Stuff You Should KnowIntellectual property sounds as dry as can be, but it’s actually very interesting. It’s at the heart of the global economy and the center of a dispute over what should belong to the people who create things, from poetry to pharmaceuticals.
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here and this is the Don't turn it off. It's actually more interesting than it sounds.
Edition. Yeah. Can I just write off the bat shout out Olivia? Uh, this was a I don't know, it's not the most fun topic. But she really dug in and it's great.
Yeah. Yeah, she's amazing at it actually, And this is yeah, she figured it out, like there is something interesting in intellectual property and she found it so.
Uh great, hudos, Ip.
Yeah, we are talking about intellectual property today. Everybody's heard that term. You have to have been living under rocks and not heard it. But we'll still tell you what we're talking about, because we're those kind of people. I'm just teasing everybody.
We're not talking about the Great Book The Yellow River by Ip Freely no, no.
Okay no, or a building by Impay, nothing like that, although that would fall under I'm sure some sort of intellectual property protection. Intellectual property is basically the fruit of your mental labor. It can be an invention, it can be a.
Slogan, yeah, screenplay, song.
Yeah, yeah, it can be a movie you wrote, it could be a way to do business like business methods. It's gotten so crazy now that types of strains of certain kinds of bacteria can be protected.
And the whole algorithm.
Yeah, that's another one, Like it just keeps going and going. But anything that you can imagine, it doesn't even have to be a tangible thing, Like an algorithm is not tangible. Even when you put it down into code. It's not tangible. It's an idea that you can make a computer you to do really neat tricks with, but it's intangible. And again, coke is it. It's a slogan that's not at all tangible, and yet it's treated in most developed countries in the world or most industrialized countries in the world as the same thing as a property like your car or your house or your wedding ring. Like it's protected, and the way that it's protected is in really weird ways. Intellectual property and intellectual property law are a very unique animal. But what they all boil down to, Chuck is that if you get some sort of protection for your slogan, for your invention, for the screenplay you wrote, the government says that's yours. You are the only person who has any claim to it for X number of years, and congratulations on the thing you came up with using your creativity. And the whole purpose of having protection for intellectual property is to spur creativity, to spur discovery, to spur invention, to get it going. Because if you if you incentivize that, if you say, hey, if you come up with the screenplay, we're gonna make it so that no one else can just come along and make the movie that you wrote, that's yours, it's gonna make you want to keep pursuing a career of writing screenplays. But if you wrote a screenplay and you wrote it and it just didn't belong to you from the moment you finished the last sentence, and anybody could come along and make the movie and not give you a dime for your creativity, for your labor, you probably wouldn't do that, And so the public domain, the cultural public domain, would suffer as a result. We wouldn't have movies, we wouldn't have algorithms, we wouldn't have coca is it amazing? Slogans like that. We would be culturally bereft. If it were not for intellectual property protection, and yet it is one of the most insidious legal protections around today because it's been so thoroughly perverted from its original intent.
Wow, it's been a while since who had one of those.
I feel pretty strongly about IP.
Here's a stat that LVIA found for US, which I think is pretty interesting as far as like how big IP is. And I think that this is from the US Patent and Trademark Office, And things have been ticking up as far as IP and how valuable it is and how you know how much people are registering IP and buying up IP since the nineties, and the US PTO said by twenty nineteen says a few years old that IP intensive industries accounted for forty one percent of the US gross domestic product. That's great, and thirty three percent of all employment was IP based. Yeah, that's startling.
We used to invent things. We used to make machines, we used to develop airplace and cars and stuff like that. But now we invent ideas. Although we still invent stuff too, sure of course, but for the most part, that really kind of goes to show you like we have come to say, like, no, we're trading in ideas, and those things are very valuable, and you can build an entire industry around certain kinds of ideas, which is pretty nuts if you think about it totally.
So if you're talking about US law, there are four kinds of ip that law covers, and we've talked about some of these here and there. I think we did a whole episode on patents in me. Well. If we haven't, we will. Patents are granted by the government, and everyone kind of knows what a patent is. I think that's when you invent an idea or a process or a design, and you can get different kinds of patents. You can get design patents or utility patents things like that. If you're like if you invented the rebox pump mechanism for the rebox shoe that we talked about, you would get maybe a design patent and a utility patent that says no one else can put an another pump and a shoe that kind of thing. So it has to be novel, which is the real key, useful and non obvious. If it qualifies, and you're generally it depends, but you're going to get about twenty years out of that patent. And you got to pay for it to get it, and it's not cheap to get a patent. You have to pay an attorney to do all the legwork and that's never cheap. Right.
The next one, Chuck, is trademarks, which everybody knows what a trademark is, especially if you grew up in the second half of the twentieth century. That's when trademarks were everywhere and kind of what we wore on our T shirts and stuff. Right, Coke, is it who didn't have that T shirt or a bud Light T shirt with Spuds Mackenzie surfing on it?
I had has puts mckenzy shirt.
So trademark is basically a brand name, kim be a slogan, and it is something that you specifically associate with a specific company or a specific brand. Yeah, and you actually don't even have to trademark or register your trademark just from using you know, the Spuds Mackenzie drawing that you see everywhere are used to you're exercising your right to use that trademark and you can actually enforce in action against infringement on it. So if you haven't registered something, you'll see the TM That means that hey, this is our trademark. Don't mess with it. We haven't gone to the trouble of registering it. A registered trademark is that a capital are in a circle.
That means that they.
Actually did go to the trouble of registering it, and you really better not mess with them.
Yeah. Like an example is when you've seen court cases plenty of times where you'll see a company go in and say, here are one hundred and fifty examples of where we used this over the years. That's people trying to argue that they that's their trademark because they didn't copyright it or they didn't trademark it.
That's why McDonald's had a legitimate case against McDowell's.
Right. Oh man, great movie.
There is also copyrights. That's another big one. I think everybody's pretty familiar with that. But that screenplay that you wrote, or the computer program that you came up with that you coded essentially a creative work, and you, as the copyright owner, you as the creator, have the sole right to do as you please with that, to turn that software into something that you sell over and over and over again, turn that screenplay into a movie. Like it's totally up to you, and nobody else can do it while you hold that copyright, and copyrights are the ones that last the longest. I don't know if we said trademarks never run out.
Right, we didn't say it.
As long as you're using as a trademark, you never your exclusivity never runs out. With patents, like you said, I think twenty years. With copyrights, it's seventy plus years after creation.
Typically, I think it's seventy years after the death of the creator.
Right, that's plus the creator's life is ensconced in that plus symbol.
All right, Okay, I got you, and we'll talk about that later. That came from nineteen seventy eight. As far as screenplays and stuff, I think you can get a copyright, but the WGA has registration methods. You can register your script but you don't even have to do that stuff. But you would be wise too, because then you would have to if you haven't, you would have to prove that it was your id for idea first and someone didn't rip it off.
Yeah, there's that other way to do, which is mail it to yourself in a sealed world. I don't know, but it seems like if you don't have to go to the trouble of registering it. That would help your claim quite a bit.
Yeah, the poor person's copyright. I've heard that before. Sure. And what else? We got trade secrets and that's recipes, strategies, customer customer information, which is big any kind of process, like industrial process that you don't want another competitor to know about. And I don't think you need to register these either. No, And I meant to look up whether or not that's an actual downside because then you have to disclose things.
No, you, oh, if you, if you registered it, that might be why you don't have to register it, because I wonder if we said or not. One of the reasons that patents are so beneficial is because you have to disclose exactly how that thing works, so that after your patent runs out, somebody can come along and make the same thing from your your patent. Trade secrets, Yeah, you would not want to do that because they never run out. Just like trademarks, they're your secrets for as long as you actively work to keep them secret, like you make employees and sign NDA's remember that episode that was a good one. Yeah, or you you keep the recipe to Kentucky Fried Chicken's original chicken like under lock and key with armed guards standing outside. That would be a pretty pretty good demonstration of actively protecting your trade secrets.
Yeah, they don't need to register it. They have guns.
Exactly exactly where this.
All started is pretty interesting. We'll kind of quickly go through the history. It could go as back as far as ancient Greece, but as far as ip as we think of it today. You can point to fourteen twenty one in the Republic of Florence and June nineteenth of that year when the government said, hey, Filippo brune Shelley, Nope, Brune Leschi ski ski.
Remember it's is it really sound with the ch in Italian?
Filipo brune Leski There you go. Okay, I'm doing the accent, you guys. We heard from Italians it said, keep doing it.
There you go.
Filippo was an architect and had a patent for a technique to move marble over a barge, and they said, hey, this was really smart and you should make money off this and only you, and that kind of kicked the whole thing off and over the next you know, one hundred years or so, governments across Europe started sort of doing the same things and getting together these ideas that you should be able to patent and own processes and ideas, including the Venetian Patent Statute of fourteen seventy four yeah, which said, hey, it's up to us and our government can grant you a ten year monopoly on the use of a technology that you have made up, and if you violate it, you can get fined or you can get like a public citation.
Yeah. And again, by using government power to protect people's inventions and ideas help spur creativity and discovery and new inventions. And it wasn't just the Venetians who figured this out. About one hundred and fifty years later, England said hey, we're going to pass our Statute of Monopolies and it basically said that if you have a new invention, you have a monopoly to it for a certain period of time, very similar to what we have now for patents. But what's interesting about that is that that actually rolled back even more draconian law where basically the king could hand out patents or sell patents exactly to whoever they wanted, and you could get a patent on vinegar, so like there existing stuff. If you were a friend with the king, you could be the sole producer of vinegar if the king gave you a patent for vinegar. And the Parliament said, this is actually stifling progress and discovery. We're going to say this is limited to new inventions and for a limited period of time, which were two really good kind of points to add to that whole idea.
Totally well, and it prevented you know, they were definitely getting kickbacks and or just outright selling stuff, right, the king selling Yeah, the king was so here. In the US, our Constitution's Patent and Copyright clause gives Congress the power to quote promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the excls right to their respective writings and discoveries. This was, I think past. I think the first patent was in seventeen ninety granted to one Samuel Hopkins, who is producing it had a method of producing potash. And they're like, hey, congratulations, you are patent number one.
He said, wow, gee, that's amazing. I've never been first at anything.
That's right.
He's done his shoelaces, that's right.
He was first on the internet, commenting all the time, but no one counts that.
So this whole thing, if you, if you stop and think about it's all legal fiction. Like the government is saying you have a monopoly on it, but that's that doesn't there's no actual concrete anything going on here. They're just saying nobody else can use this thing that you came up with. We're the government, we're saying so. But the whole concept of protecting intellectual property actually is rooted. It has a philosophical basis. There's a few different justifications for it. The first came from well, I don't know if it's the first, but the first in this list came from Hegel, the German philosopher, who said that intellectual property is an extension of you. Like if you go out and you buy some seeds, and you buy some land, and you grow crops from those seeds on that land, those are your crops. You mixed your labor with your own resources and created something, and that's yours. Why would it be any different for your ideas? You used your resources, say schooling or inspiration, and you used your brain power to turn it into an idea or a thought. That you could tell other people. I can't do that, but you know other people can. According to Hegel, why would you not own that as well just as you would those crops.
Now, what's the difference between that and Lockian?
Lockian is there's actually not a lot of difference, to tell you the truth.
So that's just another, you know, similar school of thought from another philosopher.
Yeah, an earlier philosopher too, by a couple hundred years, I think, But it's essentially the same thing from what I can tell.
Well, there's also a utilitarian which means your INCENTIVI is to create something, which is what you've been talking about, and the fact that you know, no one's going to spend a lot of time doing this stuff. If that they it's all about money. If you don't have the incentive eventually of fortune, then you're not going to spend your time doing it.
Probably, yes, And I understand the difference now if I kind of make correct myself. Locke was the one who is essentially saying, you just like mixing seeds with land and growing crops. You same thing with your thoughts. Hagel was saying, like, you own your thoughts just as much as you own your body, you own your thoughts, and that they're your thoughts and they should belong to you. So there's definitely a distinction between the two. I was confused. Has happened sometimes.
So let's take a break, good idea. All right, we'll be right back. All right, we're back everyone, and we're here to talk about some criticisms of the whole concept of IP. And things have really changed a lot since the Internet age and the tech boom as far as IP goes, things really really ramped up and took off. And there's a legal philosopher named Samir Chopra and Livia found this article in aon and basically said that, you know, kind of grouping all this stuff together and it's not just choprah like other critics will argue the same thing. If you say trademarks and copyrights and patents and trade secrets and everything is all the same thing, which is IP, it really just sort of diminishes each one's specific purpose because they all have a specific purpose. And calling it just intellectual property, you like, using the word property even makes it sound like you're a thief, that you're taking something tangible, when in fact it still exists, Like you, if you download a song for free, you're not taking that song from the artist. You're just getting that song for free, and that song still exists and the artist still owns it.
Yeah. That was a big part of Chopra's point that calling it intellectual property theft or crime makes it a moral thing, whereas if you just call it copyright infringement, it sounds like a bureaucratic issue, you know what I mean. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense, and that that's unfair semantically to kind of put it all together. But even more so, they don't all really relate to one another as easily as you would think by being all lumped together under one term. And so, like most legal protection and probably all legal protection of intellectual property around the world, they say, well, there's actually we'll put some limitations on here. One of the big ones is that there's a time limitation on it. Yeah, And again the reason why is because they're they're saying, there's a very difficult balance that's being struck here. One is that you want to foster discovery. You want to incentivize people to go out and invent new things and come up with new ideas, because everyone benefits from that. But at the same time, you don't want to incentivize it so much that you actually disincentivize it by giving people too long of a monopoly. So you give them twenty years for a patent or something, right, which works out because you know, I think about it, Think about if the first mobile phone had like a seventy year patent where we be right now? You know, so twenty years seems fair, I guess in that context.
Well, also that gives you that's basically saying like, you got this amount of time to do something with it. M yeah, go, nobody else is going to do it, Yeah, should do it for sure.
There's also like with copyright law as well, there's like fair use, like we talked about in the Mad episode how parodies allowed, or you can comment on it that there's there are some exceptions to the rule. It's not just like ironclad, and for good reason, because again, this is a very difficult balance to strike.
Yeah, and we've had our struggles with that over the year in our own show when we're doing an episode on something where it would be like hip hop or something, or record scratching, like those really lend themselves to playing examples and we've never been super clear on the actual law. We could probably get away with it, but we different companies we've worked for over the years had different tolerances for just getting you know, even having to suffer through the hassle legally of seeing if it's okay to do that, So we've always just not done it generally.
Yeah, I mean we have a few times, like I think the Disco episode we did, but we were clearly commenting on the stuff. We weren't just using it for fun, like.
Yeah, and there's also a time limit that we were never sure, like you can play so many seconds, you have to comment on it. And Jerry was always the fun killer. You know, Mom had to come in and say, guys, you can't do that. And not a great position for Jerry to be in.
No, but a highly natural one. It felt right.
The other thing we should talk about is the cost to consumers, which is there are people that say, and of course this is when we're going to talk about pharmaceuticals because that's a big part of IP. But there's an econoistman named Dean Baker and others who say, like, you know, the effect of this IP law is really making the one percent just even more rich, and there's a transfer of wealth to the tune of about a trillion dollars a year because largely because of pharmaceutical companies, they're a big chunk of that trillion dollar. When you grant a monopoly on a drug, and sometimes even the government funds that to help make it happen. But then this one company has this drug and they can charge whatever they want for it, and then all of a sudden there's a trillion dollars being you know, put in this rich person's pocket and then transferring it to another rich person's pocket.
Well, yeah, and the trillion dollars he calculated, is that's the amount we pay a year beyond what we should be paying.
Yeah, pharmaceuticals mainly.
Yeah, that's a really good, easy example, he calculated. They make up about three hundred and eighty five billion of that trillion trillion. But there's also other stuff too. There's like types of fertilizer and types of seed that are patented that because they own a patent, And if you want this life saving medicine and you want this one kind of seed, you have to pay whatever price we want because we're the only ones who can sell it. Because we have a government sanctioned monopoly. That all of that adds up to about a trillion dollars more a year that we're paying. And like I said, the pharmaceutical companies in particular are they're an easy target. But the reason they're an easy target is because they demonstrate so thoroughly the problems with intellectual property protections. And that is like you were saying, they make ridiculous amounts of money. They charge whatever they want to charge because they're the only ones making this drug for X number of years, like twenty years or something like that. Right, and then to add insult to injury, they have tons of government funding. In the United States, the National Institutes of Health kicking forty billion dollars for research, and I think the pharmaceutical industry total spends about another ninety billion. There's a lot of money on research, but they found that they in twenty twenty, the ten largest pharmaceutical makers spent more on selling and marketing existing rugs than they did on research for new drugs. They also spent seven hundred and forty seven billion dollars between I think twenty two thousand and one and twenty twenty and stock buybacks and dividends and stock buybacks are not the worst thing in the world. There's definitely worse things you could do with your corporate cash. You're essentially paying back loans that investors gave you. Nothing inherently wrong with stock buybacks. But pharmaceutical industry, it's a different example. And one of the things they could be doing with that extra money, rather than upping their share price, is pouring it into more and more research and development, because there's a lot of diseases that still need to be cured, and they're instead spending it on ads that you see on nightly news.
Yeah. True, that is why there are some people out there. And LVIA found this one guy from Columbia University and economist named Joseph Stiglitz's great name, that said, what we should be doing is giving out big cash p for a new discovery, a new pharmaceutical discovery that's like a game changer, and instead of spending your money on advertising and marketing or on like drugs for balding and a rectile dysfunction. Not saying that those aren't issues. I don't want to diminish anyone's problems with any of those things. To be clear, but a cure for cancer would be better. I think we can all agree. And or you know, drugs to treat malaria when developing countries are being ignored because they're concentrating on something like a cure for baldness. So like, let's give a cash prize instead of a monopoly and say, hey, we'll give you I mean, I'm just throwing out numbers. This it wasn't from Stigletz, but here, we'll give you five hundred million dollars if you come up with a cure for cancer. And then that's just a cash award given to your company. And then it's open source and any pharmaceutical company in the world can make this stuff and get it out there super fast and competitively speaking, probably cheaper.
Yes, And if you they threw out that five hundred million figure the pharmaceutical industry, we'd be like, huh, yeah, that's lunch. So Stiglay, you're like a doctor evil five hundred million dollars totally. So Stiglas is saying, like, you don't want to just do away with the patent and trademark protection, like you want to keep that because it does incentivize research in other areas. What he was saying is identify the really terrible diseases that don't have a financial incentive to have research and development money thrown at. I'm like malaria. It's one of the top ten killers in the world, but it kills people in less developed, lower income countries who don't have the money to spend on that kind of drug, so the malaria is allowed to run rampant. What Stiglas is saying is governments can get together, or the US could do it alone and say we'll give you five hundred billion dollars for a cure familaria and then the other stuff you guys keep going, you know, and doing and making your money off of. But how about an extra five hundred billion nothing to sneeze at. So exactly, it's a it's a good idea, but I think there's a flaw in it to chuck, and that is that if the US government did this and made it open source like he's suggesting, like you said, then the rest of the world would benefit from the US government funding. We'd become the drug research funders for the world. The rest of the world would become free riders who would just get the recipe for free because the US government handed out that prize to the company that created it or discover.
Yeah, you'd have to get together and sign a pact with like most of the major countries of the world or something. Yeah, that they all do the same, Okay, I don't know. I mean it would have to be a global push because that's and in fact, that kind of segues into our next section, which is the global globalist world that we live in. It becomes a little sticky because IP law I think generally just covers the country that you're in. I think when you get a patent, you have to get it in different countries if you want to sell it in different places. And there's a long, long history of countries not respecting IP law from other countries and stealing stuff. China is a big one. And in the case of China, it's sometimes it's hey, why don't you give me We'll let you do business in China. You know, people we have over here will let you do business here if you give us. If you like, open source your stuff only to us.
Right, right, you have to partner with the Chinese business who will have full access to your intellectual property if you want access.
Right or they'll just steal it, which also happens.
That's a big one. There was an operation that was funded and supported by China's government between twenty nineteen and twenty twenty two where Chinese hackers stole trillions of dollars worth of intellectual property from just thirty companies, just took it. They had everything to create pharmaceuticals, create guided missile systems, like just they got everything, and there's not a lot you can do about that, Like there's there's basically nothing you can do about those things. Now China has those now. And the big argument against that is that if China can just steal ideas, it doesn't have to spend tons of money on research and development, So that means that it can make those products cheaper than the people who actually whose idea it was and did spend that money on research development in price the legitimate owner right out of the market. And that is about as unfair competition as you can possibly ever encounter.
Yeah, but it's also something that has been going on forever. It's not new. China's not the first country to do this. Liba points out that when economys are emerging, and especially during like tech boom, and they're catching up to richer countries, then they will steal ideas, I mean everything from I mean it happens all the time and has for decades. The lawsuit guitars like Japan made knockoffs of like Gibson and Fender guitars in the seventies and eighties and sold a ton of them, and they were really good guitars. And I think there may be a short stuff in there about the lawsuit era, but it's always happened. Even in the United States, we did the same thing, and from the very beginning of our copyright law in the eighteenth century, we very much explicitly exempted foreign works from protection so we could go out and steal things like the power loom and stuff like that.
Yeah, those two Carnegie and Dominic guys are saying like this is just part of the trajectory that developing economies hit upon at some point in time. It's just way easier to steal the ideas and use those to grow your economy. But they said that trajectory also usually includes more strictly enforced IP protections on the other side of that development. And apparently China is starting to show signs of that that they're taking IP protection a little more seriously, at least according to the Carnegie people. But yeah, that's one of the reasons why we're in a trade war with China is because of hacks like that.
Should we take a break? Hacks like that was almost the name of our show. We'll be right back, man.
I'm still cracked up about hacks like that. So one of the things about intellectual property protection is that it is kind of grown in lockstep as American industry has. Because as American industry grows and comes up with more and more valuable intellectual property, they like to go to the government and say, hey, why don't you guys come up with stricter and stricter laws giving us longer and longer monopolies to those ideas to that intellectual property. It's basically the snake starting to eat its tail, where the government has now become Charles the First and the corporations are like all of Charles's first friends getting patents on vinegar and stuff like that. It's not quite that egregious, but it's the same contours the same idea. Basically, where incredibly wealth wealthy people are given unfair, anti competitive advantage over say startups or people who have even better ideas through these monopolies.
Contour is one of my words, like cellar door. It's not a combination. But oh yeah, yeah, the word contour just I don't know, that's velvety to me.
Hack likes that.
So you're saying copyright law like it's just sort of extended over the years as far as how long you could own these ideas. In the seventeen ninety when we first started out, it was fourteen years, you could renew for another fourteen and then you know, over the ensuing like a couple of hundred years. Basically, it just grew and grew and grew until nineteen ninety eight with the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. That's when the seventy years after the person's death was put in place, or if your corporation ninety five years from the original publication or one hundred and twenty years from creation, whichever is less a little confusing, but it makes sense if you think about it.
Yeah, and that actually brought the United States into line with international agreement on copyright limitations in time frames. I think there was lower than other countries. What other countries were at but regardless, people just kind of smelled a rat and snuck around, actually ironically a souda mouse. It's all frequently called the Mickey Mouse Protection Act because around that time, Disney was supposedly in danger of losing the rights to Steamboat Willie version of Mickey Mouse in twenty twenty three, and they were lobbying very hard to make that not happen, to get the Sunny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act passed, which was successful. But I've also read that Disney wasn't quite behind it like people say, and that even if Steamboat Willie does come into public domain this year, I don't think he did. But even if he did, just that specific version of Mickey would be in the public domain. And the Mickey that we know in love will probably never be in the public domain because not only does he have copyright protection, Disney also uses him like a trait, like a slogan or like a brand name. It's like he has trademark protection, and trademark protection never runs out as long as you keep using it. So Mickey will probably never enter the public domain even if Steamboat Willie did. I didn't see that he did.
Though I don't know. I don't think so, but this just occurred to me that with every year we do our show, we can look for a Halloween podcast story from a year later in history.
Yeah, that's why we ended up doing Philip K. Dick a couple of years ago, because he finally started to come into the public domain.
I love it. And by the way, people that wrote in that either had ideas or wrote their own stories. I haven't looked yet, but I say those emails and we're going to take a look at those, all right. The next thing we should talk about is in nineteen ninety eight the Dilgital the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which basically, the way I understand it is that it covered the Internet such that it created a way for someone to say, hey, you're using my thing on your website, go take it down. I want to officially register that you are taking my stuff, and as long as they take it down, then they are not penalized. Right.
That was a kind of a big deal because it allowed the Internet to start to flourish, and it kept people who ran social media sites or YouTube or something like that from worrying that they were going to get their pants sued off and allowed for the spread and really kind of boosted the economy quite a bit, as you can imagine.
Sure.
One of the problems though, with these long protections, and sometimes in some cases like trademarks like limitless protection, is that so seventy years beyond the lifespan of the creator. That is a long time. Yeah, as you can tell from like the Halloween stories we pick, like sometimes we have no idea what they're talking about because the the language they're using is English, and you understand that they're English words, but the context is so old that it doesn't really make sense. Just like remember that one thing about how I thought the guy was reading tea leaves or something like that to see who's coming in and yeah and yeah. So that's a really good example of one of the problems of it, because when we use those stories, we are building on them. We're taking the we're taking them and putting our own spin on them. We're making silly voice sales, yes exactly. We're creating something new using that original work as a building block. And that's one of the purposes of creating protections for creative stuff, so that eventually it will spread out into the public domain and people can do new, amazing things with them. The problem is if it's seventy plus years before you can do that, it's not as easy to make new ideas from as it would be if it were twenty years old or ten.
Yeah, this one I understand in a way because like, how many great films have we gotten based on the works of Shakespeare? Which is Lvia points out that who was it Jennifer Jenkins, director of Duke University Center for the Study of the Public Domain. That's pretty specific. Sure, that's an argument that Jennifer Jenkins makes, which is like, we wouldn't have you know, these great adaptations of the works of Shakespeare's films and stuff like that, which is true. But I also can see a world where like come up with a new idea, you know.
Well supposedly it might have been Shakespeare said it. There are no new ideas on nothing new under the sun. Like, yeah, all the ideas have been essentially come up with, and everything else is just basically a remix of it.
Yeah, there's like seven real movie plots essentially, I over seven dramatic I can't remember how many it is, but that there is an argument to me and made that there are really only seven different stories you can tell and everything else is a version of those.
Yes, and we don't protect those specific seven ideas, we would be totally messed if we if we did, right, the protections are more nuanced than that. It's like how that story develops, what the characters are doing in it, that's what's protected. And so in that sense, yes, you are coming up with a new idea rather than just remixing a Shakespeare play. And I agree with you. I I have the same that same kind of quibble with that, the idea that you can't that is too long to remix stuff, even though we do that every Halloween.
Uh. The Internet is very tricky though, because on one hand, you want like uh, the idea of like the paywall. You want people to hear your stuff and see your stuff. But if you are and Olivia's is a great example, if you're like a reporter in the South Sudan covering something very important to you, you want everyone that you can think think of to find this and discover it. But you also, like it costs money for you to be there and to be on the ground in the South Sudan for a year doing this intensive reporting, like a company needs to be paying you to do that and to fly there and to stay there and per diem and all that stuff, and they're not doing that the goodness of their hearts. So they may say, well, we got to put this behind a paywalk because we got to make money.
Yeah, And when the Internet came along in the beginning, it followed a hacker ethos, which was that it should be free and open to everybody. Information is now easiest pie to disseminate, and we should it should all be free and unfettered. And we actually see that that colliding with what you were just talking about, how you know someone's reporting is valuable and is worth money, with colliding with the idea that information should be free on the internet. With Canada right now, where I think Canada passed a law that says that if you are like a social media aggregator and news aggregator, you have to pay the creator of that news some form of compensation for aggregating that news because you're making money off of it. But you're just taking their work for free, right And Canada is in a real pickle right now because Google and Facebook said, okay, well, we're just not going to be available in Canada anymore because we're not going to pay that and what's Canada going to do? So that seems like that is very ironic. The free Internet, in the form of the most profitable, most expensive and valuable companies in the world, is crushing the journalistic value that's brought by people who create news and come up with the articles that those companies make their money off of. It's a terrible jam.
It really is. And over the years, of course, we've had sort of activist crusaders like Aaron Schwartz, who in twenty eleven was indicted for downloading one of our favorite websites, jastore jstr database. What does that stand for? Actually, I don't even know.
I can't even possibly come up with anything on this short and notice chuck believe me.
But anyway, Schwartz downloaded millions of academic articles from the jastore database, which is behind a paywall, and the idea, you know, presumably, was that he was going to share those and he even had a manifesto, the Gorilla Open Access Festo, where he's like, there's a moral imperative to have these academic articles available to the world and to someone who might not have the money in the global South, these institutions that can't pay for these journals, maybe like we should get it out there. And Jaystore did not press charges. Yeah, but US attorneys came after him and he took his own life at the age of twenty six and twenty thirteen before the trial started.
Yeah, US attorneys Carmen Ortiz and Steven Hayman really aggressively pursued charges against him. And it's kind of explained that he was the scapegoat in the post WikiLeaks world. They were seeking to make an example out of him. And yeah, he took his life at twenty six, and like a real luminary was lost, especially if you stop and consider what he was doing, and especially if you stop and consider that Jay Store was like, you gave the articles back, We're not going to press charges. And if you want to know like a little peak behind what Aaron Schwartz was doing, if you're like that's a weird thing to die over scientific journal articles, who cares. There's an amazing article from Prisonomics that Alec Mayasi wrote in twenty thirteen called why is Science behind a paywall? And everyone should read that because it's about the scientific journal publishing racket that is basically keeping science in the hands of just the wealthiest universities in the world and out of everybody else's hands because they make time of money off of it, even though science is supposed to be spread everywhere far and wide, so people can try new things based on those findings.
Because money's the root of all evil.
Right, there's an article that I think Dean Baker wrote his ip the Root of All Evil?
Oh, interesting, we're talking about earlier. Yeah, So enforcing this stuff, especially on the Internet, has been very tricky over recent years. When you talk about websites like BitTorrent and Napster. Back in the day, lime wire is what I use, remember LimeWire.
And what was the other one with the why? I can't remember, but yes.
I don't know. Someone will write in let us know. But Napster if you don't know about that, and you're pretty young and you were a kid when that happened, that was sort of one of the first free music downloading sites, and it was all over the news at the time because it devastated the music industry in a lot of ways, and a lawsuit shut them down in two thousand and one. But this was a case where the world and the internet and the music industry pivoted eventually when things like Spotify and Pandora came along and said, hey, we can't police this. You cannot shut down people trading music online. The genie has left the bottle. It's too late. But why don't we get together and at least we'll start these services where people can sign up and they can pay for this stuff, because we think people will do that. They may not buy your records anymore, but they'll pay ten bucks a month or whatever for unlimited music, and then we'll give you a tiny little piece of it. And they said, all right, I guess that's the best we can do. This is a stat Livia found in twenty twenty two inflation adjusted dollars revenue from and this is just music sales like selling a CD or whatever. At the time in nineteen ninety nine it was twenty six almost twenty six billion dollars, which was the peak, went all the way down to eight point three billion in twenty fourteen and twenty fifth, and as backup as of a couple of years ago, to about sixteen billion, which is still you know, a little more than a little less than half. I guess of the peak because of largely because of like paid subscriptions and stuff like that. But that's a huge decline and the only reason music, Like, if you complain about the price of concert tickets, it's because you stopped paying for recorded music. That's there's a direct line you can draw between musicians having to make money somehow and you stealing their music.
That's the thing. It's not necessarily the musicians making that money. Like there's huge companies that make most of the money on a ticket these days, and.
That's a like a concert ticket.
Yeah, that's why tickets sales and prices are so jecked, Like you can go on to Ticketmaster or something like that and the show won't be sold out, and yet they're suddenly at scalper prices for some reason. It makes no sense. It's a total racket. And that's the reason why it's a record because again, like you said, they stopped making as much money off of recorded music, so they figured out how to make as much money as they could off of live music. Where before, Yeah, that was like that was the artist's piece, the live thing, Like the record company got the record money you go off and do your tour. We don't care. Have as much fun as you like. And when the record company's pie was removed by Napster completely just chattered. They moved over to Live and now they have a stranglehold on ticket prices, which is awful.
Yeah, I mean back in the day it was ticket prices were low because you toured to support the album sales. Yeah, you put out a record, you go on a big tour, you charge like eight to fifteen dollars, and you sold merch. You got some money, merch money, and you sold a ton of records. Once the record thing went away, they had to make money and then all the other you know. Of course, you know, not knocking them because we work with these people, but promoters and venus and they all take a big piece public service announcement. If you'll allow really quickly, please when you go to buy a stuff you should know live ticket, please please please only go and make sure you're looking at your computer screen, make sure you're going to the ven you only because when you type in stuff you should know live Boston, the first thing that pops up might be a scalper site and you might not realize it's a scalper site because they don't look like, you know, shady guys and leather jackets on the corner anymore. It looks like, oh, this is just the place where you buy the tickets to Josh and Chuck show. And we had a few people that wrote in and said like, hey, I just paid two hundred dollars for this ticket blah blah blah blah blah, and I'm like, you went to a scalper site and they said, no, I didn't. And I said, I guarantee you did, because our tickets are not more than like whatever, like thirty five bucks or something. So just people should know that we never have a chance to say that. So please don't buy scalper ticket unless you just can't get a ticket and you're loaded and don't care.
Yeah, and that's the original price is thirty five dollars. And then there's you know, whatever fees the venue puts on it, and then once you get out of away from the venue, it just keeps going more and more people put more and more egregious fees on it. So I think the best thing to do is to either if you can go to the box office and buy them directly. That is far and away your cheapest as close as you're going to get to face value. And if you can't do that, look for pre sales. We always have pre sales, a couple of days of pre sales first where that has the least amount of fees attached to it. There's the fewest cooks in the kitchen at that point, and then after that and regular sales when it just turns into the wild West.
Yeah. I mean, we love these live shows, but I gotta say once my eyes were really open once we started doing it as to how it all works. It's really really kind of like, uh, okay.
Yeah, because we can't do anything about it. It's like, oh, you guys can sell the tickets yourselves then, and no, we can't. We can't possibly do that. Where you have to deal with the people that you have to deal with, and there are some that are better than others. There's some that are there's promoters and ticket sellers that are aware that there is a lot of terribleness to their industry and they're trying to do the opposite, and you can seek them out, but they're not in every city. You're eventually going to run into having to work with people that you don't want to work with, and that's just part of being on tour.
That's right. And this all started because of Napster and me talking about Napster.
That's right.
I don't know how to close that loop other than to say I don't know.
We could just end the episode.
I mean, I got nothing else.
Okay, I got nothing else either. If you want to know more about intellectual property protection, there's a lot of really interesting, if not kind of dry, articles out there about it. And since I said dry, it's time for a listener mail.
It's time for Chuck. This is I just thought a pretty cool little tidbit from Nicole Adreon. Hey guys, wanted to say thanks for the show. Love listening while I drive and learning something new, and you always infuse some laughter into my day. It just listened to the episode on the Manhattan Grid. It's an oldie but a goodie, and as a gal who grew up in the shadows of New York City on Long Island, spent quite a lot of time there and hold it near and dear to my heart. One thing you missed out on, though, was a little explanation on Broadway. You mentioned that it does not stay consistent with a grid. And here's the thing. The reasoning for this is because it was a deer run that indigenous people used to hunt prior to the Dutch coming in and colonizing the island. There are also some really interesting studies and maps that were created to assess what plants were native to the island before it became a concrete jungle. So Broadway, like that little diagonal thing was a deer run and it became a road eventually.
I guess that's very cool.
Pretty cool anyway, thanks for the opportunity to learn. We'd love to hear an episode on the high Line. It's got a great history. And that again is from Nicole ad.
Thanks Nicole. We love learning stuff we didn't know about. Thanks for taking the time to write in and tell us. And if you want to be like Nicole and just be super cool with some great info, you can send us an email to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
