Tommy, he's an engineer at Clinical, he's going to be talking about SOFA coupling. Take it away. Thank you. So, you already know my name. You already know where I work. You can reach me on the social media thing, which apparently is a good thing. I'm also elected to the NZ pug, so if you have questions about what we do and why you should be a member, you really should. If you're in this room right now, you can come and talk to me. I'm also the conference director for Kewpie Park on next year, which will be in Dunedin. Yes, the best city of all of them. So if you have questions or ideas or you want to help out or you want to give me lots of money, you can come and talk to me about that as well. I'm going to talk to you about three things today. First, it's going to be a wee bit emotional, a little bit touchy-feely, and I'm going to tell you about a psychology of failure, a personal failing that I have. And I'm going to tell you because I suspect many of you in this room share this particular problem. There will then be an ever-so-graceful segue into a brief discussion about code coupling and flexibility. And finally, I'm going to tell you about what you've actually come to the talk for. I'm going to make you wait and talk about this thing called kinescence. Hands up, who has heard the word kinescence before? Yeah, awesome. Okay, this is good. This is a good state to be in. If you'd all put your hand up, I would have quit. So here's what happens, right? I am a serial project starter. I write a lot of code, some for work, some for personal projects because I guess I'm a masochist. And at the start of the project, this is a graph of velocity over time and it's handwritten so you don't take it too seriously. And in the beginning, because I think I'm an okay programmer and I take pride in my work, I try and do things well, right? I try and write good code. I exhaustively test all my code. And I think I understand things like the solid principles and I think I understand the law of demeanor. And in the beginning, I have a code base that I'm proud of, right? It's clean. It has tasteful abstractions, if you want. And that means that I can go really fast. I can fix bugs quickly. I can add new features quickly because I understand the code really well. I can go in. There's no trouble modifying it to do the new thing that I need it to do or to fix the bug that I'm trying to fix. And you can kind of see there's a hint here, right? This line is not exactly level. And what happens after a wee while is I wake up one day and I realize that this has happened. I'll wake up and I will need to fix a bug, let's say. The sort of thing I've done hundreds and hundreds of times before on this code base. But this time something's different. The thing that's different this time is these tasteful abstractions that I carefully built at the beginning of the project no longer work for me. Fixing the bug now requires me to rip out code that I had written previously to change it, to refactor it, and to put new stuff in. Now, sometimes this is easy, right? Sometimes it's as simple as a search and replace throughout the entire code base and maybe replace one thing with two things or something like that. Sometimes it's a lot harder, though, and it takes longer. And eventually the kind of project velocity levels out and there's no numbers on these axes and this is all handwritten and I've kind of made it more dramatic in order for the presentation to be better. But eventually I settle on some lower velocity. And at this point I kind of beat myself up about it, right? I think I'm clearly not a very good programmer. I clearly don't understand the solid principles or I wouldn't have written this code that I have now had to delete. Like, what a waste of time. Does it sound familiar to anyone? Is it just me? Okay, some people are nodding. Yeah, all right. Some people were nodding before I asked, is it just me?  The world changes. And the software that I'm writing, I'm writing hopefully to solve some real world problem. It is ridiculous to think that my software doesn't have to change over time. And this leads me to think that maybe my priorities were wrong, right? And my assertion, the argument that I'm going to make to you now is that as an industry our priorities when we're designing software when we're designing code are often wrong. It seems to me we spend an awful lot of time prioritizing correctness. That is, can we solve this particular problem today? And I think instead the most important property of a code base is flexibility to change. And the reason why I think that there's two things. First of all, if you're the best programmer in the world, if you have the best development team, the best thing you can do is make your software correct today, right? You can solve today's problem. You can solve today's customer need. But we know that that's not going to be tomorrow's customer need, right?  The second reason, and I think this is much more common, is as a programmer you have an imperfect understanding of the real world. You are building imperfect models of the problem that you're trying to solve. And a lot of the time, the change that we have to build into our software is because we now understand the problem better, right? We've delivered the software to our customer and they've come back and they've said, well, actually in this case our workflow is slightly different. Or, you know, there's this edge case that you haven't thought about, it does the wrong thing in these situations. So we want flexible software. We want code that responds gracefully to change. But what prevents that in software? When we write code, what prevents us from being able to change it easily? And I was able to quote Benjamin Disraeli before because he happened to say exactly the thing that I wanted to say. And for this next slide, I couldn't find anyone who said what I wanted to say. I'm going to go on a bit of a narcissistic streak and quote myself. So I'm going to say the enemy of flexibility is rigid coupling. And remember this quote, right? Because this will make more sense at the end of the talk. We're going to come back to it. And hopefully I can convince you all that this is true, right? Imagine for a second a code base where you have lots of things. Maybe they're classes, maybe they're functions, doesn't really matter. And none of them are coupled together, right? They don't call each other, they don't depend on each other in any way. It would be very easy to change that hypothetical piece of software, right? You could go in, you could edit any one of those things. And the only thing you would change is the thing that you intended to change. There would be no unintended consequences from that edit. The problem is that's not software. It's not even a library, right? It is completely useless. And in the industry we have this piece of advice, right? We're all told, or at least I was when I did my degree and learned how to program, you should build software with high cohesion and low coupling. And I find this advice useless. It's correct, right? Yes, we should build software with high cohesion and low coupling. And you'll notice it says low coupling, not no coupling. But there's lots of different types of coupling. And this does not help me write better software. It just doesn't, right? What I would like is I would like a way of being more precise with the low coupling part of this. I would like a way of saying, well, this type of coupling is probably going to cause me more trouble than this type of coupling. I want a taxonomy of coupling. But it turns out that thing exists. It's called connasance. And I'm very pleased that very few of you have heard of it before. It's a proper English word and it means two things that are born together and it implies that they change together over time. You know, they're linked in some way. So you can see how this applies to software coupling. I didn't invent the term. It was first coined in 1991, I think, by Mila Page-Jones. Since then, a number of people have kind of expanded on the topic. And connasance is a taxonomy of coupling. So there are lots of different types of connasance. We're going to go through all of them today, but it's going to be fine. It won't be too rushed. This will make more sense soon. We'll come back to this. Because we're all programmers, we love code. Here are two pieces there from different bits of a code base. At the top it looks like we have some model. And at the bottom we have a function that takes an instance of that model. How are these two things coupled? Yes, there is audience participation. Shout out your answer. By name, right? The top one declares a method called setemail and the bottom one calls that setemail name. If I change the top one, I have to change the bottom one. And at this point, at least some of you are uncharitably thinking that maybe you want to be in the other room and the other talk looks a lot better. I promise you this will get better. This is connasance of name. These two are linked by name. When you change the name of one, you have to change the other. But every piece of connasance has three properties that you have to consider together. And the first one is strength. Strength is this vertical axis here. And this list of connasances, we've just looked at connasance of name, is ordered by strength. Knasance of name is the weakest connasance. So it's not that bad, right? The reason why it's weak is because if you wanted to make that refactoring, you could do search and replace in your editor, right? We have tools that help us find all the instances where setemail is called and change the name. It wouldn't be that hard a thing to change. So that is the strength of a connasance. It's basically how hard is this type of coupling going to be to change in the future? There is another instance of connasance of name on the screen. Can anyone spot it? Anyone at all? Sorry? What about it? It might, but it's not the magic answer I'm looking for. So I'll tell you the second instance of coupling is that I have this variable called customer in the parameter list for do something. And on the line afterwards, I'm referencing it, right? If I change the name of this variable, I must also change the line afterwards. Now, at this point, you're all thinking, well, this talk's getting really bad. Like, duh, of course. But this is the second property that you have to consider. And it's called locality. And this means how close the two connasant elements are to each other. Now, I said you have to consider all three of these properties together. What this means is that you can trade things off against each other. You can have stronger types of connasance that are close together. Or you can have weaker types of connasance that are far apart. What this means is that in your code, you'll have something like this where red arrows represent strong types of connasance and green arrows represent weak types of connasance. There's a very interesting kind of interplay between this idea of having strong types of coupling that's close together and cohesion. But that's a totally different talk. But I'll mention it in passing. The third property that you have to consider is the degree. And that is simply how many pieces are affected by this coupling. Is it two things? Is it a hundred things? So these three properties together give you the tools you need in order to determine if this is a problem that you ought to be worried about, that you ought to be fixing. Strength, locality, and degree. Strength is the only thing that is predetermined. The locality and the degree depend on your code base. So let's look at some stronger types of connasance. We've done connasance of name, which is the weakest. Conasance of type is when multiple components must agree on the type of an entity. And as Python program is, Python being a dynamically typed language, we have a very special relationship to connasance of type. Again, let's look at some code. Here's a function that gets an iterable of prices and it does a running total. There is coupling here between the definition of this function and everywhere where this function is called. If I call it like this, the function is going to work, right? It's going to give me an answer, but the answer is not going to be what I want.  Hands up? Who thinks it's not going to give me what I want? Who's too shy to commit to either option? Yeah, right. So it turns out actually it's still not going to give me what I want because floating point is a wonderful, wonderful mess. But these costs are for products, right? And because we have products, we're probably storing them in a database. So we're also going to have some database table definitions somewhere so the locality of the canasins in this case actually crosses two code bases because this type cannot store perhaps that answer. So we can end up in weird situations where we have data in our program that is now not representable in our database. We have to consider the entire product and often we'll find locality that crosses code bases or crosses languages. Canasins have typed those still at the relatively benign end of the spectrum, right? Let's look at something a wee bit stronger. Canasins of meaning is about applying semantic meaning to things that inherently don't have them. If we imagine a code base that does credit card processing, for example, we might have code that looks like this, right? We want to be able to put test card numbers through and in this case, this is the function that validates the credit card numbers and if you put the test card number and you want it to always return true. But you're also going to have a function that makes a payment. You're also going to have a function that does a refund and you're going to have to repeat this magic string literal everywhere in your code. We have canasins of meaning between everywhere where we're using this string literal. Now, again, this is easy to fix, right? We can do this. We can store the string literal in a named field and now we have changed from canasins of meaning to canasins of name. We've gone to a weaker form of canasins, which is good. But there is a trade-off here. In going to a weaker form of canasins and reducing the strength, we have also slightly increased the degree because we now need a place to declare this test card element. Now, maybe in your code base, that's a good thing to do. Maybe it's not. You can see how canasins of meaning is still reasonably easy to change because we could search through our code base and find every instance of this long string. But what about this example? It's exactly the same thing, but now the literal that we're using is going to be a lot harder to find. You're probably going to have the number two all throughout your code base in all sorts of unrelated places. And again, we can make the same refactoring in order to fix this. Let's get a wee bit stronger. Canasins of position. Multiple entities must agree on the order of values. Here we have two pieces of code. You have to imagine that the first one is pulling something from a database. It's probably not going to be static values hard-coded in there, but it's returning a user object and in this case it's just a list of values. In our system, we can do dangerous things, but before doing the dangerous things, we check that the user is an administrator. So this code works, but what happens when we decide that we actually need to store middle names? At this point, we have two not very good options. We could store the middle name at the end of the string, but then we still have canasins of position everywhere that wants to access the middle names has to remember that it's not obvious. It's not logical. It's not first name, middle name, last name. It's something unintuitive, and that's a bit of a problem. Or we can do what's intuitive and store it between the first name and the last name. But at that point, if we miss, if we fail to change even one place where we're doing this check for the administrator, then everyone who was not born in the year zero now can do dangerous things. This is clearly not a good idea. We can improve this by changing the structure, and that fixes that particular problem. You can hopefully see, though, that in this case, if all of the bits of code that used this particular value were very close together in the code base, it would be a lot easier to change. You could find them all easier in the same file. Conaisons of possession also occurs in API design. This is why if you've read, like, the clean code advice, they say you should limit the number of, you know, parameters to a function. It's because if you have lots of parameters everywhere that you are calling that function, you now have to remember, you know, is it first name, last name, email, or is it email, first name, last name? If the types are compatible with each other, it's a system that, you know, doesn't throw an arrow, but doesn't do anything sensible, either. Conaisons of algorithm is when multiple components must agree on a particular algorithm. We're now getting to reasonably strong types of software coupling. Let's imagine a web app at the moment. I don't know what it's for, but users sign up, and when they sign up, they have to provide an email address. And our back end is Python, because of course it is, and we want to make sure that users don't give us completely garbage email addresses. And so we're doing some sort of best effort thing to verify that, you know, they didn't give us just their name. And because we're masochists, we're using regular expressions for some reason. But our front end developers, that's all this JavaScript stuff. I don't understand how that works. And they have some library that, you know, validates form input, but we're using a different regular expression. So now we have two algorithms that are supposed to do the same thing and they don't agree. We can get into situations where users get errors on the front end, but the back end would happily accept it. What's worse is we can get into a situation where the user front end code works and says, yes, your email address is fine, but the back end doesn't accept it. This also happens a lot in tests where the tests are poorly expressed, where in this particular test, the test author has kind of looked at the production code and said, ah, you know, they're using an MD5 hash under the hood. I'm going to do the same thing in my test. Instead of testing the intent here, which is that, you know, the hash is unique for different users. We also get cognizance of algorithm any time we're taking complex types and serializing it to some simpler medium and then reconstituting it. Any time you save data to disk, right, what is it? Is it UTF-8? Is it ASCII? Is it UTF-7? Because you're doing something with IMAP? We need to think about these things. If the algorithms don't agree, we can have serious issues. So we've looked at the first five and it turns out this isn't bad type setting. There is actually a reason for the slight gap between cognizance of algorithm and cognizance of execution. The reason for that is that the first five cognizances are called static cognizances and that means that you can reason about them knowing nothing other than your source code, right? You can look at your source code, you can find them and you can fix them. The last four are dynamic cognizances and in order to reason about those, you have to understand the runtime properties of your system. This has a couple of effects. First of all, it makes them much, much stronger, right? Weird things happen at runtime. It can be very hard to predict exactly what your program is going to do. The second thing it means is that it's actually really hard to come up with small examples that fit on one slide. If we take something that is a dynamic cognizance and kind of boil it down and remove all the extraneous bits on one slide, it loses some of its charm. So we're going to go over the last four very quickly and some of the examples are perhaps not great. I beg for your forgiveness. The first is cognizance of execution order which is when multiple instructions must be run in a very particular order. So the classic thing here is you have some resources and they have to be locked because you're accessing them from multiple threads. These two functions, if I run them on different threads and I am unlucky, will deadlock. They are locking and unlocking my mutexes in different order. If you have ever spent a week trying to track this down in a large codebase, right now you should feel a kind of chilling dread at this code. So this is a problem, right? And maybe we can refactor this code in order to not require so many mutexes. Maybe we can't though. Maybe instead of reducing the strength we can reduce the locality by moving all the code that accesses locked or lockable resources to the same file. And that way when we get a deadlock we know there's only one file to look at. They're easier to find. Maybe we can reduce the degree and eliminate some of the bits of code and refactor them so that the number of places in which we're having to lock and unlock these mutexes is reduced. Conaiscence of timing is when the timing of multiple instructions is important. This happens a lot in distributed systems. So if you're doing microservices like my team is at work, we can have this issue where we're talking to some account server in multiple places and because it's an HTTP call and the account server might be down network issues, we give it a timeout. If the timeout is not the same across all our services we can have weirdness where the user was able to authenticate but in some back-end server several layers deep, something died. But it's not consistent across all the services. So now we're trying to debug something and it becomes hard to reason about. Conaiscence of value is about multiple values changing together. Again, we often see this in test code where you have to imagine this is some checkout system and we're scanning a barcode and then we're asserting that the price that we get out should be of particular value. Note we also have conaiscence of meaning here because 2.5 as a float is not a sensible place to store a price. But anyway, this price has business significance. It probably comes from a database. It probably comes from a customer. If we change that all our test code is going to break despite the fact that the checkout is still working fine. And finally, conaiscence of identity is when multiple components must reference this should say the same entity. So we see this for example if you're using an ORM that uses the active record pattern. You have an object that represents a row in a database and if you have multiple pieces of code that need to update that row they have to talk to the same object. You can't talk to a copy of it. We can also see this sometimes in multi-threading patterns where we can have multiple worker threads that are pulling work items off a queue and if you want to put work on that queue you have to talk to that queue. You can't talk to another copy of it. So we've now gone through all the conaisances. Hopefully you can see how the ones at the bottom are stronger than the ones at the top and that when we're refactoring if we can move our code towards the weaker conaisances or if we can reduce the degree or the locality we end up with a code base that's more flexible to change, that's easier to change. Throughout this talk I've been giving links to a website called conaisance.io. I've been preparing this talk for a couple of months and one of the things that I have trouble with is there's no good single reference for conaisances. I think this is an amazing idea or I wouldn't be talking to you.  But it turns out I'm a terrible, terrible web developer. This is not what I do professionally. I'd be the first to admit that it's awful and so it's open source though. Patches are most welcome if you also like the idea and you'd like to help me with it, please come and talk to me this weekend or afterwards. If I want to try and wrap things up we started out by saying that the real world is an ever-changing place. It's an ever-evolving place and our job is to write software that hopefully solves problems in the real world. Because of that, our software has to change. I then went on a narcissistic streak and quoted myself and said, the enemy of flexibility is rigid coupling and hopefully now this has slightly more significance for you. Hopefully now at least some of you are thinking well I can replace the words rigid coupling with strong canasances, right? Or canasances where either the strength or the degree or the locality are high. But this is a better sound buy. And then we started talking about canasances and there's four things I want to leave you with. First of all, we can't just replace the word coupling with the word canasance, right? That doesn't get us any further forwards. The nice thing about canasances is that it's a monotony of coupling. It allows us to look at coupling and divide it into different groups and to reason about them and to talk about their properties. It is a software quality metric and like all metrics, it's flawed. It's not perfect. The nice thing about canasances is that with those three properties, only one of them is predetermined, right? The strength is predetermined. The locality and the degree are properties of your code base. So I can't tell you for any particular piece of coupling whether it's worth refactoring it or not, all right? That's only a decision that you can make with understanding of your code base. Thirdly, like design patterns and many other things, it gives us as engineers as developers a shared vocabulary. So I can go into a code review with my colleagues and I can say, look, we have canasances of algorithm between these different code bases. It allows us to be a lot more expressive in our conversations with each other. And finally, as I've been making these slides, it's been interesting to me how often other principles that we've learned as engineers have kind of popped out of thinking about code in terms of canasants. So for example, primitive type obsession is canasants of meaning, right? Yes, it's another word, but when we use canasants, because we have this more nuanced view, it allows us to reason about our code a bit more. This is all I have, but I will certainly answer any questions that you have. I'll see you turn it on. Any questions? Oh, yes. Thank you. The canasants of identity example you gave and the name, so the very top and bottom seem very, very similar. Maybe this isn't the time to drill into that. They do seem similar, but the difference is that identity is dependent on runtime things, right? Whereas name, so I'll let me think of it. Yes, in Python and in lots of other things as well, right? Like even in a statically typed language, if we think of the active record pattern, I can have a row object and rename it. So the actual name that I'm referring to can change. The important thing is that I'm referencing that thing in memory, not a copy of it or something like that. But I mean one of the things is that, I'll just go back to this list here, I'm not totally satisfied with this, right? This is an evolving idea, and in particular I've been thinking a lot about how canasants of type in a dynamically typed language I think significantly further down the list than it appears here. I think this is probably a good categorization for statically typed language. But there's, I need to think about that some more. Do you think it's kind of well enough to find, you talk about as a metric, do you think it would be possible to build an analytic tool that could put out those metrics? I'm glad you asked that question. I think for these static canasances in theory it is certainly possible to build a tool that will find them all and measure their degree and measure their locality and give you advice. First of all I don't think it's possible for the dynamic canasances. Second of all I don't think it's a good idea. One of the things that I love about this is that it's not black and white, right?  However there are tools out there that approximate this for the static canasances. So yeah, I think it's possible. I'm not convinced it's a good idea. Over here. Thanks for your talk. Can you please summarize the difference between strength and degree because I'm not quite sure on the difference between them. Yeah, so let's look at canasances of algorithm is a very strong form of canasance. And it's strong because if you have the system, this web app, let's say you're doing this in several places, right? You might have a more distributed back end system. It's going to be hard to find all the places that you're validating email addresses. They might be in multiple libraries but even if they're not what are you going to search for? Right? You can't, I mean you could try searching for that exact regular expression but then you're not going to find all the places that use a subtly different way of doing it. So strength is predetermined and it's based on how hard it's going to be to find that coupling and to fix it. Degree on the other, sorry, locality was the other thing, right? So locality is simply how close together these things are. Ignore for a second the fact that the second piece of code here is JavaScript but let's think for a second that these two are actually in the same file. They're right next to each other. If you find the first, you're going to find the second one very easily. Having the code closer together means that as a developer it's easier to spark the other cognizant elements. If they're far apart, it's harder, right? If these happen to be in separate Python modules in the same code base, then that's a bit harder. If they're in totally separate code bases, that's much harder. So the strength and locality really do form this kind of yeah. So degree is how many places are connected. So here we have two, but maybe there's two more places elsewhere in the code base that also do the same job, right? So it's about how many things you have to worry about as you're doing your refactoring. We've got time for one final question if there is one. Okay, let's give a round of applause for Tommy. Thank you.


What kind of instruction does a library provide? There are two departments that offer instruction to K-State students, the Faculty and Graduate Services Department, and the Undergraduate and Community Services Department. These two departments work together to offer in-depth information literacy instruction to your students based on their academic level. We recognize the unique nature of many distance education courses and programs as well as the diverse educational backgrounds of many distant students. We are committed to providing customized library instruction to fit the needs of all K-State students and faculty. In addition to the online modules, tools and resources which can be found on our website, you can ask a librarian to speak to your class. We have delivered library instruction via WIMBA or other similar online meeting tools. We can also build library resource and information literacy right into your course. By granting us access to your K-State online course, we can create course assignment specific information in the place your students are most likely to utilize it. There is a librarian role in the K-State online system that allows us to build content and participate in discussions while keeping student grades private. We can also follow discussion threads and assignment posts to provide applicable links and resources that will facilitate student access to related library and information resources. By embedding a librarian in your course, you and your students will have personalized, customized instructional services and access to a librarian who deeply cares about your class and student success.


So what's what's weird about this guy is that he was he was Gigantically influential, so he never got it first. I didn't have a university post and never had any formal education after the age of 14 Yeah, but but he was like praised by everybody from Bernard Shaw to to Albert Einstein to you know, John Dewey And and his book became the best-selling book of the gilded The gilded age gilded age all the age all the best-selling book next to the Bible I mean, can you believe that? This guy was like it like an immense figure in the world What was he called? It's called progress and poverty and I mean, this is like I say the book has gone through 15 translations in foreign languages yet Has gone through somebody like 59 editions in English It's just this immensely influential thing I mean in many ways it gave rise it was the thing that shaped You know knock and charter off and all these guys so these so-called old right who then in turn You know gave rise to Rothbard and American libertarianism So he's kind of one of the fathers of American libertarianism and a tourist securities route So and I've never read this book, right? I mean it's like I see it and use bookstores all the time, right? And it was sitting on the shelf and you think I'm supposed to read that but then you never do so but now I'm actually reading it and It's it's a weird It's a weird book very very compelling and like I say it's got a lot to recommend it But you can see why everybody's borrowed from it, you know from the left to the right and He just has this idiosyncratic almost like crank crank view that that the one big That the problem of universal prosperity being I mean the possibility of universal prosperity is being held back by monopolies But and and all the monopolies but the worst monopoly by far is the land monopoly So we need to kind of like it's too bad.  And the and the end of all other types of taxation So tariffs, you know excise taxes everything And he hated inflation. He was a gold standard guy, you know, so I don't know it's just it's he's kind of He's kind of crazy But it's it's it makes an interesting study to like try to figure out like why Why was Henry George?  I mean it was This the second best-selling book next to the Bible position wasn't Displaced until rams at the shrug come came along, you know, which you're reading now, too Yeah, I'm some reading like the most important book of late 19th century and the most important book of the 20th century at once Well, sometimes Yeah, but you guys But you haven't you haven't you haven't read powerful poverty, right? I mean a lot of it reminds me of this new book the kitty book, you know on inequality Mm-hmm that everybody obsessed about there's something weird about this and it's it makes for a fascinating psychological study like What is it that? that terrifies people so much about inequality like what what is it that gives rise to this weird Anxiety, you know that that the teaming masses are are Are sort of permanently poor no matter how productive the rich get you know and You know giving this this rise to this fear that there's going to be some kind of you know revolution or revolt That's going to change life, you know fundamentally, you know, it seems this this seems to be like a Perpetuating fear, you know, and that's what George was kind of playing on and that's what Piketty addresses now, you know So It's a very interesting kind of kind of obsession that people have It's like we better address the problem of inequality or we're going to lose everything You know, they're just we're going to come after us and slit our throats, you know It seems to be the driving motivation here So you think there's a connection between land and inequality in a sense Not in a sense. Well that that's what he believed but I think that I think that his whole theory is basically Crankish and crazy It makes no sense whatsoever But he you know, he wrote like this gigantic book on the subject and just like push this idea I mean there was an illusion. I think it alive at the time that There was a kind of a class of land owning capitalists who weren't actually doing anything But we're getting enormously wealthy because of the rising land values. That's so like, okay What was giving rise to? Like explosive valuations and land and say the 18 You know 70s and 80s. I mean there were there were basically two things, right? there was westward expansion and The railroads, oh, you mean the US Yeah in the US Because that's the case.  So this like was Basically it was unconscionable to him, you know, he couldn't stand that so he thought because land is a fixed resource That can't really grow and and so therefore it like owning it doesn't like all the material Benefits for the increase of land valuation accrue to just a single Class a single person. They're not dispersed out Along the population more widely so he postulated that land was the one thing that you really should not be privately owned I mean, you could you can kind of see like like how this in a crankish 19th century way This this theory kind of spins it spins itself out, right? So was he American actually? Oh Yeah An American original a newspaper man Okay, we're gonna start in two three minutes. Yeah, okay, give me a second.  They were totally panicked by it. They were just in a meltdown state of oh my god What are we gonna do everybody's getting getting rich and The masses are reproducing themselves and living ever longer and invading our cities and changing life And this is this is terrible. This is a fundamental threat to the ruling class I mean, this is the same period in which eugenics was Was hatched, you know as a as a solution to the so-called problem of universal prosperity So So the point is that for whatever is wrong Henry George At least he aspired to You know to universal prosperity, I mean he actually like celebrated technological advance and Thought it was it was it was fabulous and wonderful I just wanted to see it more broadly shared among the population So I guess in that sense he was kind of like a predecessor to the distributive is in a way, you know in England In fact, he was writing about the same time But you know stuff and Murray wrote an attack on Henry George on the land tax because like even in the 1950s right among the American right wing There was a huge popularity of this land tax idea. Oh, yeah, well for has a great Yeah, so these guys were still these guys in the 1950s were were kind of a We're still hanging out, you know, like I think fee was filled with Kind of people that were influenced by Henry George Actually in the 1950s at some point his influence just sort of weirdly died out But Back on the day, I mean you think about it. I mean you write a book and I think it came out in like 1879 and and still You know 70 years later people are still reading it and being influenced by it. That's kind of amazing What's amazing That's why I'm reading it like I want to find out like Why was this book so compelling to so many people and I don't think it's the economics. Although he he offers this kind of like silly You know a silly model, I mean he are basically argues that that just like the socialist right that put capitals not productive The only productive thing is labor That's so he's got a you know a lot of crankish views in there but I Really, I tend to think that like like the reason the book has been so powerful is not really due to his economics But rather to them to the moral vision. He has which is which is extremely compelling And and really I'm like the language is beautiful Also, he seems to offer an alternative to socialism, okay It's not capitalism really or it is capitalism without but it's hard to imagine like how does capitalism look without private ownership of land, right? That's a little weird but But it's not socialism either. So He seemed to offer like an alternative to To George Oh That's a really interesting point Yeah Hey, so should we start talking about About IP I kind of like to introduce the topic In a way, I guess we've got everybody here, right and we're on and everything is good and we've got a lot of viewers. So we're we're good but So I would kind of like to introduce the topic by well specifically with reference With reference to libertarians. Okay, so we could talk about IP in general And that's always fun, but we're especially interested in IP as it affects Sort of the way libertarians think about the world. That's especially interesting, right? so I have to say that Like 10 years ago If you stood up in front of a libertarian audience and said IP has to be Is a monopoly privilege granted by government and should be abolished I think you would get Almost universal pushback from the audience But now I stand up in front of audiences and say this all the time and and I get almost universal agreement or Kind of like well, that's a very interesting view. I'll think about it And the only time you ever get pushed back is from some some some old guy in the back who's who has an aol dot com email address or something, you know So There's been a huge shift, I would say in the liberty world on this topic and I think it's Basically entirely attributable to To your to your book and to your essay Against intellectual property. It's probably the single most transformatively influential monograph and liberty circles in the last 30 years, I would say I can't think of another single essay or document or book That that had such a fundamental effect and shifting people's views from one way to the other When it took I would say about 10 years for this to happen But it really has happened So congratulations to you Well, I I appreciate that and I But I've never talked about I think of course. This is the first time we've talked about this topic. So this will be groundbreaking for us But I don't like to critic for things that I think that I'm building on or that you and I and others are built on I honestly think that the groundbreaking work for I come raise I mean the Benjamin Tucker before us Your namesake, I don't know if you're I'd be proud to if I were you I don't know Yeah, I've been tempted to claim to claim a succession from And I Right I think Wendy McElroy, Sam Compton or Or some of these earlier guys. He's really did The work that laid the groundwork to make it clear to us when the internet came of age And I think it is an increasingly important topic Come increasingly clear that it is And the only way to see that is to have a solid foundation Property rights and economic understanding You know, but I think intellectual property has become one of the Biggest threats to human prosperity In the modern age I'd put in the top four or five right I'm getting pushed back from some of our peeps who say that I'm echoing Yeah, I think you're echoing. I think you have Okay, hold on Okay, that that probably fixes things right That fixings I hear no echo good Okay, so let's just quickly talk about this About about this this whole problem Because within the libertarian world and and as you know I'm reading out the show right now, right? That's right. So yeah, so this and and and obviously rand was Well, let's just establish the fact that she is You know far and above The I would say there's no contest about about this far and above the single most influential thinker in in libertarianism You know ever Um, you know she more than anybody else. I mean, I don't think anybody could ever dispute this Had more influence and in shaping Um, the way libertarians go about thinking about the world than than anybody else Other people are important, but but she's you know, just epically Huge, you know for for everybody Uh and continues to be So what you get from this book is something very interesting. Um She's she's advancing a different view and as you know, I'm yes, I've mentioned to you earlier I'm reading progress and poverty the late 19th century everybody is asking this critical question in the history of political economy What is the thing That creates wealth, you know, where does this where does wealth come from? What is the central? Uh stuff That gives rise to wealth. So you have many different answers, right? So um, you know with adam smith you have, uh, uh, you know division of division of labor, you know Um with with with the socialist and marx, you know, you have you know labor uh, henry george, uh, you know echoed this it was it was labor and then Then with bombar work, you know, it's like capital and the austrian tradition Capital is the thing But this argument has gone on for a very long time, you know, people want to know what is the thing that gives rise to this great mystery That we're rising out of the state of nature to what do we attribute this, you know? um, so I think if if Like like ram's massive contribution to this to this whole debate Is that she argued and I think you know at length very successfully to many non-fiction works and also fiction works and everything else That that actually all of these physical things are a distraction It's it's not really about about the sweat of your brow. It's not really about how much You know massive capital there is or you know, all these things are kind of important But that the fundamental most productive most productive and therefore most valuable social resource there is is um ideas right that's I I mean that seemed to be ram's critical contribution uh To political economy is that that ideas are the thing it's it's intelligence. It's rationality. It's the application of of ideas to the to the world that That uh that makes for great machines and makes for wealth and and so And and like I don't think that you and I really disagree with that, right? I mean, I'm not sure what your position is on that, but I I think that sounds more or less right to me um, I mean in fact, that's an amazing insight Uh, and it kind of upends and you know the whole of political economy in a way and gives us a new way to look at the world um, but the problem is that that uh It's it's it's it's it's kind of not a big step To go from the belief that ideas are the fundamentally most important productive unit in society to believe that therefore um You know capitalistic style private property ownership should pertain to ideas and if and if ideas are just commonly owned or looted by the world or otherwise not Um, not not protected and guarded and and and titled Then they were going to lose out on something extremely significant, you know new inventions um, people are going to be decent You know immorally stolen from disincentivized to create civilization could fall apart Do you see what I mean? This seems like that's that's the The the wrong step that people take in the course of this and and it seems like why she Was uh, you know as it turns out, you know, not just a champion of of patents copyrights and trademarks, but but she believes that um Owning ideas Was the single most important thing that any society could do in order to To be just and and wealthy. Do you think do you think i'm right about that? Yes, I I I I I think I understand Look, I think i'm ran made a huge mistake and I think I understand why she made it I think it's understandable. She was trying to identify as a philosopher as a social theorist What is the nature of man? Man is the rational animal. So we're different than other animals and that we use our reason Okay, so she saw the crucial role of reason And ideas and information and intelligence and human prosperity And of course you can't disagree with that. Um, I think her mistake was Not seeing it as mesas did mesas understood the difference between In human action the role of ideas and information and the role of scarce means and resources And I'm ran made a mistake. I think Which is uncharacteristic of her because Normally she was very principled in her thinking like, you know anti-trust laws wrong because A business man has the right to set whatever price he wants to set no matter what no matter what the consequences So she was sort of anti consequentialist in those terms minimum wage Discrimination racial discrimination these these issues Okay, but when it comes to Uh The idea that the state should pass laws To make artificially scarce ideas so that they can be economized By the price system so that people have the right incentives to maximize the use of these ideas This she became sort of like a utilitarian or a chicago type economist Which is unlike her You know, which is incompatible with the rest of her For her whole idea system um So I think that she she went off track there But I think the reason is and if you go back to trace the history of this We have been off base the entire history of humanity basically In understanding the role of scarcity the role of property rights the role of ideas People have always confused these things and it wasn't just i'm ran's fault alone or failure alone to Clearly distinguish these things It was all of humanities up until the modern age and continuing until this day When intellectual property is at its zenith in a sense. I mean intellectual property patent and copyright in particular Or at doing their worst damage today as we speak primarily because our age has become so technological And so idea oriented and so universal and so international Internet with the internet and communication perversely proponents of intellectual property say that Now is the time when intellectual properties need even more right because we we live at an age of ideas and Hyper competition and technology because of that now we need copyright and patent even more than ever When the truth is that because of that now the damage done by these laws is being seen more patently You know by everyone more visibly More and more that's why there's such controversy about these laws. So that yeah, they're less enforceable than ever By the way, uh, when you said that I was thinking about a book written by michael novak You know who's who's very interesting, you know, so neoconservative, you know pro capitalist thinker still around but it was written That in the mid 1990s And he talked about this being the age of ideas that that in the past capital was all physical capital now We recognize that that we've moved into a new age where the essential capital really was ideas And so therefore he said The most important thing we can do is have have patents and in fact he attributed to the existence of patents um The the prosperity of the of the west, you know, and he actually like, you know Celebrated patents in the course of you know, a series of chapters of this one book Which I think is called free persons and I've gotten out of the name of the book. So, yeah, I mean, this is a very common view and I think that objectiveists, you know over time began to You know adopt the same positions like if if ideas are the most important thing then then surely It's more important that we have private property and ideas than than any any other institution Well, I think their mistake is the way they talk about things they call values They use the between values like a a noun according to an existing thing so And to me here's where conceptual clarity becomes very important um Which mesas and other economists do better than grand did in this field um They think of a value as a thing that you can create existing or ontological uh And therefore the owner of that thing is the creator. That's the natural The natural intuition um The the problem is this sort of a Equ amplification in the word wealth like how do you create wealth? So I like the way hanz hon hon on gamma phrases that It talks about There are different ways of acquiring ownership of things in the world You can homestead or appropriate an unowned or amused resource in the world or you can acquire it by contract Okay, that's a way to acquire ownership But to acquire wealth now what does wealth mean wealth means to increase the value of a thing Usually a thing that's already owned because you have to own the thing You have to be able to possess and control the thing to manipulate it to transform it to produce something More valuable so wealth really just means Improving things that are already owned and the wealth is the increased Value of the already owned things But if you understand that distinction then you would never make the mistake of saying that I Owned this wealth because I improved the previous thing That's actually not the case as Hapa emphasizes You don't own wealth wealth as a subjective thing that'd be like owning your reputation Owning the value of a home or owning the value of a rose garden that you can see from across the street You can't own these kinds of value to be subjective things Ownership it has to be contained to the physical control of the physically scarce material resources Okay, and so Property rights have to do with ownership and control of scarce material resources things that we can have conflict over wealth arises from the ability to control these things and in the ability and the Creativeness used and manipulating them and making them more valuable to us Or to others that is not a property rights issue. This is why I believe I know it's boring to some people or makes their eyes go glassy-eyed fuzzy, but Praxeology means is his understanding of human action which distinguishes between the use of means and the use of ideas to guide your control of these means there are two different aspects of human action and One of them has to do with property rights and law and ownership and one of them does not Okay, and so the fundamental problem with intellectual property is specifically patent and copyright is that it tries to give property rights and ideas information knowledge But in human action What we do is we manipulate the grapple with the control of scarce resources We do it by choice. The choice is guided by our information our intelligence our knowledge You have to own the resource to control it to keep it free from manipulation by someone else but the idea that you're guided by can be freely shared because information can be distributed learned transmitted communicated copied Forever and ever onto infinity. So there's a hundred rewrecks station and Remixed and yes and used and transformed, etc Okay, but Can I just go back to your this notion of conflict because it becomes extremely important? It's like you're saying if there's not a conflict then there's no reason if there's not a conflict Then there's no reason for for allocation of ownership rights Well, but Go ahead go ahead Well, the entire purpose of property rights is to is to specify Which of two or more competing claimants to a given resource has the right to use it? That that entire endeavor only makes sense if there's a possibility of conflict in her place If you lived in a world in which we were all gods or we all had infinite power or no conflict as possible the entire idea of Social norms and property rights would make no sense whatsoever but have no use it would never arise it arises only because of this social problem that we live in a world of scarcity and that only someone can use this desired resource in a certain way and Either people physically fight over it and there's always conflict in war or we seek to Find a social mechanism a socially respected way of Assigning who gets to use the resource so that the resources can be used peacefully and Cooperatively without conflict so conflict. Okay is actually essential to property rights Yeah, okay, but I think you're you're used to the term pure physical is extremely important because I mean there's Because using other people's ideas is going to give rise to conflict. I mean You know if I had an idea of opening up a donut shop here in town and then some they then becomes very profitable And some other guy opens up another donut shop, you know down the street And charges less than me. That's going to I'm going to perceive that as a conflict I mean I have I have a problem with this guy You know I had the idea first He's clearly just caught my idea You know that gives rise to certain conflicts I mean, you know if the tank rude and making rude and steel and somebody else steals his his His method of production and creates beard and steel He's gonna have a problem with that guy, right? I mean so it's not as if It's not as if there aren't conflicts in the world of ideas So what what what do you what do you mean when you say there's there's there's no conflicts because because there are conflicts Right, so I think this is where we have to This is where the notion of conflict helps to Clarify the whole idea of property rights When we have a conflict Then we can ask ask what the conflict over and that helps identify the boundaries of the property in dispute So as an example It's commonly said in loose language that you know people can fight over religion, for example That's actually not true what people fight over always is physical things bodies land animals You know material resources so for example if a Christian or a Muslim or a let's pick a neutral religion the Buddhist Buddhist wants to force someone to become a Buddhist They might do it by threatening to kill the Christian If they don't convert to Buddhism But in that case the conflict is said to be a conflict over religion But in reality the conflict is over the resource that the people are actually disagreeing about the use of which is the body of the Christian who's going to be killed. Yeah. Yeah, so It's so what people do is they're confusing Motive in the law. This is called motive or purpose, right? In other words Why are you trying to stab a sword into or spear into my body? That's the motive But the thing you're doing is what's objected to which is stabbing a spear into my body, right? So the thing that's objected to is invading the borders of my body if if someone said I'm going to convert you to my religion and if you don't agree.  They didn't do anything physical There would really be no dispute Worthy of mention it would just be a battle of words and that's fine The only time this really becomes a dispute in human life is when there's a real physical conflict over actual usable What Mises would call scarce means of action, which you might I've written about in our Right, so ideas ideas are not scarce. So yeah, so somebody steals my idea That might annoy me it might You know cause me to To compose a tweet, you know, that's sort of a nasty tweet or whatever I might I might denounce the person But but but in fact it gives no rise to a physical conflict over any existing resource That's in dispute not any more than Look we have to be careful not to use English language and possessive pronouns as a substitute for argumentation So if I can call something my idea or my wife or my store or my customer Just because I can use the word my that possessive noun possessive pronoun doesn't doesn't mean there's a legal claim to it if you would open the door to say that This kind of harm so-called harm is upsetting me in this kind of way is a legally recognizable claim Then there's no reason why you couldn't say that My competing with you in the free market and stealing your so-called customers Why that's not also a claim So in other words, if you understand that there's nothing you have no proprietary interest in your customers You have no proprietary interest in your girlfriend being your girlfriend Then just because someone could describe The competition that happens with the word theft or steal like this guy stole my girlfriend This guy stole my customers. This guy harmed me by competing with me These kinds of words don't really substitute for a clear analysis of any kind of claim at all, I mean There's nothing wrong with stealing someone's girlfriend in a legal sense, right?  That's fine The Burger King takes some of McDonald's customers. They didn't suffer. They might have harmed McDonald's But they didn't take anything from the dollars that McDonald's owned and that's the fundamental question ownership Okay, this is what people lose sight of they want to focus on these day-to-day terms like harm and cost and imposing You have to ask where's the conflict? What's the resource who has the better claim to it? Who's controlling it and who invaded the borders of it and that's it But you can understand the The intuition that people have Which is something that's a little bit a little bit interesting. It's like first movers in the marketplace Very much feel as if they have a proprietary interest and Maintaining, you know a kind of monopoly over the set of the body of ideas that led to whatever kind of innovation There they gave rise to right and you can you can sort of understand that that intuition a little bit I'm not sure if that's because we have laws concerning it or if it's really sort of intrinsic to our way of thinking about the world, but Yeah, I Honestly, I can't understand it that well even though I'm a patent attorney and I'm used to this way of thinking I just I don't quite understand that We're thinking I think it arises because of a primitive understanding of economics and that is most normal people understand that there's a harmony of interest between Economic reasoning and justice Right, so they understand that you know There's a reason to have property rights and land and cars and factories and things like that And then they also start to see that there is an unnatural incentive effect Like whoever marshal's into resources better and uses them better It's going to be might make a profit they could capture the profit because of the free market system so people start associating the idea that Whatever law could produce an incentive to produce a desired result is Consonant with justice. I think that's what people think and I think that's wrong, but that's what people think so they get used to the idea of the commodification of Things that can be sold in contractual terms like ideas or information or intellectual creations Probably because we have patent copyright law already and it's ingrained into the system of Western capitalism I think that that's true. I think that's really true. We've been shaped in many ways by the existence of or what we believe Is is the way the system currently works, right? And so yeah, that's part of our of our apparatus of thinking about political economy, you know, it just They connect incentives to property rights. So whatever they think of as being the incentive system They think that has to be part of the property rights apparatus that has to exist and they don't go further than that because they can't conceive of any other Alternative systems because they're used to it because we have patent copyright, you know, if you ask them about perfumes and Fashion designs, they they freak out and they stutter and they have no answer because that's right because the perfumes Perfumes can can be freely copied. Actually, you know, it's interesting when you think about just the sheer number of products out there that That That are copied, you know that that there's not a brand name attached to but there's an exact copy of them I was just at CVS today buying, you know basic household products and For almost everything. There's there's like a famous brand name. I Forget now what it was. I was buying now today, but there was a like a famous brand name And then there was the CVS version of the exact same thing. That's like like almost half of price Right. Yes, and they're right on the shelf right next to each other, you know Okay, the fact that they continue to exist and so I was means that you know both are Profitable and it's very obvious that the brand name has this gigantic markup over, you know Over what must be its cost of production But people continue to buy it just because they just for whatever reason, you know associate some psychological sense of trust You know with with the with the brand name product Yeah, this happens Like Tylenol versus a Cedaminophen. Yeah a motrin versus ibuprofen It's across the board. I mean even cleaning hot it happens the right time Yeah, like, you know, mr. Mr. Cleans, you know, whatever You know bleach spray or whatever compared to the exact same product of CVS, which is like right next to it on the shelf Is it so that which is an interesting thing that I think a lot of times you talk about conflict And and how property rights only pertain when there's actual conflict There's also a sense that People have that if you permit you know widespread sharing of ideas That that there can only be one winner in the space, you know Um, right So if I come up with a new kind of suitcase that's amazing and everybody steals my idea that somehow I'm going to be robbed with my own profitability But but actually the real world shows that that's that's really not true. I mean you can continue to Become the most profitable Brand name in a space for like a hundred years, you know While while there's massive competition And in offering the same product that you offered a much lower price. I mean, there's there's a weird element of rationalism associated with the with the pro IP position And they just imagine that this is not true That you can't have, you know, multiple winners from a single idea. There can only be one real winner, you know I mean the real world shows does the opposite Well, yeah, I mean you can take a Coca-Cola McDonald's companies that have survived for a long time, even though they're really making fairly generic And yet they found a way And Stephanie you're doing something to your microphones like Yeah, it's It was rubbing against something there Right now. No. No, it's suddenly all muddy Oh There we go now it's fixed Is it better? Yeah Oh, sorry, I don't know what happened. No, that's right Well, you and I were talking about iron rander earlier and how uh, well, I I've come to believe that the fountain head was kind of a an IP terrorism article of novel, right? It's about A guy destroying a private property project which he had no contractual claim to because he didn't like how they How they used his ideas. So I think the fountain head Surprisingly, although it inspired me. I'm not sure why it's the return novel. I can't figure that one out At the shrug. It's much better. But even that has these sort of, um Parts where iron rands own views of IP fall apart and you and I were talking about that the day right like about how I'm fascinated by this. I'm I'm right now. I'm I'm I'm I'm almost halfway through it and um I'm really in like constantly intrigued By the conflict between the government and and hank and hank verdant, right? because Because the government wants his his steel, you know, and and you know, there's various coercive measures that he has to produce a certain amount at a certain a certain Certain price that, you know, they want his only was they want of weird and steel, you know For their own purposes, but it's it's it's always a little bit vague in the in the text like what does this Wanting the steel, you know consist of right is it? You know relinquishing his patents, which I guess that's ultimately what it what it comes down to, right? The patent that the government itself is granted It's never quite clear. I don't know if I ran understood patents or if she Covered up what it was because she sensed that it she could never make a clear case That this was unjust. I mean the government is granting a monopoly And they forced to rear them to publicize the details in the patent So, right, I'm not sure what the government was getting did they they didn't get the knowledge because it was already public in the patent right everybody knows that and the government actually as I told you the government has the right under the patent system to Grant was called a compulsory license To any patent the government grants so the government could just easily make whatever is covered by a patent and then pay some kind of, you know minor payment to the To the patent holder or they can even grant a license to a third party, which was threatened in the cipro case in the anthrax scare about 14 14 years ago This happens all the time. Um, so It's it makes no sense in atlas for that and there's other cases in atlas where She has dagny and hank hiring a scientist to try to reverse engineer galt's engine galt's motor Right, which would be some kind of trade secret or patent violation in her ideal world And then you have that case that's that's never even brought up right and it's just seemed to be an illustration of dagny's own brilliance That that she There's nothing seen is wrong about them trying to do that right they're trying to learn from someone else Which is what competition is and then there's also the case I mean in the end judge narrow gants it you haven't gotten here yet, but judge narrow gants it in galt's bulge I'm not going to spoil it for you, but This brilliant legal genius that Aristotle plus galt squared He basically takes the u.s constitution and he he fixes it by Crossing out the bad parts and adding to the good parts and whatever. Yeah, but that's that's remixing, right? I mean that's just taking an existing work If there was a copyright on the u.s constitution He wouldn't be able to draft the ultimate constitution for galt's galtian energy in liberty or whatever And there's so many examples where reality Buds heads with her conception of intellect property also the part where that's really funny And there's the guy the guy that listens to You hear the guys whistling The unfinished concerto of haley or something like that on the train robbery Yeah, well, there's also the Um There's there's also the I mean as truck me immediately about about the matter of trademark You know when the agony names her new line the john galt line, right? Oh, right, right, right. Yeah. Yeah, I never knew Yeah, she had no obligation to find out if this is a real, you know person who maybe has a claim to his name I mean, she's just gonna I Is presented as a kind of a tribute actually she's tired of everybody saying, you know, who's john galt?  She finds it excessively cynical and too bitter So she's trying to reverse, you know the public image of of john galt, you know, uh, and naming her line this But there's no sense that oh my god. Just actually stealing somebody's identity here, you know in other words, uh right well, um So quite often in the book The impulse to copy Is is seen as a sign of of brilliance, you know, not as evidence. It's that Right Right, well because it's natural it's normal Of course, so she sees that No, what I was going to say is there's a there's a scene later where Dagny becomes his housemaid basically and he pays her like a Silver dollar or a silver coin or gold coin and she's so happy she got paid You know an honest piece of money for an honest week's work or something But that's right. Actually he should have charged her for stealing his trademark on the galt scrolls them, you know If he was being consistent You owe me a million dollars for stealing my ip It's so it's so unfair for us, you know 60 years later or whatever it is first to take apart this book, you know on you know in light of ip theory because you you get What she's doing right? She's making the very important case that ideas are the single most productive unit in society Because the ideas are more valuable than anything else, which I I think it's True and also she's against um Looting governments to steal people's stuff, you know, and she makes this sweeping and beautiful Uh elegant case. It's just that these two sort of important notions get all kind of tangled together You know in the course of the plot and in the course of her own narrative and like say it's it's unfair to us to do this Yes Yeah, it is I would say The fountain head is more mired in this stuff So it's more subject criticism and i'm not really trying to criticize atlas what i'm trying to show is that i'm rand and a lot of libertarians and lockians Are wrong about ip and what i'm trying to show is that they're wrong because it's not it's not consistent You cannot be consistently for ip And i'm rand herself and atlas shrug which was a really good novel Even even that novel illustrates Why she was wrong about ip um I'm not criticizing the novel i'm saying she's wrong about ip and that was one of her two major mistakes her Her other major mistake was being in favor of the state Of course, which even atlas also debunks that because the You know the ideal community illustrated near the end is galtz galtz Which is a quasi I think it's an anarchist society basically so right it sounds like they're they're the Constitution that they that they alluded from uh from from madison's proper intellectual property Was just really a social contract not really a government Yeah, so they violated ip They don't respect the government or the state and they violated ip and the good parts of the novel So I think she's actually on her instincts are right When she writes on these topics, she's wrong, but this isn't about i'm rand, but that's just you know an example of that Hey, just is stuff and I and we're and we're we only have 15 minutes left And I really do want to there's a couple of things I want to say and I'll just say them in a quick succession here So we can comment about the first one Okay, i'm gonna reverse them. Uh, the first one concerns lock I think since she wrote this monograph you've under you've come to understand The problems that that that you know emanate from locks basically, you know labor theory of production I I mean that was a revelation to me I now understood that lock was actually terrible on property rights And that's like the worst thing that happened to uh scottish enlightenment, you know tradition And and and thereby u.s. libertarianism To have celebrated locks theory of property Because it's gotten it's all you know enormously confused. I I find nothing redeeming about it. What's so whatsoever? Especially in light of you know, a much superior theory offered by mesis Um and and and a hop up Benjamin Tucker and others So there's that okay, so just keep that in mind the second thing I want to say is That your monograph is only ostensibly about the problems of copyright patent and intellectual property generally That's like its first level insight but For me personally intellectually Once you dispense with the need for legally creative monopolies over ideas Then you understand something like really extremely important about the role of ideas in history that That they really are a communistically owned So socialistically distributed factor of production and you know Having that insight I think does Fundamentally changes something about the Our capitalistic way of of of thinking about the market At least for me personally it upended a lot of a lot of my notions of lab about About capitalism and the function of the social order generally so it opened up a whole sphere That gives new levity and meaning to the work of Hayek in particular, but also illustrates that Hayek As as great as he was on his topics really did not go far enough that that that ideas The non ownership of ideas themselves Is a is a kind of an amazing way to understand essentially how the world works So I mean, I don't think your monographs just makes a case against the ip It makes a case for a new social theory At least for me, that's that's how important it is. And I don't think you intended to do that, but I think that's the effect of it well I think that no one prior to about 10 15 years ago Really gave these ideas enough attention and that's because they they didn't seem to be that important, right? I do think there's The mistake we talked about earlier has been made even by free market advocates, right? That's kind of incentive idea this communist idea Like we sort of forget why we're opposed to communism We're opposed to communism because Communism ignores the nature of reality and it forgets the fact that There are limited scarce resources that we need to economize and that we need to use And that property rights and capitalism is the way to do that That's what communism forgets Right, but in our zeal to argue the case for capitalism And to oppose communism We start thinking there's something wrong with A world where there would be free ownership or good ownership of lots of things If we had that kind of world the land of cocaine You know hunts calls it or the land of milk and honey That would actually be a good thing We don't have that in the land of scarce resources But if we understand the distinction between ideas And scarce meanings and how they play different roles in human action Ideas are things that everyone can have at the same time and we can teach each other We can learn from each other we can compete with each other We can observe each other and we can emulate remix and do everything to these ideas We still have the constraints of scarcity on the scarce means Property rights are necessary and good for the scarce means What they are destructive for the things that can be copied It makes no sense to do that So communism meaning universal ownership of things If they could be universally owned it's not a bad idea The reason communism is bad in the physical realm is that things cannot be universally owned And that if you don't have property rights things can't be used productively and peacefully Right, but in the realm of ideas and knowledge and information they actually can be so in a sense I agree with you communism if you apply it in that sense to ideas Is a good thing because it doesn't It doesn't not make sense. It actually does make sense in that in that realm So that's let me ask you Oh, yeah, I've never really asked you this question before but I mean once you begin to think about property rights and the way that you're stating it right now Don't you think that it it affects sort of the moral status or the moral standing Of the notion of of private property like like I think that it's been fairly typical In in libertarian in the libertarian world and liberty minded circles and classical liberalism itself to regard property rights as Kind of an extension of of human ethics, you know that it like It's a fundamental ethical postulate, you know that that that must stay alive in the world or else You know we perish in some way So look it's written in the 10 commandments You know there's a sense in which it's an even Rothbard writes like this, you know that it's but it's an extension of natural law That it's you know, it's a An ethical postulate that somehow enshrined on our and our hearts as human beings I mean you're describing property rights as Well, I mean let's just face it. It sounds completely utilitarian. I mean that that it's like a social construction That we made up in order to to achieve greater You know gains from trade and and and wealth generally I mean, do you do you agree with that and do you understand? Do you do you understand the implications of what you're saying for? a broader moral outlook of of the issue of human liberty generally I mean as much as I can I mean I would say that it's it's consequential has been a sense not utilitarian Randy Barnett does a good job in his introduction to his structure of liberty and another essay as in on his website Trying to distinguish between consequentialism and utilitarianism. I think utilitarianism is inherently Incoherent for basically Austrian reasons Consequentialism, I don't think Broadly stated is incoherent and I don't think it's incompatible With the natural law viewpoint I've never thought there was a Incompatibility I mean I'm randy herself said, you know the practical is the moral and vice versa And I think there's a truth to that the reason that we view these things as ethical rules and they get ingrained in human society Is because they tend to Practically involve good consequences I don't see there's any consequence And sorry any any any incompatibility between Those approaches and in any case No matter what you're grounding for property rights is or ethics is You just cannot deny that the nature of property rights Is to specify a rule for the exclusive control or ownership of a given Inc scarce resource and a scarce resource basically is a resource That there could be conflict over the use of So the the very nature of property rights No matter what your grounding for it is even if it's completely natural law natural rights oriented Is a rule that ends up specifying who gets to control a given resource And the natural law view is that the owner of that resource ought to be the person With the more just claim to that resource Okay, so there's really very little disagreement in the fundamental framing of the issue between natural law theorists and consequentialists. We all agree that There are scarce resources If we're going to have use of them in a productive peaceful way There needs to be a property system that everyone by and large respects That specifies the owners of these resources Pretty much no one disagrees with this even communists don't disagree with this Everyone agrees with this So then the only question is the only question is Okay, who then is the just owner of the resource? So then we come to the normative question which is well The normative answer has to relate to the function of the property rights in the first place Which is to permit resource to be utilized when they're unowned and to be used in In peace without being dispossessed by someone else So all these things imply certain things that lock himself did see in glimmers and other people have seen in other ways And which ultimately if you have a little bit of economic literacy or a little bit of logic Consistency and you keep your terms straight and you don't engage in equivocation and you're honest and you're consistent It results in the libertarian Framework which is that basically When we see a resource That is disputed by two or more people the person ought to have it and ought to be recognized as the owner of it And that is the person that had the earlier claim to it or that obtained it by contract from some previous owner It's really very simple. It's even simpler than f times simple six symbols for a complex world By the way, I don't even I'm not even sure I accept your claim that you know earlier is Justice because that that opens up a real can of worms actually Well, but the resource has to be used first somehow so that's the point so in other words There has to be a way for someone to be able to use a resource That's unowned and to pluck it out of the state of nature Yeah, but if you can use you use it and and you lose it then I don't I don't know. I mean I I think there's a there's a real problems associated with And for one thing, you know any rule about property that establishes the need for a third third party to adjudicate what is just and unjust implies the need for for you know mediation and and potentially a state so I I far prefer Mises's view that basically if you can defend it, it's yours. I think that's a much better of a perspective than the Locke and a homesteading principle But anyway, that's that's neither here nor there And so you asked also about I mean Locke, I agree Locke's Locke's views on labor are problematic, but Given what he was fighting against filmer and the uh, you know, the monolocal ideas I think he was trying to Use the existing constructs of the time Which is this religious idea that god created the world God gave the earth to Adam need And he said okay, let's start with that concept And if we start with that concept we can still arrive at kind of a proto libertarian You of things but the problem is he had to introduce this labor idea Which is the idea that you own yourself, which is a vague notion And therefore you own your your labor what you do with yourself or your actions Whatever that means. I really have never understood what anybody means by saying you own your actions Or you own your labor And therefore you have the best claim to own These unowned resources in the world that you make your labor with and he has a complicated set of arguments He was trying to overcome Another complicated set of arguments by filmer and others So I don't blame Locke at all, but I do think it's it's it goes down a rabbit hole And I do think this labor idea of Locke which blends into this Deserved idea you deserve to profit from your labor Leads to the labor theory value and the labor theory of property of Locke Um, so I do think that Locke's original conception has led to a lot of confusion And problems and it's led directly to intellectual property and ultimately we need to reject that to to get this stuff straight There's a couple of questions because we're running up right up against the hour here the first the first person Ken Who by the way disagrees with me that bagny was violating trademark by calling her line The jungle line because because she did not You know for all she knew galt was dead and there was no patent on her around so so therefore Uh, it was very little for her. But anyway, the point that I was trying to make is she didn't even she didn't bother to find out right?  I don't know. Most people I know have read it. They read it when they were young and they just devoured it. So I'm embarrassed to say that I haven't at your at your advanced age But it's I'm actually like it was tough. It was a tough slog at first. I was like, uh, god, I can't say But but now it's it's it's kind of exciting and I'm I'm starting to like dag me and you know So all the good things are happening. So it's it's it's good. It's getting groovy for me But anyway, I can't ask uh, is it illegal, uh, mr. Cancel it's illegal for a person to make their own copy of a patented product and use it for their own use without paying anything to the patent owner I mean, yes, you want to go and answer that? Yeah Well, it's not illegal, but there's there's uh, it's an infringement put it that way, which means there's there's uh damages can be Can be owed. Yeah, so the patent the patent basically makes it um An infringement to make use sell or import or offer to sell That's what the patent right is make use sell Offer to sell or import Anything that's covered by a claimable patent whether you're aware of it or not It has nothing to do with your knowledge. So if you make something or use it or sell it that happens to be close enough to the claims and some issued in existing an enforced patent Then yes, you're infringing the patent and you can be sued for damages That's the way and if you don't if you don't sell it, uh, then what? That doesn't it doesn't matter you you're making or using it. So you still you still have to owe them. You have to pay damages Okay Okay, so that Okay, another question I contribute to anti-war.com because producing the site requires a lot of work I value my opportunity to consume the product and I also value the opportunity of others to consume it Otherwise, I wouldn't contribute if we agree that the product is not property because it is not scarce. Does this uh agreement imply that I should not pay for it or or um, I think we get the The point if we agree the price not property because it's not scarce This is mean I shouldn't pay for it or even that a community A community's legal system should not penalize for for paying for it. You know, I I'd like you to answer this But I I think that this gets us into a a very interesting issue that we haven't talked about at all tonight Which is this relationship between remunerative Services or remunerative products and an IP. I mean neither you nor I are proposing That people not try to figure out ways to make money from their ideas neither of us are suggesting that Absolutely not. I mean But what I do oppose is the idea that Just because it doesn't automatically occur to you that there's some entrepreneur or some would be entrepreneur Or some would be actor in the market on society How they could get Financially compensated for something they want to engage in or think they could engage in That's something It just because they haven't come up with a business model or a way to do that Doesn't mean that the answer is that the government the state should come in and impose An anti-competitive monopoly that just legally prohibits competitors um I mean, I hate to keep going back to the simple example, but um You know movie theaters Have people that they pay to self tickets and to Watch the doors and they have doors installed So that people can't come into the movie theater Unless they pay this is a cost In economics, it's called a cost of exclusion and different businesses have come up with ways to efficiently Exclude these kinds of costs so that they exclude free riders so they can make a profit This is just part one little tiny aspect of the entire Business endeavor. I don't think it's special That's not a third starting ip you could you could have the same kind of movie theater situation in the absence of ip and basically The ip of movies is unenforceable. Anyway, anybody can pop open their laptop and watch virtually anything these days Yeah And they did profitable Well in the in the early days, you know, there was the screenwriter problem with the drive-ins Okay, so people would just park on the hills and they were to watch the movies for free Because there were big screens open to the public and they were loud speakers behind the screens So the movie theaters started putting these little speakers on these little poles Next to every car that the drive-in to the drive-in movie. That's why they did that So that was a cost of exclusion that cost them something it probably changed the experience But it worked for a while and nowadays It's it's almost probably inconceivable what people do in response to practical realities But you know movie movie producing companies They show the movies on 3d screens and big movie theaters. They have early screenings for extra extra fees they they put them on airplanes next they put them in movies and I They sell them on itunes At a high rate then they rent them later, then they put them on Netflix then you put them on HBO Whatever they have many streams of income and they have ways of dealing with this problem Even though there's pirating going on at the same time This is just reality Yeah, and some there's some kind of solution to execute people for for pirating content. It's it's it's not right There's there's a way in which I think you and I have talked about this like as important and Gigantically important intellectually the the IP issue isn't it has very terrible patterns have terrible effects on the world In the end, I mean ideas You know as as people say, you know want to be free, you know, I mean there's there's a trajectory Towards um towards piracy Um, uh, I mean if if itunes hadn't figured out a good way to organize people's Songs in a library and an efficient download system and made it incentivize people to actually pay for some service. They were offering You know, they never could have made money because because the song itself Has has essentially a zero price in the in the world of the internet It's the services that are that people are charging from and this is a linguistic confusion people get confused It's like I will buy that that book from amazon. Oh, did you buy the e-book or you buy the physical book? Well, I went ahead and bought the e-book. Well, you're actually not buying an e-book Oh, and if the book itself is under current law Under current law if you get an e-book or or you buy you quote unquote buy a song from itunes You actually only have some kind of limited license to it You actually don't own it like you would own the cd Of the vinyl album or the DVD or the movie In under the older law. So you're not actually even buying it even under current positive Positive law look, I think that the thing is that The ip mentality And the ip system is entrenched. It's not going to go away anytime soon just like the state um, so when people say what can you do You can't stop the system, but And i'm not advocating, uh, you know illegal activity piracy all that that's an individual decision However, you know, you can release your work Creative comments you can go to a publisher that doesn't force you to Lock up the copyright you can try to encourage your employer or go to a company that has a better patent policy on ideas There are actually things we can do In our daily lives you can try to be open. You can try to not use the state's monopoly Against competition and ideas. Listen. Yeah, I have to just tell you stephan from my own point of view when I look back at everything I've written If I had not published Most of what I've written in the comments, you know If I hadn't been a policy of the publishers whom I wrote Um, I would be in serious serious trouble today. You know, I mean it's just By your previous publisher you'd be you'd be actually restricting yourself Your earlier self would be restricting your future self from using what you had already built on and learned That's right. Yeah, you know, I I've been actually very insistent on on this It's every institution that I've that I've worked for or published for like that's the the first thing I do is say Listen, we have to deal with this problem of of copyright here. It is not helping you It's actually hurting you and devaluing our authors contributions Uh, and and I've been successful actually in three Or even four separate times and in bringing about this this policy of the comments and it's been You know, it's been a lifesaver for me. I mean the idea that I would have to basically start over as a as a thinker intellectual writer You know with every new institution that I'm working for or contracting with is is absolutely terrifying It's a violation of my human rights essentially So authors need to think about this Well, you know and people say well, I want to publish with an academic press or whatever for prestige You know bolder than the bean who wrote the great against intellectual monopoly a book that influenced you and me both They published that book with Cambridge University press and they actually made a deal with them That uh, Cambridge would allow them to put a free PDF version of the book online and it's still online on their site right now It's called against against monopoly.org Um, so if you just push if you just ask and push for it You can make deals and you can liberate the work that you're trying to spread to humanity Instead of shackling it with copyright, you know spread it Yeah, I mean I mean People commonly think that copyright is all about the rights of the authors Like it's not only untrue. It's quite often in reality the opposite of the truth It's the writers themselves who are most exploited by the practical implementation of copyright Uh, wow Stefan has gone away Uh, Stefan got sick of me Or something. Well, let's just wait one second here. Uh, well, let's see if he comes back We've gone over time and and to tell you the truth that, um I mean Stefan and I could sit around here and talk about this until midnight So it's probably a good idea for us to call it anyway I'll give it just one quick second to see if he comes back Okay, it's not happening. So, uh, thank you all for being here. Um, it's a it's a fascinating topic. We just Touched the surface of it. Um, on liberty.me you can download Cancelo's monograph against intellectual property, I guess is the name of it Um, a wonderful epic Epic book changed changed me, you know, I read it for the first time. I thought it was crazy It took me fully six years to come around to this argument Um, and I've still just not not stopped thinking about it because it's it's so early fascinating Thank you again for joining me on sunday night. Um, I'm sorry. I've missed the last couple weeks when traveling I think I've got a better schedule coming up. So I'll be here with you every sunday night Um, over the over the coming weeks and let's talk about some other cool books I'm thinking about introducing into the series and some different works. I like, you know, I want to talk about binging and constance Liberty the ancients compared with out of the marg of the moderns, which is a monograph that I'm obsessing about right now. I'm reading progress and poverty by Henry George, which is Just incredibly fascinating a book just for its widespread influence I mean, you know for 70 years epic amazing. I can't believe in their reddit Uh, another book I think I kind of like to talk about is is atlas shrug Since as you know, I'm I'm halfway through with it and and now at the point of binge reading so enjoying it and honestly, I hope to finish it in a few weeks and Um, we find a hold some hangouts on that one, right? Thank you all so much I'll liberty me members if if you somehow are watching and not a member Use this opportunity right now to come and join us. People are so happy. I get notes all day from new members that say I can't believe I waited so long to join you. I'm so glad I'm in now So I think I think if you're not a member, um You'll enjoy the other thing is existing members go out and recruit some people Get some more people into the community Um, we can share time together and share ideas and exchange ideas with each other I love being part of this community. I know you do too Thank you all so much and I look forward to seeing you next week all the best. Bye. Bye my friends. Bye. Bye