KOL190-2 | Part 2: On Life without Patents and Copyright: Or, But Who Would Pick the Cotton? — Panel Discussion, Hoppe, Dürr, Kinsella, van Dun, Daniels (PFS 2015)

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 190-2. Also podcast as PFP145. In 2015 I delivered this talk: “On Life without Patents and Copyright: Or, Who Would Pick The Cotton?” at the Property and Freedom Society, 10th Annual Meeting, Bodrum, Turkey (Sep. 13, 2015), which is here: KOL190 | On Life without Patents and Copyright: Or, But Who Would Pick the Cotton? (PFS 2015). This is the subsequent panel discussion with Q&A from the speakers for that day, to-wit: Hans-Hermann Hoppe, David Dürr, Stephan Kinsella, Frank van Dun, Anthony Daniels (Theodore Dalrymple). Transcript below. Panel discussion video: TRANSCRIPT Panel Discussion, Q&A: Hoppe, Dürr, Kinsella, van Dun, Daniels (PFS 2015) by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, David Dürr, Stephan Kinsella, Frank van Dun, Anthony Daniels Property and Freedom Society, 10th Annual Meeting Bodrum, Turkey (Sep. 13, 2015) 00:00:23 HANS-HERMANN HOPPE: Somebody approached me with a wish – it was a question, if email addresses would like to be shared.  I did not want to do anything without the people’s permission, so there will be a list at the front desk where you can maybe – the name list of all the participants where you can either write your email address in there or not if you prefer not to make your email address known to others.  So whoever is interested, please take advantage of the opportunity, and David Durr wanted to make a brief announcement too.  Give the microphone. 00:01:17 DAVID DÜRR: Maybe first concerning also the email address, I was asked by some of you whether I could send you these slides of this morning so you could look at it closer with all the writings.  So my email address to just give it to you is D-U-E, double R at swisslegal in one word, swisslegal.  This is the name of our law group, dot C-H.  And then may I add this?  Some people ask me whether what I gave in the speech is also somewhere written in an article.  So there are not long and thick books of me yet on this matter.  I do have two books here.  They are not as sophisticated and scientific as the one of Hans.  And namely they are not so English.  They are German. 00:02:27 One is (indiscernible_00:02:29) which means state opera.  Switzerland, you know, the state as a big opera.  It’s the state house actually as opera house, and the subtitle is Few Stars, Many Startists.  So this is one – I just have one copy of each if you want to look at this, those who read English, or if you want to buy it or order it, so it’s here.  The second one is I have a regular column in a newspaper in Switzerland, and these are sort of anarchic – anarchist columns, and the collection of this is in another book.  They are always on Fridays in that newspaper, so it’s “Das Wort zum Freitag,” the world to the Friday, not to the Sunday as usual, to the Friday, so this is the second book.  Thank you. 00:03:31 Q: Which newspaper is it?  Which newspaper? 00:03:33 DAVID DÜRR: It’s called Basler Zeitung.  It’s a – people say it’s a right-wing newspaper.  They are very open in that they have, through all parties, columnists, but I like the newspaper as such, but I’m very independent.  I had one column once when I compared IS or ISIS with US.  I said, well, actually it’s about the same thing.  US is just bigger, and that gave huge protests from the newspaper itself.  And then this gave me an opportunity just to put one on the top because right afterwards these CIA reports came up about torture practices.  That was a wonderful example to insist on it anymore. 00:04:41 00:04:49 Q: Okay.  My question is for Stephan Kinsella.  It’s a question, not an argument.  What is the case for private photos and pictures shared over the internet on Facebook and someone else is using it?  What is the argumental basis on that from the IP perspective? 00:05:13 STEPHAN KINSELLA: What’s the justification for using someone else’s? 00:05:15 Q: Using, or do they need our permission, without permission?  What is the case for… 00:05:20 STEPHAN KINSELLA: Do you mean under current law or under libertarian system? 00:05:23 Q: Under – both. 00:05:24 STEPHAN KINSELLA: Well, under current law, copyrights – photographs are owned by the photographer, and if you put it online you still own the copyright, but you’re giving a license for people to use it for limited purposes like doing it on their browser.  If you use it beyond that, unless there’s a creative common license attached to it, you could be sued.  And the perverse aspect of copyright – let’s suppose you’re on vacation and you hand your iPhone to a stranger and he takes a picture of your family.  He owns the copyright but you don’t know who he is, so you have this great picture, and you may be infringing his copyright when you put it on your Apple TV. 00:06:02 And there’s other perverse aspects of copyright.  There are cases where there’s – someone takes a photograph.  They have a copyright in the photograph, and it becomes a best-selling print or something like that.  And someone else will go to the same location and recreate the photo by taking their own photograph, and they can be sued by the owner of the first copyright for taking a photograph in that location.  Under libertarian law, there would be no property rights whatsoever in information at all. 00:06:32 Information is not an ownable thing.  Information is the impatterning of an owned thing, a physical material resource.  Information is never free-floating.  It’s always the impatterning of a substrate: your brain, electromagnetic waves, a CD-ROM, a USB drive, a hard drive on a computer.  And those things are already owned by someone according to the principles Professor Hoppe referred to earlier.  The owner of the thing—I own this physical object.  It’s structured in a certain way, which is the information.  I don’t own the information and the phone.  I own the phone and the feature – it has certain features. 00:07:06 This phone has a weight.  It has an age.  It doesn’t mean I own the age of the phone.  If I did own the age of the phone, I would own lots of other phones in the world that were made on the same day you see.  So the problem with owning an aspect of a thing that you own is it’s a universal that applies to any number of instances in the world.  And to own that universal feature of the thing would instantly give you ownership claims over other material resources in the world that other people have claims to.  This is the very problem with IP.  So if you put a photograph online in a free society, then you have to take the risk that other people might look at it and use it. 00:07:44 HANS-HERMANN HOPPE: On intellectual property rights, a funny movement – you reported about it on your website where people – some alleged Austrians from Vienna, Mrs. What’s-Her-Name from the Hayek Institute, Barbara Kolm.  She wants to defend physical and intellectual property rights at the same time.  It never occurred to her that that is an absolute impossibility.  To give you an example, I whistle a song.  You hear the song, and you copy it.  You whistle the same melody. [Update: See excerpt on Kolm here.] 00:08:34 If intellectual property rights exist, of course I would be able to then sue you for having whistled the same song without having received my permission.  But that means that I thereby acquire property rights over your own body, that I am then an owner of your vocal chords and whatever it is.  And that shows quite clearly that either physical property rights exist or intellectual property rights exist, but both of these things cannot exist simultaneously.  So it’s simply a contradiction. 00:09:28 STEPHAN KINSELLA: And an actual illustration of that is the “Happy Birthday” song, which is in litigation right now.  This is literally true.  Waiters in restaurants in the US sing a different song because they may be sued for singing the one that’s in the movies, which movie studios have to pay licensing fees for.  It’s another way IP would help movie studios.  Their costs would go down.  I want to read something Hans wrote in 19 – Hans said in 1988 on a panel with Rothbard and David Gordon and Leland Yeager.  And this is ’88 at the Mises Institute I assume, and an audience member said I have a question for Professor Hoppe. 00:10:07 Does the idea of personal sovereignty extend to knowledge?  Am I sovereign over my own thoughts, ideas, and theories?  And Hans said in order to have a thought you must have property rights over your body.  That doesn’t imply you own your thoughts.  The thoughts that can be used by – the thoughts can by used by anybody who is capable of understanding them.  So Hans understood this with pure praxeology 30 – almost 30 years ago. 00:10:34 00:10:38 HANS-HERMANN HOPPE: Then I was still young. 00:10:40 00:10:45 Q: (indiscernible_00:10:45) First of all, I wanted to thank you for a remarkably funny talk on homicide, and I wanted to tell Professor Hoppe that it was extremely refreshing to hear what should be done with politicians.  Now, having said that, don’t you think that when you say a few people have asked you who is the best person you’ve known, and several – and many people have asked you who is the worst person you’ve known in a way echoes the fact that the best person you may know involves a value judgment.  Whereas what we consider evil, echoes of a natural sense of law such that what we libertarians call the Non-Aggression Principle can be naturally recognized by people throughout cultures and times. 00:11:33 00:11:38 ANTHONY DANIELS: No.  I don’t think that’s true.  I think – I’m afraid I think people are just salaciously interested in evil in a way that they’re not salaciously interested in good.  And evil entertains them in a way that good doesn’t,