WEBVTT NOTE Andrew J., Galambos's Ideas and the Future of Private Protection for Intellectual Property 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.860 The paper that's behind this presentation, which is one of two papers that have been 2 00:00:05.860 --> 00:00:12.600 uploaded out of the whole conference, so you shouldn't have any problem finding it. 3 00:00:12.600 --> 00:00:18.840 So I cover V50, which is the Introduction to the Science of Volition, and it's also 4 00:00:18.840 --> 00:00:25.680 published in the book Seek Etur Ad Astra, Volume 1, which the translation of that is 5 00:00:25.680 --> 00:00:37.680 So basically this is the weight of the stars and then the paper goes on to cover the theory of primary property or intellectual property which is not published at this time. 6 00:00:37.680 --> 00:00:46.680 So the total course time of V50 and V201 was on the order of 300 hours so we're not going to get a full thing in 17 minutes. 7 00:00:46.680 --> 00:01:16.680 I took V50 in 1975 and V201 in 1975-76, and at this point, I'd consider myself more of a Misesian than a Golombosian, so this isn't sort of a push for you to believe everything I'm saying here, it's more of an exposition as what I would call, it's kind of scary to say, third way here, but this is another way besides kind of the utilitarian versus the natural right 8 00:01:16.680 --> 00:01:21.140 Rights Views of Intellectual Property. 9 00:01:21.140 --> 00:01:25.820 So Goulamos founded the Free Enterprise Institute in 1961 to teach his approach to freedom on 10 00:01:25.820 --> 00:01:28.340 a profit-seeking basis. 11 00:01:28.340 --> 00:01:34.260 Prior to founding FEI, Goulamos visited New York and saw Ayn Rand, Leonard Reed, Ludwig 12 00:01:34.260 --> 00:01:36.220 von Mises and Murray Rothbard. 13 00:01:36.220 --> 00:01:43.260 And as far as I know, until he died, he had a good relationship with Leonard Reed. 14 00:01:43.260 --> 00:01:50.540 He was profoundly influenced by the Austrians, but he rejected von Mises's a priori methodology. 15 00:01:50.540 --> 00:01:55.300 Columbus was so influenced by the Austrians that he invited von Mises to give FEI's first 16 00:01:55.300 --> 00:01:59.840 guest lecture in 1952, excuse me, 1962. 17 00:01:59.840 --> 00:02:06.580 So first we're going to talk about the foundation, which is the volitional science, and then 18 00:02:06.580 --> 00:02:12.280 we'll look at the intellectual property work, a sketch of that, and then some critical discussion. 19 00:02:12.280 --> 00:02:18.200 So the goal is really to convey some sense of Columbus's integrated system and its novelty. 20 00:02:18.200 --> 00:02:25.200 In other words, basically in libertarian publications, I don't see anything that really approaches 21 00:02:25.200 --> 00:02:27.560 what I'm going to talk to you about today. 22 00:02:27.560 --> 00:02:33.540 Whether or not it makes sense or not is up to you to decide, but it's quite different. 23 00:02:33.540 --> 00:02:37.080 So Columbus used many definitions in structuring his theories. 24 00:02:37.080 --> 00:02:41.880 Here we have a couple of the more significant definitions in volitional science. 25 00:02:41.880 --> 00:02:47.760 For our purposes, the most significant one is the primary property, definition primary 26 00:02:47.760 --> 00:02:55.240 property is the individual's thoughts, actions and ideas, ideas are expressed thoughts. Note 27 00:02:55.240 --> 00:03:01.880 that these definitions are not based on natural rights theory, Columbus didn't go talk about 28 00:03:01.880 --> 00:03:09.920 Locke or any other prior philosopher in making these statements, he was putting it together 29 00:03:09.920 --> 00:03:18.080 as an entire theory, sort of a bovo, although of course when you look at the components 30 00:03:18.080 --> 00:03:28.360 of property, you can see basically the idea from the American Revolution of life, liberty 31 00:03:28.360 --> 00:03:33.600 and property as being the three components. 32 00:03:33.600 --> 00:03:38.920 Note also that Galambos considered that freedom was a product, not a cause. 33 00:03:38.920 --> 00:03:44.960 So the anomalous believe that all sciences start with postulates. So we have some postulates 34 00:03:44.960 --> 00:03:49.600 here. Postulate one, all men live to pursue happiness. Postulate two, all concepts of 35 00:03:49.600 --> 00:03:55.240 happiness are pursued through moral action are equally valid. And we have a couple of 36 00:03:55.240 --> 00:04:00.480 corollaries, morally acting man seeks to profit and immorally acting man seeks to plunder 37 00:04:00.480 --> 00:04:07.480 and man lives to acquire property. So postulate one was inspired by the Declaration of Independence. 38 00:04:07.480 --> 00:04:12.480 If you look at the paper, Galamos believed that Thomas Paine wrote the Declaration of Independence. 39 00:04:12.480 --> 00:04:18.480 There's a book on that which makes a good case for it. 40 00:04:18.480 --> 00:04:23.480 Postulate 2 is based on the theory of relativity. 41 00:04:23.480 --> 00:04:27.480 All frames of reference are equally valid. 42 00:04:27.480 --> 00:04:31.480 So Galamos differentiated between government and the state. 43 00:04:31.480 --> 00:04:35.480 By the way, there are a lot more definitions in the paper. 44 00:04:35.480 --> 00:04:43.680 Well, he found it very important to differentiate every time he talked about something. 45 00:04:43.680 --> 00:04:50.840 If he had different concepts, he endeavored to define different words to mean the different 46 00:04:50.840 --> 00:04:51.840 things. 47 00:04:51.840 --> 00:04:58.920 So, he wanted to preserve the word government, specifically because it was in the Declaration 48 00:04:58.920 --> 00:05:08.160 and reference Paine who he cared a lot about, and government becomes basically a private 49 00:05:08.160 --> 00:05:15.560 property protection system where the state is the apparatus of coercion which is generally 50 00:05:15.560 --> 00:05:22.160 accredited and insurance is the replacement for the state in principle and a key component 51 00:05:22.160 --> 00:05:23.160 of government. 52 00:05:23.160 --> 00:05:34.160 This is one thing that you occasionally see a smattering of in some libertarian literature, but this was like a core principle for Galambos. 53 00:05:34.160 --> 00:05:41.160 Galambos favored a justice system focused on the restoration of property through recovery or restitution. 54 00:05:41.160 --> 00:05:48.160 The justice system would be backed by a credit system that would virtually immobilize criminals without the use of force. 55 00:05:48.160 --> 00:05:53.280 So basically we're looking at, when we look at Columbus's ideas, we're not looking at 56 00:05:53.280 --> 00:06:00.960 a way to justify force as we are normally in other systems of thought. 57 00:06:00.960 --> 00:06:10.240 And it was basically the idea that you would build a system that's so disincented crime 58 00:06:10.240 --> 00:06:11.240 that people wouldn't commit it. 59 00:06:11.240 --> 00:06:17.340 And if they didn't in fact commit it, they would lose access to the rest of society without 60 00:06:17.340 --> 00:06:23.620 being imprisoned, they'd be imprisoned in their own house at the worst case. 61 00:06:23.620 --> 00:06:29.160 Whether that would work or not is up to question. 62 00:06:29.160 --> 00:06:34.960 So he actually, in the 60s, was talking about debit cards when all we had was credit cards 63 00:06:34.960 --> 00:06:38.380 and machines that you ran things across. 64 00:06:38.380 --> 00:06:46.060 He was talking about computer-connected credit systems where if you committed a crime, your 65 00:06:46.060 --> 00:06:50.540 Your credit card or your debit card could be invalidated and every time you went to 66 00:06:50.540 --> 00:06:54.060 use it, it would be rejected. 67 00:06:54.060 --> 00:07:00.500 I will almost say that all product development follows a plan. 68 00:07:00.500 --> 00:07:05.500 The first step is innovation, the second step is education, third is advertising and fourth 69 00:07:05.500 --> 00:07:06.900 is maintenance. 70 00:07:06.900 --> 00:07:13.740 The main issue here is what he called a disclosure barrier between the first and second steps. 71 00:07:13.740 --> 00:07:19.840 He had a shaded area that he drew on a diagram and he called that the disclosure barrier and 72 00:07:19.840 --> 00:07:26.460 that was the representation of the problem that innovators have of transmitting their 73 00:07:26.460 --> 00:07:29.860 ideas to anyone else. 74 00:07:29.860 --> 00:07:36.660 And he had a whole slew of stories that he told about various innovators who had many 75 00:07:36.660 --> 00:07:40.300 problems disclosing their ideas. 76 00:07:40.300 --> 00:07:47.180 So Galambos didn't like the current system. So the scheme of patents and copyrights is 77 00:07:47.180 --> 00:07:54.660 flawed and arbitrary. Patents are exclusive. You can't have independencies. Copyright protects 78 00:07:54.660 --> 00:07:59.900 phraseology rather than the underlying idea. Limited time of protection. He thought it 79 00:07:59.900 --> 00:08:05.040 should be permanent. Cosmological discoveries are ineligible, so the theory of gravitation 80 00:08:05.040 --> 00:08:12.600 or Maxwell's equations, these kinds of things don't come into the system. 81 00:08:12.600 --> 00:08:17.440 The current system leaves secrecy as the only real protection and the theory of primary 82 00:08:17.440 --> 00:08:23.440 property aims to eliminate the need for secrecy. 83 00:08:23.440 --> 00:08:28.840 So Columbus would replace copyright and patent system with prototype registration companies. 84 00:08:28.840 --> 00:08:34.120 He would eliminate the distinction of patent copyright trademark and all of this would 85 00:08:34.120 --> 00:08:37.480 would be proprietarily administered. 86 00:08:37.480 --> 00:08:45.100 If an innovator chose not to register, they would run the higher risk of an independency. 87 00:08:45.100 --> 00:08:50.760 So remember that in his view, independency was no big problem. 88 00:08:50.760 --> 00:08:56.200 If two people came up with an idea independently, they could both pursue it. 89 00:08:56.200 --> 00:09:00.720 The natural estate was the sum of all property owned by an individual during his life and 90 00:09:00.720 --> 00:09:01.920 thereafter. 91 00:09:01.920 --> 00:09:07.840 So this could be the repository of posthumous income from rents and investments. 92 00:09:07.840 --> 00:09:12.920 It could also be a repository of posthumous primary property royalties. 93 00:09:12.920 --> 00:09:17.320 It prevented the property being dispersed due to undeserving errors. 94 00:09:17.320 --> 00:09:22.140 So whenever you hear something that says that Columbus was looking for somebody's heir to 95 00:09:22.140 --> 00:09:27.680 pass the money on to, that's baloney because he didn't believe in that at all. 96 00:09:27.680 --> 00:09:30.920 And this can be a source of capital for basic research. 97 00:09:30.920 --> 00:09:38.000 So when we talk about Newton's natural estate or any of the major scientists, their natural 98 00:09:38.000 --> 00:09:40.560 estates would be huge. 99 00:09:40.560 --> 00:09:49.360 And these funds could be used for investing in basic research. 100 00:09:49.360 --> 00:09:54.260 So there are differences between primary property and secondary property. 101 00:09:54.260 --> 00:09:59.420 He thought that primary property could only be owned by individuals. 102 00:09:59.420 --> 00:10:17.080 You can find much more detail in the paper. Compensation is only due when an income is 103 00:10:17.080 --> 00:10:24.800 generated. So if you say a poem to a lover or whatever, I won't use girlfriend because 104 00:10:24.800 --> 00:10:30.500 There may be other people in here and I'll be judged by that, but anyway, if you have 105 00:10:30.500 --> 00:10:39.880 a lever and you want to say a poem to them, there's no compensation due. 106 00:10:39.880 --> 00:10:44.780 So the compensation question has three components, why pay anything at all, that's what Columbus 107 00:10:44.780 --> 00:10:50.940 called gratitude, which is market acknowledgement, to whom should you pay it, and that's to the 108 00:10:50.940 --> 00:10:56.300 Antecedents to Produce the Ideas and to whom or how much should you pay and it's 109 00:10:56.300 --> 00:11:01.500 basically a positive non-zero amount so there's there's no specific amount 110 00:11:01.500 --> 00:11:09.220 stated. Remoteness dilution is a method by which it's similar to a mutual fund 111 00:11:09.220 --> 00:11:14.900 company where more people add ideas to a product over time. The percentage 112 00:11:14.900 --> 00:11:20.220 of their revenue share for the product stays the same but the number of people 113 00:11:20.220 --> 00:11:24.060 People that are receiving compensation goes up and so it's like when you buy a 114 00:11:24.060 --> 00:11:30.300 mutual fund, you're adding your money into the total capital of the 115 00:11:30.300 --> 00:11:37.300 mutual fund company but you're not, you don't increase the value by doing that. 116 00:11:37.300 --> 00:11:42.340 Let's see. So there's two types of remoteness solution, negotiated and 117 00:11:42.340 --> 00:11:48.580 automatic. Negotiated requires negotiation with the innovator. 118 00:11:48.580 --> 00:11:55.540 can be set by the entrepreneur. Innovators who have died primary to an 119 00:11:55.540 --> 00:12:02.740 implementation of a system like this are automatic by default and that the 120 00:12:02.740 --> 00:12:08.940 disbursement of payments would be handled by a clearing house system. So in 121 00:12:08.940 --> 00:12:12.380 an analysis of what I've just talked about, 122 00:12:12.380 --> 00:12:17.740 political science is strikingly similar to Austrian and libertarian, specifically 123 00:12:17.740 --> 00:12:25.500 The same data is of interest with emphasis on property indicating a similar prior theory. 124 00:12:25.500 --> 00:12:30.780 First postulate is reminiscent of the action axiom and the second postulate is similar 125 00:12:30.780 --> 00:12:34.380 to Rothbard's non-aggression principle. 126 00:12:34.380 --> 00:12:39.060 So the theory of primary property attempts to address some issues. 127 00:12:39.060 --> 00:12:45.060 It doesn't rely on justified force and of course in the natural rights theories and 128 00:12:45.060 --> 00:12:53.980 and stuff if you do something, steal something supposedly in intellectual property and you 129 00:12:53.980 --> 00:13:00.220 get jailed for it, that seems draconian, so this is not a problem. 130 00:13:00.220 --> 00:13:05.780 All ideas currently in common use would be automatic remote destitution, so no permission 131 00:13:05.780 --> 00:13:06.780 is required. 132 00:13:06.780 --> 00:13:13.820 There's no payment for non-commercial use, blah, blah, blah. 133 00:13:13.820 --> 00:13:18.860 I think it's important that the cost of the system would be borne by the users. 134 00:13:18.860 --> 00:13:28.700 So Kinsella's criticisms are based on, to Chile as the primary source, without, with 135 00:13:28.700 --> 00:13:34.240 limited information, he calls Galamos a nut and a crank, calls proprietary notes going 136 00:13:34.240 --> 00:13:39.020 to ridiculous lengths, and discusses some of what he thinks are insane behaviors. 137 00:13:39.020 --> 00:13:43.360 There's more explanation in the paper. 138 00:13:43.360 --> 00:13:47.260 So antagonists to IP in general claim that there cannot be conflicts over uses, ideas 139 00:13:47.260 --> 00:13:53.640 may be replicated, but there are conflicts, even when you don't have patents and copyrights. 140 00:13:53.640 --> 00:13:56.220 The innovators themselves are rivalists. 141 00:13:56.220 --> 00:14:00.520 Without being a market, they can't get paid for anything else. 142 00:14:00.520 --> 00:14:05.520 You're coming. 143 00:14:05.520 --> 00:14:09.680 Secrecy is less desirable. 144 00:14:09.680 --> 00:14:15.760 So Galamos couched this in morality and justice, but it's still subject to market reality. 145 00:14:15.760 --> 00:14:20.280 He had kind of a utopian system where everything had to come together. 146 00:14:20.280 --> 00:14:22.180 He wasn't simply an engineer. 147 00:14:22.180 --> 00:14:25.960 He had other inputs. 148 00:14:25.960 --> 00:14:31.300 State protection of IP is a mess, but that doesn't mean we can't come up with some market 149 00:14:31.300 --> 00:14:40.300 Driven Mechanism, and Columbus' methods achieved the goals that he sought. 150 00:14:40.300 --> 00:14:46.660 He had a profit all the time he was teaching, and he eliminated disclosure.