they do, not in helping big incumbents, in fact, the opposite.

00:02:42

In India, for instance, in recent re-additions of intellectual property laws and opening up of the different opportunities they had in that country, opening it up to small startups, we have a scenario where there was immediate 60% increase, not in the number of patents filed by large companies but by small startups.  That actually followed through not only in India but to Indians in America in many different areas.

00:03:12

So what we’re looking at is, I think, something where we have the rights of an individual to their own creation.  If we think about the rights of a homestead, when someone starts an initial property and creates it, then I would argue that there’s actually more rights in intellectual property than even the homestead for the simple fact that, when you homestead, there’s land there before.  You either put a fence, you do whatever else, and you have an act, an act of creating intellectual property, at the same time is an act.

00:03:50

But it’s something where you create from nothing.  You actually – from not something existent before.  You develop something new.  On that, many will argue that if we didn’t do it, someone else would.  For instance, if there wasn’t an invention X that was patented, someone else will come along and invent the same thing, which seems fine, a tabula rasa world.  We just pour information in, and people come up with new ideas.  Except, if we think about that for a moment, if Charles Dickens never existed, if Shakespeare didn’t exist, would we actually have those works?  Would there be another Charles Dickens?  Would we have A Christmas Carol?  Would someone have written that piece of work and created it?

00:04:41

Now, in this, we have the argument, of course, that it’s different and we can just protect it with trade secrets if we want.  But the truth of the matter is, when we’re looking at the alternatives, and I’ll explain this through here, trade secrets actually lower incentive.  A perfect example was ZeniMax and Oculus.  Oculus CTO went across, took IP and source code, and of course now there’s a lot of problems between Oculus, and it slowed innovation in a lot of new areas.

00:05:20

If, on the other hand, patents were disclosed, it would have added a lot of value to a lot of new organizations.  We found that the innovation and investment in that circle basically dried up for awhile.  It went from about a billion dollars down to about a hundred million after that particular case.  Now, that was because of trademark violations, but if it was a patented technology, then ZeniMax would have had it out there unsearchable.  And unlike the Oculus IP, it would have been easy to distinguish because, with trademark, you can never actually tell whether the person who asserts ownership truly does.

00:06:03

At the same time, when a patent is there, there are times to actually go out there and complain and say that it shouldn’t be filed, etc.  So you have opportunities to go out into a court of law and argue this point.  So what I’ll argue is that we have a position where the creator has a right to their creation enforcing that to be something that is in the commons.  Against the will of the creator, we take a scarce idea, and they are, and we make it effectively intellectual communism.  It is an intellectual communism of the commonance where we start actually creating a socialist force to say you have to put your particular invention out there in a way we deem, not you.

00:07:01

VIN ARMANI: All right, thank you very much, Dr. Wright.  Arguing against, once again, just for the audience, the resolution is intellectual property law is a legitimate and useful institution that belongs in the emerging global sphere of blockchain technology and cryptocurrency.  Arguing against the resolution now with a five-minute statement please, Stephan Kinsella.

00:07:25

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Sure.  Thank you.  Intellectual property is a difficult issue until you finally get it, and then it becomes easy and it opens up your understanding of other aspects of economics and property law.  But because it’s difficult and because we’re trying to overcome centuries of IP laws, which people take for granted, it’s important to approach this matter systematically and with clear definitions instead of the more scattershot approach Dr. Wright’s using.

00:07:55

So first, a definition.  Intellectual property refers – is a term used by proponents of certain laws, patent and copyright primarily, and other subsidiary types of intellectual property law called trademark law, trade secret law, and also defamation law, which is not normally considered to be an IP law by the legal profession, but it’s very similar in its effect to trademark, which are both reputation rights.  These are all called IP rights, and they’re called IP rights by the advocates because they are prima facie obviously restraints by the government.  They’re monopoly grants by the government on how people use their property, and to sell these government grants of monopoly privilege, the proponents started calling them intellectual property rights.  And they added the word intellectual to distinguish it from normal property rights, which last forever, unlike patent and copyright.

00:08:49

So just as a quick summary, patents cover inventions.  Copyrights cover artistic works.  Trademark and trade secrets and defamation law cover other things.  My contention is that intellectual property laws are completely unjust and illegitimate and un-libertarian.  And the reason is because these are laws that give other people the right to interfere with or to take outright existing property rights, so basically it’s tantamount to theft.  Contrary to the claims of advocates of patent and copyright, they do not foster innovation.

00:09:22

Rather, it hinders and distorts innovation, and it censors free speech in thought, and it threatens the freedom of the internet.  There’s nothing good about these laws and their consequences, and furthermore, the purpose of law is not to foster innovation or to further some policy goal of the current congress.  The purpose of law is to protect rights and to do justice, to protect property rights.

00:09:47

So the question is what are property rights, and how should they be determined and allocated?  Why do we have property rights?  Property rights are basically a solution to the fundamental fact of scarcity in the world.  When humans act, they can have conflict with each other over the use of their bodies and other scarce resources that they use.

00:10:06

And by scarce resource, we don’t mean something that’s not abundant, like good ideas are scarce.  We mean something that’s rivalrous, a clear economic concept, something of which there can be physical conflict.  Now, when humans act, they employ both ideas and knowledge as well as scarce resources to act, to achieve things to happen in the world.  So they’re both essential to action.  They’re both important.  Just because you’re against intellectual property doesn’t mean we’re against the importance of ideas.

00:10:33

Ideas are crucial to any successful human action.  To have an action, you have to know what you’re going to do, know how to achieve it, and you have to have available means to act with.  So you have to acquire knowledge, and you have to acquire scarce resources.  But because there can be conflict over the scarce resources, we develop property rights so that we can use these resources in a conflict-free way.  So they’re allocated in accordance with two basic principles: homesteading or original appropriation, the Lockian idea of the first person to start using a resource in the commons that was unowned has a better claim to it than anyone else, and then contractual transfer.

00:11:11

The owner of the resource can transfer it to someone else by transfer.  Those are the only two rules that we need to determine who owns a resource over which there could be a dispute.  So the problem with intellectual property is it comes up with a third rule, and it says that you own someone else’s property if you came up with an idea that is similar to the way they’re using their property.  So basically it amounts to legalized theft.  Vin, do I have more time, or is that my five minutes?

00:11:41

VIN ARMANI: You have about 45 seconds left.

00:11:45

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Okay, I’ll just say quickly one thing, and I can address this later if I have more time.  The mistake Craig is making is he’s assuming that creation is a source of ownership, and that’s completely incorrect.  In fact, he gave an example of putting a fence up or something around land and creating intellectual property.  Of course, land has nothing to do with intellectual property.

00:12:05

It is true that the human intellect and innovation and ingenuity went into the activity of doing that, but the land is not intellectual property at all.  Creation is a source of wealth.  That’s what people need to understand.  What creation means is you own a resource, that is, a scarce, physical, material thing, and then you use your intellect and your labor and your effort to modify that thing.  And therefore, you make it more valuable to you or to your customers, and therefore, you’ve created wealth, but no new property rights arose from that.  If you fashion raw iron that you own into a horseshoe, you’ve created wealth, but you’ve not created any property rights.  So creation is not a source of property rights, and that is a fundamental mistake that undercuts a lot of the arguments for intellectual property rights.

00:12:52

VIN ARMANI: All right, excellent.  Thank you, Stephan.  The first question now in this back-and-forth round will be to you.  You’ll have five minutes.  Craig will have up to five minutes to rebut, and then the reverse will happen on the next question.  So Stephan, thank you for that definition of terms.  But I really want to get into the question of whether or not intellectual property law is legitimate.  So my question to you is you’ve argued in your work that intellectual property, as an institution, is illegitimate on ethical, legal, and cultural grounds.  Can you please expand on why this is true?

00:13:35

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, that’s the argument I just gave basically, and I don’t know if I made many cultural arguments except for the distorting effect of copyright on culture and trademark as well.  But in that case, I’m just pointing to the negative consequences of an unjust law.  From my perspective, the fundamental question is an ethical one, and it’s in the question of what’s right and wrong, what’s just.

00:13:59

The people who argue for IP normally do so in a confusing fashion.  They mix together two fundamental arguments.  One is a more principled argument like Craig is trying to make, which is this Lockian argument that if you create something, you own it.  That’s transparently false, however, because number one, if patents and copyrights or inventions and artistic works were legitimate, ownable things, then the patent and copyrights should not expire after a fixed amount of time like 17 years for patents and 100+ years for copyrights.

00:14:31

They would last forever in perpetuity, and I hope Dr. Wright would not propose that because that would just make it even worse.  So if they expire arbitrarily after a certain time, they’re definitely not like normal property rights, which is why the word intellectual is put in front of them.  And then the other argument that they make is that utilitarian or empirical one that it enhances innovation.  It enhances the wealth of the world.  It causes more creations to come into being.

00:14:57

And as I said before, that is not the purpose of law.  The purpose of law is not to go around passing around laws to tinker around with things, giving people special rights to incentivize them to act in a better way so as to have more innovation.  The purpose of law is to do justice, and the way they do justice is to respect people’s property rights and to enforce those.

00:15:17

So any law that undercuts the basic Lockian libertarian property underpinnings of our system is unjust because it basically takes people’s property.  In a sense, it makes everyone else a slave of other people.  If I am not free to use my factory to make an iPhone knockoff let’s say, my rights to use my physical property as I wish are being violated.  I have never agreed to a negative servitude.  I’ve never agreed to a restrictive covenant where I can’t use my property a certain way.

00:15:50

I’m not causing trespass against someone else’s property when I use my property to make a competing automobile or car or watch or phone, and therefore hampering my freedom is a violation of my human rights.  If you tell me I can’t write a sequel to a novel or make a movie or express myself as I see fit because it violates someone’s copyright, you’re restricting my freedom of speech and the freedom of the press, freedom of expression and communication.

00:16:17

These are all things that libertarian law would oppose.  Libertarians should be in favor of people’s freedom to do whatever they want with their property as long as they don’t violate the rights of.  That means trespass against the property of another.  It has nothing to do with how much innovation we’re getting and things like that.  And to that point, we’ve had about 200 years of modern copyright and patent law.

00:16:39

We’ve had enough time for the advocates of it to prove, to come up with clear, empirical proof, not anecdotes like Dr. Wright has come up with clear proof that the patent system, for example, does result in greater innovation, the value of which is greater than the cost of the system, and believe me, the cost is tremendous.  Billions and billions of dollars are spent on lawyers like me every year.  Lots of research has never gone into it because you wouldn’t be able to sell a product because of patent thickets.  So the cost of the patent system is severe and huge.  I believe it’s on the order of trillions of dollars per year of lost innovation that we could otherwise have.

00:17:16

And in these 200 years, none of the advocates of IP have ever been able to come up with a clear empirical case that it does benefit us that the amount of value that is created by these new innovations allegedly stimulated is positive or what the value is.  They should be able to tell us what the value is, and they never can.  In fact, all of studies indicate that the patent system hinders and hampers innovation, and thus impoverishes the world and makes us worse off.

00:17:44

We’re living in a technologically inferior world today, which hurts everyone’s lives because of the patent system.  It should be abolished immediately.  I’ve been doing patents for over 20 years now.  And I have never seen a clear case of all the patents I’ve written where the invention patented was invented because of the patent system.  Instead, it’s come up with because of a necessity to solve a problem and to sell a product, and then they run to the lawyers to get a monopoly on it because they can, which further wastes the time of inventors and engineers.

00:18:17

So that’s my argument for it.  It’s destructive of human life, it’s destructive of innovation, and it censors free thought and free speech, and therefore, I’m completely and totally against patent and copyright.  And there are other arguments for trademark, trade secret, and defamation law, but they’re different in their own rights, and I can’t get to that right now.  I’ll rest here.

00:18:34

00:18:38

VIN ARMANI: Thank you very much.  So Dr. Wright, if you would like to rebut that, you have up to five minutes to do so.  Just to remind you, I know that you did get into some questions of utility on this last question.  Just to remind you, Dr. Wright, that you will have an opportunity to speak on utility directly after this.  But if you would like to rebut any of the statements made by Mr. Kinsella, you have up to five minutes to do that now.

00:19:07

1. CRAIG WRIGHT: Certainly. What I’ll first note is most of the arguments we’re hearing are circular. Intellectual property is not property because it’s not property because it’s not property.  Effectively, what we’re doing is we’re finding a circular argument about why it’s not.  We’re saying it’s not Lockian, so therefore, it can’t exist.  We have agreements within people.  We have agreements within society, and some of the claims are just plain false.  We have this idea that nothing has been done and that my anecdotes are there.

00:19:39

Mine aren’t anecdotes.  They’re very well-researched, NBER, etc.  Most countries around the world have a lot of publications with a lot of data.  And so what happens is we get this idea that it’s just empirical.  So that was a comment I heard back from Mr. Kinsella.  It’s just empirical.  I have a Twitter.  Now, the reality is we have a lot of data with natural experiments with the reduction of these laws, which led in every case, in every single country, not one, every one, 100% with a high R-squared value against this.

00:20:24

What we have is, in India, with the reduction of IP protection, IP dried up.  Basically, the only IP law that ended up being enforced was against large organizations building their own patents in their own area.  We then had China.  We then had Singapore.  We then had many, many countries, and we’ve even had ones lately in Africa.  Over the last few years, we’ve had new experiments in these countries where, with the opening of IP law and basically because of WTA sort of constraints, the implementation of all of this, we’ve actually seen up to 60% increases in the amount of intellectual property growth.

00:21:11

So this claim that that’s not true is absolutely false, not anecdotally.  There are over 2000 studies that I know of, not one, not two, over 2000.  And not a single one of those refutes these things.  What you get, self-serving papers where someone has an experiment, not reality, they create a game scenario.  And they say it doesn’t work because.  They don’t test it on real human action.  They don’t see what actually happens, so there’s a difference.

00:21:49

We also have this disingenuous idea that we have 200 years of copyright.  We don’t.  There was actually copyright, as I’ve been pointing out, in the lex judica, in – well, basically the 4^th century A.D. in Rome, copyright existed.  Patent existed.  Letters of patent go back 3000 years that we know of.  So we have the whole idea of what is a letter of patent.  Every city in Europe that was actually founded after Rome fell was done so, if it wasn’t going to be collapsed in a small amount of time, under a letter of patent.

00:22:34

Guilds were often in letter of patents, so this is actually quite – not new.  I’m not advocating guilds and whatever else.  And at the same time, there are many sort of bad areas about law, but the idea that something that is basically baby in the bathwater and we have to throw it all out because something is not ideal doesn’t mean that the law is not good.

00:22:59

Now, what is law?  At the same time, we have agreements between individuals.  Saying that individuals cannot, in their own terms, agree laws, that is wrong.  I will say, quite frankly, if a community, a society decides that these are the laws we think work best for us, that is the law that should be there as long as they don’t infringe on certain basic rights that we have.  Now, this idea that you’re infringing on the rights of people because of their IP, well, I’m also being infringed as a creator if someone takes my ideas and just uses them.

00:23:47

I have the right to take my creation and use it however I will.  I don’t own a horseshoe because I own a horseshoe.  I own a horseshoe because I somehow have the iron, which means someone else dug it out of the earth.  I didn’t do that myself.  I got it from someone, and then I created using it, and I created value in society.  I actually create value.  It doesn’t just suddenly appear otherwise.  That taking of a raw lump of iron and making it into a horseshoe is value creation.  Now, the floor that some argue is that this is a Marxian idea, but the Marxian idea was actually basically that I have the right to the amount of effort.

00:24:40

VIN ARMANI: Dr. Wright, we’re going to hold it here.  It’s gone over time a little bit.  But you do – you can expand on that.  If you’d like to continue, you have another five minutes, and within that, what I do want to ask you though, I believe we’re getting into the utility question at this point.  Both of you obviously participate in the legal system in this way, so there is at least – regardless of Mr. Kinsella’s ethical issues with intellectual property, you both at least find some legitimacy in it enough to participate in that world.

00:25:16

My question, taking that legitimacy for granted perhaps, is about utility, and Dr. Wright, you’ve claimed that intellectual property laws serve a valuable place in the market.  You’ve claimed that they spur innovation.  You’ve claimed that they enable greater prosperity.  Can you please tell us what’s the mechanism by which this is occurring, not just the fact that it does, but could you expand and explain the mechanism that would be the evidence of this occurring please?  You’ve got five minutes on that.

00:25:48

CRAIG WRIGHT: Certainly. This is where I was mentioning things like trade secrets. Now, due diligence, the value of trying to chase down thefts, whatever else, is actually very difficult.  Now, the idea of being able to know everything that’s occurred when you’re buying a company is nearly impossible.  I’m sorry, but I don’t care how good your idea is, if you have it written down on a piece of paper and you’re coming to someone for funding or whatever else, then there is no way that funder knows that your idea has not been stolen, has not been copied, has not been anything else no matter how many agreements you actually sign.

00:26:27

We saw with the resignation of the CTO of Oculus following the allegations and then legal cases between ZeniMax that this actually can be something that even large incumbent corporations such as Facebook have no way of tracing down.  Now, Facebook and Google, which are another example, Google Waymo and [indiscernible_00:26:53] and I don’t name these companies, so I’m sorry about the ridiculous IP names that we have.  But any of these end up in court, not because of patents but because of trade secrets, people having intellectual property that has been stolen, not because it’s been copied fairly or whatever else, but under agreement they’ve taken it to a third party.

00:27:18

All of these are sources of uncertainty, not just mild uncertainty, but in the cases there, billions and billions of dollars.  So all of these where we’ve had trademarks, secrets stolen or whatever else, we easily see that there would have been much more certainty in the market.  So if you have a valid patent that has gone through the process and has been tested and whatever else, then what you’re going to find is more certainty, not less.  So this argument that everything is uncertain is actually, well, not real.

00:27:55

I can tell you with my company or sort of the company that I’m with.  I won’t say my.  I founded it, but that’s it.  With Jimmy up there and others and myself, we look at proposals all the time, so we’re becoming VCs or vulture capitalists if you will, like I’ve had to deal with VCs before, so call ourselves even vulture capitalists.  If you actually want to go out there and be certain, you need to know about what you’re investing in.  And I don’t care how many signatures you get from how many people in an organization, people will do whatever they can to get funding in desperate times.

00:28:36

Compare that to how much certainty you get comparatively, and I know the claims about only 2% of patents make money.  The actual statements of real scenarios are about 50%, or they’re making money probably means 1% over the total investment.  And the number that go to court is actually far lower than have occurred.  The reality is with the number of filed cases, if we take how many court cases actually go on the tickets every year and consider that against the other, you would expect one year’s worth of patent filing to end up with 1000 years worth of court cases.

00:29:19

That doesn’t happen.  The reality is, I’m sorry; there are very few patent infringement cases.  There are some cases that make a lot of money.  There are some that are obviously foolish.  There are some patent trolls, but a lot of these really come down to other problems in the system.  They come down to the misalignment of how people can get funding for litigation.  They come down to other things such as this.  How am I going for time, by the way, Vin?

00:29:51

VIN ARMANI: You have about one minute left.

00:29:55

CRAIG WRIGHT: Great. So what we’re looking at is IP law is really about an intermixing of human ingenuity and creativity. That’s what we’re talking about.  It’s a compromise between different stakeholders and different values and outcomes.  So I admit and I’m not the first to do this, that when we have old 1970-type models of patents and copyright laws, they’re wrong.  They need to be updated.  But that doesn’t mean you can’t have law, you can’t have agreement, and communities themselves can actually form agreement.

00:30:32

And this idea that I have to be told how I’m going to sell my own product, I’m sorry; that’s just wrong.  I do not live in Stalin’s world.  I don’t really care.  I make something.  It is mine.  If I choose to give it away freely, I choose to give it away freely.  If I make something, I, me, if I work under contract, I chose to work under contract.  I’m not a slave.  I own my rights.  Everyone who is forced to give up their rights, that is slavery.  Thank you.

00:31:15

VIN ARMANI: All right, thank you very much for that.  Mr. Kinsella, you have five minutes to rebut, and then I will have immediately a question for you after that, so Mr. Kinsella.

00:31:26

STEPHAN KINSELLA: All right, I can just – in five minutes I can only do so much.  Quickly, I refer listeners to my website, C4SIF.org.  Just go to the slash AIP page and look at my post of “The Empirical Case Against Patents.”  The empirical evidence is just overwhelming.  There are no studies that Dr. Wright is referring to.  Most recently, the economists Boldrin and Levine have a paper on patents where they exhaustively studied the data, and they said the case against patents can be summarized briefly.  There is no empirical evidence that they serve to increase innovation and productivity unless you identify it with the number of patents awarded but not with innovation itself.

00:32:10

As for communist and socialist, in my view, if you read Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, he identifies the essence of socialism, which is the institutionalized interference with private property rights and private property claims.  And intellectual property law does that.  So it is actually intellectual property law that is socialist because it amounts to a taking of private property rights.  As for the self-serving argument, I’m a patent attorney, so it would be in my interest to favor the system, but instead I call for its abolition.

00:32:40

As for the host’s idea that because I participate in the system I endorse its legitimacy, that would be like saying an attorney representing a defendant accused of a drug crime agrees with the drug system, or that an oncologist agrees that there should be cancer because they’re fighting to stop them.  I totally reject that.  As for copyright and patent existing long before 200 years ago, I’m well aware of that.  I said specifically the modern copyright system, which did start with the US Constitution in 1790/1791 with the patent and copyright laws.

00:33:14

But they were modeled after the earlier laws, which Dr. Wright mentions, like the practice of monarchs and states granting letters of patent, which were clearly protectionist, mercantilist, anti-competitive monopoly privilege grants, so I don’t think that helps him.  The Statute of Monopolies in 1623 in England is what is the early basis of US patent law.  Get it?  It’s a monopoly.  We’re against state-granted monopolies.  The Statute of Anne in 1709 is where modern copyright law came from, but there are, of course, antecedents before that.

00:33:47

Even in 500 B.C. there was the Greek city state of Sybaris where there was a cooking competition, and whoever won would have a monopoly on making that dish for a year.  So there are, of course, antecedents.  There have always been people that have been trying to reduce competition and who hate the free market. [Update: see Michael Witty, “Athenaeus describes the most ancient intellectual property” (2018)]

00:34:03

As for uncertainty, the certainty of patents is ridiculous.  The system is based upon totally non-objective principles.  It’s run by a government bureaucracy, and patent and copyright law in particular are the creatures of legislation and statute.  They could never have arisen on a common law or private property-based system.  And it is actually having a legislation-based state that causes uncertainty, as Hans-Hermann Hoppe has written about, and as I’ve written about in my long paper in the 1995 JLS on legislation and uncertainty because the very existence of a legislation – a legislator – what’s the word I’m looking for?  The legislature – the existence of a legislature makes you uncertain about what the laws will be in the future because they can change the law from day to day.

00:34:49

As the saying goes, when the legislature is in session, no man’s property is safe.  As for not throwing the baby out with the bathwater, you do want to do that if it’s Rosemary’s baby we’re talking about, and that is what patent and copyright are.  Briefly, I can say as for trademark, and I elaborate on this in my papers, but I can briefly explain the reason why trademark and trade secret and defamation law are illegitimate.  Trademark law basically grants reputation rights, and as Rothbard explained in his argument against defamation law, which says something similar, you can’t own your reputation because that is what other people think about you.

00:35:27

And if you have a right to your reputation, that means you have a right to what other people think about you, which means you have a partial ownership of their brain, which means they’re your slave.  So defamation law is completely illegitimate as is trademark law, which has a similar type of argument.  Trade secret law is illegitimate because you don’t need a law to keep things secret.

00:35:46

You have the right to keep whatever you want secret.  What trade secret law does is it gives the so-called owner of a trade secret, which is just information that’s held private and confidential and it gives you some competitive advantage in the marketplace as long as it’s held confidential.  It gives you the right to go to a court to get an injunction to use state force against, not just your employees who left and who are revealing the information, which could be covered by contract law alone.  It gives you a right to go against third parties who are not parties to any contract, and that is wrong as well.

00:36:17

And an example of that is when the Apple iPhone 4 I believe was left on a bar by a careless employee.  And some guy found it, and a couple of days later, the feds, with Apple employees, burst into this guy’s apartment under the auspices of trade secret law to take it back from him so…

00:36:36

VIN ARMANI: We’re at five minutes now, Stephan.  Thank you.

00:36:41

STEPHAN KINSELLA: I’ll close there.

00:36:42

VIN ARMANI: And, of course, there – after this round of questioning, you will also both have closing statements, so you can pick it back up from there.  So now what I’m going to do, with no rebuttal on either side, I’ll start with Stephan Kinsella.  I’m going to ask questions.  You will have five minutes each.  These are just things that I’ve pulled out myself, questions that I have from statements that you’ve made in the debate so far.

00:37:10

So Stephan, in your opening statement, you explicitly said that intellectual property censors free speech, and I think in a way you may have alluded to that just now as well with your statements about defamation.  That’s a pretty strong claim, especially for people’s understanding in the west of the value of free speech.  Do you stand by that?  Will you expand on why you believe there’s an equivalence there?

00:37:39

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Absolutely.  In fact, I can give some examples, and I’ll mention a few from the top of my head here, but if people want more examples, go to my website, C4SIF.org/aip, which means against intellectual property.  And look for my post about the trade – the copyright and patent horror files, and I just detail some examples.  I stopped collecting them about ten years ago because there are just too many, but certainly.

00:38:05

There are some notorious cases where trademark or copyright law have been used to threaten people not to perform certain yoga moves.  That’s moving your body in a certain way.  There’s been threats against people with certain tattoos or designs on their faces because the tattoo has a copyright.  What are they going to do?  Be forced into court and told to have their face re-tattooed?

00:38:25

The fundamental fact is that you can’t – you are – it is a criminal violation to print certain works that are said to infringe copyright.  You can go to jail.  In fact, Kim Dotcom is still facing extradition to the US because of having a website with hyperlinks on it.  There was a grad student in England called James Dwyer I believe, D-W-Y-E-R, who simply had a website with hyperlinks pointing to someone else’s site that hosted pirated content.

00:38:55

And the US tried to extradite him to come to the US to face criminal – federal criminal charges.  It ruined his grad school career for several years.  There was a sequel written to The Catcher in the Rye, and the estate of the author took this guy to federal court in the US—this was a few decades ago—and got the book banned.  The court ordered the book to be never published and destroyed.  This is literally book banning by the courts in the name of copyright.

00:39:26

The famous vampire movie, Nosferatu, was held by a court to have infringed the copyrights of the estate of Bram Stoker, Dracula, and copies of the movie were ordered burned and destroyed.  I think a few survived luckily, so we now have it.  So there’s any number of cases.  Oh, one of the pioneers of internet technology Aaron Swartz, the poor guy uploaded some papers, academic papers to the internet because they’re behind these stupid pay walls.  And he was facing decades in federal prison, and he committed suicide.  It was one of the most tragic cases.

00:40:03

And then you have milquetoast advocates for copyright reform who want to be mavericks like – I’m not going to mention names, but it’s easy to find, saying that, well, he should have gotten some punishment, but that was too severe.  Well, I think these people bear some complicity in the death of this poor guy.  You have to be for total copyright abolition.  Of course it censors free speech.  If I wanted to make a movie or if I want to write a novel and include sections from someone else, I should have every right to do so.

00:40:32

And I would just say one more thing.  You’ll notice that the advocates of copyright and patent law, they will mix together arguments, the creation argument Dr. Wright is doing and then the utilitarian argument, and they just mix these things together.  And then they’ll also throw in things like fraud and plagiarism, which – like, for example, if I sell a bootleg copy of a novel, they say, well, that’s fraud.  Well, it’s not fraud.  I’m not pretending to be the author.  It’s not plagiarism.  Plagiarism is not even illegal.

00:40:57

If I wanted to make a copy of the Bible tomorrow and put my name on it, or if I wanted to publish Stephan Kinsella’s Romeo and Juliet tomorrow, I would be looked at as a fool, but it’s not a copyright violation because the copyright is long expired.  So plagiarism has literally nothing to do with copyright.  And believe me, the owners of vast archives of copyrighted material would not be happy if the pirates simply didn’t put their own names on it and kept the original creator’s name on it.  That’s not what they want.  They want to stop you from copying, so absolutely.

00:41:29

In fact, I think that the patent system does far more physical damage to the human race in terms of monetary damage and lost innovation, probably trillions a year.  I mean we could be having flying cars by now or something if not for the patent system hampering innovation over the last 200 years.  But the copyright system I think is arguably worse because the patents last a – I mean the copyrights last a lot longer, and they’re threatening internet freedom.

00:41:54

And the internet is the greatest tool that we have to fight the state I believe because we have communication, and it’s decentralized.  And we can get around the state this way, and if anything threatens the freedom on the internet, it’s a big danger to human freedom, and it aids the state.  And copyright is being used with these six-strikes-and-you’re-out laws and these YouTube takedown notices with the ICE system seizing websites, taking them down for having pirated content.  Anything that threatens internet freedom is a severe threat to human liberty, and libertarians should recoil in terror and fear from copyright law for that reason.  So the copyright law is very insidious and extremely evil, and the patent system does more actual tangible damage in my opinion.

00:42:35

00:42:40

CRAIG WRIGHT: We can’t hear you, Vin.

00:42:42

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Can’t hear you.

00:42:43

VIN ARMANI: I’m sorry.  I was so dialed in.  Dr. Wright, we have been – this question is now for you.  We’ve been talking in this debate about some pretty high-level philosophical principles.  I want to bring it down to some specifics, specifically for you here.  You’ve argued throughout this debate that IP spurs – has a utilitarian value in spurring innovation and creating more prosperity.

00:43:13

But your critics—myself included—argue that one of the major reasons for the growth of blockchain technology and Bitcoin specifically is due to the open-source nature of the space and the lack of intellectual property.  So I want to ask you, with this space specifically in mind, why do you believe that IP is appropriate for this space since you yourself are pursuing patents in this space?

00:43:42

CRAIG WRIGHT: Money is very simply information. Now, this idea that all information needs to be free or whatever else is false. All information doesn’t need to be free, and it comes at a cost.  It’s scarce.  If you just have everything, you have data.  You don’t have information.  If I copy every single paper ever created, I do not have information.  I have data.  There’s a big difference there.  Actionable information matters.  Now, when we’re talking about some of these things, what we’re talking about is an individual right to use things.  Now, the creator can choose.  Now, we haven’t seen this space grow as it should.

00:44:27

We’ve actually seen it grow a lot smaller and be fragmented.  We’ve seen many [indiscernible_00:44:32].  We’ve seen the splitting of the system.  And our target isn’t really each other.  It shouldn’t be.  Instead of splitting up everything that people want and sort of being small and divided, what we should do is not have everyone attacking the corners but rather looking at our one enemy and our one true – something we need to fight.  We need to take on Visa.  We need to take on PayPal.  We then need to look at the central banks, not banks because banks can actually have a function when they aren’t sort of hampered by the regulations that we have.  We need to have a space where individual players can actually form something – an individual – basically a system that will grow and not fragment.

00:45:24

Everyone else wants it to fragment.  The banks want it to fragment.  The central banks want it to fragment.  They want millions of these because then each is controllable.  So right now, what we have is a system that is becoming very easy to regulate, very easy to get around, very easy for governments to start putting their thumb down on.

00:45:45

We have gone from a system that at one stage was the one, not centralized as people say.  Being one doesn’t make centrality in the way that people argue.  One money isn’t bad.  One money actually allows anyone on Earth to start actively engaging in trade.  And that doesn’t stop competition.  It doesn’t stop people doing things.  It doesn’t stop new nodes in Bitcoin unlimited, in Bitcoin ABC, in our software, etc. that we have.  That’s competition, and even though it’s on the same blockchain with Bitcoin Cash, we have six different players all doing the same thing, proposing different things, saving up different scripts.

00:46:34

So the reality is you can actually have these things and can actually limit it.  So I have things that I don’t care whether people say they’re – someone else will think of them.  They haven’t.  Still, we filed our patents.  No one else has been doing it.  No one else has come up with a solution to some of the things we’re releasing this year as much as everyone else has been trying, as much as Core have been sitting there saying we’ll find a way.  We have, and that cost us a lot of money.  It cost a lot of time, and this idea that if everything was just going to be given away we would still invent is wrong, this idea that the evidence shows things.

00:47:24

As Mr. Kinsella showed, there are studies.  Unfortunately, what he’s not pointing out those studies are computer models.  Those studies aren’t actual real-life, actual human action.  No studies existing – I’ve pointed there’s at least 2000 studies, not small studies, at least 2000.  There are ones in Africa, ones in India, ones in wherever else.  Why is this going to take off?  Not because there are 600 forms of money in a particular country.  No bimetal system works.  Governments put in bimetallism.  Natural life doesn’t.  We had silver acted as a metal in most of Rome.

00:48:14

Silver acted as a metal in most of China, not with gold or the other until the government stepped in.  It’s when the government steps in and we start saying what will be money that it changes.  This is legal tender.  You must use it.  When people have a choice, they choose what’s easiest.  And trying to balance between 50 different currencies is not ever the easiest.  So we can say all these things about why it’s good, bad, or indifferent.

00:48:45

But the truth of the matter is what we’re trying to do is open up innovation, and that doesn’t happen by allowing fragmentation.  It doesn’t happen by having lots of small projects that have no link anymore.  All of this happened not because of control being sort of diversified.  It happens because a few small groups decided for the rest.  So this idea that everything was free, well, it’s not.  But it was put out there, and other people can compete.  But that doesn’t mean that you had open access to the Bitcoin code to do whatever you want.  We didn’t.

00:49:28

VIN ARMANI: We’re going to leave it there, but since – actually, if you would like, Dr. Wright, I think at this point what we’re going to do is we’re going to grab a closing statement from each one of you.  Since Stephan started, then we will have you, Craig, finish it.  Start on this last thing, and then, Stephan, you can have the last word on this.  So there’s been a lot that we’ve covered and some things that obviously we have not gotten into.  So any final thoughts that you have, Dr. Wright?  You are first up on this.  You will have five minutes, and then, Mr. Kinsella, you will be after that.

00:50:11

CRAIG WRIGHT: Okay. First of all, I’m going to rebut a couple of bits like this Swarz case. The Swarz case was actually not about copyright.  That is the defense.  That is free speech needs to be out there.  The reality was that a physical system was broken into.  A physical system was accessed.  Electronic controls were bypassed because someone broke into a building, accessed security controls, and then physically altered a machine so that they could actually copy things remotely to a person in Canada.

00:50:48

They re-cabled systems.  They broke systems.  Basically, the argument is it should be okay because it’s free speech to break into your house.  That’s what Mr. Kinsella’s argument here is.  Well, your front door wasn’t secured enough.  I mean, well, yes.  You have a lock, but I’m sorry, I got to drill through it, blow up the hinge, and then basically go in there and do what I want.  So therefore, after I set the webcam up in your house and embarrassed you by posting all the pictures of you having sex with your wife, that’s okay because, well, it’s your responsibility to protect your system, so therefore, the end.

00:51:34

We then have the Apple case.  What we have is theft.  We have this thing called theft by finding.  It’s a type of larceny.  If you actively identify the owner of a product, not you’ve looked for them and decided you couldn’t, then you have committed theft.  This goes back to common law.  We’re not talking anything new, so the disingenuous statements about how none of this existed by Mr. Kinsella over there is basically taking out of context the fact that all of this goes back to common law.

00:52:10

When I mentioned republic in Rome and those laws, these were actually enacted in what was equivalent to common law of the time.  It was judicial law that was handed down the same way it was in early Europe, in early Saxon Europe that was, where different people would go on a circuit and be a magistrate for a time, and the law would evolve, not written—common law.  Even Rome started with common law.  Everyone remembers Rome as this authoritarian state with an emperor.  It wasn’t.  Before the time of Marcius, Rome was actually a republic, which is a different thing all together.  And before that, they had law.  They had law that was dictated in a common law sense.

00:53:04

So we have this little fact here that even without contract, that third party who grabbed and broke into that device, they didn’t just find it.  They didn’t just take it away.  They physically took someone else’s property, the Lockian argument that Mr. Kinsella keeps using.  They took that property and accessed it.  They violated that person’s physical property rights to gain access to intellectual property.

00:53:37

By Mr. Kinsella’s own argument where he has claimed property rights are physical, he has put an example where someone has physically stolen goods, gone off intentionally because it’s a new product, and sought to sell them on market knowing, not just suspecting, knowing after breaking in that this was stolen property.  If you received stolen property and you sell it on, you and the person who knowingly receives it are in breach.  What libertarian here will say that the receipt of stolen property is okay?  I dare any libertarian to say you have the right to steal my car because you could get in there and joyride.

00:54:31

I dare you to tell me that one.  I dare you to say my goods are yours to do what you want with.  So we have a case here where we have lots of evidence according to Mr. Kinsella’s site, lots of evidence of studies.  I can make a computer model that says anything.  Computer models aren’t reality.  This is the old argument that goes back to our friend Mises.  Mises didn’t like all these mathematical models that were used by people like Keynes for a reason.

00:55:04

He didn’t like them because they weren’t honest because you could make them say anything you want.  When you look at econometric models and you start tweaking how they’re going to work, small changes make very radical differences.  And as for none of this being available, I’m going to put it all up on a website.  I’m going to actually start populating all of this.  For every one of his, I’m going to do ten.  For every one of those things, I’m going to put a model so that you can tweak and see what happens.

00:55:40

VIN ARMANI: We’re going to leave it there.  Thank you, Dr. Wright.  Stephan Kinsella, you are going to have the last word in this debate, and you have five minutes to do so, sir.

00:55:54

STEPHAN KINSELLA: All right, just quickly I’ll hit on a few things before the main meat.  But if Swarz committed trespass, then he could have been punished under regular trespass law, but he was facing criminal copyright charges of decades in federal prison, which is clearly unjust.

00:56:08

As for the Apple case, yes, it was Apple’s property.  They had a right to get it back.  My point was to show that trade secret law can affect third parties.  Trade secret law was actually used in that case, not some kind of property law, which should have been the law used.  As for the history of copyright and all this stuff, I would refer people to an article.  It’s on my site, C4SIF.org/resources.  It’s by Karl Fogel.  It’s “The Surprising History of Copyright.”  So it’s a very illuminating description of the history of this whole area of copyright.

00:56:41

And I’d like to say I agree with Dr. Wright on a couple of things, which is good.  I agree with him that one money is possible and maybe desirable, and I agree that information doesn’t have to be free.  If information – if someone wants to keep information private, they have certainly a right to do so.  But when you put a product into the stream of commerce that has publicly accessible features like the design of an iPhone, you make that information public.

00:57:09

When you publish a novel and decide to publish it, the information is out there, and then you can’t tell people what not – that they can’t use the information that they’ve learned from you.  It is absolutely clear that libertarians who believe in the basic principles of property rights in tangible scarce resources like I think we do, we believe that people have the right to own their bodies and their cars and their houses.  If you believe in those rights, then it is clear that any system that undercuts those rights and that is at least prima facie a violation, the burden is on the person presenting it.

00:57:43

The burden is not on me to show that copyright and patent law are invalid just because we have those systems because, after all, we’ve had slavery in the past, and we’ve had a drug war.  We’ve had taxation and wars and the Federal Reserve and government schools, lots of laws that exist which are clearly unjust.  The burden is on someone to justify those laws, and you have simply given no argument for intellectual property law.  And, in fact, there are no good arguments for intellectual property law if you accept the basic principles of property rights.

00:58:10

As for the studies you talked about, I would just refer people to the book, Against Intellectual Monopoly by Boldrin and Levine, which is online for free.  It’s linked at my website, and it’s on their site, AgainstMonopoly.org.  They exhaustively go through the empirical argument that your side has to put on.  The burden is on you.  And the evidence is not in the form of computer studies.  I only know of one study on my site by Andrew Torrance which is a computer model.  All the others are looking at the evidence that’s presented and looking at the evidence that was produced by advocates of IP and showing that it was a bad argument being made.

00:58:47

So what I would like to emphasize is that we have to realize that, as libertarians, as people who believe in property rights and justice and the free market, we are in favor of competition.  We’re not against competition.  We’re not afraid of competition.  We’re in favor of the acquisition of knowledge and the sharing of knowledge and the learning of knowledge and emulating what other people do and competing with other people.  Competing is good, learning is good, and emulating other people is good, and the free market is good, and we should oppose any system that interferes with free market competition, which is what patent and copyright law do.

00:59:23

00:59:26

VIN ARMANI: Excellent.  Thank you both.  I just want to say, gentlemen, this was wonderful that – and I want to thank you both and I think the audience would like to thank you for putting this on with such short notice.  I think it’s a testament to both of your integrity to step out of the online world of Twitter and to sit down with each other and to actually hash this out.  So I want to really just solute you both for that; eye-opening debate.  I thank you guys for this.

00:59:58

I don’t know that the issue is settled.  I’m telling you I’m looking through the comments, and it seems that both of you have made some strong arguments, and it seems that the audience feels that way.  We’ll have to go back on the look-back through this, but I want to thank you both for this, and I’m sure that I will get a chance to interact with both of you in person.  But thank you both for this, and have a great rest of your evening there in London, guys.

01:00:24

CRAIG WRIGHT: Thank you very much.

01:00:25

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Thanks.

01:00:26

❧

Comments from original youtube video:

N. Stephan Kinsella

0 seconds ago

Video with captions here https://youtu.be/5ckcdnD9lFw . Podcast at https://stephankinsella.com/paf-podcast/kol234-vin-armani-show-live-from-london-kinsella-v-craig-wright-on-intellectual-property/

REPLY

 

abram galler

3 years ago

If intellectual property were abolished within a few weeks it would disappear from memory .

8

REPLY

 

Tommy Boyle and the Party of One

3 years ago

“No, you’re the socialist!” -Every libertarian debate ever

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Tusk Bilasimo

3 years ago

As usual when you put Fake Satoshi up against a credible expert, he comes up short

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motech man

3 years ago

I won’t comment on the topic, but I want to give Vin major kudos and thanks for the way you presented this debate. I love that you positioned yourself between the two debaters, I love how you moderated and structured it, how you display the 5 timer (too bad participants couldn’t see it too). Such a well done video and a useful work Vin!

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N. Stephan Kinsella

3 years ago

He was great, and yes, we could not see the timer!

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Kiwi AustEcon

3 years ago

I really respect both of these men. Love them both. Two of my favourite intellectuals. Just wanted to say this as context to my comments below

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Mate 20x

2 years ago

Lol! Mr. Stephan got OWNED by Mr. Nakamoto!! ????????????

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Noble Phoenix

2 months ago

Stephan owned it. Glad people like him are dedicating their time to Liberty and freedom.

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John Anonymous

3 years ago (edited)

I don’t like these type of debates anymore. I want interaction. Kinsella should just talk with Wright sometime, for an hour or two, and go trough the arguments together back and forth. Now we’re only listening to the arguments we already know (well, the people who are familiar with Kinsella). Kinsella won of course, hands down.

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N. Stephan Kinsella

3 years ago

I wanted a free-for-all but the opponent and moderator dug their heels in and insisted on the rigid, boring format.

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John Anonymous

3 years ago

Figures. BTW, why did you ‘heart’ this Yevgeny guy on Twitter? He’s not someone you seem to agree with.

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Kiwi AustEcon

3 years ago (edited)

CSW says what we need is “for people to have a choice (about their money)” and “they’ll choose what’s easiest”, while also saying that “we need IP so that there is just one money instead of loads of different coins competing… He’s contradicting himself. Which is it? Free choice and competition? or Monopoly –> one money – all in. Cross your fingers and hope that we got it right with that one money.

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Ramon Quesada

6 months ago

Maybe you would like to have a full list of Craig Wright public videos in chronological order, here you are!!!! Any idea or suggestions are welcome!!! https://ramonquesada.com/english/craig-wright-videos/

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krishool

3 years ago

Bravo! Excellent moderation and solid arguments made by both parties. As to the morality of I.P. If a contractual agreement is made on the limitations of the use of a purchased I.P then it’s morally sound. In regards to the utility of I.P, I’m inclined to think that applying it in the block-chain would stifle innovation, however I could be wrong on that point.

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N. Stephan Kinsella

3 years ago

Exactly. You can’t get in rem (property) rights, which are good agains the world (which is what patent and copyright are) from in personam (contract) rights, which are good only as between the parties. Most people have a hard time understanding this, partly because they are naive about law, and partly because they never bother to define exactly what they mean by “intellectural property” rights or law.

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Kiwi AustEcon

3 years ago

What happens if someone patents crucial, key concepts for scaling BCH to the next level?? But then it gets mixed in with this segwit kind of trash or some other useles alt coin? How would CSW feel then aye?

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Daniel Roth

2 years ago

What is the point of a moderator if you don’t moderate?

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SunriseFestival

1 year ago

All your belongings is mine and i´m not paying for it – Kinsella

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David Parrish

9 months ago

Not at all what Kinsella said.

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Luc Chase

3 years ago (edited)

Would BCH definitely exist if Bitcoin/BTC had been patented? If no, would being stuck with BTC be a good thing? If yes, how?

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Vin Armani

3 years ago

Luc Chase BCH wouldn’t exist had Blockstream not controlled the narrative through censorship and stopped block size increases

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Kiwi AustEcon

3 years ago

Even though I think that “IP” should only be socially enforced (i.e. by loss of face, social status, ridicule, admiration etc. and maybe even dictionary-like social institutions that codify what is generally held to be the creators or main contributors to various fields of knowledge… I also kind of like how… if bitcoin cash does take over the world and allow us to rip governments out of our lives like the parasites that they are… we will have successfully used the state apparatus (IP law enforced by governments) AGAINST ITSELF UNTIL IT DIES BY ENFORCING THIS!

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Andy Rowe

3 years ago

There you are.

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Noble Phoenix

2 months ago

Ideas are not property. Property is physical.

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Wouter Vos

3 years ago (edited)

An idea is not scarce because if someone copies your idea, you don’t lose control of it. All you’ve lost is a monopoly on the use of that idea and monopolies are bad. They might not even have taken the idea from you, different people come up with the same idea on a regular basis. Earth is a big place with many people, an idea can take a long time to develop, two people could easily have the same idea. Increases in activity in copyright law aren’t good, decreases aren’t bad. Copyright and patents are government creations and would not exist in a free society. “I have a right to do anything I want with the idea’s I create” Not when you patent them, then you have to make them public after an arbitrary duration. You will have this right in a free society. But that doesn’t give you the restrict other people’s use of that idea.

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Andy Rowe

3 years ago

Everyone sounds good now.

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Laprisamata

3 years ago

Whereas I completely agree on an ideological level with Kinsella and the Austrian side of this debate, I have a great deal of respect for Dr. Wright. I don’t think that Dr. Wright is actually arguing for IP beyond using it as a justification for his next move in the context of the ‘Bitcoin Scaling Debate’. Despite being against my personal ideology, I completely understand why Dr. Wright has been pushed into this corner. We live in an IP world currently, and he can’t play the game he needs to without fighting fire with fire. Simply, he has to implement his stated strategy to undo the damage and corruption that has manifest at the hands of the Bitcoin Core development team. Whether that damage and corruption be through ‘malintent’, or through ignorance. In turn, the indecision by Bitcoin Core has resulted in the saturation of the crypto-space with pointless shitcoins, most of which have been created on the back of Ethereum, which only exists due to a fundamental misunderstanding of the original Bitcoin code, and a misunderstanding that lead to Ethereum’s particular implementation of Turing completeness and network topology.

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N. Stephan Kinsella

3 years ago

Except that he’s filed for dozens if not hundreds of patents on crypto tech, trying to control is using state coercion, so I think he’s trying to justify that horrible move too.

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uksuperrascal

3 years ago

Hi Vin – You Published on 24 Aug 2017, How To EASILY Upload Files To IPFS (The Interplanetary File System) I have been using IPFS and it worked ok till a windows update changed the non associated to anything files, install.sh and readme.md, Now both have been associated to notepad – I tried the regedit way of resetting but it did not work. and I can not run a dos ipfs deamon. Any Idea how to change the files back to them being non associated to anything. Anyone else have an idea or got the same problem?

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Vin Armani

3 years ago

uksuperrascal Can you please post this in the comments section of the appropriate video?

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barkingbandicoot

3 years ago

Question: From the Voluntaryist perspective; If all ethical human interaction is based on consent/contract. Does one not have the right to specify whatever terms and conditions when offering a product or service? A girl could offer you a naked jpg of herself on the condition that you do not copy and distribute it. The jpg is simply a collection of 0 & 1’s (pixel data). Are you bound to the contract or are you free to distribute it? If theft means that a person is deprived of property, then copying the jpg does not deprive the owner of the image. The owner still retains the image therefore no theft has occurred -??

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MonadTransformer

3 years ago

Craig is a software engineer with too many hobbies on the side, Stephan is a libertarian thinker & IP lawyer. They are not even in the same category in this “debate”. Craig is being absolutely destroyed here, and I am not sure he even has the skills to understand it. Now, same thing would happen if Stephan joined the Bitcoin scaling debate – and incidentally, he did. And again, same thing – Stephan is getting absolutely destroyed in any meaningful technical debate, but has no skills to understand it. I would suggest both folks should stick to what they actually know, since they are pretty good with it, and avoid the temptation to have hard opinions on anything outside their area of expertise.

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cent25

3 years ago

I’m not aware of stephan making any public statements on scaling debate.

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Wouter Vos

3 years ago

+MonadTransformer I love these debates, so what if someone doesn’t understand what they’re talking about? The only way to discover that is to have debates/discussions and express your idea’s. I thought Craig started off really well, even though his arguments held no water. He started from a libertarian perspective, so he’s very likely to have made arguments that are very popular with Libertarians, allowing Stephan to refute them. Apparently Vin Armani and Stephan Kinsella thought he was worth debating, what other requirement could you have?

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Jamie Peay

3 years ago (edited)

I know right? After Craig’s introduction and initial spiel, I couldn’t help but notice that it appeared as if Kinsella could barely contain his laughter.

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MrCharliers

3 years ago

patents are like guns.. think… full stop..

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Hwītehlāf

3 years ago

Wright did not make one solid argument. I’m not surprised.

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Carlos Castro Prieto

3 years ago

Not so impressed by Stephen Kinsella and with his previous interactions on Twitter with Craig Wright on this topic. I personally had a slight penchant against IP (after my readings from Mises Institute or Miguel Anxo Bastos), but not anymore, after reading and listening to Craig Wright’s much more compelling case. I would be glad to read many of those research papers mentioned that they promised to provide.

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Dr Sammy D

3 years ago

Rothbardians are too fixated on the natural law being the expression of the opinions by judges in their private law system. They should realize that judges will most likely express the preferences for fairness in their subscribers, which likely will include common thoughts of fairness surrounding intellectual property. Most people think 2-8 years is proper. That’s probably what judges will say.

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cent25

3 years ago

most of what wright said was just incomprehensible gibberish.

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N. Stephan Kinsella

3 years ago

Um, he had no case. He didn’t even define IP.

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Bloodluster

3 years ago (edited)

Should’ve just kept it simple instead of rambling in circles. 1. As long as law exists, there will be many fucked up cases whether in patent law or drug law, or what ever, that is unavoidable but doesn’t mean that we should have no law. 2. Intellectual property still has an important role, even in blockchain or no one would spend massive amounts of time, money, and manpower to research and develop new technologies if someone else can just steal it and use it for themselves. In this case, the very wealthy can just steal any idea/tech, hire their own people, and make a more popular variation since they have the marketing power. So the average joe will have no chance and desire to innovate. Just because intellectual property laws should exist for blockchain as well doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be updated/changed for this space. Maybe put a limit of 2 years for intellectual property in blockchain.

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N. Stephan Kinsella

3 years ago

You realize that’s in no wise any sort of justification for IP law, right?

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Noble Phoenix

2 months ago (edited)

Why 2 years and not 200 years or two days? I agree 2 years is better than the current one hundred ish years.

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Armando Anderson

3 years ago (edited)

Patent protection gives choice. The inventor can either give it away or exercise the protection by realizing the invention or simply do nothing. It’s the inventor’s choice and should have that right, especially if a substantial amount of time, money, effort, ingenuity, creativity, research, and experimentation was dedicated to it. They should be rewarded in the form of the patent. This gives more incentive to innovate and to lead. Otherwise, it pays just to wait and steal. Taking credit for someone’s invention is also stealing because there is market value in knowing who invented the invention. Consumers have the tendency to go with the originator with the underlying assumption that he/she is the most competent with delivering the invention to market. Otherwise, it is fraud. History becomes rewritten by the most powerful and innovative stealer. A working example of choice is in AI (Artificial Intelligence) research. A good chunk of AI researchers give their new ideas and algorithms away by immediately publishing them on the internet instead waiting for patents. They do this to speed up innovation and they know the sum of the parts far out weigh the few. But at least they have a choice. They have the option to license it, to sell it, to give it away, etc. Patent law gives them choice with whatever makes most sense. Elon Musk chose to give away his idea for the hyperloop and the blueprints for the early Tesla vehicles. But is he still giving away Tesla’s tech secrets? No, of course not because he needs to maintain a competitive edge. He only did it in the beginning to ensure the electric car industry will survive. This is choice.

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N. Stephan Kinsella

3 years ago

And we all know that the purpose of law is to “give people lots of choices”!! Brilliant! Why didn’t I think of that!

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Armando Anderson

3 years ago

Yup. Laws such as the freedom of speech as a good example. Another is the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. Preserves individual liberty while deterring the false notions of “the majority is always right” and “might makes right”.

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Armando Anderson

2 years ago

 @tark farhen  Government is not an all or nothing thing. Most government regulation should be left to the markets in general. But property rights including IP are individual liberties which empowered governments need to protect. This includes freedom of speech, protection against unlawful search and seizure, etc. where the majority cannot rule against. Prevents bullying and thus theft where “might makes right.” To say humans will share IP fairly with no laws to protect the inventor is a naive flawed assumption. Because there’s no incentive to be fair. The incentive is to bully and steal.

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Armando Anderson

2 years ago

 @tark farhen  Freedom of speech doesn’t have to be law? Reread the history books on the American revolution; the French Revolution; communism and the Bolshevik revolution; propaganda and control of media by Nazi Germany; etc. Visit China and the revival of communist party posters and surveillance. These are some reasons why humans have died to preserve freedom of speech and examples of oppression. You have lived in protected freedom and have no idea why. Government isn’t perfect. Democracy is messy. Without the constitution and Bill of rights, there is no freedom but only oppression you say you are against — free for all where the law is survival of the fittest. Human history has proved this over and over since the beginning. To think this generation is different is naive and ignorant. We are in an upswing of a new socialist cycle. Nothing new. Created by oceans of money printing by every central bank causing bubble after bubble of inflation where those who invest flourish while those who can’t (including savers) wither. Where the middle class disappear and the rich get richer. Gentrification becomes common. This is not capitalism but legalized counterfeiting. That’s why we need bitcoin cash. Sound money. Until the fiat machine is replaced, socialism and communism will rise. Expect more social unrest. Not less.

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Armando Anderson

2 years ago

 @tark farhen  Life is not binary. This all-or-none, good-or-bad, black-or-white, right-or-wrong, with-or-against-us thinking is what’s wrong with these debates. I’m for individual liberty and the protection of that liberty regardless what the majority thinks. Preserving liberty is not regulation. Preserving justice when one is murdered is not regulation. What I am for is patent protection. A logo, a style of shoe, song are not inventions. Patents protect inventors who invest years of research and development of something new technology that has not existed based on the laws of nature/science. Just because there are issues around copyright does not mean patent protection must be abolished. Avoid the all-or-none thinking.

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Just Do It

3 years ago

Kinsella got owned.

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Matija Papec

3 years ago (edited)

So basically a lawyer wants to deny intelectual property to an innovator, and limit him what he can or can’t do with fruits of his labor. I believe authoritarians and collectivists would agree here with Kinsella.

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cent25

3 years ago

“basically” you have no idea what you’re talking about.

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Matija Papec

3 years ago

What mechanism would you propose to protect useful intellectual work, for which you have no guarantee they would be laid out by someone else.

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N. Stephan Kinsella

3 years ago

Sort of how libertarians want to “deny” people a right to a welfare check!

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Matija Papec

3 years ago

For that parallel to be valid, intellectual labor should have no value at all.

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N. Stephan Kinsella

3 years ago

Matija Papec nothing has value.

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Matija Papec

3 years ago

I’m afraid market can’t agree on this axiom.

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jmcknight00

3 years ago

You don’t get it. Nothing “has” value — value is imputed on something by a person or persons. By itself no object “has” value.

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John Anonymous

3 years ago

Labor doesn’t exist. Labor is an action you undertake. You have to distinguish between thing that exist (objects, entities) and things that happen (processes, action, etc.). Only things that exist can be owned. And notice that labor doesn’t create things, it only rearranges stuff (which should already be owned first in order to do something with it).

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Matija Papec

3 years ago (edited)

Tell that to Martin Armstrong who was imprisoned by US government for denying to hand out his own mathematic market model. At the end he was released, but didn’t hand out anything and remained owner of his model. It must be that government saw value in his ideas and was prepared to take them by force. I have actually no problem with concept of owning of only what exist, but wouldn’t limit that only to steel and bricks.

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John Anonymous

3 years ago

Matija Papec What does that have to do with anything? I’m not advocating for full disclosure here. Anti-IP does not mean we have to share information. But once it out there, other people can use it too, obviously.

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Matija Papec

3 years ago

I’ve referred to “Only things that exist can be owned.” If I understand you correctly, Microsoft and Apple can sell one copy of their OS, and after that since it is “out there”, neither can object to free use by other people.

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John Anonymous

3 years ago

Yes, that’s exactly the case. And what’s the problem with that? Even with giants like MicroSoft and Apple, people still make money with Linux OS and OpenOffice. Nothing wrong with open source. Maybe they wouldn’t be as rich as they are, but that doesn’t mean the ICT world of today would be a lot different. Besides, didn’t “steal” MicroSoft a lot of ideas stuff from Apple? Something with windows? Copying is not theft!

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Matija Papec

3 years ago

This is all far stretched; would you release Windows 1.0 up to 10.0 knowing that you will sold only one copy per release? Open source or not, every piece of software is already accompanied by licence which gives certain rights on usage. If one doesn’t feel comfortable with given licence it should *feel free to go somewhere else*. Sheer fact that licence can be violated, doesn’t imply you have any right to do so. Am I wrong if I assume you’re exercising Pirate Party politics?

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John Anonymous

3 years ago

First of all, you don’t know that they would only sell one copy. Lots of people will still like to run the official release, and may pay for it in combination with a service contract. Secondly, I personally don’t care whether of not Apple or MicroSoft will release new versions. If they don’t, open source software will make sure innovation will continue with regard to operating systems. Just look at the succes of wikipedia. I’m not affiliated in any way with Pirate Party politics, but I certainly don’t care about the fact that there are laws that say I can’t download creative content using bittorrent.

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Matija Papec

3 years ago

The point is they would sell significantly less copies which in turn hinders further improvement and development of a product. Further, if market has a say, it voted for Windows as it dominates desktop market share despite of a free (as in beer) linux alternative (it looks like IP brings value to the market). Sure you can download and use software regardless of it’s license, but of course that would not be possible in case where author has control over distribution (as author would not give his software for free).

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John Anonymous

3 years ago

“The point is they would sell significantly less copies which in turn hinders further improvement and development of a product.” Sorry, I don’t care. And it may hinder quick further improvement and development of Windows, but it would open up the market for new startups. Currently it is almost impossible to create a new OS, because you will be sued for infringement of large amounts of patents.

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Matija Papec

3 years ago

Linux is already there, no one is suing it, and desktop market prefers IP operating system. My question was, would you create a OS for which you know in advance that required investment/development won’t necessarily be covered due to unrestricted distribution of product.

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John Anonymous

3 years ago (edited)

“desktop market prefers IP operating system” Which were developed at a time that there was far less IP in software technology. The world of software used to be one of the least regulated when it all started. And Linux din’t know in advance. Wikipedia didn’t know in advance. Nobody knows these things in advance. It’s called entrepreneurship. But even if we did know, and new OS-system wouldn’t be developed, that is still not an argument. There is no universal right to new OS-systems. But of course, without IP, there would be OS-system, obviously.

Podcast (kinsella-on-liberty): Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:00:55 — 83.7MB)

1. Update: Grok re Wright PhDs (“In the 2024 UK High Court judgment in COPA v Wright (where Wright was ruled not to be Bitcoin’s creator Satoshi Nakamoto), the judge noted Wright’s pattern of forgery and plagiarism in other academic work (e.g., his 2008 LLM dissertation had 45 of 58 paragraphs copied verbatim), casting indirect doubt on his degrees. However, the court assumed his qualifications were true for the case, as they weren’t directly challenged.“); Wikipedia; Craig Wright, “The quantification of information systems risk: A look at quantitative responses to information security issues,” Doctoral Thesis, “Charles Sturt University” (2017); 2024 UK High Court judgment in COPA v Wright (pdf), ¶¶ 565–568, 582–585, on pattern of dishonesty,” ¶¶ 127–128, 393–395, 400, 926. [↩]

Another great legal scholar, and friend of mine, LSU Law Professor Robert Pascal, has passed away. I previously commented on the death of my friend, LSU Law Professor Saúl Litvinoff, a giant of civil law scholarship who died in 2010. I never even knew Saúl while I was at LSU law school, but I became close friends with him shortly after my graduation in 1991, and maintained correspondence with him until his death in  2010 (he was one of the three professors who wrote recommendation letters for me to apply to the University of London’s PhD in Laws programme, the others being Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Randy Barnett). ¹

And another Louisiana legal titan, A.N. ‘Thanassi’ Yiannopoulos, died last year at age 88. I never met Yiannopoulos at all, but we corresponded in the years before his death in 2017 about some civil law matters. He was friends with my friend Gregory Rome, a young Louisiana lawyer who co-authored Louisiana Civil Law Dictionary with me in 2011. [continue reading…]

1. Litvinoff’s recommendation letter. [↩]

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 233.

This is my appearance on the Jan. 9, 2018 episode of the Mises UK Podcast, with host Andy Duncan. From his shownotes:

On the fourth episode of the MisesUK.Org Podcast, Andy Duncan discusses with Stephan Kinsella the concept, theory, and practice of Bitcoin ownership, amongst other topics, which include the use of Bitcoin as money, the comparison between gold and Bitcoin, and the possible collapse of states everywhere due to the current monetary revolution which states may have been too slow to respond to, for the sake of their own existence.

Youtube version:

Related material: [continue reading…]

Podcast (kinsella-on-liberty): Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:10 — 36.9MB)

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 232.

This is my appearance on Keith Knight’s Youtube show “Don’t Tread on Anyone” (Dec. 18, 2017), discussing a hodge-podge of issues such as the fundamentals of libertarianism, why scarcity is an important concept, Hoppe’s greatest contributions, and so on. Youtube embedded below.

Podcast (kinsella-on-liberty): Play in new window | Download (Duration: 59:56 — 137.2MB)

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 231.

This is my appearance on Let’s Talk ETC! (Ethereum Classic) (Dec. 8, 2017), discussing the referenced topics. The audience is not really a libertarian one so I explained different approaches to libertarianism and some of my thoughts about libertarian activism, the prospects of bitcoin and other technology possibly aiding in the fight for human liberty and the battle against the state, and so on. The host was very good, the discussion very civil, and the audio quality is pretty good.

Transcript below.

Youtube:

Original Youtube:

TRANSCRIPT

Let’s Talk Ethereum—Libertarianism, Anarcho-Capitalism & Blockchains

Stephan Kinsella and Christian Seberino

Let’s Talk ETC! (Ethereum Classic) podcast, Dec. 8, 2017

00:00:05

CHRISTIAN SEBERINO: Hello and welcome to another edition of Let’s Talk ETC.  I’m your host, Christian Seberino.  And today I have a special guest with me, Stephen Kinzella.  Did I pronounce your name correctly?

00:00:20

STEPHAN KINSELLA: No, Stephen Kinsella, but that’s close enough.

00:00:24

CHRISTIAN SEBERINO: Okay, Stephen Kinsella.  And so I think you’ll agree he’s a will be an interesting guest for us.  He is – let me read part of his Wikipedia page.  So Stephan Kinsella is an American intellectual property lawyer, author and deontological anarcho-capitalist.  He attended Louisiana State University where he earned a Bachelor of Science and Master of Science in electrical engineering.  So he does have knowledge definitely of technical aspects and a Juris Doctor from the Paul M. Hebert Law Center, and he also obtained an LL.M. at the University of London.

00:01:11

He was formerly an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, faculty member of the Mises Academy, and he also co-founded the Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom, C4SIF, of which he is currently the director.  So wow.  Welcome, and congrats on that very impressive resume.

00:01:37

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Thank you very much.

00:01:39

CHRISTIAN SEBERINO: So the reason I thought it would be interesting to have you on the show, and I think the audience would agree – so a lot of people get into blockchain technology and Ethereum Classic, which is one of the main focuses of the show, because they have libertarian leanings.  That’s not a requirement, but I do notice it attracts a lot of those people.  And they were all – or most of us are technically minded, and so a lot of times people will say things and I’ll wonder, well, is what you’re saying really backed up by the people that know about the law and economy more than developers?

00:02:26

Would they agree with the things people are saying?  And so that’s why I think you’re a very helpful guest because you bring that that side of things.  We don’t usually discuss things with lawyers and people that know so much about the economy.  So why don’t we – why don’t you start with – why don’t you describe from your website what a deontological libertarian is?  Now, when I searched for that on Wikipedia, it came up that it was the same thing as a natural-rights libertarian.  So can you kind of talk about that?

00:03:05

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Sure.  Well, keep in mind that I didn’t write that page, so that’s someone else’s description.  I don’t strongly disagree with it, but I think what the person writing that was trying to get at was there are – there’s considered to be two basic types.  Now there are some people that think there are three or more but two basic types of approaches towards, say, ethics.  And to simplify it, they’re empirical/utilitarian and natural rights/deontological.

00:03:40

So the first would be kind of a consequentialist approach, which is basically, we’re in favor of rules in society and laws that lead to the greatest benefit for society in general.  And that’s sometimes called utilitarianism.  It’s an empirical approach that a lot of economists favor, like they try to say, should we adjust the tax code this way?  Should we have this kind of law?  Who’s it going to benefit?  Who’s it going to hurt?  And we sum this up, and we try to do the overall best good for society.

00:04:14

CHRISTIAN SEBERINO: All right.

00:04:13

STEPHAN KINSELLA: And then the deontological approach, and by the way, people that are familiar with the philosophical idea of ontology, which is the philosophical study of the types of things that exist, the word sounds similar.  But they actually have nothing to do with each other.  So deontology and ontology have literally nothing to do with each other.  Deontological just means an approach that is more rule or principle-based, and that’s why it’s more geared towards the natural law.  So the idea is that we’re in favor of rules that are right, no matter what the consequences, so that’s the kind of classical division.

00:04:55

Now, someone like me, I wouldn’t really – I don’t actually think there’s a division. I think that the rules that are right and good sort of blend with and complement the rules that lead to the best results for society on average.  So I wouldn’t really distinguish between the two.  I think people call me a deontological anarchist libertarian because I’ve written in the tradition of Ayn Rand, who’s sort of an Aristotelian natural-rights theorist, and Rothbard, who was in the natural rights tradition.

00:05:27

But I myself have been more influenced by Mises – Ludwig von Mises in economics, who’s an Austrian economist, and by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, who is a German Austrian economist, who’s been influenced by Rothbard and Mises.  But his theory of rights is sort of a blend of consequentialism and the natural rights approach.  So we could get into that if it’s interesting, but basically I prefer to view my approach as logical and consistent and principled.

00:06:02

So you talk to other human beings that we live with, the ones that share similar values, basic values like peace, prosperity, cooperation.  And we say, listen, if you apply the rules of economics and logic and consistency and honesty and evidence to these things, what would what would that lead you to conclude?  So if we all are in favor of each other prospering and everyone doing better in life and we have some awareness of the laws of economics, the basic laws of economics, then what kind of laws would we be in favor of?  What kind of legal policies would we be in favor of?

00:06:43

CHRISTIAN SEBERINO: Okay, so you want me to answer that?  Okay, so two general classes of answers that I hear to your question is there’s the camp that says that we give everybody – we respect everyone’s freedom, and we leave people alone.  That’s what I think of when I think of libertarianism.  I’m a simple guy.  I think in simple definitions.  That’s how I would – your definition was obviously much more sophisticated than mine.  But that’s like a broad category.  And then other people seem to want to focus on taking care of people…

00:07:22

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yes.

00:07:23

CHRISTIAN SEBERINO: What we would call the socialistic approach perhaps.  And those are kind of the two big answers that I see, and they’re always in conflict, maybe not all the time.  But those are the kind of the biggest, two divisions that I see.  Would you agree with that?

00:07:38

STEPHAN KINSELLA: I see.  I think from the perspective that I come from, we don’t agree with all these bifurcations exactly because we see that there are loaded presuppositions in the way that these things are framed.  And so it depends upon who or which audience we’re speaking to.  But if I’m talking to someone that just is dabbling in this or hasn’t experienced the libertarian perspective on things, then that perspective that you just put out, so we would say that’s a false dichotomy that, first of all, there’s no conflict between rights, and there’s no conflict between the desire to help people and the desire to protect people’s individual property rights.

00:08:29

We think that those things go together.  But there is a conflict between the idea of having, say, a legal right to be taken care of and a legal right to your property.  They do run in conflict with each other because – and this goes into what libertarians sometimes emphasize, the distinction between negative and positive rights.

00:08:51

So basically libertarians tend to say that we believe in negative rights and the corresponding negative obligations, which means that you have a right to do whatever you want within your own territory basically, and your own property, your own body, as long as you don’t invade someone else’s rights, which is sort of what you stated earlier as the kind of rule-of-thumb way of looking at it.  And that can be viewed as a negative right because the only obligation or duty that it imposes upon your neighbors is for them not to do something.  All they have to do is not invade your property.  They have to not hurt you.  They have to not steal from you.  They have to not invade your – so the only burden you impose upon them is to just not do something, to refrain from doing something.

00:09:38

CHRISTIAN SEBERINO: I see.

00:09:39

STEPHAN KINSELLA: But if you believe in positive rights, which is the right to be educated, the right to a house, the right to food, these kinds of things, that requires that someone else has to have an obligation or a duty to provide you with it.  So if you have a right to an income, that means other people have the obligation to give that to you.  But that means that you have a right to their property, so there’s always a conflict between the right that you have to your property and other people’s rights to try to get a piece of it

00:10:11

CHRISTIAN SEBERINO: Okay so…

00:10:12

STEPHAN KINSELLA: It becomes positive welfare rights.

00:10:14

CHRISTIAN SEBERINO: Okay, so if understood you correctly, you – two of the points that you made were that you don’t like these – some of these words that get banded about because they come with baggage.  And so we wanted – you sound like you’re obviously very precise on the language that you use, which is good.  And then also you said that the conflict between the two major camps comes whether we’re obligated to do something or simply have a right to be protected from doing something but that it’s the duty – how much duty we have is the difference.  Would that be a correct way to summarize it?

00:10:57

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, or it’s the type of duty.  Is the duty or the obligation to refrain from doing something, or is the duty to provide someone with something?  So it’s easy to just mind your own business and stay within the borders of your own property.  And if you want to cross the boundaries of someone else’s property basically and use their property, you need to get their permission.  You can’t do it without their consent.  So all you have to do is refrain from crossing their property borders without their permission.  And you can think of it in the most basic case of human bodies.  Human bodies are a type of scarce resource.  And the basic libertarian axiom would be self ownership, so every person owns their body

00:11:42

CHRISTIAN SEBERINO: Right.

00:11:43

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Which means the opposite of slavery because slavery means someone gets to own someone else’s body, or in the case of, say, sexual relations, can a man have sex with that woman’s body?  Whose decision is it?  Is it the woman’s decision, or is it the man’s decision?  And so the locus of control has to be with the actor himself that controls that body.  And then libertarianism is just an extension of that basic idea, the idea that we are self-owners, that we own our own bodies, that slavery is impermissible, extending that to other things in the world that we control and use as extensions of ourselves.  So basically people have a natural intuitive opposition to slavery.

00:12:27

They have a natural intuitive belief in self ownership by and large, people who don’t want to dominate each other, people that think that it’s wrong to stab someone or kill them or mug them or attack them without their consent.  We just extend that consistently to other scarce resources in the universe.

00:12:47

CHRISTIAN SEBERINO: Right.  Now, to be honest, I – so I don’t have an economics degree.  So when I listen to the libertarian arguments, they sound the most compelling to me personally.  And this isn’t an argument in support of socialism, but I do see on TV that there are people that have pretty impressive credentials that disagree with libertarianism.  And so you would think that they would know better if indeed they are wrong, and so let me ask you this.  Have you heard any good arguments on the other side, arguing against libertarianism?  Because there are some smart people.  I think you would agree that…

00:13:35

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yes.

00:13:36

CHRISTIAN SEBERINO: So it’s not just a bunch of knuckleheads that – so what would you say to that?

00:13:41

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, so I believe there are some positions that there are really no good arguments against so, for example, the drug war or intellectual property, for example, which are two of my libertarian positions.  So I believe that all patent and copyright law should be abolished and all – so the drug war is completely illegitimate, and so is, say, conscription, the draft for war.  I don’t think there really any good arguments for that.  But for the state itself for a minimal state that does some functions instead of an anarchist position, which is what I hold, yes, I think there are some honest arguments for that.

00:14:19

And there are some decent arguments for that.  I think they’re flawed, but I don’t think they’re crazy.  So, for example, you could argue that if we live in a world as we do today where there are states like China and Russia and other states, if the US were to become anarchist, what would happen if China were to threaten us with nuclear annihilation?  What would happen to this anarchist regime?  Maybe they couldn’t defend themselves.  So that’s a difficulty that anarchist theory has to grapple with, and there are other arguments like that.

00:14:50

So I don’t deny that there are some honest disagreements about the basics.  But the farther you get away from a minimal state, say, the argument that Robert Nozick argued for, like instead of having anarchy, we should have a minimal state or an ultra-minimal state or what some libertarians call the night watchman state.  The farther you get away from that and the more you get into the modern democratic welfare state, which has broader and broader powers and unlimited taxing power, the right to conscript people for war, the right to throw people in jail for smoking marijuana.  The farther you get away from the core functions that you could argue for as a public function, the more indefensible those arguments become I believe.

00:15:34

CHRISTIAN SEBERINO: Okay, that makes sense.  Now, I’m glad you brought up the term.  I think you said anarchist or anarcho-capitalist because that…

00:15:44

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yes.  So there are different types of anarchists, and I’m an anarcho-capitalist or an anarcho-libertarian, but they’re different terms.

00:15:50

CHRISTIAN SEBERINO: I printed that Wikipedia page, so let me just – for the benefit of the listeners, let me say what the Wikipedia page said because I’ve heard this term and I really want to make sure to get it right.  And then you tell me if you agree or if you want to add to it.  So anarcho-capitalist advocates the elimination of the state in favor of self-ownership, private property, and free markets.  And they believe that in the absence of law by centralized decrees and legislation that society tends to contractually self-regulate and civilize through the discipline of a free market.  And what surprised me the most or what it was shocking to me was that they believe that courts of law will be operated privately.

00:16:38

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yes.

00:16:39

CHRISTIAN SEBERINO: And then they talked about the history.  Murray Rothbard was the first person to use the term.  But the question that came to my mind, which I’d love you to elaborate on, is if the free market sets up a court system and somebody says, well, I don’t care what you say.  I’m still going to do what I want anyway.  How do you – who has that final authority to – so can you kind of elaborate on that kind of confusion that some people might have?

00:17:10

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Absolutely.  And to be honest, I do a lot of interviews, and I kind of didn’t realize I was doing.  I didn’t realize this was not a libertarian show, which is fine with me.  It’s kind of a pleasure.  So I have to re-orientate – let me just maybe explain a couple of basics just to make sure the people listening, because if you were shocked by the private courts idea, I just dropped a while ago the idea of private – the idea of having no military and things like that.

00:17:41

CHRISTIAN SEBERINO: I mean I’m open to ideas.  I just never heard that before.

00:17:47

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Right, so let me explain – the territory is this.  There are – you had these old – oh, the history is vast, okay.  Brian Doherty’s book about the origins libertarianism is good.  But basically you had the old right.  You had the old liberals.  You had all these strains of politics from the last 2-300 years.  Say, in the ‘50s and ‘60s, Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman, and these radical free-market types emerged.  And they sort of allied to some degree with the conservatives for various tactical reasons.  And they’re seen as allied with them now, but in a way they’re very leftist and very progressive because they’re very pro-civil liberties, anti-drug war, anti-war, things like this.  So they’re really not categorized into the left-right spectrum.

00:18:43

CHRISTIAN SEBERINO:  Yeah, they don’t fit into that so nicely.  They don’t fit those categories too well.

00:18:49

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Right.  So we’ve come up with our own spectrum, which you can look up the Nolan chart.  David Nolan, one of the early libertarians, came up with a two-dimensional chart, which has two axes.  One axis is personal freedom, and one axis is economic freedom.  And libertarians believe in the maximum amount of both, whereas we would simplify and say liberals or leftists believe in maybe a lot of personal freedoms like free speech and things like that but not a lot of economic freedoms.

00:19:18

And conservatives would be the opposite.  They would believe in low taxes, but regulating abortion and religion, things like that, whereas we believe in high freedoms in both.  And the original guys sort of harked back to the original founding fathers of the US, and they view the original founding, Constitution, that era, as more proto-libertarian because it was kind of a more minimalist government.  They can only regulate a little bit.  And these guys are what we now call minarchist, which means they believe in a very minimal state, a night watchman state.

00:19:52

But there’s emerged a more radical strain of anarchists who believe in – the government should not just be minimal but zero, or the state.  I should say the state, not the government because we distinguish between those two.  And – but there is a tradition of anarchist that has, long before the ‘50s and long before libertarians like the left anarchists, the syndicalists, the socialists, the communist anarchists.  And they all say they don’t believe in the state, so you basically have different types of anarchists even today.

00:20:21

And they all disagree with each other.  So the libertarian anarchists, of which I am a part, and we call ourselves anarcho-capitalists because we believe there should not be a state and there should be a private property order.  And I’ll get to the court thing in a second, but we think that the socialist anarchists or the left anarchists are not true anarchists because the only way you could have socialism in a private system would be to have a state emerge to enforce those rules.  And they sort of think the opposite about us, so they think you could only have capitalism with the state to protect  the rights of the capitalist classes against the workers, etc.

00:21:00

So that’s sort of the landscape.  Okay, now, so the idea, and I’ll put it as simply as possible, and by the way, because I’m a so-called deontological anarchist, my perspective on this is not quite the same as the other type of libertarians who are more pragmatic-minded.  So they would just say the state doesn’t work.  Therefore, it’s bad.  So – and I kind of agree with that, but my view is more principled.  And I would say that we have certain rights as human beings.  We have a right to private property.

00:21:35

You have a right to do whatever you want with your body and with the things that you homestead or acquire by contract peacefully without hurting anyone.  And anything you want to do within that sphere is fine as long as you don’t invade the equal rights of other people.  That’s basically the core idea of anarcho-libertarians.  And if you have that framework, then you basically oppose what we call aggression, and aggression means the use of someone else’s property, including their body, without their consent.  Basically, it means hitting someone or walking on their property without their permission.  So we basically favor peace and voluntarism and consent, and if you have that basic principle, then you apply it consistently.

00:22:21

Then as Bastiat, the great French thinker who wrote The Law in the 1850s, as he explained, just because – if something is impermissible for one person to do, it doesn’t become permissible when a larger number of people vote in favor of it.  So if it’s wrong for me to come…

00:22:41

CHRISTIAN SEBERINO: Confiscate property.

00:22:44

STEPHAN KINSELLA: If it’s wrong for me to steal from you, it’s still wrong if 100 of my neighbors get together and we pass a law saying we can steal from you and give it to the poor, which is like welfare.  So we think that you can’t make something right just by majority vote.  And therefore, the state, by its nature, has to tax, which means take property by theft from people, and it has to outlaw competing agencies.

00:23:12

So it has to be the monopolistic provider of law and justice and force in a given community.  And those two things combined, and actually either one of them implies the other – that’s far afield, but those two things are both acts of aggression.  They’re basically acts of violence against innocent people who have done nothing wrong.  And as libertarians, we say it’s wrong, so we say the state is inherently aggressive and criminal.  That’s why we’re anarchist because we think the state is legitimate.  Now, then the practical issue is people say, well, what would society look like if we abolish the state, right?

00:23:52

CHRISTIAN SEBERINO: Exactly.  How you going to protect from invasion and bad actors?

00:23:58

STEPHAN KINSELLA: And the pragmatic and consequentialist-minded libertarians, they sort of start from that area.  They say that, well, we would be better off if the government provided – if the private companies provided the roads and education instead of the government, and so therefore we favor it.  But from my point of view, it’s the other way around.  We say it’s wrong for the government to take money for me to build a road.  It’s wrong for the government to steal my house to make a road.  It’s wrong for the government to force my kid to go to school.  It’s wrong for the government to tax me and to pay for public education.

00:24:31

So that’s the more deontological approach.  It’s a principled approach.  It’s like it’s just wrong.  And then the question would be secondary to us of, well, then what would society look like in the absence of that?  And from our point of view, this question would be similar to the abolition question of slavery during the antebellum south where, if you said we have to abolish slavery, not because it’s inefficient, not because it’s an inefficient use of resources.  We have to abolish slavery because it’s wrong because you’re violating the rights of black slaves.

00:25:09

CHRISTIAN SEBERINO: Right

00:25:10

STEPHAN KINSELLA: And if you said I am in favor of abolition of slavery because it is a violation of human rights—it’s wrong—and if someone said in opposition, but who would pick the cotton?  You see, so to us that wouldn’t be a good argument.

00:25:28

CHRISTIAN SEBERINO: A valid argument.  Yes, yes.  Now…

00:25:30

STEPHAN KINSELLA: If they said who would pick the cotton, if it’s a genuine question, we can ask – we can say, okay, well, we can look into that.  We can say, well, maybe.  But if you ask the question rhetorically as to the abolition of slavery, if you say basically, listen, I know you want to abolish slavery, but I don’t understand who would pick the cotton, and we have to have the cotton picked, and the slaves are picking it now.

00:25:57

And so, therefore, until you prove to me that the cotton will be picked as well and as efficiently after slavery then as before, until that point in time, we’re not going to abolish it.  The burden of proof is on you.  You see, we don’t think that way.  We think that the burden of proof is on them to justify slavery, and of course they can’t.  And then if the question is, okay, we have to abolish slavery, and who’s going to pick the cotton? I don’t know.  We have to wait and see and figure it out.  We’re okay with that answer.  So that’s the first kind of response.  Now, of course, common sense will tell you who would pick the cotton.  It would be you pay some laborer.  He’d invent machines or whatever.  So in the case of the court system, it shouldn’t be that shocking to you because there have been private court systems for all of history, and in fact, the entire…

00:26:46

CHRISTIAN SEBERINO: Oh, see, I didn’t know that.

00:26:48

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, I mean, first of all, arbitration is private.

00:26:51

CHRISTIAN SEBERINO: Okay.  I’ve heard of arbitration, and I never had to go through it, but I – okay, I understand what you’re saying.

00:26:59

STEPHAN KINSELLA: And contracts are private because they’re agreements negotiated between people.  And they’re like little legal systems between the people that are parties to the contract.  And not only that, the entire western legal system that we’re used to now, the private law that we rely upon, was developed in two great legal systems in the world.  One was the Roman law from, say, minus – so 500 B.C. to 500 A.D. roughly, that thousand-year period.  And the other was the English common law, which started maybe 7-800 years later for about 1000 years too until today, and they were both basically decentralized systems.

00:27:39

They were not completely private, but they were not controlled by legislation and governments, as we think of today.  They basically were – they resulted from two human beings who had a dispute, and they needed this dispute resolved.  And they knew that fighting each other would result in social ostracism or penalties.  And so they had an incentive to go to some arbiter, some arbitrator who would decide the case, a judge basically.

00:28:10

And they put their dispute before them, and the judge tried to find the just result or the right result and looked at precedent and tradition and expectations of the parties and natural law and common sense and made a decision and made an award.  You get to own this, not you, whatever.  And over time, these principles developed into the body of private law that we still rely upon today, private contract law, property law, tort law, things like that.  So the idea is that this would – this is what would happen in a private law society.  And let me mention one more thing and then – and that is that even in today’s society, we have roughly 200 governments in the world.  So in a sense, we have anarchy right now between countries.

00:28:59

Now, they do have treaties between each other, but that’s analogous to private contracts.  But here’s no overlord government that makes all the countries abide by the treaties, and we have transnational commerce.  You will have a French company doing business with a Belgian company or whatever, and the contracts happen to be enforced.  They find a way to do it through contract and through arbitration and through cooperation between the government’s legal systems.  So it’s clearly possible to have anarchy in a sense.

00:29:29

And one more thing: There’s a great article from the early Journal of Libertarian Studies by Alfred Cuzan, who is not a libertarian, but it’s a great article.  It’s called “Do We Ever Really Get Out of Anarchy?”  And he points out that within a government, within a state, there’s no overlord enforcer that makes them comply with the rules of the government itself.  So even within a government, you have a type of anarchy because, say, the US government.  You have the Supreme Court issue a verdict, and Richard Nixon complies with it.  He steps down because the Supreme Court said you have to turn over the tapes.

00:30:05

There’s no pistols being pointed at him.  There’s just an interlocking series of understandings and social traditions and understand agreements that result in a web of law that binds the people within the government itself.  I mean you see this playing out right now with all these – the things with Trump and Mueller and the Democrats.  They’re all playing this dance, but they’re abiding by a certain set of rules that they respect, not that these rules are valid or just or natural, but that it’s possible to have a set of rules that do bind actors within a system.  And we think that that’s possible within society at large.  We just think that they should be just instead of arbitrary and based upon force,

00:30:54

CHRISTIAN SEBERINO: Okay.  Now, if – now let me tell you a little bit about my simple introduction to libertarianism.

00:31:03

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Sure.

00:31:04

CHRISTIAN SEBERINO: So I have mainly read Milton Friedman, specifically his great book, Free to Choose, which I’ve read twice and gone through with my – well, not the book, but I went through the series, TV series with my daughter.  And I watched that twice.  It’s on YouTube.  I highly recommend it.  I think he’s one of the greatest intellectuals in history.  But would you say that that is a good starting point for somebody that kind of wants to jump into and learn more about this whole discussion?  Because he, to me, seems like one of the most amazing teachers I’ve ever heard.

00:31:42

STEPHAN KINSELLA: I think he was great and my personal sort of pantheon or list of works.  I think his book, Capitalism and Freedom, is really the pinnacle of what he wrote in terms of libertarianism.  Free to Choose is really good too.  Now, he is more of a consequentialist and minarchist libertarian, but yes, he’s fantastic.  And up there along with him would be Henry Hazlitt in his book. Economics in One Lesson.

00:32:13

I think if you read one of the Milton Friedman books, Free to Choose, or the series or his Capitalism and Freedom, and Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson, and the very short book by Frédéric Bastiat, that I mentioned earlier, called The Law, which is from 1850 or something, those three things will give you a very solid foundation, mostly in consistency and economic thinking and based upon kind of some simple principles of justice.  But yes, I totally agree with you.  Milton Friedman is great.  He’s not quite an anarchist.  But he’s great.

00:32:50

CHRISTIAN SEBERINO: Okay.  Now I’m going to put you on the spot because – or here’s – I didn’t have an answer to my own question that I thought of after I saw the Free to Choose series, which was, wow, this guy’s arguments are so amazing.  You could almost see somebody believing everything he says.  So then it occurred to me that I should probably see the flipside, and then I was trying to think, is there some communist/Marxian economist that maybe did a YouTube series as well that is equally articulate to just kind of get a balanced viewpoint or the other side?  So can you think of – I couldn’t think of anybody that was the equal of Milton Friedman on the other opposing side.  Can you think of somebody just to…

00:33:38

STEPHAN KINSELLA: No, and I hate these kinds of questions.  I mean I don’t blame you for asking.  The problem is if you don’t have an answer, it sounds like you’re not being objective.  But I’m well known to anti – I’m a patent lawyer, and I’m against the patent system, and I do lots of talks and debates.  And I’ll get asked all the time.  Hey, Kinsella, we want to do – I’d like to do a debate instead of an interview.  Could you recommend to me the top two or three people on the other side?

00:34:05

And unfortunately I think there are literally no good arguments for IP, so I’m always stumbling.  It’s not – I’m not trying to sandbag it.  I just can’t find anyone.  And on the question you asked, as I said earlier, I think there are some respectable arguments for some kind of minimal state and some kinds of interventions, not an intrusive state.  But if you want to go say communism or totalitarianism against some form of Western liberalism, some form of minimal or limited state that we have now, I think there are just no good arguments because just the empirical evidence alone there’s hundreds of millions of people killed and just impoverishment in the last century alone by communism and forms of socialism.  And I just don’t – I mean I think that in 1991 or ’90, when communism fell, they basically lost their argument in an empirical sense.  Now, in a more moderate form, like if you argue for the welfare state…

00:35:10

CHRISTIAN SEBERINO: Let’s do that.

00:35:13

STEPHAN KINSELLA: I think that probably the best arguments would be something like, say, Francis Fukuyama.  I don’t know if you’ve heard of him, but he had this provocative article, which turned into a book in the – I think around 1991.

00:35:23

CHRISTIAN SEBERINO: The End of History.

00:35:24

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yes, The End of History and the Last Man.  And they sort of argued that it’s sort of a neo-liberal view that modern liberal democracy is the ultimate pinnacle of humanism.  And you have to have a balance between the desires of the masses, but you have to have capitalism in some form as the engine from – that provides growth and prosperity.  But then you have to have a state that redistributes it too a bit.  So I would say – and then John Rawls, of course, is the famous political philosopher.  And I’m blanking on the name of his book.

00:35:59

He had a famous book in 1970 or something.  I think it’s called A Theory of Justice.  And that’s the book that Robert Nozick, the famous libertarian philosopher, argued against in his book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia.  So those sort of books are the antipodes of the two views, but they’re all rooted in the liberal tradition in the sense that, say, John Rawls, and these welfarists believe in some form of redistributionism.

00:36:25

But they don’t believe in ultimate communism.  I mean you could look at Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and these guys.  They don’t really oppose the free market and capitalism.  They understand that you can’t have communism.  You can’t have central command of the economy.  They may go a little bit too far, but they understand that the essential essence of the Western liberal system is commerce, trade, private property rights, free markets.

00:36:51

They just think it has to be heavily regulated by other values.  So the way I would pitch it is that, like a libertarian like me, I think that you should not commit aggression against someone.  You shouldn’t steal from them.  You shouldn’t invade their body without their permission.  I wouldn’t say it’s an absolute, but it’s basically my principle.  I think it’s just wrong.  Whereas if you put it that way to the typical social democratic-type thinking person, which is what most people are nowadays, they would say, well, I think that aggression is wrong, but there are other values.

00:37:28

We have to balance and weigh and juggle these things against each other.  So equality is also important and some kid starving in Africa being given food is also important.  I think that a lot of those concerns would disappear if they had a better understanding of economics, like if they understood the incentive systems that governments have to come with.  And basically the whole field of public choice economics, which explains why a lot of the grand schemes and projects that these idealistic, utopian, progressive dreamers want to accomplish, they just cannot be accomplished because once you set a program in motion, it has its own inertia.  And the people inside that program want to benefit themselves, right?

00:38:17

CHRISTIAN SEBERINO: Right.  Well, see, now – see, that’s a – okay, so just if I can try to reiterate some of what you said.  So you believe in what you believe because you think it’s right and – but towards the end of your comment, you were also saying that not only do I believe it’s right, but it also provides the most benefit.

00:38:41

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yes.  That’s why I said earlier I don’t think there’s a conflict between consequentialism and between deontological or principled approaches.  I think they dovetail together, but yes.

00:38:53

CHRISTIAN SEBERINO: Okay.  So in the last part of our show, why don’t we move into talking a little bit about blockchains and like Bitcoin?  So a lot of people involved with this technology I think have visions that it’s going to help promote a lot of the political and economic viewpoints that you share.  And a lot of people don’t know if the government is going to eventually just figure out a way to kill it and that’s going to be the end of it.  But what’s your experience with this technology?  And kind of what are your thoughts on vigilante little activists?

00:39:38

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, first of all, I’ll say that – so I’m of the Austrian, which is Austrian economics, which is like a hard money, pro gold, anti-Federal Reserve, anti-inflationary money tradition, and libertarian and suspicious of the government controlling money in the Fed.  So just from that point of view, there’s aspects of just any kind of private money that attracts us.  And there are some Austrians who think that Bitcoin is impossible because they think that money has to arise from a physical commodity.  I’ve never believed that.  I’ve always thought that this is – I think that Bitcoin is a new phenomenon the world.

00:40:16

I think the idea of the blockchain and aspects of – that it built upon Nick Szabo’s idea, are complete genius.  And if we knew who Satoshi was, I mean he probably should get the Nobel Prize someday just for this new phenomenon.  And we’re reaching a new stage of human evolution.  There’s lots of things happening.  I think we can’t predict what’s going to happen: artificial intelligence, 3D printing, encryption, what Doug Casey calls phyles, P-H-Y-L-E-S, people associated with each other not based upon their ethnicity or their regions but upon other affinities.

¹

00:40:54

And I think Bitcoin could be extremely disruptive.  Look, I’ll say that I was never skeptical of it in an economic sense like some of my fellow Austrians were.  But I was skeptical that – I thought it might be a threat to the government if it ever became successful.  And I thought the government would shut it down.  I actually lost a bet against one of my friends in 2013 about that, and I learned my lesson.  I paid him $100 in Bitcoin, which is now worth about $50,000, so I lost a $50,000 bet.

00:41:25

CHRISTIAN SEBERINO: Wow.

00:41:26

STEPHAN KINSELLA: But I wised up, and I bought some in 2014, and so now I’m just watching what happens.  And I think – my hope and my somewhat prediction is that it’s going to be something like Uber.  Uber is something that got popular so fast that by the time it got popular enough to raise the ire of the protected industries, the cab companies, etc., it – who were going to lobby the government to shut it down, it was too late.

00:41:55

And I think Uber has escaped the clutches of the government because the government is slow and stupid, which is one thing we have in our favor.  And I’m hoping that that happens with Bitcoin.  By the time the government wakes up and tries to outlaw Bitcoin, it will be too late.  And also it’s distributed around the world, so even if one or two or ten governments outlaw it, they’re just going to be left in the dust by the countries that don’t.

00:42:20

And there are lots of countries that don’t have the dominant world money, basically everyone except for the US, smaller countries that don’t – they don’t care if their currency is outmoded by Bitcoin.  So it’s going to just prosper there.  My guess is that Bitcoin could – if it emerges and gets more and more dominant, it could – if it replaces, say, gold and then starts becoming a haven for people to resort to – instead of the inflationary currencies like the dollar and the euro and others, that it’s going to severely limit the power of the government, number one, to inflate.

00:42:58

And that’s what funds government wars, so it could have a direct effect on the ability of governments to wage war.  It could also impact the government’s ability to tax people and to regulate the economy, to have currency limitations, exchanges, and all that.  So I think it could severely – it could end up being the thing that’s the silver bullet or the stake in the vampire, which is the state.  It could kill the state.  Now, this is an ambitious and utopian goal, but I’m hopeful, and I do think that there’s huge potential for Bitcoin.

00:43:32

My personal view is I’m leaning more towards the Bitcoiners, the ones that believe that there can only – there should probably only be one in the long run.  It’s probably going to be Bitcoin because of its network effects and that – I think it’s going very, very high in the future, or I’m hoping that will.  So that’s kind of my thoughts on Bitcoin, although I admit that I’m an amateur and an outsider observer.

00:44:02

CHRISTIAN SEBERINO: No, that’s good.  No, that’s really good.  What – if I could just add one other supporting data point to your optimistic hope that this technology will get popular so fast that nobody can shut it down.  One, when people – when I get in discussions about this very thing, one thing I will remind people of is that think about Hollywood and how powerful Hollywood was and how hard they tried to basically re-engineer the internet to stop piracy.

00:44:36

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yes.

00:44:37

CHRISTIAN SEBERINO: And they couldn’t do it, and even today, there’s still rampant, massive file sharing.  And so freedom won out, and so I use that to try to encourage people to remain optimistic that it is true that a technology can take off.  Go ahead.

00:44:52

STEPHAN KINSELLA: And so that’s – the key point there is that all these things are basically based on technology.  So as I mentioned, I’m patent attorney and I’m a libertarian, but I’m – I think copyright and patent law are two of the worst laws that we have and should be totally abolished.  But I do – but thankfully the advent of the internet and encryption and torrenting has basically made copyright almost obsolete.  So even if you have strict laws against it, copying is going on at a rapid pace now, and as I think Cory Doctorow pointed out that the internet is a perfect copying machine.

00:45:28

And at this point in history, copying will never get harder than it is now.  It’s only going to get easier.  So basically technology has made copyright obsolete, and I think the same thing is going to happen with patents because of 3D printing.  So when you have 3D printing become more sophisticated, and I think it might take 30 or 40 years, but when you have people have a copying thing in their basement or down the block, and they could get an encrypted file of a pattern for an object, they can make whatever the hell they want.  They don’t need someone’s permission, right?   So that’s going to kind of help circumvent patent law, which is a good thing, I believe.

00:46:06

CHRISTIAN SEBERINO: And also gun control as well.

00:46:08

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yes.  It’s going to circumvent gun control and lots of things.  It’s going to cause some problems too, but that’s freedom emerging.  And I think that Bitcoin could do something similar with money.  There’s a great article by one of my favorite philosophers, my favorite philosopher, Hans-Hermann Hoppe.  He’s got this article called “Banking Nation States and –” I forgot the rest of the title.  But it’s in his – it’s in one of his books.  It’s on his website, hanshoppe.com.  And he points out that there’s a systematic way that the state, over time, takes control of society.  So it takes control of transportation, so like the Romans build the roads, right?

00:46:49

It takes control of the courts and law, which is kind of quasi-private, and it takes control of education.  All the kids have to go to government schools, so it’s like an insidious way that it puts itself into society to get its tentacles of control.  And finally, it gets control of money in banking like how the government took over money, and then they cut the tie to gold, and they have the Federal Reserve.  So it has these ways of worming its way into control over society, but to my mind that means that if you break the government’s ability to control money, that’s going to be a key turning point.

00:47:31

I personally think that we are not going to have a libertarian or anarchist revolution.  We’re not going to have people marching in the streets.  We’re not going to have a victory by means of my fellow libertarians running around pinning up pamphlets to tell people to change their minds because we’re always going to be a small, intellectual, geeky minority.  That’s not how you do things.  But I think we’re going to win for the same reason that communism collapsed.

00:47:57

It just collapsed of its own weight and just because freedom is just more efficient.  People are just not going to need the state.  The state is going to – the state will wither away as Marx predicted but not in the way he predicted.  It’s going to whither away in favor of freedom and capitalism, as people just have so much wealth and technology.  They’ll have little robot nano armies around them and 3D printers and encryption and billions of dollars in Bitcoin, and the government will just become increasingly irrelevant.  That’s kind of my utopian dream and hope.

00:48:31

CHRISTIAN SEBERINO: Right, right.  I wonder if we can close with this, if you could say something encouraging to people like me.  So I’m a nerd who focuses on technology, and I don’t know as much about law and economics as you do.  But it seems to me that, with this technology, people that believe in freedom agree with a lot of your program.  We can almost use technology to make the same or even a more effective change in society than somebody that’s, say, a politician.  You see what I’m saying?  This is one of the first times I’ve seen that somebody that’s involved with technology could really make big political changes.  What do you think about that?

00:49:24

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, I hate to be a Pollyanna, but I am optimistic.

00:49:29

CHRISTIAN SEBERINO: Feel free.  Be honest.  Be honest.  Go ahead.  Tell it like it is.

00:49:34

STEPHAN KINSELLA: I’ve always been optimistic, and I don’t like to be naive and to say the state doesn’t exist and that there aren’t great setbacks.  But so I agree with that.  I think that technology is the key to the future, and I think wealth is a key to the future.  And we’re in a cusp on the Industrial Revolution curve.  So you think about human society had about the same standard of living for, like, 5000 years until about 250 years ago.  And then we started on this Industrial Revolution curve, which is an exponential curve.

00:50:04

And we’re accelerating even that now with potential AI, with 3D printing, with nanotechnology, with the internet, with mobile technology.  We’re going to have telepathy pretty soon effectively with little things in our heads, and we can – and with this kind of money and this power, the state is going to go away.  And I think technology is the key to the future.  I don’t want to say it’s a given.

00:50:29

We could have gray goo and snuff ourselves out with religious ideology and with war and with bioterrorism or nuclear war.  It’s possible, and I think even if we have nuclear war, it’ll be horrible and will just set back humanity for 300 years, and then we’ll finally reemerge or maybe 50 years.  So it’ll be bad for us, but in the long run, maybe we’ll survive, so I’m hopeful.  My only concern is that we – is it Freeman Dyson or someone who said – the physicist who said, well, where are they?

00:51:05

It’s not Dyson.  It’s someone else.  But it’s like we don’t hear any signals from outer space, so that implies that life is either very rare or it snuffs itself out.  I’m hopeful that it’s very rare and that’s why we don’t hear from them.  But no, I’m very optimistic about I think things are getting better.  We’re richer.  We’re healthier.  We’re – and technology is going to enable us.  We’re at the cusp of great things.  We’re young gods I think – I hope, and our grandchildren will be gods.

00:51:34

CHRISTIAN SEBERINO: Okay, interesting, interesting thought.  Well, thank you.  Thank you, Stephan, for sharing your thoughts.  You’re obviously very educated, very talented person.  And thank you, and maybe we’ll have you on the show again sometime in the future.

00:51:50

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Be happy to do it

00:51:52

CHRISTIAN SEBERINO: All right, any other last closing thoughts or comments you want to make?

00:51:56

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, I would just say one thing.  I would say that – you mentioned like I sound like I’m educated on law and economics.  And I would say this.  I think that specialists – you don’t have to be a specialist to understand enough to understand a lot about the world.  If you understand technology, that’s a key thing, and all the rest of that you need is a little bit of honesty and sincerity and consistency in your thinking and just a little bit of economic literacy.

00:52:26

And, like I said, if you just read Economics in One Lesson, by Henry Hazlitt, if you understand the law of supply and demand and a few basic laws of economics, that can help inform your thinking about higher-level political norms.  You don’t need to have an economics degree.  In fact, that might be a detriment with the way – the things they’re teaching in school.  So it’s not that hard to self-educate yourself on a few basic things about economics and the basics of law.

00:52:52

You don’t have to go to law school.  You don’t have to be an economist to know enough to have an educated opinion about these matters.  And then the technology is what I would say is key, the technological information.  Immerse yourself in technology, and I think just try to take advantage of it and buy some Bitcoin I would say.

00:53:11

CHRISTIAN SEBERINO: Yes.  All right, and with that – well, why don’t we go ahead and we’ll stop there.  So thank you again and best wishes to you this holiday season.

00:53:22

STEPHAN KINSELLA: You too.

00:53:23

CHRISTIAN SEBERINO: All right, bye.

00:53:24

Podcast (kinsella-on-liberty): Play in new window | Download (Duration: 53:45 — 41.5MB)

1. Update: Re phyles, I am reminded of the idea behind “flag theory” discussed in Emile Phaneuf III and Rahim Taghizadegan, “Jurisdiction Shopping: The Forgotten Logic Behind Flag Theory,” The Daily Economy (February 2, 2026): “Harry Schultz, who coined the term “flag theory,” framed his thinking in an explicitly Austrian register, crediting Friedrich Hayek as his main economic inspiration and frequently citing Ludwig von Mises and Mises’s American student Hans Sennholz. The same pattern appears among other popularizers of international diversification such as Jerome Tuccille and WG Hill. In other words, the “flags” idea did not arise in a vacuum. It grew naturally from a worldview that treats institutions as constraints to compare, compete, and, when necessary, exit.” [↩]

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 230.

This is my own audio recording of my debate on IP at the Yale Political Union (Facebook) on Tues., Dec. 5, 2017. My opponent was attorney Candice Cook. My initial argument begins at 0:04:40, followed by some Q&A, and my closing argument begins at 1:42:20. I can’t say I recommend listening to the comments of others, as none of my arguments were really addressed and the arguments given are pretty incoherent—the arguments for IP were rooted in confused utilitarianism and even the arguments against IP were mostly rooted in anti-property socialistic assumptions.

As expected, I lost the debate, by vote of the students, by a vote of about 2:1. Admittedly, it doesn’t sound too bad to get 1/3, when not even all libertarians have the right view on IP, but it’s worse than that: many of those who voted with me voted against IP for socialistic, anti-property reasons. Everyone is so confused about this topic. I knew this would be the case, I knew it would basically impossible, hopeless, to persuade mainstream left-socialistic types in a short talk of a radical position that rests upon having a sound view of property rights.

So I went ahead, giving up hope on the audience, and laid out a systematic argument against IP based the nature of human action, human interaction, and property rights. A systematic, if compressed, argument, that could possibly resonate with some open-minded people someday listening to the recording via this podcast.  Thus, my initial presentation was a very condensed (15-20 minutes) but very fundamental explanation of the nature of property rights and why intellectual property is totally incompatible with property rights. Even though I knew it would be a hard sell with Yale undergrads.

As can be heard from the “hissing” (their version of booing) whenever anything pro-private-property or capitalistic was mentioned, and from the comments of some of the student political group leaders, there was a good deal of explicit Marxism and socialism among the student. But it was fun nonetheless and they were very civil and respectful.

Video of the debate available here and embedded below.

(I spoke on IP before a smaller student group back in 2014—see KOL151 | Yale Speech: Balancing Intellectual Property Rights and Civil Liberties: A Libertarian Perspective.)

Podcast (kinsella-on-liberty): Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:48:00 — 74.2MB)

Update: See “Dialogical Arguments for Libertarian Rights” in The Dialectics of Liberty.

I’ve been invited to contribute to a proposed new book, The Dialectics of Liberty, to be co-edited by Chris Sciabarra, Ed Younkins, and Roger Bissell, to be published by Lexington Books in 2019. My chapter is “Dialogical Arguments for Libertarian Rights,” based on my article “New Rationalist Directions in Libertarian Rights Theory,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 12:2 (Fall 1996): 313–26, updated including material drawn from other material:

• Argumentation Ethics and Liberty: A Concise Guide
• The Genesis of Estoppel: My Libertarian Rights Theory
• Hoppe’s Argumentation Ethics and Its Critics

Updates to follow in due course.

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 229.

This is my appearance on the Ernie Hancock “Declare your Independence” show for Nov. 3, hours 2 and 3. There is a “debate”—more of a discussion really—with libertarian-ish gun-rights author Alan Korwin in the first segment.

Grok summary shownotes: [0:00–59:24] In this episode of the Ernest Hancock Show (KOL229, Nov. 3, 2017), host Ernest Hancock facilitates a heated debate on intellectual property (IP), specifically copyright, featuring Stephan Kinsella and Alan Korwin. Kinsella, a libertarian legal theorist and outspoken critic of IP, argues that copyright is an unjust state-granted monopoly that stifles innovation and free speech, rooted in historical control mechanisms like the Stationers Company and the Statute of Anne (1709). He emphasizes that ideas are not scarce resources and thus cannot be owned, drawing on Austrian economics and the nonaggression principle to assert that copying is not theft but a natural part of human learning and competition. Hancock aligns with Kinsella, expressing frustration with government-enforced IP restrictions and advocating for a decentralized, piracy-friendly internet where ideas flow freely, citing examples like Napster and crowdsourced films like Iron Sky to illustrate alternative models.

Grok detailed shownotes and Youtube Transcript below.

GROK DETAILED SHOWNOTES:

Some of Ernie’s shownotes are pasted below.

11-03-17 — Roy Robin – Stephan Kinsella – Alan Korwin — (VIDEO MP3 LOADED) Roy Robin (Founder ICO Token Fund) talks about their decentralized investment platform – Stephan Kinsella (Intellectual Property Attorney) and Alan Korwin (Author; GunLaws.Com) discuss intellectual property and copyright issuesProgram Date:  Friday, November 3, 2017
Hour 1:  Media Type: Audio   •  Time: 48:48 Mins and Secs
Hour 2:  Media Type: Audio   •  Time: 136:0 Mins and Secs
Declare Your Independence with Ernest Hancock – Radio Host: Ernest Hancock Email: [email protected] Website: www.ernesthancock.com Declare Your Independence with Ernest Hancock strives to create an understanding of the Philosophy of Liberty. Understanding is far more important than agreement — that will come in its own time. DONATE Bitcoins Here 1PCnPViv1PENR5Qme63DKYbj19hmHQoag1
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HOUR ONE
Media Type: Audio   •  Time: 48:48 Mins and Secs
Guests:  Roy Robin Topics:  ICO Token FundHour 1 – Roy Robin (Founder ICO Token Fund) talks about their decentralized investment platform  Hour 2 – Stephan Kinsella (Intellectual Property Attorney) and Alan Korwin (Author; GunLaws.Com) discuss intellectual property and copyright issues Hour 3 – Stephan Kinsella on intellectual property rights CALL IN TO SHOW: 602-264-2800 -30- Feature Article  •  Global Edition Freedom’s Phoenix Declare Your Independence APP now on Google Play  Donna Hancock Listen to any recent show of “Declare Your Independence” at the click of a button!     November 3rd, 2017 Declare Your Independence with Ernest Hancock on LRN.FM / Monday – Friday 9 a.m. – Noon (EST) Studio Line: 602-264-2800    Hour 1 2017-11-03 Hour 1 Roy Robin from Ernest Hancock on Vimeo. Roy Robin With Over 10 Years of Experience Building Teams, Building Brands and Launching Companies, Roy brings a unique background of proven leadership to the ICOT Project. Webpage: http://icotokenfund.com/go/ Investment Breakdown Below is the ICOT Foundations Strategy One Year Hold 40% of the Holdings will be invested 1/3’rd into BTC, 1/3’rd into LTC and 1/3’rd into ETH for a One Year Hold ICO Investing 25% of the Funds will be used for ICO investing. Market Opportunities The ICOT Foundation will invest 12.5% of the fund into to profit from market opportunities such as Corrections, Hard Forks, etc. Acqusitions The ICOT Foundation will keep 22.5% of the fund available for ICO Acquisitions & Mergers. CHECK OUT THE ICOT TOKEN SALE Round One $ 50,000 5 Million Coin Hard Cap Any Unsold Tokens BURNED SOLD OUT Round Two $ 1.8 Mil 2.5 Mil Tokens at 0.25 2.5 Mil Tokens at 0.50 Any Unsold Tokens BURNED This Round is Live Round Three 5 Mil 2.5 Mil Tokens at 0.75 1.25 Mil Tokens at $1 1.25 Mil Tokens at $1.50 Upcoming Round Join The Token Sale! Below Are The Steps To Buy ICOT: Send Eth From ERC20 Wallet :  Token Address: 0xEF333188332869D25C67CA7505a2eE9CD6B591dB Gas: 200,000 Add Custom Token Information : Token Address: 0x63e7eEd4c0B1EaA2c8b21195e5255aB227fe3D2a Token: ICOT Decimals: 18 ======================================= TOPICS DISCUSSED… http://www.icotokenfund.com/go/whitepaper.pdf ICOT the Shark Tank for Cryptocurrencies and ICOs October 31, 2017, 12:13:37 PM  #1 Hello all, I wanted to let you know about a fantastic ICO called ICOT (Initial Coin Offering Token) that I have been privileged to become a part of. You might want to get in while it is still cheap!! (Just a thought) Why invest? This coin consists of 2 parts and solves a major problem in the crypto world. First, it acts just like any other cryptocoin out there in existence as it can be bought, held, or sold for profit. Second, which is amazing in my opinion, you can stake a percentage of your coins and thereby own a percent of the profits made when the company invests into other ICOs. Basically you become part of a Shark Tank but for ICOs!! This coin aims to reduce the risk associated with ICOs, which as someone who is taking part in that area of the cryptocurrency world, I greatly appreciate. However, with all that being said, with so many coins being made it’s hard to tell scam coins from coins that have potential. So how has ICOT dealt with that? Well, what ICOT has done is to create a team of highly experienced crypto investors to sift through all the ICOs. Their job is to pick the ones that have the best potential and invest in them. If you stake some of your coins when ICOT earns a profit off one of these ICOs, you make money off it as well the percentage of which being based off your stake amount compared to the total pool of staked ICOT. Granted, though, staked ICOT are burned but that does not mean that you lose your percentage……it’s just part of the process and increases the overall value of the remaining ICOT. But what if I don’t want to stake? No worries, you don’t have to, you can just keep the coins and sell them when you want if you so choose. Here is a little bit more regarding the specifics: It is an ERC20 Token with a Circulating Supply of 30,000,000. It’s total supply is 100,000,000 but 70,000,000 are to be BURNED in first year which will increase the value of the remaining ICOT tokens! What does the road map look like? – October 2017 ICO rounds a total of 10m tokens to be sold at .25c, .50c, .75c, $1.00 and $1.50 ICOT confirmed it will be listed on COINEXCHANGE.IO ICOT listed and reviewed by verifiedicos.com ICOT listed in one of the largest ICO directories – 6th November 2017 (Right around the corner!!) ICO rounds end All unsold coins are BURNED – 8th November 2017 ICOT listed on major exchanges ICOT acquires its first investments – 1st January 2018 The CoinLock System™ Wallet v1.0 will be released Coins will be staked/burned There is a very active Slack channel where you can discuss the project with the entire team and those who have already become a part of this ICO!! We would really like it if you came and said hello. Any questions feel free to ask! I can help you get set up and I’d be more than happy to help where I can. I believe this project to be a game changer and would hate for you to miss out on such a great opportunity. Here is some links for more info, etc. Website:http://icotokenfund.com Slack: icotoken.slack.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ICOTokenFund
HOUR TWO
Media Type: Audio   •  Time: 136:0 Mins and Secs
Guests:  Stephan Kinsella , Alan Korwin Topics:  Intellectual PropertyHour 2 – Stephan Kinsella (Intellectual Property Attorney) and Alan Korwin (Author; GunLaws.Com) discuss intellectual property and copyright issues-30-Hour 2 2017-11-03 Hour 2 Stephan Kinsella, Alan Korwin from Ernest Hancock on Vimeo. Stephan Kinsella (Intellectual Property Attorney) and Alan Korwin (Author; GunLaws.Com) discuss intellectual property and copyright issues STPEHAN KINSELLA BIO – Stephan Kinsella is Founder and Executive Editor of Libertarian Papers, Founder and Director of the Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom (C4SIF), a member of the Editorial Board of Reason Papers, a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the Molinari Review, a member of the Editorial Board of The Journal of Peace, Prosperity & Freedom (Australia), a member of the Advisory Board of the Lexington Books series Capitalist Thought: Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, a member of the Advisory Council of the Government Wast and Over-regulation Council of the Our America Initiative (2014—), and legal advisor to LBRY (2015—). A registered patent attorney and former adjunct professor at South Texas College of Law, Stephan has published numerous articles and books on IP law, international law, and the application of libertarian principles to legal topics. He received an LL.M. in international business law from King’s College London, a JD from the Paul M. Hebert Law Center at LSU, and BSEE and MSEE degrees from LSU. • [email protected] Webpages:  https://stephankinsella.com/ http://c4sif.org/ ALAN KORWIN BIO – Alan Korwin wrote his first book, The Arizona Gun Owner’s Guide, in 1989. It is now in its 26th edition with about 250,000 copies in print. He went on to write or co-write nine more books on gun laws, including state guides for California, Florida, Texasand Virginia, and the unabridged federal guides Gun Laws of America and Supreme Court Gun Cases. His 11th book, which debuted in 2008, is The Heller Case: Gun Rights Affirmed!, and his 12th, After You Shoot, is about the deadly loophole in self-defense law. He recently completed Your First Gun, for people new to gun ownership, and for gun owners to give to their gunless friends. With his wife Cheryl he operates Bloomfield Press, the largest publisher and distributor of gun-law books in America. His website, GunLaws.com, features a free National Directory to every gun law in the country and more than 300 books and DVDs for gun owners and the freedom movement. Alan’s blog, PageNine.org, is carried by scores of paper and online outlets. Wild rumors about his outrageous political-parody band, The Cartridge Family, could not be confirmed at press time. Webpage: http://www.gunlaws.com/ =================================== TOPICS DISCUSSED OR REFERENCED…   The Surprising History of Copyright: Karl Fogel at Google Tech Talks by STEPHAN KINSELLA on FEBRUARY 7, 2012 This is a truly amazing talk about copyright. And waaaay back in 2006! Truly amazing. From Karl Fogel at QuestionCopyright.org. What is truly impressive is how prescient Fogel is, and how he comes at this not from a libertarian angle but still gets it right on every major theme, and without being anti-free market. [See also Fogel’s article The Surprising History of Copyright and The Promise of a Post-Copyright World.] See also other interviews, videos, and talks on QuestionCopyright’s Speakers Bureau page, including: “Brian Lehrer Live (NYC) interviews Nina Paley and Karl Fogel” In May 2010, QCO’s Executive Director, Karl Fogel, and artist-in-residence, Nina Paley appeared on the CUNY TV show presented by renowned WNYC radio host Brian Lehrer. “We Are Creators Too” Art Brodsky of Public Knowledge Interviews QCO Artist-In-Residence Nina Paley “The Public Perception of Copyright” To document the public perception of copyright today, we went around Chicago with a video camera over two days… “History of Copyright and Information Ownership” Talk by Karl Fogel at the Stanford University Library; about 90 minutes, with Q&A. ===================================   The Surprising History of Copyright and The Promise of a Post-Copyright World http://questioncopyright.org/promise by Karl Fogel

TRANSCRIPT

Ernie Hancock Show: IP Debate with Alan Korwin (Nov. 3, 2017)

00:00:00

M: And now, live, from the studios of Freedoms Phoenix, Ernest Hancock.

00:00:06

M: 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!  Tonight, let us make them remember.  We are not afraid!

00:00:55

[music]

00:01:07

ERNEST HANCOCK: No fear, no fear, no fear, no fear here on Declare Your Independence with me, Ernest Hancock, here in Phoenix, Arizona from the b-e-a-utiful studios freedoms with an S, freedomsphoenix.com.  All right, we’ll do better next time.  All right, we have Stephan Kinsella on, and it’s stephankinsella.com, S-T-E-P-H-A-N, K-I-N-S-E-L-L-A, Stephan Kinsella.  Now, years ago, we spent quite a few hours with him on the show when it first really started becoming a big thing, and Stephan’s out there kicking ass on this intellectual property thing.

00:01:41

Well, it’s getting to where, yeah, the patents and inventions and fraud.  How do you build an idea on an idea of whose idea and kind of in this new technology of an idea, and now we patent it, and so only we can do the idea.  And anybody else that does the idea, whether we do it or not, you’re not allowed to do it?  And I’m going, that sucks.  I hate that.  Now, then we get into copyright, which is another intellectual property claim.  If wrote it down on a piece of paper first and I did the song, then it’s mine, and you’re not allowed because you’re not.

00:02:10

Well, this is—brings up the Pirate Party.  I mean, heck, in Europe when they were doing all this, that was all about online privacy and freedom, and I can do whatever and Pirate Bay this and going to be pirate and pirate.  Pirateswithoutborders.com—that’s us, man.  We’re going to go pirate.  I need pirate currency.  I need pirate communications.  I need pirate—oh, I’m sorry.  You can’t do that one.  That’s protected by—and we got some government agent with a shiny badge and a gun and says you can’t do that because you can’t.  This guy said.  And I’m going, I’m tired of looking to see what I can and can’t do.  I go to the blue pages and what government agency for to give me permission to something, or if I got an idea, can I even publish it if somebody ever thought of it, and you can’t—nope.  The bottom of all shoes that are red belong to this company, and you’re not allowed to do it.  I mean, I’m just—I hate this crap.

00:02:59

So what we’re going to do today, a good friend of mine is an acquaintance.  Alan Korwin is an author here in the Valley, and he generally does a lot of—he writes a lot of books.  It’s been dozens, a bunch, and he does a lot on the second amendment.  Now, he is—wrote a lot of very powerful books that have had an influence in the space, certainly on second amendment issues.  And it goes to the Supreme Court.  He gets invited.  He gets to sit there and play journalist, and you guys make the arguments about whether or not to write a book about it.

00:03:32

So his whole thing is like, that’s my books.  If somebody starts taking pieces of my books out, even the state of Arizona, and start using it, and they’re for a service of a little pamphlet.  He’ll go, hey, that’s—you didn’t give me credit.  I’d go, that’s mine, mine, mine, my words.  Well, he gave a presentation at a discussion group that I do just this last month.  And it was obvious to me that he was doing research and had read some of Stephan Kinsella’s work because he came back—well, damn libertarians say this and that, but I think—I go, you know, you want to duke it out.  We’ll just get Stephan on, and you can come on for an hour.  Now, he’s going to go on from the bottom of this hour to the bottom of the next hour.

00:04:09

The way the schedule works is 7:30 to 8:30 here in the mid of the show.  And then we got Stephan for a whole two hours. Well, this is what I want.  This battle, when Alan comes on, he has an opinion, and a lot of people share this opinion.  Now, some people change their opinion as getting more freedom-oriented, but he thinks that whatever is in his head, and gosh darnit, if he wrote it down, it’s freaking his and protected by the government man.  So I’m going—so that’s the battle we’re going to have.

00:04:40

Now, Stephan has published numerous articles and books on intellectual property law, international law, and the application of libertarian principles to legal topics.  He received an LLM in international business law from King’s College London, a JD from the Paul M. Hebert Law Center at LSU, and BSCE and MSCE degrees from LSU, and he’s been published and on the council of and director and all over the world.  I mean, his opinion means something to a lot of people.  Stephan, how far off am I?  Is there something else you want to add to that?

00:05:12

STEPHAN KINSELLA: No, that’s perfect.

00:05:14

ERNEST HANCOCK: Okay.

00:05:14

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Go Tigers!

00:05:15

ERNEST HANCOCK: All right.  This is what we’re going to do today.  My thing is that it was obvious to Alan, in preparation for his presentation, came across a lot of stuff that he did not anticipate, and I guarantee a bunch of it was you.  And he reads it, and he’s like—and you could see that he had a cognitive dissonance as he was talking in his head, so he wants to carve out intellectual property for copyright.  He doesn’t want to talk about the patents and inventions and all this other stuff that I think is—well, nothing will get invented if you don’t.  And I go, BS.  That’s what’s stopping a lot of innovation.  I’m so sick of this control thing on our brains.  So now, with copyright, define for the audience what we’re going to be talking about.  What’s the difference in copyright?

00:05:59

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Me?  You want me to do this?

00:06:02

ERNEST HANCOCK: Please.

00:06:03

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yeah, hello?

00:06:05

ERNEST HANCOCK: Yes, yes, please.

00:06:06

STEPHAN KINSELLA: So a patent is a grant the government gives to inventors, that is, inventors of inventions, and an invention is like a practical, useful machine or process that has some practical result or practical application like a mousetrap or a computer or carburetor or a software program.  Copyright is a type of grant given by the government to authors of created works, and examples of that would be a novel, a painting, a movie, a song.  And they are—they last much longer than patents.  Patents expire after about 17 years.  Copyright expires after over 100 years in most cases because it’s the life of the author plus 70 more years.

00:07:00

ERNEST HANCOCK: Okay, when did that change?  That was not the way it used to be, was it?

00:07:04

STEPHAN KINSELLA: No.  Something called the Founders Copyright with the copyright at the beginning of the republic.  The Constitution was ratified in 1789, and within a year or two, the Congress had enacted both a copyright and patent statute.  And the terms for both were about 14 years originally, and that was based upon, believe it or not, the term of an apprentice, which was seven years.  The idea was you should get two apprentice terms because your apprentice is going to learn your secrets, so you need at least a two-apprentice-term monopoly on these ideas.  And the patent term hasn’t changed very much, but the copyright term has slowly expanded over the decades.  Basically, every time Mickey Mouse…

00:07:48

ERNEST HANCOCK: Exactly.  I was just thinking—I go, Mickey Mouse—they’re going—Disney is kind of—and they’re going, nope, forever and always.  Well, we got—Walt Disney died—I don’t know—decades ago.  We’re coming up—maybe in my lifetime, all of a sudden, it’s going to be 70 years after his death.  Does Mickey Mouse go open source then?

00:08:07

STEPHAN KINSELLA: I think one of the most recent ones was the Sonny Bono—you know, Sonny and Cher.  Sonny Bono was a Republican congressman, the one that was too stupid to wear a helmet and hit himself on a tree and got killed.  But before he died, he gave us the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act I think in the ‘80s, and that added 20 more years onto the term.  And it actually retroactively covered some things that had already gone public domain, but they got put back into the copyright sphere.

00:08:34

ERNEST HANCOCK: What?  Give me an example.

00:08:36

STEPHAN KINSELLA: I can’t remember an example, but there were court cases challenging it, and the people challenging it lost it, so the works still—and now what we’re doing is, because our term is 20 years longer than most other countries, now we’re trying to force these other countries to add 20 more years like in the TPP, that thing that Trump killed, and in bilateral trade agreements and other trade agreements.  So we use these trade agreements to push our version of IP onto the rest of the world.  I call it a type of IP imperialism.  And this is one of the worst things about these trade agreements.  IP has nothing to do with trade.  That’s the local property rights of a country.  It shouldn’t even be part of the trade agreement.

00:09:16

ERNEST HANCOCK: Okay.  Now, this is a really good example.  You go to China.  You’re in Shenzhen, which is on the mainland across from Hong Kong.  They have—I don’t know—tens of millions of people, and it’s just a bustling thing.  And copyright—you shouldn’t be copying.  That would be bad in this agreement, and that would be bad.  And you go to this five-story building, and it’s all full of DVDs of all that Hollywood just released, and bite me.  Now what?   So I’m—they go, see, they’re cutting in, and I’m going, yeah.  Well, now it’s streaming.  I got my Kodi, and I just go watch whatever I want.  What are you going to do about that?  Somebody’s got to die!  They’ve got to die.  How are we going to do this?  But what should be done?  That’s what we’re going to be talking about.  How should it be?  We’ll be right back.

00:09:59

[commercial break]

00:11:01

ERNEST HANCOCK: Pirates, pirates, pirates.  Go to pirateswithoutborders.com, and one of the big things that we’re really emphasizing—we have the First Letter of Captain Marque, the Second Letter of Captain Marque as in marque and reprisal.  And reprisal is kind of the trinity to the neo-character kind of thing.  Well, reprisal, the first letter, reprisal, is going to be antiwar.  We’re working on this weekend, and within the next week or so we’ll publish the Third Letter of Captain Marque, which will be on communication, which will include copyrights and so on because our whole point is whatever you’re going to do, it can’t have the Crown deciding this and changing the goalposts and doing this kind of crap all the time.

00:11:38

So in our—you go to pirateswithoutborders.com, and you’ll see these letters there, and some of them are read by—you may know the Bad Quaker, Ben Stone.  He does a really good job doing Arrrizona Pirates.  So this copyright thing is a big part of the communication category.  That’s why it’s timely that we do this because starting this weekend we’re going to finalize the letter.

00:12:00

Now, I’m looking at—it’s really moot.  It’s getting to the point with streaming and MP3s or files just going around that.  You’re going to have to come up with another fun, new mechanism and sell lunchboxes or something because the way this is working, it’s done.  So then what do they say?  Well, movies won’t get made if we don’t have—and you’ll never get the movie made, and there won’t be—one, you’re confusing me with someone that cares.  And two, there’s a whole bunch of other ways to do it, and that was what I—have you ever heard of the movie, Iron Sky?  You ever seen that, Stephan?

00:12:35

STEPHAN KINSELLA: I did, yes.

00:12:37

ERNEST HANCOCK: That—do you know how that was made and funded?

00:12:40

STEPHAN KINSELLA: If I recall, it was crowdsourced.

00:12:42

ERNEST HANCOCK: Right.  Now, these guys said, screw your distribution.  We’re not going to put it in the theaters.  Yeah, bite me.  We’re going to do the crowdsourced, funded of—now, Iron Sky 2: The Coming Race is coming with Hitler on his T-Rex.

00:12:55

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yeah, it’s crazy.

00:12:56

ERNEST HANCOCK: So I’m going, yay.  So I funded—I think I paid 40, 50 bucks or something to get the hat, the t-shirt, and a Blue-ray one of these days or something.  So I go, yes, well, these get funded totally differently.  Well, they don’t like that.  The studios want to have control.  Well, now we got Sony or China comes in and buys up all the intellectual we got, and now we can just make whatever we want, or we can try.  See, I don’t understand what the big aversion is other than it’s like monopolies trying to use government protection to eliminate competition.

00:13:29

And I’m—but against what?  So Alan wants to really focus on the concept: Should there be intellectual property?  Can it be enforced?  My thing is that, look, you can’t enforce it anyway, so what’s the difference?  But he goes, no.  You’ve got to have it, should, and they’re taking from me, and they should stop, and now let’s quit it.  And I’m—so that’s what we’re having a discussion about.  Now, when we come back, I want to keep going on the history of it and how it keeps expanding for Disney and what damage that does.  We’re coming right back.

00:14:02

STEPHAN KINSELLA: We’re not live now?  Okay, got it.

00:14:03

ERNEST HANCOCK: No, no, no, we’re coming right back.

00:14:05

[commercial break]

00:14:38

And we’re going into the ring of fire!  This is a big issue with a lot of people.  They’re like oh, you can’t—oh, it’s one of the last things to hold onto, and they’ll go, hey, man.  The Constitution says—it says—it says copyright.  Right there, it said the word copyright.  We’ve got to have one.  Yeah, it keeps getting higher, but the problem is that it’s always changing.  You have this copyright concept of I get it, and you’re not allowed, and I get to make the money from them.

00:15:12

Okay, then it’s out there for everybody, and they keep changing it.  The Congress keeps changing it because you’ve got people with these interests, big industries like the MPAA.  They’re always on YouTube.  I do that right there.  I put it and they go, oh, you’re flagged.  You’re not—so screw them.  I don’t do it there because this is always this IP stuff.  They’re always wanting to—ah, I heard five seconds of Led Zeppelin, man.  You’re gigged.  I’m going, no.  So this—copyright, give me the concept that you think intellectual property as far as copyright is, should be handled.  What’s been its history, Stephan?  Edu-ma-cate us.

00:15:50

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, sure.  So this started with the printing press.  Before the printing press, books had to be hand-copied by scribes, and this was done under the auspices of the church and the king, the Crown.  So they could control which books were going to be published.  When the printing press came out—you know about the Gutenberg printing press—then the monopoly was under threat.  So what the government did, say, in England was they had this thing called the Stationers Company, so it’s like an officially chartered company.  I think it lasted about 150 years or so.  And it had the monopoly on which books could be printed.  But then when its charter expired…

00:16:27

ERNEST HANCOCK: What do you mean a monopoly?  You mean you couldn’t print another book unless you went—it was a royal, We Are the Printer Guys, and you’re not allowed?

00:16:34

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yeah.  There was one company that had a monopoly on printing, and you had to go through them, and they were under the control of the church and the Crown.  Okay, and so and there are…

00:16:42

ERNEST HANCOCK: Of course they were.

00:16:43

STEPHAN KINSELLA: So if you’re an author of a book, you need to go through them, and you need to watch what you say.  Otherwise, your book won’t be published.

00:16:49

ERNEST HANCOCK: So Martin Luther didn’t get to have them print his Bible.

00:16:52

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, okay.  So after the Stationers Company—their monopoly fell, and Martin Luther I guess was Germany, so I’m talking about England here.  The history in Europe is somewhat similar, but the rough history which led to our Constitution was that, in 1709, by then you had a publishing industry that had built up around this—the printing press and the Stationers Guild, Stationers Company.  And so when the charter was going to expire, they lobbied the parliament to enact something called the Statute of Anne in 1709.  And that basically was like one of the first modern copyrights.

00:17:31

ERNEST HANCOCK: Okay, now when did this start?  This is 1709 that they do an extension, but when did the first charter by the king they lay hands on, they get to be the only publisher?  When did that happen?

00:17:41

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, I think the Stationers Company started maybe 150 years before, right around the time of the printing press.

00:17:46

ERNEST HANCOCK: Man, as soon as—okay, so as soon as there was the printing press, as soon as there was a fax machine, as soon as there was email, as soon as there was the web, there’s government sitting there saying who can and can’t something.

00:17:55

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yeah, and there’s a great article on this by Karl Fogel from questioncopyright.org.  It’s on his site, and I have a link to it on my site, CFSIF.org, Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom.  It’s on the Resources page.  But in any case…

00:18:11

ERNEST HANCOCK: I’m sorry.  I’m writing this down; Karl Fogel.  It’s C-A-R-L, F-O-G-L-E?

00:18:16

STEPHAN KINSELLA: I think it’s C, yes, Carl [Karl] Fogel, F-O-G-E-L, and I’ve got his article link.  He’s a great guy.

00:18:25

ERNEST HANCOCK: And what’s the name of the article?  I’m going to have Donna put it up right now.

00:18:28

STEPHAN KINSELLA: I think it’s called—it’s—I forgot the name.  It’s something like The Surprising Origins or History of Copyright, something like that.  But it’s—his website is questioncopyright.org.  But if you go to my site, C4SIF.org/resources, I’ve got that article linked right there.

00:18:50

ERNEST HANCOCK: Okay, Donna is getting that up in the second hour right now.  We want to—they’re going to learn-ify, so we have it for everybody.  Okay, continue.  I apologize.

00:18:58

STEPHAN KINSELLA: And in the commercial, I can send you the link if you don’t mind.  But in any case, in the Statute of Anne, the copyright was given to authors instead of to the publishers.  But it reverted right back to the publishers because of the way the publishing industry worked, which is why we’ve had—up until fairly recently, you’ve had this gatekeeper role of the publishers.  And the same system with the studios in Hollywood and with the music industry.  You’ve had basically artists who have been beholden to the gatekeepers, the publishing industry, which is reliant upon copyright for their business model.  And, of course, they take most of the profits for most artists.  So up until recently, we’ve had this copyright system.

00:19:37

Now, in the US, when the Constitution was drafted in 1787, ratified two years later by 11 states, not 13 as most people erroneously believe, it had a clause saying that Congress shall have the power to protect the works of artists and inventors for their works, for a limited period of time.  So they were sort of giving a nod to the Statute of Anne of 1709, and they were also giving—basing it upon the Statute of Monopolies of 1623, which was the origin of modern patent law in England.  And notice, they called it Statute of Monopolies, so they admitted that patents were monopoly grants by the government.

00:20:22

ERNEST HANCOCK: Well, that was a little badge they got to wear on their chest, man.  The king granted you get monopoly of I’m better than you.  I mean, that’s exactly what this thing is.

00:20:31

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yeah, or you’re the only guy that can sell buttons in this area, or you’re the only guy that can sell—export sheepskin, and then if anyone else—or you’re the only one who can sell playing cards.  And so then you would have goons of the Crown bust into a pirate’s shop who was selling unmarked cards or unstamped cards and arrest these people.  They would put people to death in France if they sold a button or something that wasn’t approved by the guilds.  It was crazy.  It’s complete protectionism, completely antithetical to free markets and private property rights.

00:21:02

Okay, so basically, the copyright statute was enacted, and we had 14-year terms.  I think it could be doubled.  It could be extended one time so up to 28 years.  But you had to register it.  That was a big difference between then and our modern system.  You had to register it.  You had to actually go to the office and apply.  So the benefit of that was the was the presumption was something wasn’t copyrighted unless it was actually on the registry books of the Library of Congress.  You follow me?

00:21:29

ERNEST HANCOCK: Yeah.

00:21:29

STEPHAN KINSELLA: So at least you could tell whether a book was copyrighted and who owned the copyright.  So you would know who to go to for permission.

00:21:35

ERNEST HANCOCK: There was a form.

00:21:37

STEPHAN KINSELLA: In the late 1800s, there was something called the Berne Convention agreed to by most of the European nations, and America resisted that for almost 100 years because it did what we call abolishing formalities.  The formality would be registering it and putting a copyright notice on it.  So what that means is when we finally acceded in the 1980s to the Berne Convention—so we’re part of it now too—this means that copyright now is automatic.  As soon as you write something down on a piece of paper, you have a copyright in it.  You don’t have to make it public.  You don’t have to put a copyright notice on it.  You don’t have to file a registration for it.  So you can’t copyright something anymore.  Everything you do is copyrighted basically.

00:22:19

ERNEST HANCOCK: Okay, now let me inject here.  This was something that Alan did at his presentation.  He gave everybody a pen and a piece of paper.  Fold it in half.  Okay, now, here’s the front cover of your book.  Write on there the title of your book and buy whatever, and then open it up and put the table of contents.  You do it.  He goes, there you go.  You’re just copyrighted.  You wrote it down.  You got copyright.  You got a sanction of the king because you just did it and kind of don’t you feel good about in the copyright.  And I’m going, so it’s automatic, and it does—so am I feeling better now?  I wrote it down.  It’s out there, and somebody can steal my freaking great new title of whatever, and I don’t care.  So we’re going to talk about the mechanism.

00:23:00

[commercial break]

00:23:03

That’s—sorry.  I just want to get to the end there.  The—that’s what he did, exactly what you’re talking about, and he wanted to emphasize that, that it was automatic, and I’m going…

00:23:13

STEPHAN KINSELLA: He’s correct.  He is correct.

00:23:15

ERNEST HANCOCK: … so?  Yeah, so?  [laughter]

00:23:17

STEPHAN KINSELLA: That’s a bad thing.  It’s a horrible thing.

00:23:20

ERNEST HANCOCK: I’m going, yeah, I’ll write it down.  Now you can’t have that title because I already got that title, and I wrote it here with a witness that signed it.  I got that title.  And I’m going, that is—I’m—when you’re dealing with anybody, I mean, two people, but I mean, certainly billions of people, I’m—there is no original idea.  I mean, that’s pretty—it’s just who does it first.

00:23:40

STEPHAN KINSELLA: The problem with the automatic is it gives rise to this orphan works problem where there’s millions of books out there, and we don’t really know who owns the copyright because they didn’t have to register them.  And the authors are dead or long gone, and no one knows who to contact, and so people are afraid to publish these out-of-print books because some heir might show up and sue you.  But you don’t know who to contact ahead of time, so it’s…

00:24:06

ERNEST HANCOCK: You know, there was a—in the beginning of the Lovelution, I remember, so it had to be ’07/’08 or something.  There was a guy in New York, a libertarian, that that’s what he did.  He had a publishing company that anything that was in the public domain or old works or whatever, he was just printing them, making them available, putting them in nice binding of whatever the hell.  And he was just selling them.  He’s like…

00:24:27

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yeah.  And people do that now with books that Google Print has liberated because if they’re old enough and you know that they’re out of copyright, okay, so if it’s more than, say, X years old and you know that it’s out of copyright.  But for books that were published—let’s say a book that was published in 1940 or 1920 that’s still under copyright but you don’t know who to contact to get permission, people are afraid to publish those, or they do it taking a risk of being sued.

00:24:51

ERNEST HANCOCK: Okay, well, what about Dr. Zhivago or something, these old books?  I don’t know if they’re old enough yet.  But I mean, just some of these old classics, Frankenstein or something, can I print a gazillion copies of that and put my logo on it and sell it?

00:25:03

STEPHAN KINSELLA: If it’s out of copyright, you could.  But you have to—there’s all these copyright sherpas or calculators online.  You could—you enter in the publishing date and a couple of other facts, and it will tell you whether it’s still under copyright because there was lots of these transitional regimes, and it’s hard to keep track of exactly when.

00:25:18

ERNEST HANCOCK: Okay, now what am I looking—if I put Frankenstein…

00:25:24

STEPHAN KINSELLA: What you would do—well, yeah.  First, you’d look up when Frankenstein was published, so you just need the publication date.  And then you would look up copyright term calculator.  Google that.  You’ll find a couple, and you could just enter the information in, and it will tell you whether it’s in the public domain or not.

00:25:39

ERNEST HANCOCK: Okay, now what am I looking for?  I was looking at the date.  It was 1851 or something.  That was a long time ago.

00:25:43

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yeah, so look at the copyright date and/or the publication date.

00:25:48

ERNEST HANCOCK: What was that site you said?  It was copyright what?

00:25:50

STEPHAN KINSELLA: I would just Google “copyright term calculator.”

00:25:55

ERNEST HANCOCK: Copyright term calculator.  Okay, are you getting Alan?

00:26:04

ALAN KORWIN: Hey.

00:26:05

ERNEST HANCOCK: Hey, Alan.  Hold on a second.  We’re in a break.  We’re getting right to it.  Okay, copyright term calculator, blah, blah, blah.  Go to try now.  I go here.

00:26:15

ALAN KORWIN: I can year you, Ernie.  Can you hear me?

00:26:17

ERNEST HANCOCK: Yeah, I got you.  Just hold on.  We’re setting something up.  They’ve got a copyright calculator.

00:26:24

ALAN KORWIN: I can see a static picture of Stephan.

00:26:28

ERNEST HANCOCK: Yeah, you’re good.

00:26:29

ALAN KORWIN: Stephan, can you see me or hear me?

00:26:31

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Let’s see here.  I’m actually not looking at the…

00:26:34

ERNEST HANCOCK: Yeah, he’s not…

00:26:35

STEPHAN KINSELLA: I do see you.  I don’t have my video on.  I didn’t think I was supposed to put my video on.

00:26:38

ERNEST HANCOCK: No, you don’t have to.  It doesn’t matter.  I got…

00:26:41

ALAN KORWIN: Go ahead.  Put it on.  Let’s see each other.

00:26:44

STEPHAN KINSELLA: I thought it might be a bandwidth problem, but no, I’m here.

00:26:46

ALAN KORWIN: Oh, there we go.  I’m using the microphone in my machine.  That’s how I usually do Skype.  Is that okay?

00:26:52

ERNEST HANCOCK: Yeah.  It’s a little echoey, but see, we got graphics here also.  Take a look at the screen.  You can see there’s graphics, everybody, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.  See, this probably gives more information as you guys are talking.  So we can do the video a little bit, but let’s go ahead and we’ll…

00:27:13

ALAN KORWIN: Nice to make your acquaintance, Stephan.

00:27:14

STEPHAN KINSELLA: You too, Alan.

00:27:16

ALAN KORWIN: I’ve read some of your work.  Have you read any of mine?

00:27:18

STEPHAN KINSELLA: I didn’t hear your last name, to be honest.  Sorry.

00:27:22

ERNEST HANCOCK: Korwin.

00:27:23

ALAN KORWIN: [indiscernible_00:27:24]

00:27:26

STEPHAN KINSELLA: What is it?

00:27:27

ALAN KORWIN: Korwin.

00:27:28

ERNEST HANCOCK: Okay, we’re back.  We’ve been yacking, and it’s come back, and this is what we’ve been doing.  Alan Korwin is on with us.  Let me go ahead and give you a quick intro of Alan.  He’s a full-time writer whose three-decade background includes working business, legal, news, entertainment industries.  Mr. Korwin wrote the business plan to raise $5 million in venture capital and launched in the in-flight catalogue, SkyMall.

00:27:51

He did a publicity campaign for Pulitzer Prize cartoonist, Steve Benson in his fourth book, Where Do You Draw the Line?  Invited twice to US Supreme Court to observe oral argument in second amendment gun right cases, which was a book that was well-received.  And he’s written ten of his 14 books on that subject, and is among the leading national experts in that field on gun rights.

00:28:14

Now—and then he goes on.  He does a bunch of other stuff, and Alan Korwin, a good friend that’s here in the Valley, but definitely—he’s got to lean in more and more and more and more, and then all of a sudden, he starts saying he’s libertarian.  But he’s got this copyright thing going on.  So we’re looking at this, and one thing that we’re looking at is the copyright calculator.

00:28:34

Now, I’m going, where is this limit?  Well, if I look at Frankenstein, and it’s published back in—I think it was 1850—I don’t know—the 1800s.  It was early in the 1800s.  And then, all of a sudden, how many years have to go by before I can just take all that and print it and do it and sell the book, put a pirate face on it?  I mean, I can do whatever.  Well, it keeps changing.  Well, in the Constitution, it has the word copyright.  Man, Alan will tell you all about it.  So, Alan, go ahead and do your introduction and what your position is, and then we’ll get into it with Stephan.

00:29:12

ALAN KORWIN: Well, thank you, Ernie, and it’s always a pleasure to be with you; Stephan, a real honor to be with you and maybe explore this issue.  When I was asked to do a presentation on this, I’ve been a copyright practitioner for decades, and I was actually surprised to find that libertarians were vigorous defenders of private property rights, which I think is the correct position to take, are mixed about whether intellectual property is real, whether it deserves protection, whether copyright is real.  That actually shocked me, the idea that anybody can question whether copyright is real, whether authors own their works.

00:29:54

I read your paper on intellectual property, and I’d like to ask you some questions about it, help clarify it, and maybe help me understand it better.  There is no doubt in my mind, at least at the moment, that copyright is real, that it’s protectable.  It’s a bundle of rights.

00:30:14

I own them as the creator.  I heard Ernie mention that I had the people at this presentation create a copyright of their own, start a book right there in the room.  They all started a book, and they own it by the fact that they created it.  Of the three types of property, realty, which is land and what’s on it, personalty, or chattel, moveable, personal property, and a variety of names, but intellectual property, which is a bundle of things, or what I call mentality, things you create in your mind.

00:30:49

These are all very real.  They’re all entitled to protection.  They all have value.  They can all be bought or sold.  And apparently, you don’t feel that intellectual—or clarify it for me.  Intellectual property is real.  You can buy it, sell it, own it, trade it, license it, do things with it, and the idea that people can steal it and that’s okay, I don’t get it.  If somebody takes my song, performs it somewhere, makes a million dollars, and that’s their money, not mine, or there isn’t some division of the money they got from my property, maybe you can help me understand why that’s okay.

00:31:33

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Sure.

00:31:34

ALAN KORWIN: Most of the world accepts that copyright is real, that my right to copy it rests with me, and that I can license it or sell it or let them use it, but if they use it without me, there’s an injustice in that.  And I’m not talking about the law, per se.

00:31:52

ERNEST HANCOCK: Okay, let go ahead and respond before we run out of this segment.  Go ahead, Stephan.  Give him what for.

00:31:56

ALAN KORWIN: Go ahead.

00:31:57

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Let me make a couple of fairly short assertions, and then you can respond when we have—maybe after.  First of all, the Constitution does not mention the word copyright.  It says to promote the progress of science and the useful arts by securing, for a limited time, to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their writings and discoveries.  Okay, so that’s what gives Congress the authorization.  I wouldn’t deny copyright is real.  It is a real law that exists because Congress has enacted a copyright statute, which is rooted back in the Statute of Anne from 1709 or ’10, as we mentioned earlier, which is rooted in the prior monopolization of the printing press and the scribes by the government and by the church.

00:32:40

So the question for me is not whether it’s real.  I agree that it exists and that you can get copyrights in a book.  I think you’re wrong to say—to use the word steal just as a legal matter because, even under the current law, if you copy someone’s book, it is not stealing.  It’s considered copyright infringement, and there are damages payable, but it is not stealing.  Even the Supreme Court has recognized this. It’s not stealing, and it’s not taking because if I copy what you wrote, you still have what you wrote, so I’m not taking something from you.

00:33:13

You could say I’m taking your customers, or I’m taking money that you could have made, but that’s a different issue.  So stealing is actually just legally the wrong word.  And also, as a legal geek, technical matter, you’re wrong to say there are three types of property—immoveable or realty and personalty or movables and then this other category.  As a legal matter, copyright is classified as an incorporeal or an intangible moveable because the way the division between moveable and immoveable works is that everything that’s not immoveable is moveable.  That’s just the way it works.  So if it’s land, it’s immoveable, or if something incorporated into the land, everything else is moveable.  So if you’re going to call copyright a property right, it is actually moveable, which makes no sense I know, which gets to the problem with the idea of property in ideas.  To call an idea moveable makes no sense anyway.

00:34:09

ALAN KORWIN: So let’s start with the first one.  I can trace copyright back to 560 A.D.

00:34:14

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yes.

00:34:15

ALAN KORWIN: The legal history is 1400 years old.  The Statute of Anne in 1709 is the western civilization statute, but it goes back to the church and recognition that an author owns the author’s work.  So the legal history is quite old.

00:34:34

STEPHAN KINSELLA: It’s actually about 1000 years older than that, Alan.  In about 400-500 B.C., there was a Greek city-state, Cerberus, or something like that.  And they had a cooking competition, and whoever won would get a monopoly on their recipes for a year, so I mean, the idea is pretty old.

00:34:52

ALAN KORWIN: So when we’re done, let’s stay in communication.  You’ll send me that.  It goes back to the Torah, and a member of Chabad gave me a book called Copyright in Jewish Law, which was an inch and a half thick, and went through the religious scribes and what they found, and it was fascinating.  But the Torah is filled with when you can copy and when you can’t and when you are taking—doing a taking of somebody else’s work.  So the age of it doesn’t just trace back to the first law, and some of the laws are out of whack.  I think we’ll agree on that.  But the principle that you hold…

00:35:32

ERNEST HANCOCK: You agree that laws are out of whack, that there is a law—that they’ve even got a law, in the Crown of the law?  Is that what you’re saying, Alan?

00:35:36

ALAN KORWIN: Ernie, I know your distaste for law and government.  That’s famous.

00:35:41

ERNEST HANCOCK: See, this is my point.  I want to make sure—I’m going to let you guys go, but I want to make sure that my opinion gets in there is that if I have an idea or I’m writing something or I’m doing—I’m not looking for a blue pages or an index or a list to go check to see if somebody else thought of it first.  When my ideas on built on 15 gazillion, and somebody after me is going to copyright something they got from me, or hell, they do it.  They do bumper stickers and so on.

00:36:06

I am not—as a practical matter, I don’t even see how this can be enforceable in the digital age now.  I mean, it’s not.  So let’s go ahead and—I know your opinion, Alan, but I want to—this is fascinating, the history that you guys are going through.  I just have—the fact that there’s a history, and a bunch of kings and potentates and democracies and governments and all this with shiny badges and guns said so doesn’t mean squat to me.  I don’t care.  I want to get down to the principle of should it or even can it.  So when we come back, you guys go to the livestream.  It’s on freedomsphoenix.com.  Top right, you can get the audio livestream during the live show.  And if you go to the—on the left with the video streaming, you get the break conversation, which will be in the archive, but you’ll get that talk.  Listen to it live right now.

00:36:59

[commercial break]

00:38:01

ERNEST HANCOCK: I’m sorry.  What?

00:38:02

STEPHAN KINSELLA: I was just trying to talk to Alan.  I was just wondering if he could see the text window in the Skype here.

00:38:09

ALAN KORWIN: All I see is the audio track.

00:38:13

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Oh.

00:38:15

ERNEST HANCOCK: Oh, well, here.  I can—well, if I do this, and…

00:38:21

STEPHAN KINSELLA: If you’re in Skype, you can click on that little…

00:38:22

ERNEST HANCOCK: If you click on that little chat thing at the top right, it has a word bubble.  You do that, and you’ll be able to see the…

00:38:29

STEPHAN KINSELLA: If I can find that link, I can send you guys a couple of links.

00:38:31

ALAN KORWIN: Please do, but I’m not going to distract and see it.  Are you getting a strong moray pattern off my shirt?

00:38:38

ERNEST HANCOCK: Not bad.  You’re okay.

00:38:40

ALAN KORWIN: Okay because…

00:38:41

ERNEST HANCOCK: It’s more echoey on your audio than anything.

00:38:43

STEPHAN KINSELLA: You don’t have a microphone, like earbuds or something you can…

00:38:46

ALAN KORWIN: I do but not a place to plug it in on this machine, and in the past, this has worked fine.  I’ll get a little closer.

00:38:52

STEPHAN KINSELLA: It’s audible.

00:38:54

ERNEST HANCOCK: It sounds like you’re in a bathroom.

00:38:56

ALAN KORWIN: Send me your email, would you, Stephan?

00:38:57

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Sure.  Yeah, I’ll do that.

00:39:00

ALAN KORWIN: And then, when we’re done, I’ll send you mine, but I’ve got to be out of here really quick.  We have opened so many topics.  There’s no way we’ll be able to cover this all.

00:39:08

ERNEST HANCOCK: Well, no.  We’re going to focus on the copyright and the right: should, could—it doesn’t matter to me because it’s going to get to the point where it’s irrelevant.  It’s moot.  But should?  Where does this—you’re saying it needs to be protected.  All right, here we’re coming back.  Here we go.

00:39:25

M: At LRN.FM.

00:39:28

M: Freedom’s the answer.  What’s the question?  You’re listening to Ernest Hancock.

00:39:33

ERNEST HANCOCK: And we’re right back with Stephan Kinsella and Alan Korwin talking about—the history and all this is fascinating, but it all comes down to one thing for me.  My thing is that, yeah, that’s all very interesting, what kings and governments all said about what they can do and who it gets the monopoly of and the grant of the charter of you’re allowed to print this and you’re not, and you can’t think and share.  And I’m like, none of your freaking business.  I don’t care.  My thing is you don’t want me to know it, and you don’t want me to build on the idea.

00:40:01

You don’t want me to write about it.  Then don’t freaking tell me because I’m not going to sit there and take a butterknife to my brain and try and carve something out of what I can or can’t use and how.  And I’m not doing it, not, not, not.  And technology is getting to the point that it’s moot anyway, but to have the conversation to talk about how it evolved, and it keeps changing.  Disney’s Mickey Mouse is going to copyrighted forever, which means other stuff is going to be done too because they got the pressure to go to Congress and get them to pass something of I get Mickey Mouse.  So I’m going—all right, go ahead.  Go, Alan.  Go do your thing.

00:40:38

ALAN KORWIN: Ernie, let me address this.  Your distaste for government and rules is famous, and I understand that.  So let me address this, and I might be a little sarcastic, but you know me.  Let me address this in terms you can understand, and maybe Stephan can help us clear it all up.  You’re concerned about who invented it first and that the words are always there, and I used two examples before.  I’ll use them again.  Johnny B. Good by Chuck Berry—he invented it first.  Nobody invented it before him, and nobody is going to invent it after him.  It’s unique.  And Michelle by the Beatles—they invented it, nobody before them, nobody after them.  It’s unique.  It’s theirs.  We all love it.  We enjoy it.

00:41:23

ERNEST HANCOCK: I thought it was Michael Jackson’s now, but anyway.

00:41:25

ALAN KORWIN: Okay, because it can be sold.  It is a piece of property.  Do we agree that those two songs are pieces of property and that they have value…

00:41:38

STEPHAN KINSELLA: No.

00:41:39

ERNEST HANCOCK: No.

00:41:39

ALAN KORWIN: Let me finish.  Do we agree that they’re pieces of property and that you can own them, sell them?  People are willing to spend money to get them, and they have to spend the money somewhere to buy them.

00:41:50

ERNEST HANCOCK: If they’re in an album, if you’re talking about the actual book itself, if you’re talking about the CD, if you’re talking about the means of transfer of—I got my goodies and I hold it, yes.  But the actual…

00:42:00

ALAN KORWIN: Let me clarify.

00:42:00

ERNEST HANCOCK: See, you’ve got to clarify.

00:42:02

ALAN KORWIN: Let me clarify it.  Now, I play the song, but we’ll use Chuck Berry.  When he invented, out of thin air, something that didn’t exist, not atoms in the universe but a piece of mentality, a song, he created it.  It would be fraud to say—how can I put this so you’ll get it?

00:42:25

ERNEST HANCOCK: That somebody else made it?

00:42:26

ALAN KORWIN: Johnny B. Good by Ernie Hancock.  That would be fraud.  Do we agree?

00:42:32

STEPHAN KINSELLA: No, it wouldn’t.  No, I disagree with that, actually.

00:42:34

ALAN KORWIN: It wouldn’t be fraud to say…

00:42:37

ERNEST HANCOCK: Let Stephan go ahead and respond.  Go ahead.

00:42:40

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Let me just have a couple of things where I would clarify.  First of all, Johnny B. Good was invented by Marty McFly.  If you remember Back to the Future, there was a time loop so…

00:42:48

ALAN KORWIN: You’re being silly.  Let’s be serious.

00:42:50

STEPHAN KINSELLA: I’m just joking.  I’m just joking.

00:42:51

ALAN KORWIN: Try and be serious…

00:42:54

ERNEST HANCOCK: No, no, let him respond.  Alan, let Stephan respond.  Go ahead, Stephan.

00:42:57

STEPHAN KINSELLA: It’s just a joke.  It’s just a joke.  Look, Ernie and I—I think Ernie and I are not against rules or law.  We’re just against the state.  Whether we’re against government or not depends upon how you define government.  If you mean that the governing institutions of law and order, I’m not against that.  I’m just an anarchist, so I’m against the state, so if you’re precise with your terms.  But we’re not against law.

00:43:17

ALAN KORWIN: I addressed that to Ernie, not you, Stephan.

00:43:19

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, I think we feel similarly on that.

00:43:22

ERNEST HANCOCK: Stephan and I are—when he says something that I don’t agree with, I’ll say.  Go ahead, Stephan.

00:43:26

ALAN KORWIN: Try and address what I said, and we’ll get somewhere.

00:43:28

ERNEST HANCOCK: He’s going.  If you’ll let him, he’ll do it.  Stephan, go.

00:43:31

STEPHAN KINSELLA: What I’m saying is we disagree with particular rules, particular laws that are unjust.  It is true you can sell a copyright, and some people want to buy it given that they exist.  But it’s also true that in the days of slavery, human beings were chattel property, and they could be sold.  So just because the legal system, pushed on us by the state, can have rules that allow things to be treated like property doesn’t mean that that’s just, so the question is justice.

00:43:57

Now, you also said earlier that it’s—the Constitution and our law recognizes copyright as property.  I actually don’t think that’s correct.  I think that copyright and patent were recognized as monopoly grants, privileges, granted by the state, and they were called property as a sort of propaganda term to defend against criticisms by free-market economists in the 1800s.  Okay.  A property right doesn’t expire after an arbitrary period of years, Alan.  If you own your grandfather’s watch or his car, or you own a home, you can own it potentially forever; pass it on to your children.  Patents expire in 17 or so years.  Copyrights expire after 100 or so years.  How can that be a property right if it just expires?  So it’s obviously just a social…

00:44:45

ALAN KORWIN: No, I’m not going to participate in this.  This is what libertarians do that make them ineffective in politics.  I asked you a specific question about one thing, and like libertarians I deal with, you’re now talking about patents, watches, law, the Constitution.

00:45:01

ERNEST HANCOCK: I guarantee Stephan will answer your question—ask the question, Alan.

00:45:05

STEPHAN KINSELLA: I’m happy to answer any particular question.

00:45:07

ERNEST HANCOCK: Ask the—don’t make a speech.  Make a particular question so he can answer it.  Go.

00:45:12

ALAN KORWIN: Is Johnny B. Good a piece of property?

00:45:17

00:45:21

STEPHAN KINSELLA: I would say under today’s legal system, it is classified as property, yes, it is.  But that doesn’t mean it’s just.

00:45:29

ALAN KORWIN: Fair enough.  Who owns that original piece of property when it was created?

00:45:36

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, it depends upon whether it was a work-for-hire.  So some corporation or human being owns it.  Either the author, or if it’s a work-for-hire, it would be the employer, which usually is a corporation, or it could be someone that he contractually assigned the right to later, which would probably be a corporation yet again.  So I don’t know.  According to—I don’t know who owns it.  But someone owns it.

00:45:59

ALAN KORWIN: We know the conditions of its creation.

00:46:03

STEPHAN KINSELLA: I don’t.

00:46:04

ALAN KORWIN: I do.  He wrote it in the privacy of a room.  It was not a work-for-hire.  He was not under contract.  I know what work-for-hire is.  It’s a change of subject.

00:46:15

STEPHAN KINSELLA: It means you have to—I’m not changing the subject.  You asked me a question.  I’m…

00:46:19

ALAN KORWIN: Who owned—when Chuck Berry wrote Johnny B. Good in the privacy of a room as a song, who owned it?

00:46:28

STEPHAN KINSELLA: If he was employed by a company to write songs, then the employer would own it.  The fact they…

00:46:33

ALAN KORWIN: But he was not.

00:46:34

ERNEST HANCOCK: All right, I’m pushing the button so I can have a statement here.  When you say who owns it, based on what?  The current law.  Well, who owns the slave?  Well, the man says you do.  Just because you have this ownership and I’ve got to paper from the Crown and I got guns that’s going to enforce this contract or this seal of—bill of sale of I’ve got this slave, that doesn’t mean squat to a libertarian.  You are correct, Alan.  Not a damn thing.  It is a moral thing.  Can I have an idea and express it without looking for who had the idea?

00:47:10

I don’t care.  Now, is it—you’re going, is there a legal framework?  Does it go back to the Bible?  Yep, I can show you, and Stephan Kinsella is a freaking expert on this.  He can show you nit and tittle of every little thing that it does, and it keeps changing.  My property right in stuff doesn’t change.  Either it’s mine or it’s not.  Intellectual property is built on [indiscernible_00:47:31].  No, I don’t recognize your law, Alan.  I don’t.  It doesn’t mean anything to me.  You’ve got to come up with a better idea.  For you to say, well, who owns it, well, Stephan is going, well, I guess under that current system, the king says, which don’t mean crap to me.

00:47:45

ALAN KORWIN: I’m not referring to law.  I’m referring in principle.

00:47:52

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Oh, oh, so—okay…

00:47:51

ERNEST HANCOCK: Then that’s a whole different thing.

00:47:53

STEPHAN KINSELLA: I was confused.  If you’re asking under a libertarian—under a private law society, in a libertarian legal order, are you asking me who would own the song?

00:48:02

ALAN KORWIN: I’m trying to get down to root principles of nature that, if I create something in the privacy of my mind, like a song, and I’m using Chuck Berry who is a simple guy, writing a simple song we all know.  He creates it…

00:48:20

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yeah, I got it.

00:48:20

ALAN KORWIN: … in his mind.  And then I want to get to the next issue, which is, is it a bundle of rights?  Are there many things in a right…

00:48:27

STEPHAN KINSELLA: I got it.  I got it.

00:48:29

ERNEST HANCOCK: Okay, let him answer.

00:48:30

STEPHAN KINSELLA: I got it.  So let me—so when you asked me earlier whether it’s a piece of property, I thought you were asking a positive-law question about how it’s treated under today’s legal system.

00:48:38

ALAN KORWIN: I already said I am not looking at the statutes and the laws because they’re messed up.

00:48:43

STEPHAN KINSELLA: I understand.  But when you asked that question, I thought you were changing, so I misunderstood you.  If you’re asking me as a libertarian under natural law, natural property rights systems, no.  The answer is clearly no.  A song is not a piece of property because it’s not a scarce resource.  It’s a pattern of information.  A song cannot be owned by anyone.  It doesn’t have an owner.  It’s not property.  So that would be my answer to that.

00:49:07

ALAN KORWIN: You brought up scarcity, so let me address scarcity.

00:49:12

ERNEST HANCOCK: Okay, we’re going—see, that’s why we needed two hours with Alan and Stephan, but we get an hour.  Let’s go bisect it by the break here, but when we come back, we’re going to get right to it.  You guys—we’ll take a break.  I’ll go to the bathroom, chill, take a hit, whatever it takes, smoke and toke.  And then, we’ll come back and hit it because this is good, good.  I knew this would be great, and we’re going to have a lot of fun with it.  But come back at 6 after, guys, and we’ll do the newsbreak, and then we’re going to hit it hard when we come back.  Alan Korwin, gunlaws.com.  Stephan Kinsella, S-T-E-P-H-A-N, K-I-N-S-E-L-L-A dot com, Stephan Kinsella.  We’ll be right back.

00:49:58

[song]

00:50:09

ERNEST HANCOCK: Okay, we’ll be back at 6 after.  I’ll come in just a little bit before that.  I’ll take a break, be right back.

00:50:14

[commercial break]

00:55:23

ERNEST HANCOCK: Okay, we’re getting ready to go.  Go ahead and tilt your camera down a little, Stephan.  I’m missing you here.  There you go.

00:55:29

M: And now, live, from the studios of Freedoms Phoenix, Ernest Hancock.

00:55:37

M: 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!  Tonight, let us make them remember.  We are not afraid!

00:56:25

[song]

00:56:34

ERNST HANCOCK: Yeah.  Unafeared, unafeared, unafeared, unafeared here on Declare Your Independence.  Bring it on.  Bring it on.  Bring it on.  We’ve got Alan Korwin at gunlaws.com, and we have Stephan Kinsella, Stephan, P-H-A-N, Stephan Kinsella, K-I-N-S-E-L-L-A dot com.  And this is what we’re talking about.  We’re trying to focus it on copyright.  Is it protected property?  Well, I did a show on—when was this?  It was November—it was October 20, so just a couple weeks ago.  We had Matt Smith on.  Now, we know Matt Smith.  He [indiscernible_00:57:07].  He’s an entrepreneur, a gazillionaire, does great and wonderful and everything.  And what did he do?  He created a thing.  It’s called Royalty Exchange.  Now, these are songs that have a revenue stream.  A lot of these, they got Eminem and all his stuff out there and so on, and they’re trading the revenue that’s created from these songs, and they go, you know what?

00:57:30

These have value, and they put up, and they’re offered as pieces of this, a royalty exchange in that.  I want to buy and sell in this and kind of—and it makes me money.  Well, you can sell it for future revenue that’s going to happen.  It’s all based—and he’s a hardcore anarchist-libertarian type, but he knows where to make him some money.  Now, he’s not necessarily supportive of the concept, but that won’t stop him from making money on it.  And I’m going, okay, well, a good libertarian can make money off copyright, peace out.  And you go listen to that show, and we had a really good conversation.  But is it real property?  Well, just like Stephan and Alan will agree that there’s the Crown out there going, yeah, I say it is.

00:58:13

So my whole thing—I don’t feel that any intellectual property and certainly copyright is a permission slip in my brain that I need to go and get sanction from the government on something that’s an idea.  You don’t want me to have this idea, and if you don’t want me to propagate it, don’t tell me.  I’ve got a perfect example.  My son’s in-laws, they have this great salsa recipe.  I mean, I’m like, oh hell no.  I need to have this.  And they go, well, I guess it’s a family secret, but I guess we can give it.  I go, no, don’t tell me because as soon as you tell me, it goes in a cookbook to everybody, and it’s mine.

00:58:53

If you don’t want me to know, don’t tell me.  So they didn’t, but they gave me a bunch of salsa.  Well, that’s your protection right there.  Don’t tell me.  Keep it secret.  But if you think you’re going to publish it and somebody else isn’t going to do it, that’s just dumb.  It’s going to happen anyway.  So now we’re into the real conversation where I think it’s very interesting is do you have a property right in an idea?  Well, I don’t think so, but that’s what we’re discussing.  Okay, I’ll let you go, Alan, first because I know you’re on the edge of your seat, man.  Go.

00:59:24

ALAN KORWIN: Ernie, once again, I’m not going to talk to you about recipes or change the subject.  If we’re going to get anywhere, we’ve got to focus, and we’re going to stay with songs because they’re discreet, and they’re easy.  It’s dead center on copyright, and I’m going to go back to where we were.

00:59:41

ERNEST HANCOCK: Okay, so I want to tell a story about Alan.  This is what Alan did.  At this meeting, he sang a song…

00:59:46

ALAN KORWIN: You just said I’ll…

00:59:47

ERNEST HANCOCK: He sang a song: I’m Just a Cat.  It was an awesome song, and I can see that’s catchy, man.  That’s going to hit the internet, and you shouldn’t have sang it, man.  If I had a recording, I would have posted it up on YouTube right away.  If I’d known you’d do that again, boom.  I’m putting it up, and it’s gone.  Now what?

01:00:02

ALAN KORWIN: Okay, thank you, Ernie.  I appreciate that.  That gets back to theft, but that’s another subject, and I’m trying to stay focused and get somewhere.  Once—I’m going to put this out there.  One of the reasons libertarians—I sometimes call loser-tarians—and they don’t get anywhere politically, which I’d…

01:00:18

ERNEST HANCOCK: More than sometimes.

01:00:19

ALAN KORWIN: … like to see.  Let me speak.  Look, I think libertarians hold a key to the safety of this nation, which I would like to see happen because the nation is going down the tubes.  And the principles that libertarians hold could save America and freedom, which I hold very dear.  But if they keep changing the subject, can’t stay focused, have principles which lead to absurd conclusions, they have to refocus and get their brains screwed on.  So you talk about salsa.  I’m going to stay with copyright and a song.  I used Chuck Berry as an example because we all know it.

01:00:57

So Stephan brought up scarcity.  I want to address scarcity because, out of all the literature I read, you don’t understand scarcity, at least you, Ernie.  I won’t address Stephan, let him answer.  When a hit song comes out, it is the most scarce thing on the face of the planet.  I was at Arista Records when they found out that Eric Carmen’s song, All By Myself, was going to number one, the entire building was ecstatic.  There was nothing more scarce than a hit song or a New York Times best-selling book.  Gold and silver and diamonds come out of the earth constantly.  But a hit song copyright, a hit book is scarce beyond anything, immeasurable, and of value beyond calculation.  That is scarcity of the third type of property.

01:01:49

Now, we haven’t completely agreed that all three types of property exist, at least Stephan and I.  I believe there’s three types.  Copyright is the third, and it is actually the biggest, most important super type of property with all sorts of almost magical properties to it.  And it is scarce beyond gold and diamonds.  Stephan, tell me why copyrights aren’t scarce.  Chuck Berry’s song, immeasurably valuable, generated millions of dollars.

01:02:20

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, see how you’re conflating valuable with scarcity and you’ve got…

01:02:27

ALAN KORWIN: No, just scarcity, just scarcity.  There’s nothing else like it before or since.  It is unique.

01:02:32

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, uniqueness is not what scarcity is about, and I think that, in political—we’re having some kind of weird audio feedback.

01:02:40

ERNEST HANCOCK: It will clear up.  Go ahead.

01:02:41

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Okay.  So in political legal terms, scarcity refers to something that in economics is called rivalrousness.  Maybe we should use that word instead because it keeps leading to confusion and to people talking past each other.  We don’t mean something that’s unique or even lack of abundance.  Scarcity is a rivalrousness, is a particular quality of a resource on the Earth where two or more people can have a conflict over the use of that thing.  Okay, so this gets back to Austrian economics and the way we classify human action.

01:03:19

ALAN KORWIN: Can you define rivalrousness?  I don’t know have a definition.

01:03:22

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Rivalry means it’s a quality of a good, which means that one person’s use excludes anyone else’s use of it.  So it’s something where there could be conflict over it.  So, for example, if you and I wanted to use a kitchen or a pot to make a…

01:03:41

ALAN KORWIN: No, no, no.  Use Johnny B. Good.  Don’t go to a physical good.

01:03:44

ERNEST HANCOCK: No.  Let him express himself, Alan.

01:03:47

ALAN KORWIN: [indiscernible_01:03:48]  Stay with the song.

01:03:50

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, what I’m going to explain is that the song is information, and so information is one aspect of human action.  Material scarce goods or rivalrous resources, means of action, are another part of human action.  We need to employ these things to act to get things done, but we need information to guide our choices and our decisions.  The information is not scarce.  It’s not a rivalrous thing, and the reason I say it’s not rivalrous is because you and I could both sing the song, Johnny B. Good, at the same time in our own houses without conflict with each other.  But we can’t use the same guitar.  Do you understand that distinction?

01:04:28

ALAN KORWIN: I certainly do, but two companies can’t get the same song at the same time.

01:04:33

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Sure they can.

01:04:34

ALAN KORWIN: From Chuck Berry.

01:04:35

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Sure they could.  Why couldn’t they?

01:04:38

ALAN KORWIN: If he chose to walk—well, because there are rights to the property.

01:04:49

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, that’s circular then.  You’re making a circular argument then.

01:04:52

ALAN KORWIN: I don’t believe I am.

01:04:53

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, you’re trying to argue the way it should be, not what the rights—I mean, so you can’t say that the rights—the rights—I mean, that’s a positive law thing.  So if we’re going to talk about what the rights should be, we need to distinguish between the way the law is and the way the law should be.

01:05:07

ERNEST HANCOCK: Okay, we’re going to go straight into break with this.  We’re going to go straight into the break.  Go to the archive, or certainly you can go to the live feed on freedomsphoenix.com.  And we’re going to talk about it during the break and continue this train of thought because we’re going to lose Alan at the bottom of the hour, so I want to make sure we take advantage of all the seconds that we’ve got available on this issue.

01:05:27

STEPHAN KINSELLA: I need to step out for two minutes, guys, three minutes.

01:05:30

ERNEST HANCOCK: Yeah, go ahead.

01:05:31

ALAN KORWIN: Cut the audio feed.

01:05:33

[commercial break]

01:07:02

ERNEST HANCOCK: Ernie, you’re going to jail.  You did Johnny B. Good without permission, so that means he didn’t get a cut, and you’re not allowed.  Never mind.

01:07:08

[song]

01:07:27

ERNEST HANCOCK: Okay.  Go, Alan and Stephan, go.  And this is the one thing I’m so looking forward to a decentralized internet that I can do whatever the heck I want and have a video and it goes up, and everybody can suck it because that is what’s going to happen.  And all of these—and you’re seeing it happen now.  For whatever reason or excuse, here comes the man, and they—ah, and we shut you down, and you’re not allowed.  And I’m going, you know what?  It’s going to get to the point very soon that it’s not going to matter.  It’s moot.

01:07:55

You can sit there and whine and complain and bitch all you want.  It’s called Napster.  I mean, this is—and this is what has got Alan worked up, man.  He’s like, damn.  I mean, it’s just everybody can steal everything from you and steal.  Well, we’re going, steal?  It’s not steal.  You get to have it.  You get to use it.  So I’m just—that’s what the discussion is, and we’re getting down to the history of where copyright comes from, and it’s always from the collective of those that—the Crown grants and you’re allowed and you’re not, and kind of—that’s bad to begin with from my opinion.  So all right, I’ll let you go first, Stephan.  Go and respond.

01:08:30

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, by the way, Alan, if copyright was enforced strictly enough, we wouldn’t have been able to play that song just now.

01:08:40

ERNEST HANCOCK: I know.  That’s why I played it.  Hellfire missile is on its way.

01:08:43

ALAN KORWIN: That’s not true.

01:08:44

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Why not?

01:08:46

ALAN KORWIN: Well, copyright is actually enforced privately.  But when you go into a club and they’re playing music, ASCAP and BMI monitor that, collect royalties from the club so they can play music.  It’s done in a statistical way.  And I get a check every time they play one of my songs.  I get a small check.  The Beatles and Chuck Berry get a big check because their music is played more and more places, and it’s a private company.  When mechanicals are made, physical copies, the Harry Fox Agency, a private company, monitors that, collects royalties, and distributes them statistically.

01:09:21

ERNEST HANCOCK: Sounds like a lot of paperwork.

01:09:22

STEPHAN KINSELLA: But you missed my point.

01:09:23

ALAN KORWIN: Well, it is.

01:09:24

STEPHAN KINSELLA: You missed my point.

01:09:25

ALAN KORWIN: It’s a lot of money.  There’s a lot of places that collect a lot of it, and they distribute it.  Sorry it’s paperwork, Ernie, but if it’s your music, you want to get paid.

01:09:31

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yeah, but you think Ernie should actually be penalized right now for what he just did?

01:09:35

ERNEST HANCOCK: Hell yeah.

01:09:35

ALAN KORWIN: He wasn’t penalized.  He pays for use of property.

01:09:38

STEPHAN KINSELLA: So when I get a tax bill, it’s not a penalty.  It’s just what you have to pay for…

01:09:42

ALAN KORWIN: You’re changing the subject again to taxes.  I’m talking about paying for use of a person’s property.  It’s like rent.  I own it.  You use it.  I charge you through my agent, and I get paid.  It’s fair.  It’s libertarian.  Look, I only have a few minutes left, so let me bring up a couple of points.

01:10:01

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Wait.  I thought it was my turn.

01:10:03

ALAN KORWIN: You’ll be able to discuss them when I’m not here.  Is that okay?  I think we agreed that if I write a song and you say you wrote it, that’s fraud so…

01:10:13

STEPHAN KINSELLA:  No, actually, I disagreed with that.

01:10:16

ALAN KORWIN: Okay, well, I’ll make my position, and I won’t be here in a couple of minutes because I have a meeting downtown.  I believe if I write a song and you say you wrote it, you’re cheating.  It’s fraud.  It’s a form of theft.

01:10:33

STEPHAN KINSELLA: It’s dishonesty.  It’s not fraud.

01:10:34

ALAN KORWIN: Well, okay, it’s dishonesty.

01:10:36

ERNEST HANCOCK: Well, let him define that real quick so you can continue the conversation.  Stephan, it’s not fraud if I take one of his books, publish it, and put my name on it and say I did it.  Okay, why is that not fraud?

01:10:47

STEPHAN KINSELLA: It could be fraud.  It’s not necessarily fraud, but it’s rarely fraud.  Go ahead.  I don’t want to interrupt Alan’s scarce time that he has left.

01:10:54

ERNEST HANCOCK: Go.

01:10:54

ALAN KORWIN: Okay.  So like Ernie said, I wrote a book.  Ernie copies it, puts it out on the market, and says, by Ernie Hancock.  It’s a lie, it’s fraud, and it’s theft in my opinion.  If he makes money on it, let’s say there’s a million-dollar market for this book, and he makes a half a million dollars.  I’ve been harmed a half a million dollars’ worth, and I can only make a half a million dollars because he has sucked that money out of the market.  I’ve been harmed.  That’s bad.  And these rights.

01:11:25

STEPHAN KINSELLA: It’s not bad.  I disagree with you.  It’s not bad.

01:11:26

ALAN KORWIN: I understand you don’t agree, and you’ll be able to respond without me here to defend myself, and you and I will talk online or offline afterwards.  Where are you based?

01:11:34

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, first of all, I’m in Houston, but I’m happy to have you stay on longer if you want.  You can stay on the whole time I’m on, so it’s not—I’m not trying to…

01:11:40

ALAN KORWIN: I’m a chairman of a meeting.  I’ve got a lot of people coming.  I’ve got to be there.  I’m sorry.

01:11:45

STEPHAN KINSELLA: I’m not shutting the microphone off.  You’re welcome to stay as long as you want as far as I’m concerned.

01:11:50

ALAN KORWIN: Thank you, but you understand I have other obligations, and I’m not that libertarian.

01:11:54

ERNEST HANCOCK: Go ahead and finish.

01:11:56

ALAN KORWIN: That’s fraud, and I’ve covered theft.  If the market has a certain size, you suck money out because people want to hear my song, and they hear you play it, you’re entitled to the performance royalty.  If Glenn Campbell plays my song, he should get the performance royalty, and I should get the royalty as the creator of the song that everybody wants to come and hear.

01:12:17

STEPHAN KINSELLA: I thought you were said you were talking about principles.  Now, you’re going back to the current legal system.

01:12:23

ALAN KORWIN: I don’t believe I am.  There’s natural rights.  So copyright is a bundle rights, and they’re natural and inherent in the creation, in the mentality that I invented this song like Chuck Berry invented his.  I invented mine.  It’s more real property than dirt or physical goods.  Those require atoms that already exist.  The Chuck Berry song involves something that never existed before or after.  It’s only because Chuck Berry lived that this effloresced.  It’s a creation.

01:12:57

STEPHAN KINSELLA: I totally agree with you on that.  I totally agree with you on that, by the way.  I totally agree.

01:13:00

ALAN KORWIN: Good, good, so…

01:13:02

STEPHAN KINSELLA: But creation is not a source of ownership.  Creation is a source of wealth, not of ownership.  That’s the distinction that you don’t understand.

01:13:08

ALAN KORWIN: Fair enough.  Like Bitcoin, Bitcoin isn’t actually real.  It’s a concept that we accept and agree to, and it’s digits on a wire, and it has value.  So songs are—have enormous value.  The music industry is worth billions.  It’s based on songs, and the laws that govern it need some improvement.  I have no problem with law as a principle, and that goes on.  Let me touch on monopoly briefly.  I have only a few minutes left.  I own my house in a monopoly sort of way.  It’s mine.  You can’t just walk in.  I can actually defend it with lethal force.  And I own my songs and my books in a monopoly sort of way.  They are mine.  They are not yours.  Law recognizes that, and those can be defended with the government as an intermediary.  Police can come and help me defend my house.

01:14:05

STEPHAN KINSELLA: What about your kids and your wife?  Do you own them?

01:14:09

ALAN KORWIN: No, of course not, not that way.

01:14:11

STEPHAN KINSELLA: But you can’t just use a preposition like it’s my song.  Therefore, I own it.

01:14:15

ERNEST HANCOCK: See, this is one thing you complained that Stephan is off the beaten path.  Oh, I don’t want to talk about that, but you keep doing the same thing, Alan.  You keep trying to equate copyright with some kind of physical property thing.

01:14:26

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, plus he used the word invent.  You said you invent a song.  Invention is a patent law concept, so now you…

01:14:32

ALAN KORWIN: Okay, I used…

01:14:33

STEPHAN KINSELLA: … you see why I brought patent law in because these things are related.

01:14:35

ALAN KORWIN: I used the word imprecisely out of speed and the short time we have.  I created the song.  It’s an invention of my mind.  It’s a creation of my mind.  I’ll be more precise with language, and as a writer of legal texts, I usually am very precise, but because of time.  It’s a creation of my mind, and as such, it has certain unique properties.  And as Ernie has pointed out and libertarians have pointed out to me, if somebody takes it, I still have it.  That’s an almost magical property of this kind of property.  There’s the music.  We’re out of time.  Stephan, I wish we had more time to go through this.  It’s fascinating.

01:15:17

You’re right on some parts.  Libertarians like Ernie and perhaps yourself miss the boat on some issues.  Copyright is real.  It’s property.  It’s a bundle of rights.  It’s a principle.  It’s worth a fortune.  It’s the most scarce property.  Libertarians like to steal it, apparently, because it’s easy to do.  It’s hard to be caught.  They want it.  They don’t want to pay for it.  They feel once they hear it, now it’s theirs.  That is completely false.  It’s dishonorable.  The Torah says a person who does that is a sordid person.  Now, that’s just one philosophical perspective, but you could go perform it, say this is my song.  I can’t even know you’re doing it, but it’s a sordid thing to do, and that’s the nature of the game.  So there.  I wish I had more time, and we could go…

01:16:12

ERNEST HANCOCK: We do too.  I’m glad we got to do this, Alan, and you got to express yourself.  I think you did as good a job as you could when you did your presentation and now, but I just—I knew this would be interesting because it gets down to the basics of what I think is—should the government be able to tell me what I can and can’t do with what’s in my brain.  And that’s a bad slope to go sliding down.

01:16:35

ALAN KORWIN: Ernie, you can do what you want when it’s in your brain.  When you take it out of your brain and give it to other people for large amounts of money, some of that money is mine, and you could do it with my permission.

01:16:47

ERNEST HANCOCK: See, that’s another thing.  When you go like this, you say…

01:16:50

STEPHAN KINSELLA: You don’t own the money.

01:16:50

ERNEST HANCOCK: See, you’re going like—you’re making all this money, and it should be mine.  Hell, then you go make it.  I mean, what made me different than…

01:16:56

ALAN KORWIN: No, no, no, no.  We split the money under contract.

01:16:59

ERNEST HANCOCK: No.  You know, I go and perform something or reconstitute the idea or do or change it, not change it, sing it better.  I could put up here Johnny B. Good by freaking McFly, and I’m just going—so I understand your point, and we’ll go ahead, and you’re right, and we’re going to try not to beat you up too much while you’re not here, but…

01:17:19

ALAN KORWIN: Ernie, go ahead and perform it.  I want you to perform it.  We’ll go 50/50, maybe 60/40, have a great time.

01:17:27

ERNEST HANCOCK: All right, all right.  Thanks Alan.

01:17:29

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Nice meeting you.

01:17:29

ALAN KORWIN: I love ya.

01:17:30

ERNEST HANCOCK: Bye.

01:17:31

ALAN KORWIN: You be good.  Save the world.  I think libertarians can save the world, but you’ve got to do it right.

01:17:35

ERNEST HANCOCK: Of course.  There’s a central plan for freedom according to Alan.

01:17:39

ALAN KORWIN: Take care, my friend.

01:17:41

ERNEST HANCOCK: Bye, Alan.

01:17:42

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Ernie, when are we coming back on because I’ve got to step out for two minutes.  Is that okay?

01:17:47

ERNEST HANCOCK: It’s 31:20, and we come back at 33.  Go.

01:17:51

[commercial break]

01:18:06

McFly, Johnny B. Good.  That’s copyright violation.

01:18:10

01:18:38

That’s McFly, Johnny B. Good.  He’s still not allowed.  Well, in the timeline, he invented it.  Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah.  All right, so let’s go ahead and give it what for, Stephan.  Comments, and this is common.  This is—Alan has always been—he likes to kind of—he gets closer and closer, and he sees libertarianism as take—I’ve known him for 20+ years.  And kind of—his evolution is going, except on this one thing because he’s an author and a songwriter.  And he wants it to be—and he uses all kind of mental gymnastics to justify because some king did it back in the day, and they had the printing press.

01:19:17

So we loser-tarians, damnit, we’re doing it that freedom thing, and it applies to this particular point in law, and he’s like, man, if you guys ever want to be successful and not loser-tarians, you need to get with the program.  Well, express yourself.  Go ahead.

01:19:36

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, let’s get back on the loser-tarian thing.  I mean, I agree with him.  There’s lots of loser-tarians out there, but he—I think—when I say it, it has a different meaning than what he says.  I think he’s talking about our lack of success.  Now, I don’t really blame libertarians for our lack of success.  Libertarians are…

01:19:54

ERNEST HANCOCK: Success in what?  I feel successful.  I’ve got my head on straight.

01:19:57

STEPHAN KINSELLA: And that’s another thing, personal success or success in politics, political activism?  He thinks that we’re off the track by advocating this whacky idea.  I’ll give you a personal anecdote.  One of my best friends, Jeff Tucker at Mises when I published some of these early anti-IP things, right at the dawn of the internet when people weren’t thinking about it.  He read it, and he thought I was crazy.  He said, why the hell is he writing all this about patent and copyright?  And, but then he kept—it nagged him, and he kept reading it.  He became a total convert like hundreds of thousands of other people have over the years.

01:20:33

I’ve talked to them.  “You’ve changed my mind.”  But because this piracy issue, the internet became more of an issue.  I personally actually believe that the IP issue—the copyright issue and the patent issue—are two of the biggest state problems that we have.  They are up there with the drug war, war, taxation, public education, and the federal reserve, and in a way, they’re worse than almost all of those because they’re more insidious.  At least most people sense there’s something wrong with war.  They know that taxes are something we have to do, but it’s bad to do it too much.  They know that war kills people.  Ideally, private education would be better, etc.  But patent and copyright fly under the banner of private property rights, and so people say, well, that’s a type of—that’s part of capitalism.

01:21:26

So it’s more insidious, and the idea spreads so much.  I personally believe that the patent system imposes trillions of dollars of economic, direct material cost on the human race every year because of the way it suppresses innovation.  And the copyright system is a danger in a worse sense because it lasts so much longer, and it imperils freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and internet freedom.  In the name of copyright, we are taking down websites.  We have these six-strikes-and-you’re-out rules.

01:22:03

We have people being threatened not to put up hyperlinks on the internet and not copying other texts.  This is stifling human freedom and human speech.  So for this guy to say that we’re just making a big deal about nothing is absolutely absurd.  And I personally believe that copyright is the biggest threat to human freedom almost ever.  However, luckily, we have piracy.  We have encryption.  We have torrenting.  We have the ability for once to just make an end-run around this horrible, statist, fascist system., so that’s a good thing.  The fact that people can copy information with impunity almost if they’re technically smart is a good thing.

01:22:46

So this guy—it’s nice that he has a liberal spirit. It’s nice that he wants to make money selling his novels or his books.  But that doesn’t mean he should favor a fascist—a literally fascist, thought-controlling system, and I’m glad that his books and my books and anyone else’s books can be pirated easily and that the copyright system has withered into a shell of its former self.  I’m glad.  That’s a positive movement in the direction of human freedom.

01:23:12

ERNEST HANCOCK: I’m with you, brother, but he will continue to make the argument that the brain neurons firing of I created and wrote down on a piece of paper and making the point that it was automatically copyrighted doesn’t mean anything to me.  I’m going, okay.

01:23:30

STEPHAN KINSELLA: So his main mistake—so he keeps saying he wants to talk about what the law should be, but every one of his arguments points to existing statutory law like this idea about the ASCAP system and dividing rights up this way and that way.  So and then when you say that, well, we’re against the current system, he gets upset.  I’m not advocating that, whatever.  So he’s confused.  He thinks this is naturally a part of capitalism.  It’s part of his livelihood.  I think he’s actually wrong.  You can make money without being part of a government, monopolistic, privileged licensing scheme.  You don’t have to do it that way.  We could have other ways of doing things.

01:24:07

ERNEST HANCOCK: You know, this is one thing that you had an impact—I’ve got to tell you this story.  I don’t even know.  You probably don’t even remember.  What happened when this first started going, I think it was ’09/’10 we had you on the first time, in ’09/’10.  And somebody called in, man.  They were on it.  It was Scott Bieser from Big Head Press.  He does Quantum Vibe.  He does some graphic novels.  He’s an illustrator.  He did a lot of our covers for Freedoms Phoenix.  And he called in, and he goes, no—he was making these arguments.  It’s mine, mine, mine.  Years later, a couple years later, I see him at PorcFest, and I go, so how’s that copyright thing working out?  He’s kind of changed his tune.  He’s going—I’m sorry?

01:24:44

STEPHAN KINSELLA: I know.  Scott and I are friends.  I think he’s here in Houston, and I met him at PorcFest as well, and I think he has toned down his opposition to copyright.

01:24:55

ERNEST HANCOCK: Oh, but he went all Alan Korwin on you in the beginning.  So what do you think his realization was?  I think a lot of it has to do when you kind of open it up and people share, and it gets—his revenue goes up.  His notoriety goes up.  This is one thing when we do Aaron Russo’s America: Freedom to Fascism.  He was all pissed off I made 150,000 copies of that during the Lovelution.  And we compilated with a bunch of other stuff in there.  And he goes—and I go, I’m on the show.  You can go listen to it.  I go, Aaron, sue me.  There’s nothing you can do about it.  What are you going to do?  Later, he got—sorry, just a second.

01:25:26

Later, he made a bunch of money because it got notoriety.  Well, then he goes on the air, and he says, all right, Ernie.  Just don’t—please don’t do the director’s cut.  So he was—because of us not doing—listening to him, he became more wealthy or at least made more money with it.  So I’m going, look.  This concept, these guys are starting to come this way, what do you think is the biggest change or realization that they have that they start taking on your position?

01:25:52

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, for libertarians, I think they are searching their souls, and they finally start seeing that they can’t—they say, I don’t support this or this or this or this from the copyright guys.  And I think they also realize that it’s futile because there is piracy out there, so they realize they have to come up with a different business model.  I think maybe one thing we could do is, hey, let’s promote Alan’s works.  I’m going to go buy some of his works now because he seems like an interesting guy, and I’ve heard about him now because of this.  Maybe on your show we could say go investigate his website.  Look at Alan Korwin’s works.  And he’ll sell more.  I have no problem…

01:26:26

ERNEST HANCOCK: Merchandising, where the real money is made.

01:26:28

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yeah, merchandise.  So I just think he is blinding himself to the danger and the horror of copyright because he thinks it’s in his self-interest.  I personally think copyright is actually not in the self-interest of most people or most companies.  It’s in the interest of a very narrow, large corporation subset of America.  The pharmaceutical—I mean, and patent and copyright—pharmaceutical industry, Hollywood, the music industry.  And these three or four industries have lobbied the US government to twist the arms of other countries around the world all of the favor of [indiscernible_01:27:14].

01:27:15

ERNEST HANCOCK: When we come back—this is a TPP thing.  It’s just like this Transpacific Partnership of whatever.  Yeah, we’ll sign here as long as China starts respecting our version of copyright and 70 years plus of—100 years plus of—200 years plus of Mickey Mouse.  And they go, we’re China.  We don’t give a crap.  We’ve got half the world’s population.  They’re all Mickey Mouse’d up.  And you don’t get any, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah.

01:27:40

[commercial break]

01:28:40

You know, that’s one outlet for you, Stephan.  This is—pirateswithoutborders.com, this weekend, we’re working on communication, and I want to include a reference to copyright because, obviously, pirate this and pirate that, and we’re all pirates, and we get pirated up.  So my thing is, I’m going, all right.  We had—Paul Rosenberg was instrumental in a lot of the phrasing and some of the paragraphs and so on in our first letter of Captain Marque.

01:29:08

So what I’m hoping that you’ll do is that you’ll go ahead and go, you know what?  I can have a couple of paragraphs, something to say about—the Third Letter of Captain Marque is about communication and copyright because if you go to pirateswithoutborders.com and you read the first and second letter, you’ll go, ah, I see where they’re going.  And I’m hoping that you’ll participate and give us—because we’re going to be formulating this over the next week.  If you can give us some kind—on communication and the ability to—not the Crown say what I can and can’t say or how, that will get included in that letter.  Are you willing to help us?

01:29:39

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Sure, absolutely.

01:29:42

ERNEST HANCOCK: Let’s do it.  We’re putting it together this weekend or early next week.  So some great pirate, argghhh, the Crown this and the Crown that, and pirates know that—and suck it.  So if you can do that, I’ll include it.  We’ll word it in such a way and get your approval on it, and boom.  We’re done.

01:29:59

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, you know who else is really good on this is—who else is really good.  Have you ever heard of Rick Falkvinge?

01:30:11

ERNEST HANCOCK: No.  You mean Falkaneer, the pirate guy in Europe?

01:30:18

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yeah.

01:30:18

ERNEST HANCOCK: I’ve had him on.  We’re all over it.  When we start—this is what happened.  I’ll tell you real quick.  We had—about a year ago, it was October, I think.  The headline was, the Pirate Party don’t mean nothing.  They only got 16% of parliament in Iceland.  And I go, what?  I’m going, 16%.  Let’s—here it comes.  The Lovelution, at the same time you had the Pirate Party, then the Lovelution starts, and they kind of overlap across the Atlantic, and we had kind of the same thing.  Well, Rick, he wants to use politics and pirating this issue and then kind of have some political influence.

01:30:53

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yes, I know.

01:30:54

ERNEST HANCOCK: But parliamentary positions in Europe is different than this 50-plus-1-percent kind of crap here in America.  So I’m not sure how it’s going to work.  So when we started the pirate thing, it was on that inspiration.  Arizona Pirate Party instead of a political thing, and then we were waiting.  That was a placeholder to come up with a name.  So the name, Pirates Without Borders—boom.  That’s it, man, rock and roll.

01:31:15

So you’ll see on the right side all these different categories like communication and energy and transportation.  We’re looking for the decentralization of everything.  Communication is first.  That’s what you hear.  We’re talking about cryptocurrencies need to—I can need pirate money, so I don’t need a permission slip.  Well, when we do communication, this includes intellectual property stuff, and this is where the pirate party thing comes in.  And whatever contribution you have to that would be cool.  All right, here, we’re coming back.

01:31:43

M: And now, live, from the studios of Freedoms Phoenix, Ernest Hancock.

01:31:49

ERNEST HANCOCK: And we’re right back.  Stephan Kinsella, man, we’re just yacking it.  This is what I want to make sure that we—that Pirates Without Borders, Captain Marque, the Third Letter of Captain Marque is going to be on communication.  We’re working on it now.  If Stephan Kinsella—we’re had a lot of people participate and help with the writing, and we kind of pirate it up and then make sure that’s what they wanted to say.  So any influence that Stephan can have in this to where we can make it clear the base principle of what we are advocating as good pirates.  You think you can come up with something for us, Stephan?

01:32:21

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Ay.

01:32:24

ERNEST HANCOCK: Ay!  Arrrizona Pirates.  Okay, so go ahead and what do you think you would want to emphasize to pirate-oriented in that way?  And you mentioned Rick Falkvinge there from the Pirate Party in Europe.  That’s kind of—raising his head here in America.  And what reference to him you were going to make?

01:32:44

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Oh yeah, I think he’s at falkvinge.net actually, and he is very solid.  I think he is an early Bitcoin investor, so if I’m not mistaken, he has some heft behind himself.  And he’s always been very solid on this whole issue.  I don’t know that he’s a hardcore libertarian, but he seems like one to me from his natural sort of piracy.

01:33:07

ERNEST HANCOCK: He’s pretty good.  He votes, but nobody’s perfect.

01:33:09

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, my wife made me vote last time too, I will say.

01:33:16

ERNEST HANCOCK: I went with my wife, Donna.  She had to vote for Dr. Paul in the ’08 election in the primary.  And she goes in, and I go, all right, I’ll go with you, but I ain’t doing it, and man, what a mess that was.  I’m going, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

01:33:28

STEPHAN KINSELLA: I think in the ’08, I took my son, young son, and I went there to show him what it’s like, and he went into the booth with me, and I cast a blank ballot.  That’s an option here in Texas, and so I voted by saying blank ballot.  I’m not voting for anyone.

01:33:43

ERNEST HANCOCK: You know what I did?  I printed up a piece of paper.  I put my voter ID on it, and it said I vote for Ron Paul, big letters on a parchment paper, 8 ½ by 11, signed it, went in, checked in, handed it to them, and walked out.  And as I’m walking out, they go, it won’t count.  I’m like, it kind of wouldn’t the other way either.  It’s just—I counted with me.  Peace out, and left, and I felt a lot better.  I’m going, look, man.  I’m not playing in your system.  So give me kind of the—if you’re going to do a paragraph and you want to make a principled statement for pirates, give me kind of a summary of what it would be.

01:34:18

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Oh my God.  I can do it.  How much time do we have?

01:34:22

ERNEST HANCOCK: We got about six minutes.

01:34:26

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Okay, okay.  So to understand the problem with intellectual property, and then thus to understand what’s—why there’s nothing wrong with so-called piracy, you have to understand what our basic property rights case is.  And then you’ll understand where IP fits.  So let me give a condensed, condensed argument.  I’m not going to argue for libertarianism, but I’m going to just describe what libertarians believe.

01:34:51

What we believe in essence, we call it the nonaggression principle, voluntarism.  Those are just shorthand words for the type of property rights that we believe in, okay, the particular property rights system that we believe in, which I believe is just a more consistent, streamlined version of what is behind all western, modern civilization because, to succeed, we have to have respected property rights to a certain degree.

01:35:17

So the view is this.  We live in a world where we can have conflict with each other.  Most of us are somewhat social beings.  We have some empathy for each other.  We want to live together.  We want to prosper in our lives.  We want to use things without being molested.  We also want our neighbors, our family members to do well too, so we have a certain social consciousness or mentality.  And because of this, we realize there’s a possibility of conflict.  That is, someone can want to use my body without my permission, or they might want to use a resource that I’m using.  These are the means of action that Mises talked about.

01:35:52

ERNEST HANCOCK: Sounds like taxes.

01:35:53

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, yes.  A tax means they want to take some of my property, and they say they own it now.  So the question is, whenever there’s a dispute, we need to have a mechanism or a property rules system that says who owns it, and the property rights that…

01:36:07

ERNEST HANCOCK: Tilt your camera down a little bit, will you, please?  There you go.  Thank you.

01:36:11

STEPHAN KINSELLA: I didn’t know we were video, but okay, fine.  The property rules that we libertarians believe in is basically the classical liberal or Lockian system, which is applied very consistently, which is two or three very simple rules.  Whenever there’s a dispute over who owns a resource—okay, the body is special.  The body is owned by the person himself.  Okay, so we don’t believe in slavery.  That’s simple.  But for all other things, the question is who owns it.  And we answer that by asking who had it first.  That’s called Lockian homesteading or original appropriation.  Who had the thing first?  He has a better claim than other people.  Number two, did an owner contractually transfer it to someone else, like contract?  In which case that person has a better claim than even the original owner because it was given to him.

01:37:04

And then number three, restitution or rectification for crimes or torts—if you hurt someone, you owe them recompense.  You owe them compensation.  So you might owe them something for your property to pay them back.  But other than those three rules, that’s all you need.  And then the legal system works out the fine details.  So that’s the basics of what property rights are.  Property rights are rules for saying who owns a contested or contestable resource, which we call scarce resources by which we mean rivalrous, things that there could be conflict over.

01:37:37

Okay, so that’s the basics of what libertarianism is for.  Now, when someone says intellectual property, what they mean is that some third party is granted a right by the state that lets them come in and control your property.  They can tell you, you can’t use your body in this way.  You can’t use your house in this way.  You can’t use your printing press in this way.  You can’t use your factory in this way to make a certain widget.  Now, they don’t have that right because the other people are the owners of those things.

01:38:11

So IP rights are basically the infringement of property rights because it takes away the control, the control rights that are already owned by people.  And this idea is so pernicious and so insidious, it could spread and spread and spread.  It’s patent law.  It’s copyright law.  It’s boat hull designs.  It’s a semiconductor mask work protection act.  It’s database rights.  It’s moral rights.  It’s trade secrets.  It’s trademark law.  It’s even defamation law, the idea that you have a right to your reputation.  It’s all these rules that expand and expand and expand.  You have the fashion industry wanting it too now.  You have the other industries wanting this.  You have the newspaper industry wanting a right to headlines.  They don’t want to be scooped even by headlines on Drudge or whatever.

01:38:58

So this idea is pernicious.  It’s insidious.  It’s anti-capitalist.  The fundamental thing we have to recognize is that learning is good.  Information is good.  It’s good if more people have information.  It’s good if people copy each other and learn from each other.  It’s good if they compete with each other.  That’s what competition is about.  You don’t have a right to your customers.  You don’t have a right to your future profits.  You don’t have a right to the money that would be in your pocket if you didn’t have competition.

01:39:28

So ultimately, patent and copyright are about suppressing the free market, about restricting competition, and being protectionist, and we’re against protectionism, and about suppressing thought and speech.  You should be able to make whatever video you want, use whatever song you want, and the idea is that you’re not stealing when you use something public.  The thing is that, if someone comes up with an idea and they make it public, then they are releasing it to the public.  If they don’t want other people to learn or emulate them or to know what they’re doing, they should keep their ideas to themselves.  But if they open their mouths and they give information to people, they have no right whatsoever to expect people not to use that information in whatever way they want—for profit, for creativity, whatever.

01:40:17

ERNEST HANCOCK: I’m with you.  My thing is that Alan has always been—for years, he’s more Republican.  It’s a gun thing, and the libertarians that keep making kind of—then it’s all kind of, well, we libertarians.  He starts going—he sees the advantage of claiming to be a libertarian except on this copyright thing, you dumb libertarian, loser-tarians.  If you change this, then you’ll be successful because this is what it hinges on, and you’re weight, and you need to get the pedophiles in Hollywood to support you.  I mean, you know…

01:40:49

STEPHAN KINSELLA: But you notice that he didn’t want to defend patent.  Even he senses something’s wrong with the patent system.

01:40:55

ERNEST HANCOCK: Yeah.  No, no, no, and a lot of it was in—I’m sure in the research that he was doing in preparation.  In his presentation, I could just hear a whole bunch of Stephan Kinsella, man.  It was just, yeah, well, they say and do.  But it’s different on copyright, which is why he wanted to focus on it.  But he would say that, and then at the same time, he would go, well, in my property and this and that, and he would keep trying to use law, the king, the church, property rights to validate his position on intellectual property.  And I’m going, you know, we’re pretty clear on this.  You don’t want it to be propagated or explained or shared or taken or used.  Then don’t tell me.  Don’t sit there and try.  I got to take a spoon to my brain and try and carve out where I got what.  You’re standing on the shoulders of a whole bunch of stuff, and I don’t want to be limited.  I refuse to.  And technology is free in me.  The technological advances are kind of making this all moot, Stephan?

01:41:54

STEPHAN KINSELLA: I think yes, and that’s a good thing.

01:41:59

ERNEST HANCOCK: Yeah, me too, me too.  Any parting thought?  Oh, give out your webpage, where you want people to go to get all things Stephan Kinsella.

01:42:06

STEPHAN KINSELLA: On this issue, C4SIF.org, C4SIF.org.

01:42:12

ERNEST HANCOCK: C4SIF.org.  All right, Donna, make sure you get that into the—Donna’s putting it up there, and you can just click on it and go learn everything Stephan Kinsella.  There we go.  Thank you, Stephan.  That was fun.

01:42:27

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yeah, it was fun.

01:42:29

ERNEST HANCOCK:  This is what you’re up against.  This is what I hear all the time.  This was—and it’s not good enough to say, look, man.  How do I build on which part of and kind of—no.  I’m not—I don’t recognize some king’s grant of monopoly of an idea.  No, I’m not doing it.  Well, then you’re—and it just goes from there.  And I’m glad you’re there because without you being able to help us with this thought process, I don’t know where else to go because you’ve been kind of the touchstone for this for a long time.  Do you get a lot of these opportunities to speak and explain yourself?

01:43:01

STEPHAN KINSELLA: I do.  I mean, it’s like with libertarianism, right?  You find yourself hearing the same old arguments from newbies that you’ve heard refuted 1000 times, and it gets a little bit frustrating and tedious to have to redo it over and over and over and over and over again.  And I don’t mind doing it over and over again, but you kind of wish that people that wanted to bear their balls in public would at least do a little homework first.  And they almost never do because they ask questions that have been debunked so many times.

01:43:38

ERNEST HANCOCK: Finish your thought.  Donna, email me Alan’s email, and I’m going to forward from Stephan here to him.  The—this is—there is—we’re going to be doing other events, speaking events and stuff here, and I might focus on this a little bit.  I’ll let you know because I’d like this to get out a little bit.  I think it’s good information that people should know.

01:44:03

And it’s just—it’s a concept that’s going—but I’m looking at it’s always what’s in somebody’s own self-interest.

01:44:12

A good friend of mine—he’s just—he’s a big movie buff, man.  He’s like, movies won’t get made unless you have this copyright of whatever.  And then there will be something comes out, and I’m like, eh, I wouldn’t go to the movie to see it, or maybe I’d watch it just in the privacy of my own home.  And Kodi stream it, and that just pisses him off.  He goes, you should—I go, yeah.  It doesn’t bother me one bit.

01:44:32

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, and they’ll say something like this.  They’ll say, you libertarians just want things for free.  And actually, that’s not what motivates me because I have plenty of money, and I could buy movies, and I do it.  But what’s wrong with wanting something for free, like that’s a bad thing?  But same thing with this white privilege stuff.  It’s like—I say, wait a second.  I’m working so my kid has privilege.  I want my kid to have privilege.  I thought privilege was something you aspire to.  When did having privilege become a bad thing?

01:45:03

ERNEST HANCOCK: You know, it’s what we’re up against, and I think what is—it all comes down to just what’s practical.  Well, I remember a scene from a social network.  They were talking about the beginnings of Facebook and so on, and Justin Timberlake played the character of the guy that did Napster or something.  And then they go, oh, well, see.  You got shut down.  He goes, yeah, are you buying stock in Tower Records anymore?  Probably not.  It just makes all these things moot.  It doesn’t matter.  Well, they’re going to China, and they’re pirating every freaking thing and kind of—well, you’re—we need intellectual property.

01:45:37

We need a trade agreement so you won’t do that anymore and kind of—it’s a culture thing, and what happens when Chinese start getting all libertarianized and understand the concept of it’s not, and probably they already have that culture anyway.  You’re trying to control what I can make in my own machine and sell?  Screw you.  And you call yourself capitalist?

01:45:55

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Let me ask you.  Do you want to do another hour?  Because I mean, I don’t—what is your plan for your next hour?

01:46:01

ERNEST HANCOCK: Well, no.  My show is over.  It goes 6 to 9 Arizona.  It’s 9 to noon, so we’re at the end of the show, so we can keep talking if you’ve got time.

01:46:08

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Oh, so I missed your first hour.  Okay.  No, no.  No, no.  I thought I—I remember I could only do two.

01:46:14

ERNEST HANCOCK: No, if you want—well, if you’ve got something to share, go, man.  Go ahead and—I’d love to hear how this battle is going.  Tell me about the battle on the front—on the internet because I’m not paying attention.  I don’t care.  I’m like, yeah, whatever.  Technology makes it moot anyway.  You guys can whine all you want.  So—but they’re trying to change laws and prosecute and extend, extend, extend and pretend that they’re doing good.  And how is the battle going from your perspective?

01:46:40

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, I think that the influence of the IP—I don’t know what you want to call it.  There must be a term we could come up with to call the big American industries that are heavily dependent upon IP—pharmaceuticals, Hollywood, and music and software to a degree.  Software, though, is split between the protectionist side and the open-source side.  But—so a very narrow segment of American life has dominated the Congress, and because of America’s hegemony over the rest of the world, has dominated the world’s IP systems.  It’s one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen, and it’s a never-ending battle.  They sneak this stuff into every fucking law and treaty they can think of.  On the other hand, as I said, there is an increasing awareness by younger people, like what the hell?  What’s wrong with cutting and pasting and mixing and all this kind of stuff?

01:47:41

ERNEST HANCOCK: See, it gets so bad that government is their own worst enemy.  It gets to a point to where you have pirate parties spring up and screw all y’all.

01:47:50

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yes, sort of like Trump.  I mean, Trump I think is not great obviously, but he’s a phenomenon that arose in response to a lot of excesses of the left and the social justice warriors.  People are sick are being told that they’re abominables or what is that?  A basket of deplorables or whatever.  And to my mind, most—a lot of the people that voted for Trump are natural Democrat voters, blue-collar types.

01:48:19

They would vote for a nice, conservative, redistributionist Democrat party, but the Democrats are so fucking stupid that they just can’t help but bash the rubes, make— act condescending to them, talk about abortion and transgender rights all the time and prefixes and pronouns.  And they alienate their natural voters, which I’m glad they do because it means that the Democrats are going to have a delay when they finally assume total power.  But I find something is similar with the other phenomenon too.  I mean, what do you think about it?

01:49:00

ERNEST HANCOCK: Specifically about what?

01:49:01

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, this—well, Trump versus Democrats.

01:49:08

ERNEST HANCOCK: Okay, let me give you my spiel.  When Trump came down the escalator—this is what, June, July of ’15.  When he came down, a gentleman, a friend of mine here, Dr. Phranq Tamburri.  He goes, man, don’t be a hater, but I want to come on the show every Thursday, and we’re going to do the Trump report.  We have been doing every Thursday for at least two to five hours, and we’ll go long, every Thursday for over two years that the Trump report.

01:49:37

Now, he was a Ron Paul-supporting Republican of Ron Paul.  Well, what happens is—and he ran as a libertarian doing different stuff.  So he’s libertarianized.  But his parents—his father and his uncles have a high-rise steel construction business, building high-rises in Philadelphia, so they’re on the same Christmas card list or whatever.  So when he’s around the family dinner table or Thanksgiving or something, he’s surrounded by Trumps.  He read his book.  He knows, and he goes, look, you’re going to—let me tell you what’s going to happen.  He made a big-dollar bet, and he’s going to win.

01:50:08

Well, everything that he’s been saying has been right.  We do debate parties here since ’07.  I mean, we’ve done dozens and dozens of them, every debate.  Holy crap.  How many is there going to be?  So when we’re here and we do it and the Trump thing was going on, we’re like, they’re interested because—to see what Rand did.  And all of a sudden, you could see what was going to happen.  They are so pissed off that he’s tweeting and bypassing their control grid of whatever.  He just goes straight to the people, a fireside chat, and I get to say what I want.

01:50:36

Well, what were the common thing—statements by a lot of the activists?  Well, they’re going, God, the Democrats hate him.  Hell, the Republicans hate him.  The media hates him.  He’s my guy.  And it was nothing other than that.  He was a representative of this anti-establishment thing, as much as a billionaire can be anti-establishment.  But it was just this feeling of we’re just pissed off, mad as hell, and screw all y’all.  And it wasn’t so much a support for Trump, I think, and sure as hell libertarians for the wall.  But then you got guys like Walter Block out there.  Libertarians for Trump.  And that just pissed everybody off.  Now, you see where you got the [indiscernible_01:51:15] and all—and Reason and LP and the national chair, Nick Sarwark, lives here.  We’ve had him on the show quite a bit.  Well, when they started going after Mises and Tom Woods and Murphy and Ron Paul and Jeff Deist and Lew Rockwell and so on.

01:51:29

STEPHAN KINSELLA: And me.  Sarwarck went after me because I didn’t sign that stupid petition.

01:51:32

ERNEST HANCOCK: See, I’m going, yeah, this petition.  I’m going, it was an appeal to the left.  It was this Weld thing.  It was that, we’re going to get support from, and we hate Trump, and somebody promised us money or something.  And I’m going, you guys are so far off.  And I did the show, and I had Tom Woods, Bob Murphy, Nick Sarwark, and Ron Paul on talking about this issue, and it just…

01:51:55

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Not together, right?

01:51:55

ERNEST HANCOCK: No, separately, within a week.  So what happened is that Nick—I think they found out that he went into a buzz saw more than what they anticipated.  So the New Orleans Convention, a whole bunch of Mises guys, they go, all right.  You guys want to rock?  You want to play?  Let’s go play.  And the reason they were attacking you guys is I see that this intellectual—exactly what Alan is talking about, this thought process that we have that applies to everything consistently, what property really is and what the proper role of government is, if there even was one.

01:52:26

And the reason this is Declare Your Independence with Ernest Hancock is because the Declaration made it very clear.  The only purpose of government is defense of individual rights, or you all are to abolish.  I’m like, I’m hip to that.  The thing is, is that these guys see you and this thought process as a threat.  There is no way that they can consolidate the youth in the future around the idea of we rule you better when you got the ideas of Ron Paul et al and Woods and you and all these guys.  They’re just, we’ve got to go after them.  We’ve got to call them racists, and they didn’t sign the paper of whatever the hell.  Well, they overplayed their hand, and they played right into this social justice thing, and they didn’t realize it.  And I’m going, you guys are so stupid.  I’ve seen this over and over, this attack on this, and they don’t realize the buzz saw they went into.  Your opinion.

01:53:13

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, I totally agree with you.  I think that—I think it backfired on them.  I think—and they’re in a bubble a little bit like these Democrat people in the bubble cities—San Francisco, New York, whatever.  I’ve never met someone who voted for Bush.  I don’t know how he won, or with Trump or whatever.  It’s like—because you’re not in reality.  Look, I don’t need some nobody, anonymous person to twist my arm to come out and declare that I’m against fascism when I’m already obviously against fascism and especially when the message is so convoluted and riddled with little SJW kind of things.

01:53:59

ERNEST HANCOCK: Bake the cake.  Bake the cake.  We got—a libertarian, got to force them to bake the cake.  We had a party, a pool party here.  Nick is over with his family.  He’s up against the wall in the shallow end, and everybody is surrounded him.  Man, they’re just beating up on him, and he’s doing the mental gymnastics of an attorney and appealing to the left.  We got to make the baker bake the cake for the gay couple because you’ve got to bake the cake because you’re out in the public.  Bake the cake.  And I’m going, this is an issue?  That libertarians—you go, what?  How the hell is that even—they’re just appealing to something.  It’s—they’re just mental gymnastics to get some benefit.

01:54:29

STEPHAN KINSELLA: I think they’re kissing ass, and you know what?  I understand the pressure to do that for some people.  I personally believe, in life, you should live a life where you try to achieve a position where you can have integrity and do what you believe in.  So I’ve done that.  I’ve achieved a life where I can say whatever the fuck I want.  And if I piss off someone, I don’t care because I don’t need them, and even if I lose all my fans and audience, so be it.  So I think it’s good to be independent, and I try to do that.  And I’m not going to kiss ass and run around and kiss ass to people that I don’t even respect as much as myself.  I mean, I’m not going to assign a declaration that has a bunch of people that sign it that I think are ass-kissing compromisers.  And I don’t even know who the author is, and I don’t know if he could change the words.

01:55:32

ERNEST HANCOCK: You know, I think it was kind of the Center for—CAS, Center for a—whatever it was and…

01:55:44

STEPHAN KINSELLA: I know who did it.  It was Jason Lee [indiscernible_01:55:47] who’s a friend of mine.  He wrote it.  I know that now, but it was anonymous at first, and fine.

01:55:53

ERNEST HANCOCK: It was an appeal—well, I’ll tell you what it came from.  In my opinion, when Bill Weld became the VP, I was at the New—I mean, the Orlando—shit, where the hell was it?  Anyway, the last LP convention—Orlando.  That’s where it was, in Orlando.  I’m there, and I’m just having fun, a fly on the wall, and I get my vote and get to have my say and whatever, and say it.  I’m a—I won’t stab you in the back.  He wouldn’t say that.  Will you stab us in the back?  He goes, I’m a card-carrying member of a lifetime card-carrier, and I’m going, you didn’t say it.  Say it.  Say it.  Say it.

01:56:27

And Nick came out and saved him, and the thing is, I talked to Bill Weld, and I know Gary Johnson fairly well.  And we were supportive of his efforts, even did fundraisers for him just to give him a voice.  But the thing is, is that you’re going to have a flat tax, and we got to have these kind of—and bake the cake, and we’re going to—and then here comes Bill Weld.  And I’m going, they were trying to appeal to this council on foreign [indiscernible_01:56:52] something or whatever the hell they’re trying to do is what Alan is saying.

01:56:55

He would be very happy with these if he thought it would give him more votes, if he thought—your mother-in-law would have more respect for you, you know, that kind of stuff.  And I’m going, it doesn’t matter to me.  It’s a principle thing.  The market will determine.  The people will eventually come out—they are.  That’s what’s scaring the establishment.  They’re freaking out, and you and Woods and Murphy and Deist and Lew and Ron represent this Rothbardian thing, and that was the beginning salvo.  They were going, yeah, you’re just a Rothbardian, and I remember them calling me a Rothbardian in the mid ‘90s.  I had no idea what the hell they were talking about.  They were calling me a racial slur or something.  I go read them, and I go, yeah, what he said.

01:57:37

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Did you see the bruhaha about the helicopter?

01:57:40

ERNEST HANCOCK: No.

01:57:41

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Oh man, you missed it so…

01:57:43

ERNEST HANCOCK: Oh gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme.

01:57:44

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Oh, this was hilarious.  It’s all over Twitter and Facebook and everything.  And so about, what, three or four weeks ago, the Mises Institute had their 35^th anniversary event in New York City, which I went to, and I brought my wife for the first time.  She’s met my crazy libertarian friends, etc.  So I wanted her to meet Hoppe basically and Guido Hülsmann.  So anyway…

01:58:07

ERNEST HANCOCK: What should I look up to find anything?

01:58:10

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Oh, just go to Mises.org and go to Events.  You’ll see the 35^th—oh, oh, if you want to see this event?  I’ll send you a couple links, but look up Michael Malice, Hoppe, helicopter.  That’s probably your key words, Michael Malice, Hoppe, helicopter.  It was hilarious.

01:58:30

ERNEST HANCOCK: All right, tell me about it.

01:58:30

STEPHAN KINSELLA: You know how there’s this meme about Pinochet and the helicopter, dropping his enemies out of a helicopter or something?

01:58:38

ERNEST HANCOCK: Oh, okay, yeah.

01:58:39

STEPHAN KINSELLA: So—because Hans-Hermann Hoppe has this sort of forced—no, physical removal meme that’s surrounded him about getting—ejecting people from your community.  They’re not basically libertarians, something like that.  So that became the Hoppe dropping-people-out-of-helicopters meme.  Now, he didn’t have anything to do with it.  It was just these crazy people on the internet.

01:59:01

ERNEST HANCOCK: Now, I’ve got a picture here of him and you, and he’s holding a helicopter.

01:59:05

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yeah, so—yes, and so when I was in New York City three or four weeks ago for the Mises event, I was at a reception, and Michael Malice, who I’d been friends with but I’d never met in person, walked up to me, and we were giggling and laughing.  We took some pictures together, and he told me he had just given Hans Hoppe a toy helicopter as a gift, and he sent me the picture.  It was hilarious.  So he gave Hans a helicopter.  It’s a joke, right?  And I posted it, but I was with Hans later at a bar having drinks that night, and I said, hey, what’s this about the helicopter?  And so he pulled it out of his pocket, and we took a picture, and I posted it, and all hell broke loose because, oh, Kinsella, you’re condoning political violence against your enemies.  It’s like, Jesus-fucking-Christ, don’t you lefties have any sense of humor?  It’s like, well, I don’t think that the Holocaust is a laughing matter.  It’s like, well, it’s not about the Holocaust.

02:00:00

ERNEST HANCOCK: No, no, no, no.  I’ll tell what’s going on.  I had Woods on, and I said, you need to talk to Ron about this stuff, the history.  I don’t think you guys realize what you’re up against.  This is a campaign.  I can feel it coming.  This is something that’s going to manifest itself in New Orleans.  I’m like, everybody get your ticket to leave on Tuesday because I could see them changing—I’m sorry?

02:00:18

STEPHAN KINSELLA: What’s happening in New Orleans?

02:00:19

ERNEST HANCOCK: It’s the Libertarian National Convention that—the election—whatever the hell.  So they’re going to be doing chair, and they’re going to be new LNCs, and it’s in New Orleans this July or whatever.  And I go, they’re trying to change bylaws, and so I can see it.  I get up and I said, look.  I just want you to know what they’re doing.  They’re changing this so that on Monday, after everybody goes home on Sunday, they’re going to F you, man.  You’re screwed.  If you guys don’t go, you better get your return ticket on Tuesday because here it comes.  And the reason is because they see the anarchist, the voluntarists, are starting to invade back into the party.  And I’ve been doing this—I ran for national chair four times just to bring attention to this.  I’m going, look.  You guys need to understand what they’re doing.

02:01:00

And this is—they see you and this philosophy as a threat, and everybody wants to control the kingmaker.  They want to control the LP.  They have the local and national—this philosophy of this Rothbardian, leave-me-alonist kind of thing is infecting too many minds.  And this internet deal, they’ve got to deal with it and make you all racist, and you didn’t sign you’re not a Nazi.  And I’m going, I’m libertarian.  Of course I’m not a Nazi.  Shut up.  Let them keep yapping.  I’ll bring them on the show, go ahead and tell me all about it.

02:01:30

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yeah, so I hear you, and I just—look.  I’m not a member of the LP.  I’ve never been a member of the LP.  I did run for office one time on their ticket, but I’m not a member of it.  And I’m supportive, but I don’t think they’re synonymous with libertarianism, and I think that most LP members, especially the hardcore ones, they tend not to be that good libertarians.  They’re into their little microcosm of power and their petty crap, and they’re usually minarchists or mini-statists.

02:02:01

So they’re not—I have—they’re not theorists.  I have—it’s just not my interest.  I’m interested in people that have insights into Austrian economics or into modern politics from a radical perspective or who make a change, and I just don’t think the LP is that.  I don’t blame them for that.  It’s not their fault that we have [indiscernible_02:02:22].

02:02:22

ERNEST HANCOCK: You know what we call the LP.  We always call it the liberty nexus, and it was like—one guy put it really well, Drew Phillips from Bitcoin, Not Bombs.  He goes, you know what the LP conventions are like?  It’s like the high school dance.  It’s where you go to find out where the real party is.

02:02:34

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Okay, that’s fine.

02:02:36

ERNEST HANCOCK: It’s just a lot of these people—we’ve made all these networks, and the party—the libertarian philosophy is much bigger than the LP to the point that it’s gotten out of their control.  When people think libertarian, they don’t think Libertarian Party.  They might think Ron Paul Revolution or voluntarist or somebody they know or something.  But the LP is so far from what it originally set up to be, and they keep trying to change it all the time.  They’re just—I think they pissed off so many real libertarians by attacking you guys.  I’m going, I don’t think you guys know what—the hornet’s nest you—you better be busing a whole shitload of people into New Orleans.

02:03:12

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, this—okay, this guy, Sarwark, I mean, to just launch an attack on—I mean, Tom Woods is very, very popular, very principled, very hard-working, very well-known in the movement as being a principled, radical libertarian.  For Sarwark to attack him out of the blue for nothing—it’s just bizarre.

02:03:35

ERNEST HANCOCK: Stupid.

02:03:36

STEPHAN KINSELLA: And then to—he attacked me.  Look, I was getting pressure from people behind the scenes.  Sign this petition.  And I just said, I’m not going to sign it, and I just did a Facebook post explaining why I’m not signing it.  I mean—and of course, then the haters start.  Oh, I guess you’re a Nazi or whatever.  It’s like if that’s all you guys have left, you’ve lost.

02:03:56

ERNEST HANCOCK: It was a troll campaign.

02:03:57

STEPHAN KINSELLA: You’ve lost.

02:03:58

ERNEST HANCOCK: It was an appeal to the left if we get some—promise some money, and I told Nick on the air.  I’m going, Nick, you can buy the Libertarian Party for a well-placed $10,000, and $100,000 you rule all the states and count them too.  And I’m going, you guys are cheap hoes.  If you’re going to be a hoe, be an expensive hoe.  I mean, you know, quit being hoes.

02:04:16

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yeah, it’s interesting.  But look, Ernie, my—I like to—I’m trying to finish my book on libertarian legal theory.  I like theory.  I like libertarian principles.  I like philosophical and legal theoretic reasoning about things, Austrian economics.  The other—and then I think that in your life it’s a different issue.  You live your life.  You try to succeed.  You do what you are passionate about, what you’re good at, and you take care of your family and your friends, and you have a good career.

02:04:47

But life is a mixture of these things.  I don’t think libertarianism is everything.  I would never have been—I would never—it would never appeal to me, the idea that, hey, come move to New Hampshire.  You can live around a bunch of libertarians.  I mean, what’s that mean?  I’m going to live around a bunch of people who are going to not pay their rent and try to couch surf all the time?  I mean, not to be critical.  I understand we’re a marginal movement, but there’s nothing especially attractive about living around a bunch of libertarians.  I would like society to be more libertarian in general.

02:05:21

ERNEST HANCOCK: Well, isn’t that happening?  Don’t you feel that we’re…

02:05:23

STEPHAN KINSELLA: I do think it’s happening.  I think there’s a soft libertarian uprising.

02:05:27

ERNEST HANCOCK: Culture.  It’s all about—I tell you; this is my focus and why we’re doing the Pirates Without Borders thing.  I really am encouraged by the you participating in that.  Don’t forget, and I need—if you’ve got just a paragraph, some concept you want to make sure gets in, read the first and second letters, and you’ll see how it’s formatted and how it’s going.

02:05:44

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Send it to me.  I’ll take a look.

02:05:45

ERNEST HANCOCK: Just go to pirateswithoutborders.com.  You can do it right now, and you can see the first and second letters, and it’s also—Ben Stone, the Bad Quaker, read it.  He’s the voice on it.  So this is—and Paul Rosenberg was really instrumental in some of the concepts in there too.

02:06:02

STEPHAN KINSELLA: I thought Ben had kind of retired for health reasons.

02:06:05

ERNEST HANCOCK: Yeah, he’s not doing a lot, but he’s definitely all in on this.  I mean, he’s—this gets him all motivated.  So we’re having fun.  The—my whole point on that was to promote the decentralization of everything.  If you look on the right, it says Build a Ship.  We’re going to—that will be a fun project.

02:06:25

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yeah, I see the website now.

02:06:27

ERNEST HANCOCK: It’s communication, energy, decentralization of everything.  So I’m looking no central authority, no permission-asking.  You read the first and second letter, you’ll get it.  The point is that promotion of this decentralization of everything is just an opinion.  See, everybody thinks that, well, if I don’t get the sanction of some shiny badge with a fine hat and available gun and a clipboard, then it ain’t so.  I don’t give a crap with them.  I’m a pirate, man.  I’m against all flags.  And that’s what we found out was a pirate.  It wasn’t so much that you’re raping and pillaging or anything.  It was if you were not recognized by any—you didn’t recognize a flag.  Well, all the states and crowns and everybody comes and says, oh, you’re a pirate because you’re against all flags, and I’m going, yep.

02:07:10

STEPHAN KINSELLA: There’s something like that with wearing a uniform during a war.

02:07:15

ERNEST HANCOCK: Yeah, you represent a side.  Well, see, the thing is they don’t have a problem with privateers or a letter of marque.  They go, that’s why it’s Marque, Captain Marque.  It’s the letter of Captain Marque because what the Crown does is says here.  You have a permission slip from me to go rape and pillage the Spanish galleon, and I get a cut.  You’re good.  But if you go, no, I don’t want to have nothing to do with all y’all, oh hell no.  You’re not allowed to do that.  So the promotion of the decentralization of everything is just an opinion.  This is where the culture comes in.

02:07:45

If you get everybody just saying, you know, I think this should, and I don’t like that, all of a sudden, you get Trump’s elected.  And my point is that it’s just an opinion, and that’s where you and Mises and Rothbard and all these guys come in is that opinion is infectious, and it has a tried-and-true, stayed, this-is-constant way of thinking.  And that’s what Ron Paul represented.  When these young people go back and look at his previous writings, they go, well, hell, he’s been saying this for freaking ever.  I go, yeah, this is what this is about.  That’s why you have to be attacked.  You guys represent the seed kernel of this idea springing in the minds of everybody.

02:08:23

And I saw it happen during the Lovelution.  I would go to PorcFest, and you see these guys on their Kindle download a bunch of Mises, Rothbard, and reading, and they’re all up on the kind of well-read, and they’ve got an opinion.  And I’m going, damn, they’re not going to be able to compete with that.  This is—and then them to even try was just stupid and an act of—somebody either paid them or desperation or something.  I don’t know what the hell they were thinking, but here it comes.  You’re muted.  I can’t hear you.

02:08:54

STEPHAN KINSELLA: All right, sorry.

02:08:58

ERNEST HANCOCK: There you go.

02:08:59

STEPHAN KINSELLA: I’m back now.  Anyway, I can’t see you, by the way.  Can you flip yourself on?

02:09:03

ERNEST HANCOCK: I can do that.  How about that?

02:09:06

STEPHAN KINSELLA: There you are.

02:09:06

ERNEST HANCOCK: Okay, there you go.

02:09:07

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Anyway, I’ve got to go in a second, but look.  What can you say?  I just—I mean, did it hurt the Sarwark guy?  It seemed to me that it did, but I hear people on the other side.  When you get to the point where you’re calling people fascist or Nazi when they’re basically libertarian—now, I’m not an alt-right fan.  I don’t like those guys.  They are weird, and I don’t like racism, but there’s nothing wrong with conceptually distinguishing between racism and libertarianism.  They’re different things, right?

02:09:42

I mean, opposition to racism and opposition to tyranny.  Okay, so we’re libertarians.  That means we’re in favor of private property rights and people getting along together.  We tend to be cosmopolitan and modernist.  I’m not a racist by any sensible definition, and I don’t like racists.  But I don’t like calling everything racist.

02:10:07

ERNEST HANCOCK: No, and it’s—they’re…

02:10:09

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Because then you lose the power of the words.  It’s like calling everything rape.

02:10:12

ERNEST HANCOCK: It was…

02:10:13

STEPHAN KINSELLA: If a guy kisses a girl, it’s rape.

02:10:14

ERNEST HANCOCK: This was a technique.  They wanted to seed the internet with this—it’s a campaign.  I can see it going.  It’s going to—I’m going, it is so neon-freaking obvious to an activist like me, have been through this so many times.  They’re just seeding the conversation out there.  It’s kind of—I had Nick on, and I go, this sounds like the racist Ron Paul papers everybody was talking about.  Yes, exactly, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe is one of the worst of them.  I mean, he was there rattling off everybody.  And anyone that they—you know, like—they go, Tom Woods had the Nazi what’s-his-face, Chris Cantrell on.

02:10:48

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Chris Cantwell.

02:10:48

ERNEST HANCOCK: He had Cantrell on, and I go—pardon me?

02:10:49

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Chris Cantwell.

02:10:51

ERNEST HANCOCK: Yeah, yeah, Cantwell.  I’m sorry.  I’m sorry, Cantwell.  He had Cantwell on, and I go, yeah, so did I.  I just let him talk.  I’m going, yep, okay [indiscernible_02:10:59].  I go, so what?  Well, he was not—he didn’t beat him up enough or something.  I go, shut up.  This is—and it’s just like with this intellectual thing.  They’re trying to shut down debate.  They’re going to have you painted as a fascist before you even started because there’s something else a-comin’, and money I get because it was not a philosophical argument.  And it was not to their advantage, so somebody paid.  There was some influence.  Somebody influenced something.  Here it comes.

02:11:28

So I can feel it.  They’re coming into New Orleans, and we’re going to sit there and have some fun.  Either way it comes out, I don’t care.  And so we’re going to learn something.  I go, you guys get it now.  Do you see?  You see how many they bust in?  If they got the plan and they’re going to take over and change and do, well, you got the witness, sit.  Peace out.  We’re out of here.  Or they change it, and we get more anarchists because I’ve seen on the LNC, it was about 30 to 40-something percent of them were the voluntarist, hardcore kind of people going they didn’t see the invasion coming.

02:11:56

So I’m—now what?  Well, Nick—he would be—if he got elected national chair this time, it would be the first time national chair has gone the same guy three times in a row.  Well, I’m going, do I need to run, or is there somebody else?  Well, a bunch of the Mises kids, when I was at the Aspen Institute for the Nexus Earth Conference where a bunch of the guys were Judge Napolitano and Ron Paul.

02:12:18

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Hey, I’d support you.

02:12:20

ERNEST HANCOCK: Well, you know—well, I’m hoping not.  I don’t need to fit.  I don’t care, but I’m going to go there and have some fun.  The thing is, is I’m hoping these guys come up with someone that cares more and they’re hardcore, but if not, I—sign me up.  Let’s do a debate, but…

02:12:37

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, to me, hardcore is one thing.  I can understand having a somewhat incrementalist approach.  That might be the best tactic.  But you’ve got to be honest and principled, and you can’t attack people that—in a very harmful way based on [indiscernible_02:12:55].

02:12:55

ERNEST HANCOCK: Nazis.

02:12:56

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yeah, don’t call people…

02:12:57

ERNEST HANCOCK: You didn’t sign it, Nazi.  You didn’t sign it.

02:12:59

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Don’t call them racist or Nazis or fascists without really good evidence.  Don’t do that.

02:13:05

ERNEST HANCOCK: It’s already blown up in their face.  It’s way too much.  I don’t think they really realized what they were up against, and they keep underestimating this philosophy.  They keep underestimating the ideas of Rothbard and Ron Paul and you and Woods and all.  I mean, they keep missing it.  They don’t get it.  And I’ve seen—because they’re looking at it from just a database or how much money you got to raise or the various different groups and students for whatever.  They’ll go to some popular liberty-on-the-rocks meetup, and they go, we need one guy.  We need somebody in charge.  Okay, here’s a bunch of money, and this has happened.  It’s like a technique.  They come in with some money.  They give it to them, and they say, there’s one guy, and we get to have a table at your next there meetings or whatever.

02:13:53

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Right, right.

02:13:53

ERNEST HANCOCK: Then they take all the database and get everybody, and once they got the email, the money pulls, the thing falls, and it’s not organic, and it wasn’t spontaneous order anymore because we call it Steiger’s Law.  Whenever you create an organization around a movement or a concept or an idea, sooner or later the organization—every time, not most of the time—every time the organization becomes more important than the reason you created it.  And that is what they are doing.  They’re trying to support this entity, or they can bleed off on or use, or it’s a block of votes they can go and lobby with or something.

02:14:27

And I’m going, that is not what libertarians are about, and it’s gotten big enough and influential enough, and the contact has gone from our first emails in ’93 when we started finding out a bunch of legislation and concepts being down to every municipality across the planet.  And we’re going, ah, we’re up against a philosophy, and they, them, those won’t leave us alone.  When you have enough people understand that and get the education from the things that you’re talking about and be able to incorporate this into an opinion, they’re going away.  And it’s so neon-obvious, but they’re desperate.  They’re desperate to get some little in into this libertarian movement, and the easiest way, cheapest way is the Libertarian Party.  But they don’t realize how small that is in the scope of everything.

02:15:11

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Yeah.

02:15:13

ERNEST HANCOCK: In my opinion.

02:15:14

STEPHAN KINSELLA: All right, well, look, my brother.  I’ve got to go, but good talking to you.  Thanks for having me on, and if you want to do something else some other time, we can do it.

02:15:21

ERNEST HANCOCK: Constantly.  I’m going to bug the living crap out of you.

02:15:24

STEPHAN KINSELLA: All right, man.

02:15:25

ERNEST HANCOCK: All right, hey.  Thanks, Stephan, for coming on, man.  It was awesome.

02:15:28

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Keep up the good work.

02:15:29

ERNEST HANCOCK: Thank you.  You too, brother.  Bye.

02:15:30

STEPHAN KINSELLA: Bye.

02:15:31

Podcast (kinsella-on-liberty): Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:15:32 — 87.7MB)

“The Voluntaryist Constitution,” by  Trey Goff, Stephan Kinsella, Cesar Balmeseda, and Pierre-Louis Boitel, published 10/24/17 at Mises Wire. This article was based in part on work I did in preparing notes for a draft constitution for Liberland (see its Constitution here).

See also my recent The Universal Principles of Liberty (Aug. 14, 2025).

For discussion of similar projects, see Libertarian Nation and Related Projects (cataloging various libertarian “free nation” and related projects); KOL359 | State Constitutions vs. the Libertarian Private Law Code (PFS 2021) and KOL345 | Kinsella’s Libertarian “Constitution” or: State Constitutions vs. the Libertarian Private Law Code (PorcFest 2021).

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 228.

This is my appearance on Lions of Liberty, Episode 318, with host Marc Clair. We discussed Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s “argumentation ethics” defense of libertarian rights, and related issues.

Related:

• “Argumentation Ethics and Liberty: A Concise Guide” (2011) and Supplemental Resources
• Hoppe’s Argumentation Ethics and Its Critics
• New Rationalist Directions in Libertarian Rights Theory, 12:2 Journal of Libertarian Studies: 313-26 (Fall 1996)
• Punishment and Proportionality: The Estoppel Approach, 12:1 Journal of Libertarian Studies 51 (Spring 1996).
• Defending Argumentation Ethics: Reply to Murphy & Callahan, Anti-state.com (Sept. 19, 2002)
• KOL218 | Argumentation Ethics – Patterson in Pursuit
  March 26, 2017
• Hans Hermann Hoppe, “On The Ethics of Argumentation” (PFS 2016)
• Frank van Dun, “Argumentation Ethics and The Philosophy of Freedom”
• Kinsella, The Genesis of Estoppel: My Libertarian Rights Theory
• KOL161 | Argumentation Ethics, Estoppel, and Libertarian Rights: Adam Smith Forum, Moscow (2014)
• KOL181 | Tom Woods Show: It Is Impossible to Argue Against Libertarianism Without Contradiction
• The A priori of Argumention, video introduction by Hoppe
• Lecture 3 of my 2011 Mises Academy course, “The Social Theory of Hoppe” (slides here)
• Lecture 2 of my 2011 Mises Academy course, “Libertarian Legal Theory: Property, Conflict, and Society” (slides here)

Podcast (kinsella-on-liberty): Play in new window | Download (Duration: 57:40 — 46.4MB)