Hello everyone, my name is Eduardo Silva, and welcome to this session called Hydroboot Plus Low Resource Usage Outlogging Journey. As you can see my email is on the first slide, so feel free to reach out anytime for questions or any kind of follow-up that you wanted to do. As I said, my name is Eduardo, I'm mostly on Twitter and GitHub and the main link is Twitter. I'm the founder of Caliphia, which is a company which provides food support and products on top of the FluentD and FluentBit ecosystem. Feel free to reach out through the website too. I'm also the creator and maintainer of FluentBit project, which is part of the CNTF FluentD subproject. So in general, everybody wants performance, right? If you want to achieve high throughput, you think about performance. But everything has a little cost, right? So and when people say performance, sometimes think about what's the number of records or events that they can process by a unit of time, right? And after that, you start realizing that maybe the setup that you have or the strategy that your tool is using might not be conformant or maybe it's not following the best practices from a configuration perspective. If you think about, I want to consume low CPU or I don't want to exceed this amount of memory. And that is, it's really hard to come up with an ideal solution. But I can talk about how do we solve this problem in FluentBit and where are we going with this? So our journey started years ago. We had this project called FluentD. And FluentD is really good for service, it's really good for aggregating information. We have a huge ecosystem, right? Where with people and companies has contributed more than a thousand of plugins. And it's really great. So I'm saying this because maybe I would say that 80% of you may be familiar with FluentD, which is CNCF project. But also here we're going to explain and talk about the journey of the sub-project of it, which is part of the ecosystem. And when talking about logging, there's a couple of things that we need to clarify, right? Logging by itself is not cheap. And we need to understand that logging in the past used to be pretty simple, right? An application just chip a message, this message. Or maybe use a syslog or syslog or any kind of service to handle the message for it, right? And most of these messages are text-based. But if you think about what is the end of this message is that it allows you to perform some data analysis. And to do that, you need to take all these messages and centralize them in a database. So then you can create some kind of schema or run some queries on top of it. It doesn't matter if you store it in a sequel or no sequel kind of database or document oriented. Actually, the pattern is pretty much the same. You want to have some structure, which is on top of the text message that was generated at the beginning. And one of the challenges if you think about throughput performance is that every time we have more data because we have more applications, right? Everybody is now deploying microservices, the coupling, everything. And it's really hard to keep control of what's the logging rate of the application. What kind of messages did this send in, right? Sometimes you don't want to just care about specific messages like info warning errors, but maybe you don't want to debug messages. Maybe you can raise your hand if you have been managing some system where a developer by mistake just enabled the debug mode for one application.  But that affects performance, right? Because that is our goal. And as I said earlier, so if we think about the workflow of how these work together, is that we have this application that generates a simple log message. And sometimes multiple of them. As an example, let's take this simple message that comes from a NGINX log access log. Actually, what it's doing is just writing a message which specifies the IT address, a timestamp on when the request was generated, plus the information from the protocol, the method, the URI, the protocol version, the response site from the server, blah, blah, blah. But this log message also is not unique, right? It could be different. Sometimes applications generate messages in different formats, even coming from the same application. Sometimes you have multi-line application or think about stack traces, right? So you can think that this thing is a bit complex. And when you have this application generating this message, I would say that 80% of the time is just a raw text message. It doesn't have any structure. It doesn't have any schema. Nowadays, we are seeing people and companies trying to accomplish. Let's try to log with JSON or trying to unify a specific format. But in reality, that effort has been around for years. And it's really hard to say that the industry is going to align to one specific format. It's really hard. It doesn't happen in the last 20 years, right? But I would say that nowadays, because of parting capabilities, maybe JSON is like the middle point between all the options available. I'm not saying that it's best. It's really slow. But at least it's something that we can start with, right? And when we generate this message, this message gets to this, being handled by syslog or syslog or syslog. Any kind of services running in the system. And now we can have many of them. But also we think how this works, because our goal is to perform data analysis, is that we have all these files with all these records, maybe from different applications, maybe from the same one. So we need to have this kind of engine that is able to listen for these messages, or realize that they are there, and then be able to take them and send it out to any destination, like Amazon 3, Elastic, Stackdriver, Splank, or any kind of service, right? Nowadays we have multiple options in the market. This is just an example of one of them. There's no preference from my perspective. Actually every user might choose their own vendor or vendors for each one. And in the engine side, there's a couple of steps. It's not just take the data in and send the data out. If you think about throughput, that is quite easy, and that is quite fast. There's not so much possible work on that, take the data in, send the data out. But actually a real log processing, log processor, needs to come, deal with different kinds of things, like for example, collection of logs that come from different sources, not just a file, maybe from system D, from TCP, UDP. Take this data, optionally try to apply some parsing to convert it on a structure method to a structure, maybe to JSON or maybe some binary format that we can deal with internally. And sometimes most of these messages also need to have some metadata on it. If you are receiving some messages over TCP, likely you would like to write that IP address from where these messages come in from. Now, if you are, we're in KubeCon, right? So if you think about messages coming from your pod, you would like to have your labels inside the same record. So then you can group them and perform your query without any problems without losing context. But also there are other cases where you want to perform some data reduction, right? If you're dropping a lot of messages, and these messages have like, as I said earlier, information, debug messages, maybe you don't want them, right? So you want to make sure that everything that comes as a debug messages in your pipeline, just drop it, right? If you think about a storage that charge you the build, right? Because of the amount of data that you ingest, right? You're maybe interested in to perform data reduction and not send the whole information. Also as part of the role of the log processor is to perform buffering. And buffering is the capability to take this data and optionally maybe store it perceived in a person's way on this, because you need to restart the service or maybe the service just crashed, or you have to get a hardware failure or net audience. So you want to make sure that you don't lose any data. And finally, be able to send this information to different destinations. And these destinations are important is some of them are just to handle the information as binary blocks, right? Because they just want to store the information that I'm getting. But for example, in the case of Elastic, you just care about how to query my documents. Ideally, I want to have all my documents in Elastic with a good structure in the JSON map so I can query or have kind of index through them, right? Same thing happened with Stackdriver and same thing happens with Explan plus others. In general, you can think that we have an input with different sources. We have this engine in the middle and we have the output. So explaining these concepts is really important to understand performance, right? Because we need to realize how this works behind the scenes, right? So in general, simplifying everything is an input and an output. But we need to explain what is happening inside the input. For example, inside the input, you have a lot of IO. IO means maybe you are opening a file from the disk, right? Or maybe you are listening from a new network connection or maybe you are collecting metrics locally from the protocol system or just receiving them from a third party service. In the engine, it has a lot of work. As I explained earlier, it's like you have to parse information. You have to offer options to filter this data. Like enrich it or discard data also to serialize this information because if you get the data as route data or binary data and you're going to do all this parsing, this filtering, you need to have a unified model for your data, right? And having a binary format is ideal to do any kind of data processing. This buffering to store the data so you don't lose it and be able to have a routing logic to decide how to send my information that is coming from a specific source to a different destination based in a pattern, how to scale it twice and so on. And in the output side means that how do I send this information that I just got in my engine to a third party service? It's like I need to deal with network setup with payload formatting because every output destination expects a different payload format. Most of them are working with JSON nowadays, but for example, the difference is Kafka. Kafka has its own format for the network, but all of the others elastic, actual log analytics, even in Splunk, use JSON. And the output side needs to be with delivering content in different formats or also be able to understand if I'm sending this information, I need to expect for a specific return code because if something fails and my server maybe says, you know what, I could not produce process with information. We need to retry. The engine needs to be able to retry through a scheduler. So something that started as an input output has a lot of tasks that works internally. And now I'm going to introduce FluentBit. I know that just talking about it, talking about FluentD, and I'm sure that you are really familiar with this. Actually, FluentD and FluentBit are from the same family from the CNCF, and FluentBit is a CNCF subproject under the umbrella of FluentD. The good thing about FluentBit is that it was always designed to have high performance with FluentD, FluentD is great, but also is written in Ruby. And being written in Ruby has some downsides from a scripting language. It's really easy to extend, it's really easy to scale, but if you want to optimize some resources, it's really hard. And I would say that it's not just a Ruby, but any kind of language that starts implementing a system level application that starts coupling a bunch of dependencies, right? Actually, you start focusing mostly on usability or how to extend it, that optimizing every single component for performance. FluentBit is written in C language, and we try to reduce as much as possible the dependency and try to build our architecture and deal with most of the stuff on our own. And I think that from a community perspective, we have to get a really good feedback and really good traction from this. Nowadays, the users use FluentD, the majority of them, while others are using FluentBit, and we have a third option which both are using, well, they are using both, they are using FluentBit and they are using FluentD together. So let's talk more about the pipeline internals. We call a pipeline to everything that it closed data, right? We're talking about logging, we're talking about technology, right? We're talking about that kind of pipes. So understanding how the data flows is really interesting. Now, if we talk about system code, if we analyze in general, all the input interfaces to collect data from IOD's metrics or so on, you end up using system codes like open read, so can read and bind, and both functions to perform a memory allocation and memory management in general. This is pretty fine. This is not a big problem. I would say that most critical part is how do you manage the memory while consuming data, while processing the data, and while sending this information out. As part of the engine, we can call it a processor. Here we're splitting the screenings in two parts. Actually, the engine needs to be able to do parsing, right? Because we mentioned that we want to have this constructed information to a structure format, right? So we could take a JSON, parse a JSON, or apply a regular expression on top of this data, because my data is quite custom, but I know how to group them, right? As the engine example, we know that the first field is an IP address, the second one is a timestamp, and so on, or log format for a golden message, CSV, etc. Also, as part of filtering, you might want to do some kind of data enrichment. In Kubernetes, of course, you want to open all your labels, or sometimes your annotations, to every single log record. But also, you want to do some kind of data exclusion based on some patterns. And internally, I would say in our case, we sterilize all our information. Every single event, that's a metric or a log record, we use message pack, which is a kind of a similar to a JSON binary, but quite more performant. And for buffering mechanism, we offer memory and disk, which we are going to explain in a few minutes. Also, as part of this processing work, we need to be able to roll this data, right? We have a logic to roll this data, meaning, like, for every data that comes from a different, from a specific source, you want to send it, for example, elastic search. But also, you want to archive all the information to Amazon F3. Yeah, this is quite common example. And we have found some cases also that a enterprise companies are using Splunk heavily, and they are deciding to just send to Splunk, not 100% of the data, but maybe 50%, right, which is more critical information that you are going to rank where it's already, and all of the other two archive systems, right? And also, as part of this processing engine, we have all this scheduling, we have our own schedule, because if you're collecting data, you need to have a lot of timers to say when to collect data from which place and which kind of collector, but also have this logic that if some output destination failed and asked to reply something, be able to handle that task and implement a reply in place. As part of the output side of this pipeline, we mentioned that everything is about also network setups. So we need to perform DNS lookup, connect to a endpoint, and you want to implement, of course, nowadays, TLS. So actually, as part of that process, you want to handle the TLS handshake, and ideally, you want to maintain this a connection alike with keep alive, right? If you are closing a connection and open a new connection every single time, that will be really expensive because the TLS handshake process is really expensive because of the round trips. We mentioned that also internally, we have all this data in binary format, right? And this binary format for us is message-to-pack. But when you are talking to Elasticsearch, Elasticsearch does not understand message-to-pack. It understands JSON maps or well, any kind of JSON object. So what you have to do or what we do in our Elasticsearch connector is take this message-to-pack binary message and then convert it back to JSON and then send it over the network, right? So we need to do the payload delivery, write all the data, make sure that all data was delivered, check for return status, and report to the engine what was the final status of about all this process. So now about optimizing all this data process and IO in general, it's really interesting to understand how things works at the deep level. So as I said, for managed messages internally, we use a binary representation of the data using message-to-pack. And also, when dealing with how to handle this information, what is sterilized internally at runtime, we have a really good implementation with buffer management, with an hybrid mechanism, with memory and no file system. We group all the records in chunks, and this is something I'm going to explain in the next slide. About data serialization and message-to-pack, here in the screen we have a table which compares how many bytes compares to using JSON versus message-to-pack, right? For example, for a new message-to-null in JSON, this means four bytes in message-to-pack is just one. If we go to a more critical example with a map, which is in the last line, with a key called 40, and when a value new, actually it uses 11 bytes. In message-to-pack, that is five bytes. This is just a comparison of how one format works against the other. Of course, message-to-pack is quite small than a JSON payload, but I would say that this is one of the advantages. The other advantage is that in message-to-pack, you don't need to parse every single byte per byte. In JSON, you have to do it. You have to create some kind of index across all your maps, and then you can know where the data starts and where the data begins. In message-to-pack, you can know that you have an array beforehand with X number of items, so you can jump between them. When you are dealing with data processing, when you are removing some message, sorry, so key or adding more key or doing any kind of modification, it's quite more performant and easy to do it. Internally, when we get this data, we talk about data serialization. Now, imagine that we got a text message as a JSON map. What we do is convert this JSON to message-to-pack, and then we have this notion of tag. A tag is just like a label. For every information that comes from a specific source that has the same tag, they are all grouped together under the same chunk. A chunk is just an amount of bytes that store many records. Usually, we handle chunks around two megabytes, which has been really efficient for most of the use cases. Consider the chunk, which is a more critical unit of data, granular data that we have in the fluent bit pipeline. Now, how this operates, for example, in memory? When the agent starts getting data, what we do is to create just one chunk in memory. What we do is start appending the events on that chunk until that chunk gets to two megabytes. Then we simply create, if we get more information, we just get a new chunk and we do the same procedure. It doesn't matter if we have the same tag or not, we just create blocks of chunks in memory. At one point, we have a bunch of chunks linked in memory, which is pretty efficient. It's pretty fast. Actually, memory buffering is a faster implementation. But there's one downside, right? It's not persistent. It's not persistent. So what would happen if our service is restarted? What would happen if it's a service crash? Yeah, you're going to lose that data. Also, there's one more critical part. If you're running in containers, likely your container will have a limit about how much memory that process in this case, fluent bit, can consume.  So there's a kind of special situations where you just want to run in memory, right? But I would say 90% of the time, you want to use a secondary option with a secondary option, which is a file system. In the opposite, what it does in the file system is not storing the things in memory, means that we're going to start storing the things in the file system, right? But this, of course, is more intensive on IOS. But here we have a couple of optimizations on how do we find the chunks on how do we store them, right? So every time that we get more information, we are getting a new chunk and just appending this information to the chunk. And to what point that we have many chunks in the file system. But there's a curious thing here. Here, this is a couple of simple examples where we have five files, right? Five chunks. But if you think about that we have 2000s, 30,000s, because maybe you are not able to send the data because the destination is down, right? You will see a, but I'm going to have all these chunks open. I'm going to use a single file descriptor for each one. And I would say that now we are going to talk most about a databases concept, right? We don't use any external database, right? We implemented our own layer for this specific use case. Actually, we think that databases are really good and better proof, but they are for generic purposes, right? Here we are dealing with this kind of log information that we need to group in a different way and we need to deal with file system, memory, but based on our pipeline logic and not a generic database logic. I'm not saying that databases are bad. I'm saying that for our purposes and performance gains, our solution, this is the solution that we implemented works quite good. And now we are going to jump into a more elaborate complex, and this is what people really use in production. Actually, it's not just a memory of file system. What we have is like an hybrid mechanism where all the data that we are creating, of course, goes to memory. But in the pipeline, we say for this input source of data, for example, you are taking log files or listening for messages, you can say just keep up in memory. We have the concept of up and down. You can see in the screen that we have different colors in gray for down and a light green for up. Means that everything that is up in memory is ready to be used or maybe it's a challenge that you can append more data, right? But we protect the memory saying that, hey, you can have a memory up to, for an example, a hundred of chunks, right? And if each chunk is two megabytes, well, you can make the map your own. But after that, we start storing all the chunks in the file system. But how do we correlate this between all the chunks that are in memory plus file system? Actually, what we do is to use a memory map files, which is a really common implementation for databases, where we map a file that exists in the file system as if it were in memory. And actually, that is really, really performant, right? We are not using common system calls like read and write, because we try to avoid the context copy of the data between the kernel and user space. So using memory map files is quite fast. And we can have the control on how the data flows. And if we get ingested, for example, imagine that the output side is down, and we're getting more data in, you are going to face this concept of back pressure, right? If you don't have a file system, you're going to store all your data memory. And at some point, your process is going to crash. But what we do is storing memory as much as we can, based on our own configuration limits. And after that, continue writing to files. Now, if you look at the image, you will see that in the file system part or on the disk, you will see that some blocks are gray and others are likely. On this case, on gray, we are saying that these chunks are not up in memory. They're just in the file system. And when the memory part gets empty, not get empty, but start delivering the chunks, we get more room, more space to work on the pipeline. We just take the chunks and load them up in memory. And this has been implemented for almost two years. And there are various level designs where we can have, I don't know, 200k messages per second without any problem, but you can increase that based on configuration and your own, there are many variables in your environment. And then one thing about this, all this data processing, for example, with binary representation, we can get the CPU and the CPU consumption low, right? Also, all this IO2Ds, all this memory is quite more performant and it's a really scalable design. Right now, this is better proof. This is a fluent bit. It's quite used heavily on most of major cloud providers like Google, AWS, Microsoft, Azure. And as a team, we have this kind of companies that work together. Actually, we have working meetings with most of them, where they contribute also to the project. They are part of fluent bit and they're trying to improve the whole fluent ecosystem. Nowadays, this is a scalable design. I would say that it's most scalable and chip implementation in the market right now. You might find another solutions, but you will find that one thing is data rate and the other is data consumption, right? So if you want to send the data fast enough, yeah, just avoid the filings, right? If you want to always have a low CPU, a low memory consumption, maybe you can slow down the ingestion, do something. Also, a good thing to mention for everybody is like, don't trust what I'm saying. I would say that in general, when running these kind of things, you should run your own benchmark. And don't trust in benchmarks that are published on the website, right? We need to trust in our own benchmarks. You might, every project has not had their own baseline, but we encourage every single user to run your own benchmark because every single configuration is different. Every use case is different. Now, as an expert, we're going to do a quick demo on how fluent bit operates. And with the time, we're going to just explain a little bit of the configuration, how do we achieve to send in just something conservative numbers like 100,000 records per second, which is most suitable for all cases. Actually, that configuration is using file system buffering, right? Together with this hybrid mechanism. So I'm going to switch back to the terminal. Now, in my left pane here, I have the my fluent bit configuration. This is a bare metal server on a different place. And we're going to do is basically just tell one log file and send the data in JSON format to a remote HTTP endpoint, right? The remote HTTP endpoint is here on the right. And this is just a basic TLS with HTTP server that is able to understand the JSON records and also expose a primitives metrics. Okay. And on the third one, I'm going to run the load generator, which is a script that will generate around a thousand lines per second, right? Each one will have one kilobyte. Okay. So to get started, I'm going to run fluent bit. And now the configuration file. But let me check that I didn't add a full cleanup of everything. Okay. We're good to go. Now I'm going to start Prometheus because we are interested in to collect the metrics and run the HTTP server. And as soon as I start the load generator here, we are going to see that the data, the count of records will start increasing on the right. So let's start. You will see also that in the fluent bit pane right here, we're seeing a bunch of AS status messages that the data was processed. And now also you can realize on the right that the number of records keep increasing. And actually it's increasing quite constantly for a hundred thousand records. So let's verify how everything is working on the Prometheus side. So I'm going to my web browser and start typing the address of Prometheus endpoint. Okay. I'm here. I'm going to write my promql query, which will be fluent underscore records total. And we're going to use a five minutes. And we're going to graph this information. We're going to get down so we can just get the new data that we are getting now or just the latest minute. Okay. So this is information that we are processing at the moment. Actually it's quite constant. This was the start of the process. If we continue running the query, we will see that we are constantly around a hundred thousand messages per second. Usually on this scenario, we don't see any back pressure. We don't see any problems. We might see sometimes that the data goes down for a few seconds, but could be because of networking. But then usually it recovers without problem. Okay. In the normal scenario, like in a Kubernetes cluster, the data rate will be different. Actually, you might expect to have, I don't know, a couple of notes sending data to your own database. Right? It could be Elastic Splang, but there's no generic setup for each one to achieve a perfect rate. Actually, it's quite complex to determine what would be the ideal requirements from a hardware perspective. But we can see that with this way, we can process data without any major problem. Okay. So we're going to get back here to the terminal and we see that everything keeps running without any major problem. Okay. So I think that we are good to go with this. And I think that now it's time for some Q and A, some questions. So please feel free to write your questions right now in the chat or live during this session. Thank you so much.


Now, we have to bring on our next guest, Stefan Kinselli is a registered patent attorney, Libertarian theorist and a lecturer, director of the Center for Study of Innovative Freedom and Executive Director of Libertarian Papers. He's published numerous articles and books on IP law, international law and the application of libertarian principles to legal topics, received an LLM, I don't know exactly what that is, but I think it's a legal note of recognition, an international business law from Kings College, London, a JAD from Paul M. Herbert Law Center at LSU, I guess if it was an LSU, it was probably a Bayer Law Center, and BSE and MSCE degrees from LSU. He has a book that's going to be coming out soon titled Law in a Libertarian World, Legal Foundations of Free Society, and it's going to be published by liberty.me next year, so it's going to be coming out probably after the first year. Stefan, welcome to the show. Yeah, is he there? Is his microphone muted? Chuck, he should be connected to us here. It shows up on my screen. Yeah, we're maybe had to go to the bathroom or something. Okay. I had to do that one night, I remember. Well, he's in the chat. Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now? Okay, sorry, it's a microphone problem. I just took my microphone out. I'm glad to be here, Chuck. Thank you very much. Yes, I'm leaving. I'm going to have to put a headphone to something. I'm just getting the nap call off. Yeah, give me a second. While you're doing that, I'm going to Stefan probably has his console running on UCY. Oh, let me see. Maybe. I'm hearing myself. Anyway, I first came across Stephen, when he delivered a speech at a Mises Institute gathering about about really thinking intellectual properties. And it was it literally changed the way I thought about intellectual property. And I guess we just had on Richard von Sternberg from the founder of the American Star Company. Immediately, I thought of him when I saw when I watched Stefan's speech, this is this is exactly what happened to Richard. And so he's he's been somebody that's been on my kind of on my screen. I always wanted to read anything he wrote. Can you hear me now, Chuck? Perfect now. Perfect. Good. I think I had a bit of like that. Yes. So anyway, it's been about it's been about seven years since that speech, I think. So I've had many, many a debate with people who would debate the things that I used to believe to me. And I would I found myself defending all the things I'd learned from you and kind of attacking their positions, because I thought they're just fundamentally wrong. And it was this very difficult process. But I was able to at least convince a large majority of the people I did talk with that the intellectual property laws weren't working the way they're supposed to be working. And so I think that'd be a good place to start is maybe talk about some of the abuses of the system. And maybe actually, we should probably go back a little bit and kind of explain how the patent is and copyright system is intended to work. And then we can go into why it doesn't work. Well, so the way it's intended to work, you can talk about the way it's sold right down and the way it's stated by legislators when it's enacted, or you can talk about the real sort of the real purpose behind it. I don't think the stated intent of patent and copyright law is really what is the real intent behind it. The stated intent is to encourage and promote innovation and artistic creativity by providing you some kind of financial incentive to be compensated for producing innovations and inventions, artistic works, things like that. This is the common argument given for these laws, copyright and patent primarily. Other types of laws that are similar are trademark and trade secret, but we don't really, unless you want to, we need to go into both. The two big ones are trademark, I'm sorry, patent and copyright. I think that would be enough. We're just trying to, I think that we're trying to see how they've been kind of taken over and controlled by other parties that we're supposed to be protected from. For a short history, we haven't had free markets forever. In fact, we don't have free markets now, perfectly. There's always been use by people in power of their ability to control things for their own benefit. Back in the days of mercantilism, say several hundred years ago in Europe, the kings would grant favors to people. So they would say, I will give you the monopoly on the right to sell soap, or you're the only person who can trade sheepskin in this area. That's called the patent or a monopoly. In exchange, the guy would help the king collect taxes or he would get his loyalty. So it was basically an exchange. So the crown used their political power to grant a monopoly to protect someone from competition or to give them a monopoly over a given area in exchange or some kind of favor or some kind of service. I have an interesting story that just popped in my head from my days in the jewelry business. The first person had discovered how to make porcelain china. He took it to the king to show him what he had done. The king immediately had him locked up and he was then, from that point on, only to make china for the king. And that was how they protected that intellectual property. The innovation of the person that had the brilliance to figure that out, he was in a prisoner. He was well fed and well clothed and everything. But he was the prisoner nonetheless for the rest of his life. The king did not want anyone else to have the sacred. It was how he became rich. And that was one of the things that enriched that bloodline of people throughout Europe was the wedgewood china company was founded from the descendants of that king. Well, and this gets to the modern confusion over the justification for patent and copyright. So patent, which people now say is used to stimulate innovation and invention was really originated in the grant of monopoly privileges and anti competitive, you know, control of the market by the crown. Copyright was originated in the government and the church's fear of the printing press because they didn't want ideas to get circulated widely that they didn't approve of. They didn't want the average person to be able to see. So they instituted these guild like structures that controlled which books could be printed. And so one example would be the stationers company in the 1500s in England. This culminated in the statute of Anne of 1709. And by the way, the patent statutes culminated in the statute of monopolies is 1623. So they were actually called it was called the statute of monopolies. There was no bones about it. Nowadays we call it intellectual property as sort of a cover for what it really is. But originally the government was pretty plain about the nature of what they were doing. But the interesting thing in your your story reminds me of this is that the authors of books who were controlled by this guild, the stationers company and later by the crowns copyright type regulations. What they wanted was the ability to publish their own books without permission of anyone else. This is why they were in favor of copyright because the copyright statute the statute of Anne appeared to give the right back to the authors because it said now the authors have the right to control who can publish their works. They weren't seeking this right so they could extort, you know, royalties from people and keep people from copying their works. They were doing it so that they wouldn't be prohibited from doing it. But very soon after the publishing industry stepped right back into the role it had had before because you had to have a publisher to publish your book. And so you had to assign your copyright back to the publishing industry. So this has led to the situation we have now where most authors even today have sold their life's work to some publishing industry company. And even if they wanted to publish a sequel or to authorize a foreign translation of their own book, they can't do it. And if they don't have a big bestseller, the publisher might forget about it. It goes into oblivion. It goes into this black hole of unpublished works which no one else can authorize even the author can't authorize it. So you have this mythological idea that the patent system is for the little guy, the little inventor and the copyright system protects authors and musicians. When in reality the copyright system has propped up the publishing and the music industry and forced these creators to sell their souls to these large companies. And the patent system basically benefits large companies like Apple and Samsung and even Google but almost never the small inventor. Yeah, I actually think that Microsoft the last or the next innovation that they come up with might be their first. I think they exist solely on just buying up other companies, taking all their patents and going out going to court and seeing how many royalties they can harvest and finds and things they can collect. It's turning into kind of a joke. It's not even close to the stated purpose of the patent. What a copyright. Yeah, not only that, I mean the so-called stated purpose in the Constitution is that Congress is authorized and this is the Constitution enacted in 1789, authorized Congress to protect the works of authors and inventors for limited times to promote the progress of science and the arts. And by the way, science in those days meant what we would call the arts now and the arts meant what we would call science now sort of backwards because arts meant like the work of artisans like people that make inventions or innovations or horseshoes or whatever and science meant just the general knowledges, the knowledge sciences, literature, etc. But it only authorized Congress to protect these for limited times. And originally the copyright law protected works for 14 years, extendable by application of the holder for another 14 years, 28 years maximum. And by the way, 14 years was there because it was a term of two consecutive apprenticeship terms. The idea was, let's give this guy a monopoly privilege over his inventions or his copyrighted works that last for about the length of two apprentice terms because by that time he can train them and use their services and then maybe they can compete with them after that, but he's got enough breathing room to compete with his own apprentice. Something weird like that. Well, now copyrighted lasts for the life of the author in America plus 70 years. So that's well over 100 years in most cases. Yes. And not only that, but companies like Disney have copyrighted Snow White, which they didn't even write. Yeah. Well, they copyrighted their version of it. So that would be a derivative work, but the original work was public domain. So they didn't need permission of any copyright holder, but so they came up with the derivative of it, which was itself original. So it was covered by copyright. And you have right now, I mean, this is being negotiated as we speak the Trans Pacific Partnership, which is a huge treaty, which is being negotiated by America and Western and Asian countries that represent about 40% of the world's GDP. It's been negotiated for a couple of years in secret. It holds itself out as being for a pro free trade agreement. But as released like yesterday or today on WikiLeaks, there's a huge IP section, which seeks to force the other nations to adopt America's copyright terms. So most countries of the world have signed on to the burn convention, which America forced them to sign 20, 30 years ago, which is, which says a copyright term has to be life of the author plus 50 years. America added tack 20 years on to it when Mickey Mouse's copyright is going to expire courtesy of Sonny Bono of Sonny and Sharefane, you know, the congressman who ran for the tree when he was he into a tree. Yes. Exactly. And by the way, we're all over this Trans Pacific Partnership agreement. We've been posting it in our Facebook page all the news, as much news as we can find about it for about a month. Yeah, it's horrible. It's not, it's not pre trade. It's not, it's called free trade. It's only free trade for a few select insiders. It's kind of free trade inside a vacuum bell. Everybody else right outside. We don't have free trade, but those people inside that that bell, the bell shaped vacuum thing, they've got free trade. Yeah, it's managed trade and but the worst thing is it's not only managed trade and it extends IP law. It's trying to extend draconian US style IP law, which is the worst in the world, basically, to other countries to make them extend their burn prevention copyright coverage by 20 years and other provisions as well. Thank God that this thing was leaked, although I don't know if it's going to stop it. You know, we defeated SOPA and PIPPA, the Stop Online Empiracy Act and the another counterfeiting act and the anti-counterfeiting trade agreement, the ACTA, has been ratified by a few countries now and also a lot of the provisions of both of those laws are in the TPP. So these guys don't give up. Even if the internet rises up and stops one of these laws, these lobbyists just work behind the scenes and they just, they put it into another bill or another treaty or another trade agreement and they just, they keep going. The forces are inevitable. Yes. Well, let's, I want to just kind of take a small detour. This is kind of still in the same vein. In the speech you've given there, there were some real hilarious things you were showing about the, some cases that actually came out were patents or went to trial because patents had supposedly been violated. The one that made me laugh the hardest was the one that Amazon brought against a book company. You're talking about the one-click patent they brought against the Barnes and Noble right before Christmas is about six or seven years ago. Yeah. Because it was, they owned, they had patented the one-click. They patented a method for like completing an online transaction by having a shopping cart representation and allowing the sale to be completed by making one click instead of two or three. So really it wasn't technological. It was just kind of the business idea. And by the way, Jeff Bezos, who I think was the actual inventor on that patent, who's the CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos has come out in the meantime. He says, he thinks that software patents, the term should be reduced from about 17 years, which is the typical patent term now, to about three years. He really thinks software patents are harmful. Of course, that's a little self-serving because Amazon hasn't used that since and it helped them demolish their competitor for one Christmas season and probably made several million dollars off of it. So they've already gotten the return on their $10,000 patent. And they're going to change the rules again. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And that, there was another one in that presentation you showed, so your PowerPoint, there was a sculpture of a hand making a one-finger salute. That's a copyrighted design or is it a design patent or I don't know. Yeah, that was a, I've got the, if your listeners want to see that, I've got a speech I gave at the Mises Institute. It was the Rothbard Memorial Lecture. If you just go to stephandconcello.com or go to my media page, you can find it. And if you click on that link, I've got these slides I used and some examples of absurd patents. And that one was probably a design patent. I think it was the, it was the shape of a hand giving someone the finger flipping the bird used on an ornament or a trailer hitch or something like that. I forgot exactly where it was. But yeah, that was a design patent, which is a type of patent. And that was, that somebody would, would actually be allowed to have a design patent on that was, to me, was kind of absurd. That's probably been, what do you say, that only got a three or four thousand year old symbol? Well, but actually, to be honest, design patents. So there are several types of patents. There's plant patents, which has to do with asexually reproduced plants, plants. There's design patents, which are sort of like copyrights or the way things ornamentally look. And then there's utility patents, which is the patent we all think of. It's a patent on a useful or something that has utility as a useful machine or process. As silly as the design patents are, they're not that harmful in practice. The most harmful ones are the utility patents. And not only that, as much as we hear about junk patents and patents that shouldn't have been granted, because they're obvious, you know, the invention uncovered is obvious. Or as much as we hear about patent trolls, people that sue people, even though they never made the product that is covered by their own patent. These are the least harmful applications of patent law. The most harmful is the utility patent that is not a junk patent and that is not asserted by a troll. That is a patent that is a high quality patent. That is a patent that should have been granted according to the patent rules. A patent that covers the invention that is unique and is not obvious and is useful and is covers a product made by the person asserting it. Because those are the types of patents that are used to hamper competition. The entire purpose of a free market and property rights or one of its characterizing features is that we ought to have free competition. And if you see someone doing something that is successful and pleases customers, you can enter the field and compete with them. That's what competition is all about. The entire purpose of the patent system is to stop that. It's to say that you cannot compete with someone for some silly reason, but you can't do it. They can use this patent to prevent you from doing something too similar to what they're doing. And if you step back and think about it, there's nothing wrong with emulating or even copying what other people have done as long as you use your own resources and you sell to your own customers. There's just nothing wrong whatsoever with that. And for the law to stop it is market list and protectionist. And it's anti-free market. It's anti-free property. That's exactly what I believe. During that speech, someone made a question from the audience, and I couldn't quite hear the question, but she were talking about the... Once they grant a patent, there's like an 18-month waiting period before they even publish it, so nobody else even knows what its contents of the patent are for 18 months. Well, this is a relatively... Yeah, so this is about... Did I understand that correct? Yeah, that's correct. Until the law was changed in the 1990s, patent applications were kept secret until the patent issued, which could be 10, 20, 30 years. That gave rise to what's called submarine patents. That is, so someone would file something, and in the meantime, and they would keep refiling it in secret and changing it a little bit. In the meantime, someone else would independently invent something covered by the patent, and the whole industry would arise to be covered by it, like say windshield wipers, intermittent windshield wipers, something like that. And then the patent owner would let the patent emerge like a submarine emerging from the sea. That's why they call them submarine patents, and sue everyone based upon the current market size. Well, in the 1990s, the law was changed pursuant to the gadgetry, the general agreement on terrorist and trade, and the trips agreement, the trade related IP aspects of the trade agreement. It was changed so that you had what's called a provisional patent. You could file it a year ahead of time to get a placeholder, and the patent term has changed at that time from 17 years from the date of issuance to 20 years from the date of filing. They did that partly to counter the submarine patent problem, and what they said was, if you want to take advantage of this new system, now we're going to publish your patent application at 18 months. So at 18 months after you file it, all patent applications now become public unless you file a disclaimer at the beginning saying, I promise you, I won't file for international trademark of patent protection. So in most cases, you don't want to do that. You want to keep open the option of filing an international patent on your patent. And so in that case, your patent is published at 18 months. So that's still, you have, if you're in a state of the art type of innovation, there's a lot of people trying to create this next, let's say like in cell phone technology or something. And you come across this great idea, and you're the first one, you get your thing in there. It's going to be secret for 18 months, and someone else might come up with something else and start building a similar product, maybe based on that same idea, one would violate your patent, but then they are then liable for something they didn't need, they couldn't possibly even know about. Well, so, so, well, that is potentially correct. So, but how would they know about it? I guess if you're selling the product all right, so you're selling a product, and you have a patent pending that is secret, you're supposed to mark your product patent pending, and then patented once it's patented, you don't have to. And by the way, Obama changed the law a couple of years ago, so that the penalties for failing to mark your product patent pending or patented have almost disappeared. Under the old law that is two years ago before two years ago, if you fail to mark your product patented, then you're really at a disadvantage when trying to sue people later because the idea is, well, you had the chance to put them on notice and you didn't, so it's not fair to extort them from money now. Well, now the penalties for failing to mark are almost non-existent, so they basically got rid of the marketing requirement, so it's even worse in a way that it used to be. Well, it's, I think it's really slowed down the innovation process across the board. I mean, America used to be the place where everything was invented and not so much anymore. You said in your speech that that one, I'm referring to that same talk again. That's the one that first grabbed my attention. I've always used these examples when I debate with people. They're the ones that are easy to remember. But you said something, I think it was Switzerland and another country in Europe that abolished their patent laws and changed them so that they could be more competitive, more competition in the marketplace. And they found out that innovation didn't get worse. It got better. Yeah. And if you look in, I've got a blog post about this, but there's also, if you go to my website, c4sif.org, Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom, to go to my resources page, I linked to a book by some friends of mine called the McKelley and Boldren and David Levine called Against Intellectual Monopoly. My work has been mostly sort of property rights and libertarian based. Theirs is more empirical and utilitarian and they examine the empirical case. And in chapter nine of their book Against Intellectual Monopoly, they examine the entire case for pharmaceutical patents, which is usually held up as the obvious case for patents. Like we have to have it for drugs or pharmaceuticals. And they look into this and they show that there have been long stretches in modern history, like 20, 30, 50 years at a time. I think Switzerland was one. I think Italy was another, well, they just simply didn't have a patent system that covered pharmaceuticals. And yet they were among the top pharmaceutical producers in the world for a while. There's lots of empirical studies like this that show, I would say counterintuitive, it's just, it's against the contrary, the received wisdom, but they show that innovation is perfectly possible and very prevalent in the absence of patent and even copyright systems. Yeah. And I think that that's, to me, is perfectly reasonable because I think there's a lot of people now that their resources that they have are being put into, they've been put into the things like staff, attorneys on staff to protect the patents. They're trying, when they do develop something, they're going to go on and cover as much of the market as they can to make sure that they aren't violating the patents. So they're spending a lot of time and energy on things that aren't producing any products and not producing any more innovations. They're just trying to cover their rear end and possibly keep them from getting, especially the smaller companies, because we saw beforehand what happened to my friend Richard in the diamond industry. He was just squashed like a bug by big, big money that copyrighted a trademark that made it impossible for him to talk about the superior nature of the product that he was producing.  I was going to say these laws, the common perception of these laws is helping the little guy is just completely wrong. What happens in reality, especially nowadays, it's gotten worse in the last 20 years or so. Think of the smartphone wars. Right now there are literally dozens of patent lawsuits going on around the world in different countries between dozens of country companies like Amazon, I'm going to start Apple and Samsung and various other players in the smartphone areas. And sometimes Apple or the other guys will be on the receiving side. Sometimes we'll be on the on the aggressive side. And what this does is they're, I mean, literally spending tens or hundreds of millions of dollars per year on legal fees alone, just funneling this to patent litigators like people like me to litigate these battles. Now, what this does is it, it, it, it means that only companies with the large patent arsenal, which also takes millions of dollars to obtain in the first place can even engage in this only large established companies, the big players can afford to pay these lawyers to be on the defense or the offense. So what it, what it does is it basically shuts out the smaller players, they can't even afford to enter the field. So it erects barriers to entry, it creates an oligopolized industry, which means an industry with one or two or three or very small number of very large players. So these laws, which the state grants monopoly power to companies, not surprisingly results in monopolistic behavior. So it actually hurts the small companies because they believe me, if you're a small company trying to go public or you're just small, trying to eke by on your meager, you know, angel funds or your friends and family funds or your very small profits, if you get sued by a big, a big competitor or you get a big demand letter saying you have to stop or we're going to hit you with a patent lawsuit and it's going to take you $5 million to defend yourself, you have to cave in or, or even better, you just don't enter a field in the first place because you know that it's impossible. So patent law actually staples, you know, individual entrepreneurship and innovation. It doesn't help it at all. Yes. Yes. And when they, when the small guys, even though there, there might be like a little mouse compared to an elephant in terms of the size of their competition, that still is, it forces the big guys to produce new products that they don't get, they don't lose their market share of these little startup companies. And so when they don't have to worry about those guys' market because they can crush them legally, they don't have to worry about innovation so much anymore because they've got the market, this is what we're going to produce and you're going to buy it. Yeah, I think that, well, and not only that, if you have a patent on a product that's popular, then you have less incentive to innovate because you don't need to in the free market. Oh yeah, that'd be cutting out your cash flow because that product seems to be sold if something new came along. Well, yeah, and not only that, I mean, people talk about the pharmaceutical case is the paradigm, the paradigm, paradigmatic case, you know, the standard case that argues for patents, but, and I'm not denying the benefit of some modern wonder drugs, although if you look at the modern wonder drugs that we've had in the last 50 years, almost none of them have been patented. All the great drugs of history that have cured millions of diseases, they've pretty much been not patented.  That one or some homeopathic natural remedy that no one has a patent on? I mean, there may be in some cases, I mean, I'm not a big homeopathic natural path type, but the point is, in some cases, I think that those remedies are as good or even better for some types of afflictions or maladies or conditions. Yeah, there's actually, seven, that's something I've spent a lot of time on because I had a really bad hypertension issue and medicine that they were putting me under control. It was making me feel horrible. And the doctor just told, well, I'm just going to have to live with it.  And I just refused to believe that. So I went started reading and I found that actually if you eat the right foods, your body will repair itself and your blood pressure will return to normal. And there's some lifestyle changes you might want to, you know, think out to change and things like that. So in my case, I was able to get off seven different pills and I have normal blood pressure now and a lot of other chronic symptoms that I had of other things to come, maybe down the road like diabetes and things like that have all disappeared. Just just because I eliminated a few problem foods from my diet and I started eating more nutritious food. So there's a lot to be said for some of these things is just getting the essential new minerals that you need to have healthy organ function. It's really important. But the point is the big pharmaceutical companies are not going to be promoting this because it's not in their interest. And I don't blame them for not supporting it. But the point is they're of course going to support the patent system because that allows them to patent some new fangled remedy, which they can charge a monopoly price for for 17 years or something like that. They're even trying to get a monopoly patent status on some designer vitamins that are basically there are synthetic vitamins that only have better vitamins that occur naturally that work better in your body. But they patent these and then they can get doctor to prescribe them. They can make a lot of money. So I think we can talk a lot about how the system is broken for probably another couple of hours because there's a lot of examples. I think everybody gets the idea here that it's not there's something wrong. So what kinds of you had some great ideas on things that could improve the situation and and make make the system work closer to how it was intended and then you could go over some of those. Well, honestly, I think the best solution would be to abolish patent and copyright. I think they are both contrary to the free market and private property. So the easiest the best solution would be to get rid of them. And by the way, I also believe there's a good argument that patent and copyright are unconstitutional because they were both authorized in the 1789 Constitution. But in 1791, two years later, the Bill of Rights was ratified and the Bill of Rights has many provisions which are contrary to patent and especially copyright. So for example, the First Amendment says that the government shouldn't regulate freedom of speech or freedom of the press. Well, there's no doubt that granting a copyright, which allows someone to go to court to get government force to stop someone from printing a book is a regulation of freedom of the press. So if you were a strict First Amendment First, you know, freedom of press, freedom of speech rights type person, you would see the conflict between freedom of the press and copyright clause. And so there's a conflict in the courts to see this, but they try to balance it. But they shouldn't try to balance it because the First Amendment came after. So it should repeal the copyright clause. So I would say, and there are other other arguments you could make for other, you could argue that the Eighth Amendment on the ban on cruel and unusual punishment applies to these crazy statutory fines, statutory penalties for copyright violations. The Fourth Amendment, the search and seizure is violated all the time in enforcing copyright law. The Fifth Amendment due process is violated by assuming someone's guilty just by showing that their IP address was used to download a movie, even though you don't show that they did it. So there's lots of arguments in the Bill of Rights that are in conflict with the copyright and even the patent clause because the patent law also results in censorship in some cases and other and other things. So if you stop short of this crazy kind of radical abolitionist approach, if you wanted to get closer to what the Constitution says, then first of all, the Constitution says the purpose of Congress being granted this power is to promote the progress of science and the arts. So I would say first, do no harm. Congress should only issue copyright monopolies and patent monopolies when there's a reasonable basis to believe that it promotes progress of science and the arts, which means they should have a study. Now at the beginning, 1789, they didn't have time to do studies. Okay, fine. It's been 230-something years. They've had time to do studies and there's been dozens or hundreds of studies done and guess what? None of them prove that these laws actually promote the progress of science and the useful arts. So until they can come up with reliable studies that it does, I think the laws should sunset or should be abolished. But short of that, if you wanted to improve things, you could at least go back to the original systems. The proposal and the copyright realm is called the Founder's Copyright. Let's go back, let's go from life of the author plus 70 years back to 14 years. Let's require registration of copyrights instead of having it be granted automatically. Just a couple of changes like that would radically improve the process. In the patent field, if you could simply get rid of injunctions and say you can get a royalty from someone who's using your idea but you can't stop them with a court injunction, that would radically improve it. If you would shorten the term from 17 years to say five years or three years, that would radically improve matters. So there are several practical things that could be done except that some of these things would violate treaties that we have insisted be forced upon the world. So the Berne Convention arguably prevents us from getting rid of the automatic registration of copyrights and requiring active registration like we used to have before 1982 because we have Berne and now Berne obligates us to adhere to Berne standards. So we have conveniently Hollywood and the movie industry and the software industry has in the pharmaceutical industry have conveniently forced Congress to enact a treaty that we forced other countries to agree to that ties our hands and now if we say well we should relax our copyright standards and move backwards a little bit, they say well we can't, we have Berne, we have to live up to, we have to live up to our international obligations don't we? So it's, it's like when you impose this on us in the first place, we need to exit Berne, we need to exit these international treaties and we need to radically scale back patent and copyright law. Yeah, that's, it's basically, I think the introduction you gave on the history of this where they used to call it like it is, it's a, it's a permission to have a monopoly. Right. That's, that's exactly what it is and all my whole life I've learned is one simple fact that monopolies are impossible without the force of government and it's nowhere more apparent than in the patent and copyright laws. Yeah, I agree. Look, I understand people want to be in favor of innovation and creativity and ideas and I am too. I'm a patent lawyer and I'm a libertarian and I'm an, you know, I believe in the intellect and creativity but we have been sold a bill of goods. These, these laws are special interest laws which benefit very narrow sectors of the economy and they do not result in anything good whatsoever except for an excuse for tyranny. I mean the internet is one of the most important tools for freedom that's ever emerged and we cannot let the government regulate it and control what can be set on it or how it can be used and yet copyright law and other government laws like child pornography, terrorism, money laundering, gambling, you know, these kinds of things, drug laws, there, the government uses these laws as an excuse to regulate the internet.  If someone, there was a, I don't, I did not read this firsthand so I got this from somebody else but apparently just like a year or two ago, Sky News which is the equivalent of Fox News in this country in England sues Suin Skype because they use Skype in the Skype name and they thought it was an infringement in their copyright. So this is, this is how it can be perverted and misused and used to take one person and even if they win a case they have to pay for the court costs and the person's retention from progressing and innovating and everything else that, yes, it's very disruptive to society and maybe just to individuals that, that who are those guys are true innovators. I mean they, they just get off our first gas Richard told this great story about the, you know, how much, how much of, I would say there's probably 20 years to develop this eight-star diamond from the beginning to the end and it had a lot of dead ends and they had to go back and start over and they went through literally tens of millions of dollars to do this and he has the rights to North America to cut these diamonds and to sell them there and someone thinks of a way they can screw them in court using IP laws so that he's out of business. Yeah, I agree. One of the reforms I proposed is for patent law and even copyright law is called the losing plaintiff pays rule.   All that does is magnify the potential losses of a small victim of a copyright or a patent suit, but if you adopted the rule that the losing patent plaintiff pays, so that means that the only, the only one who suffers from this rule is the potential aggressor. If you have a patent, let's say, and you decide to assert it against someone and if you lose, in my view, you should have to pay the fees of the person that you're attacking, but I don't agree that it should be symmetrical. I don't agree that the person that you sue should have to pay your fees if you succeed. I mean, it's bad enough that you win under these laws, but you shouldn't be able to magnify the threat because that's just going to make them cave in even more easily. But I do think that a losing patent plaintiff rules, and by the way, something similar was proposed in what the Electronic Frontier Foundation has put forward in some reforms to the copyright, to the patent laws, sorry, in response to the patent troll problem. Their reforms don't go far enough, but at least there would be some improvement. So they want to say that if you're a patent troll, then there are a lot of limitations on how you can exercise patent rights and whether you would have to pay the cost of of your victim if you lose the suit. Okay. Well, to me, it all makes a lot of sense and just from my experience in just the world of business, I'll use my co-host and good friend Drew as an example here. He's quite an innovator in his field, which he's due to, that would be a long story to tell you all the reasons, but he's built a farm inside a warehouse and uses some natural sunlight and some artificial light and uses aquaponics systemary as fish that create the nutrients for the plants that create the food for the fish. And he brings in some black soldier flies and uses the garbage that he gets donated for free from restaurants and feeds those larvae to the fish. And anyway, he's got worms that go through the stuff that the black soldier fly can't do it and uses that for his plants. And he has really good high-quality food which he sells to restaurants and he's starting to do pretty well on it. And he's innovated quite a few systems here, but if he had to stop and file patents on every time he has an idea, he'd be out of business. His innovations are kind of protected because he has witnessed the fact that he did this on this date or pretty close to this date. So if someone else comes up with it and they make him cease insist he could still say he had prior, thought of it prior to that. Am I understanding the law correctly? Well, yes.  You have to either spend a lot of money to apply for patents, which is a waste of money and resources and time. And it could divert you too. It could get you locked into, well, I've got to keep doing this kind of business technique or this kind of method because I've got a patent on this, just like the drug companies are going to try to sell the patented drugs or you remain defenseless and you have nothing to use if someone comes after you or someone wants to patent your own idea out from underneath you. So it's a horrible choice that small businessmen face now because of the patent system. And I think for Drew, I think his probably is his best, the best outcome that he could hope for is to become known as the person who did this innovation and this, have his name on some of these innovations, whether he gets the royalty form or not, but then it'll give him great speaking appearance fees and he could maybe author books and he could do other things in the future based on the verification he builds from all the, I mean, he's really, he's really an innovator. I'm so impressed with the stuff he's comes up with. He's a great thinker. But anyway, to me, that would be the way to go and if you can find ways to give people those recognitions, you can give them the status of being an innovator, not going to be somebody that everybody respects and looks to for advice and he suddenly has a reputation for that kind of ability, then he's going to get his rewards in a different way, not by going to court and forcing other people to give them royalties. Well, let me just say something a little bit optimistic, a little bit subversive maybe.  Think of the analogy of the gold community.  They're not going to change it. We can beg the government or the Fed to change their policies and it readopt gold, but they're not going to. So what did the community do? We've adopted Bitcoin. We've done an in run around the government. We've adopted our own money. So I think something like that can be done in copyright and patent instead of asking the government to drop its laws or to to reduce them in the copyright field. People can just get around the government by using torrenting and encryption and in the in the in the in the field of inventions, 3D printing is coming, my friend. And 3D printing is going to become a huge way people can get around the government's monopolization of physical objects through the patent law. People just print what they want and they can get an encrypted file with the design of it using a bit torrent or something like that. They don't need they don't need government permission or approval. Okay, well, Stephen, that's our our bumper music. We're all done for tonight. Thank you so much. This has been one of the best shows we've ever had. And I really appreciate you're being a part of it.


On Tuesday, April 2nd, Donate Life Kentucky and Pikeville Medical Center hosted an awareness event for those in need of organ transplants. Because April is Donate Life Month, there's no better time to make the message heard. Some guest speakers were also invited to share their story and inspire others. Yeah, so today we are here at Pikeville Medical Center for a ceremony and a flag raising where we are celebrating National Donate Life Month and we are truly here to honor those who have, you know, provided life through the gift of donation and also even honor those who have signed up on the donor registry to provide hope for those who are in need of life-saving transplants. Make your ride one of a kind and see the experts at J&M Custom Auto and Off-Road. It's your customization candy store. Visit jmcustomauto.com and select your makeup model. It's that easy. Window tanning, remote starts, leather interiors, sound systems, front and rear bumpers, spray and bed liners, bed covers, wheels and tires, lift kits, step rails, even underglow light kits and so much more. If you can dream it, we can do it at J&M Custom. The need for organ transplant is constant, prompting generous donors to give all they can. Over 1000 Kentuckians are currently waiting for a donation. We want to just raise awareness about the mission and the importance of it. There are so many people who have signed up to just provide hope and that hope is truly what those who are waiting, you know, rely on. We have over half the state who are registered organ donors and that's absolutely amazing and you know over 1000 Kentuckians are waiting on those transplants so just signing up and providing hope to those people who are waiting is absolutely amazing. Reporting for Mountain Top News, I'm Nick Colum.


What's going on everybody welcome back to some breaking news and the world number one Novak Djokovic He is going to the Olympics. We have a lot of players that have pulled out We've already gone through those in the last couple of days, but the world number one. He is going to the Olympics Let's go look at the statement that he brought out on Twitter. This is what Djokovic said over on Twitter He said I booked my flights for Tokyo and will proudly be joining hashtag team Serbia for the Olympics with much pride I'm packing for Tokyo and joining our national team in the fight for the brightest medals at the Olympic arenas for me Playing for Serbia was always a special joy and motivation and I will give my best to make us all happy Let's go. So there it is Djokovic is going to the Olympics now. We have a lot of players that are not going to Olympics We already went through that in a previous video. Go check that out if you haven't already But obviously the big names being Nadal and Federer, they're not going to the Olympics Which kind of paves the way for Djokovic to go for his first gold medal hasn't won the gold medal at the Olympics in His career. We got a bronze medal back in 2008 in Beijing And of course, he's won the first three slams of the year the Australian open the French open and Wimbledon The Golden Grand Slam is alive just as to win the gold medal and the US Open The only player to ever do that in a single calendar year was Steffi Graf back in 1988 so no men has done it no one has done it and of course no one's won the calendar slam since Rod Laver did it all the way back in the late 60s So it's been a long long time for the men to have a chance of getting this. Now Novak Djokovic He's going to the Olympics. Let me know down in the comments below What are his chances because there are players that are still going at this stage that could be a little bit of a trouble to him Daniel Medvedev is one of those players that we don't know yet if he's going to the Olympics But if he is it could be a little bit of trouble for Djokovic and of course the final since he passes as well Alexander Zverev, Andrej Ruble, there are some young next-gen guys that could potentially hurt Djokovic in a best-of-three match But let me know down in the comments below Do you think Djokovic just got this sewn up because he's the only one who has actually confirmed that they're going to be playing the Olympics So Novak Djokovic, he is going to the Olympics and the Golden Slam still alive


Hello, thank you for joining me. I'm in a residential area of Northwich today. This is the beginning of another episode of Miniature Railway Britain. So in Northwich in Cheshire now, it may look like a very sort of normal housing estate until you see there's a huge viaduct crossing it. This is Northwich viaduct or also known as the Weaver viaduct as it takes the Cheshire Lions Committee Railway over the River Weaver. It has opened in 1854 I believe and it's about, what is it, 739 yards long. So it's really quite a large viaduct. I'd like to live here. It'd be quite cool. You know, it's your house.  I think that's a pretty cool view to have. Just look how it completely towers above the whole estate. I think that's really cool. I really like that. It just shows, it really dwarfs the houses towering above the estate like that. So we're going to go down this footpath here. We're going to go under the viaduct and have a closer look and as I already mentioned, it takes the railway line over River Weaver. So we'll also see the River Weaver and and then we're going to head on to the Miniature Railway, but firstly we'll just have a look at this viaduct because it is amazing. I mean, look at it. I just love how it's stretched across the valley in the way it does. The place I want to show you is Hunt's Lock on the River Weaver. It's where the River Weaver navigation and the River Weaver themselves join. So we go underneath those houses there. I just noticed they're built in 1998, so the viaduct is quite a lot older, but look at the juxtaposition of modern 90s houses stroke makes the Victorian engineering. As we now go under the viaduct, we can see the River Weaver. It's just down there. So I believe this section of water we can see here is the navigations. The main River Weaver will be somewhere over there, which I'm hoping we should be able to see in a moment. I'm just going to follow this path and when we get to the locks I'll show you the locks. So I've just come up the path a little way. Still the viaduct very much dominating the background. I mean it really is kind of the main notable landmark of Norfolk, which you kind of can't miss it if you come to the town. Now we're just coming to Hunt's Lock and there's something rather unusual like to show because it's not just your usual average lock. It's huge for taking pretty big vessels. Now look at the size of that. It's no small canal lock. So if we go over and of course you get a very good view of the viaduct, and look at this you could put about five canal bodies next to each other. That's how big it is. There's something here which I think is quite cool and that is more what you'd expect to see on a railway line. So with the railway in the background here we have some 74 signals. Now these were for the canal boats. There's some more at the other end. So what I assume happened was when they were, so that one there must have been for the smaller lock and that one there had been for the larger lock. So that would have been in the go position. So that would have said okay you can go in. Although as we can see the gates are currently closed and this one, the other 74 signal seems to have lost its arm. There are some at the other end so if we show what we'll do is we will walk along up here and we're going to have a look at the other end and just one more time isn't it amazing how much the viaduct dominates the sea. It's very impressive. I think actually while we're here if you have a look you can see the girder arch here. So that's the river weaver navigation. I assume the other one is the main river weaver but we'll go over there in a minute and have a look. So we're divided up behind us. We're now walking through the middle of the two locks. There's the larger one. Even this one is you know compared to your average canal lock it's still quite large. So I'm effectively on an island I'm surrounded by water doing my practices is over the the gates of the locks and what we're going to do now is have a look up this end because there's some more 74 signals and again one's in the go position and the other is in the stop position. So I think that's really cool that canals had 74 signals. I think there's one case I know of where a road had them that was in Worcester. There was a railway level crossing and there were 74 signals for the traffic not for the trains so the traffic to stop. Yeah look at that 74 signals and the north which viaduct is in the background and then looking that way we can see up the river weaver and you can just see where the other course goes so we'll go and have a look at that in a minute. So let's go and have a look at the main river weaver and again at least 74 signals are great I think. I'll just show you while we're here this is like there's been a weight on here you know it's not going to move it's seized but the weight as you can see on this one is tied to the arm of the signal so it's like counterweight it's a fail safe method so should the wire break then the weight would put the signal at danger so there's no chance of train passing signal at danger. So I'm now taking you over the gates of the smaller lock and again with a fantastic view of the aqueduct sorry not aqueduct viaduct go and do aqueducts another day. I've done aqueduct videos in the past have a look I did one at Chirk aqueduct that was quite an exciting day out. Now then we're going to leave the main or the river weaver and other gates and go up this path here and it already looks quite exciting I can see ahead where we're going to cross the actual original course of the river weaver looks like this is going to be possibly a suspension bridge so I always enjoy the good bridge you know rather than just your normal straight across sort of thing something I've made it a bit more exciting so yeah it's a suspension bridge in front of us I'll take you over that and have a look at the other river weaver and then the plan is we're going to head off to the miniature railway because that's a miniature railway video I do sometimes like to show you some local areas so here we are it looks like it swings as well yeah it's a swinging suspension bridge so look here the bridge would turn like that so you can see the workings there so they would actually have boats coming up this section of the river weaver so the whole bridge would swing so it would swing like that and it would rest just there and then a boat would be able to pass through so even more exciting so um yeah I'm really impressed with this so far I'm enjoying Northwich before we get another view yeah and there's a view of almost yeah there we are of the fire duct so let's go and have a look at the main river weaver and again at least seven four signals are great I think and I'll just show you while we're here this is like there's been a weight on here you know it's not going to move it's seized but the weight that you can see on this one is tied to the arm under signal so it's like counterweight it's a fail safe method so should the wire break then the weight would put the signal at danger so there's no chance of train passing signal danger so I'm now taking you over the gates of the smaller lock and again with a fantastic view of the aqueduct sorry not aqueduct viaducts going to do an aqueduct another day I've done aqueduct videos in the past have a look I did one at Cherk Aqueduct that was quite an exciting day out now then we're going to leave the main or the river weaver navigation go up this half here and it already looks quite exciting I can see ahead where we're going to cross the actual original course of the river weaver looks like it's going to be possibly a suspension bridge so um I always enjoy at the good bridge you know rather than just your normal straight across sort of thing something I never made it a bit more exciting so yeah it's a suspension bridge in front of this I'll take you over that let me have a look at the river weaver and then the plan is we're going to head off to the miniature railway because that's a miniature railway video I do someone's like to show you some local areas so here we are it looks like it swings as well yeah it's a swinging um suspension bridge so here the bridge would turn like that so you can see the workings there so they would actually have uh boats coming up this section of the river weaver so the whole bridge would swing so it would swing like that and it would rest just there and then a boat would be able to pass through so even more exciting so um yeah I'm really impressed with this so far I'm enjoying north which before we get another view yeah and there's a view of almost get there we are of the fire duct so we've come up the path a little way from the suspension bridge which was just around the corner up there here we are back at the viaduct you can just see how enormous it is so you've got a sort of traditional viaduct then you've got the girder over the navigation then another arch then you've got another girder over the main river weaver if you look there there's a gantry that goes down into one of the boat yards now what we're going to do we're now going to walk back underneath the viaduct and um we're going to have a look at a couple of other things so we're going sort of through the trees here because it stretches um as far as I can see when you can't receive much because of the trees but it stretches quite a long way that way as well so it's a pretty amazing structure but you might be able to hear a kind of a roaring sort of water noise now sometimes I'm thinking is that possibly a train going over but no it's not there is just here you can see there that's like that's the top of a weir and it looked like you could once walk over it but we can't do that as you can see it's all fenced off but there is a rather large weir I appreciate at the moment you can't see much the palisthenics blocking the view so I'm taking down this really narrow footpath and when we get up here a bit we will find somewhere I think just here where I can show you the weir properly and look at that there's all sorts of stray coming off it it's a really quiet and exciting sight and the water is really roaring through and look how they can open and close those gates as they need to and the water is jumping up as it crashes through they've got the actled up above it and then you've got a walking viaduct over it which I was hoping to tell you on but obviously we can't so plan is now we're going to continue up this very narrow path and what I've had planned to do was go to Norfolk station catch the train to Cuddington over this viaduct and then um we're going to walk to the railway from there but there's had a look at the Sunday timetable there's not that many trains so plan B and that is to walk all the way down this alleyway to Waitrose but this is a rather interesting approach to a Waitrose it's one of those ones where you can actually park your boat almost as close you can park your car and look at this they've kind of made these um this this isn't the miniature rail I promise um we'll get into but these are the effects of its type of trains it's for like launching a boat down into the water obviously these are modern replicas for the themed area so with now this isn't Waitrose that's a posh restaurant Waitrose to the other side it's really nice so this marine it's not quite like Chester Waitrose um where I joked that you could um you could it wasn't a joke it was quite funny you could get a canal bar just closer than you could your car um so this is the car park and um here's Waitrose so I'm going to go and get a coffee then we're going to head to the miniature railway so I've got my coffee now let's go to the miniature railway in my larder so we're now going to go from Waitrose at Norwich to the mid-chesher society of model engineers railway over in Cuddenton on the way to the railway now we're in my car driving along the a54 and it should be somewhere up here on my left is that a place called Blackmere Craft Village so that'll probably also be quite interesting as well as the railway itself so I'm looking forward to this had a enjoyed the morning looking around Norwich in the viaduct etc and the river weaver navigation oh yeah I can see obviously you can't I'm looking ahead I can see this side says Blackmere Craft Village and um it is yeah just the heads on and turning we're going to find so here we are it says beautiful unique discover a different way to shop play eat and relax so sounds very good it's very pleasant as well so we've arrived at Blackmere Craft Village in my larder we're going to find a miniature railway now and that's quite a big looking place it's well to be honest I didn't really imagine anything I just thought right let's go to that miniature today it's huge there's so many different sort of units and everything from I couldn't see it says there's a falconry bird of prey center you go from one like that let's bring her here won't they and there's other things so in a sort of place you could come and quite easily spend a day and you know have um have a good day out here rather than just come on a january afternoon like I have so admittedly I don't even know if the miniature railways this way I just sort of felt drawn to go this way see if these signs here make sense oh look at that m c s m e midge chestnut as item all engineers train rides today so we know we're going in in the right direction there's a top car park um so it must be up here somewhere it must be I imagine it to be the other side of these buildings it's quite fun when you're sort of looking for a miniature railway you don't really know exactly where you're going but you know you know it's going to be worth looking for vintage and collectibles important that sounds interesting and we'll have a look at that afterwards if I have a chance because as I said obviously the main reason I've come up here is for the miniature railway but going around here must be around here somewhere there's a tea room through there might get a cup of tea there afterwards so I mean it really is a whole village it's not just like it has it in the name it really seems like there's a lot of different things to see that's for a railway still not entirely sure must be over here somewhere another tea room oh yeah I can see the words steam rail that's how it looks like fine we found it I've got the parks up here actually there's two car parks there's a lower one right there's a top one so um I think we are here it says steam rail let's have a look here in front of us it's quite impressive the loco there let's just go around now I can see a huge turn table so I've never been to this railroad before we go because we don't know where I'm going pound per ride it's got a little steam locomotive they've also got a racetrack so um yeah I think it's time I won't have my ride trip around the miniature railway now what I've realized is there's actually public footpath here the cross is the site so we're going to go and do that we're going to walk the footpath which gives us the opportunity to see some more of the track I'll tell you a bit more about it so this is the main station as you can see they are doing some work here they're putting another through line there goes the whistle for a train to go you can see they've put some points in there and they're doing some extensions so we can we're going to walk around and we're going to go and have a look at the extensions and of course because they're doing an extension it means I'm going to have to come back here at some point when the extension opens open and um have a ride so various paths around here if we follow the footpath we've got to where two of the extensions are going to kind of meet with the existing track so you would have seen as we passed on the train and it looks like we're going to the train's just gone out so we should see the train pass as well so we come up to here this is science n b where the trains so the railway line crosses and I can hear the train coming so the train is going to pass us in a minute hear the horn of the train if you look there's even an engineers train on the new line that's being built so let's just watch the train go past and I'll tell you a little bit more so as you can see the train has gone down there and if you look that way you can see where the train has come from what's actually happening here is there's going to be a new line going off in that direction which we're going to go I've been given permission to walk to the new extension so we're going to go and do that in a minute and then the line the train goes on will be sluered this way and the new line will go along there and run off down there but what's going to happen first is the extension will open with the line going that way this section of track will be relayed and then eventually when they relay it like I said the track will come across here so they'll effectively be two loops so if we now cross the track out into the woods have a look at this engineers train I think it's really cool that they've got you know doing some engineering works on a sunday just like they are on the main lines today and they're also doing it here on some miniature railways so if we have a look here you can see the locomotive with the engineers train it's called Rusty so that's just seven and a quarter so yeah the track is seven and a quarter and the and five inch and they've just built this nice new viaduct here and we're going to see the train pass on the other section of tracks this is new viaduct it's currently only seven and a quarter inch haven't put the the third rail in they're going to train again we'll just see it pass now you can see the new line which is due to open fairly soon so we'll certainly come back and have a ride on that you can see the new line and see how there's three rails but the third one runs out there they haven't yet laid the third rail over the bridge so I'm really looking forward to coming back having a trip over the bridge so we're now going to head off up here so you can see where the extension is due to go so you'll get two loops so while we're here let's just have a quick look there's also a race track which isn't running today here deep in the woods we find a race track and it's a railway so I'll have to come and have a ride on this one day and if you look over you can just see the station over there there is like a third platform if you were to get on and off the race track railway right let's go walk the track bed of the extension slightly opposite to what we sometimes do we sometimes walk disused railways which is you know quite fun looking at where the track was and trying to imagine how it once looked like well today we're walking along a track bed of where railway will go and we can imagine what it will look like you can imagine the little track running along here and the little train you know taking visitors for a nice ride through the woods it's going to really make this railway a lot longer you know more than twice the length I'd say you know we're looking up to three or four times the length so it's going to be you know it's going to be a good really nice railway I mean already is a nice railway here in the woods but it's going to get a really long ride so definitely as I say we will be back to do that and also that the public footpath there's another one running that way so there'll be quite a lot of places where you know you'll be able to see the train from I'm going to carry on walking the extension and I'll show you the other end when I get round there so we are now coming to near the end of the extension you may have just heard a whistle from the railway station so you can see we're almost about to start at this section here they've actually had to build a bit of an embankment now if we look over here well firstly we're probably about to see a train gets to here building a bridge for the new extension carry over this this some depression around if you look at the existing bridge which we went over on the train about to see a train pass over it the new bridge they're building you know it's quite a deep deep down inside the cut and it goes over so I look forward to that being finished and having a trip on that now here this is the bridge that we traveled over one thing I quite like is the bridge on the racetrack miniature railway which is just across here you can see the racetrack how they've effectively done what looks a bit like 1960s brutalist style bridge but it obviously isn't 1960s because this railway is fairly new but the other thing I think is really nice is how um so that's run by the mid chest year modelling near such it's called the sandway and it's a railway so they've put the initials in um in a mopedic form which I think you know is a really nice touch so soon there'll be three bridges here in the road this one this one and the one they're building over there I'm now going to walk back to the railway station and it's nearly time for me to jump back into the other and drive home just show you a couple more things they've got quite an impressive large road here engine sheds in there I think we're about to hear and hear the train pass again so that pretty much concludes my afternoon at the mid chest year model engineering society's nature rail I've really enjoyed it and if you're ever in the area you know do come and visit not only the railway but the whole of the blackmere craft village you could easily spend a day here so that there really is a lot to see so yeah do come visit them so from the sandway miniature railway thank you very much for watching please do feel free to like subscribe comment tell your friends both about henry's adventures and the sandway miniature railway thank you very much for watching and goodbye