Andrew J., Galambos's Ideas and the Future of Private Protection for Intellectual Property

0:00The paper that's behind this presentation, which is one of two papers that have been uploaded out of the whole conference, so you shouldn't have any problem finding it. So I cover V50, which is the Introduction to the Science of Volition, and it's also published in the book Seek Etur Ad Astra, Volume 1, which the translation of that is 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. 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.

0:46I 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 Rights Views of Intellectual Property. So Goulamos founded the Free Enterprise Institute in 1961 to teach his approach to freedom on a profit-seeking basis. Prior to founding FEI, Goulamos visited New York and saw Ayn Rand, Leonard Reed, Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard.

1:36And as far as I know, until he died, he had a good relationship with Leonard Reed. He was profoundly influenced by the Austrians, but he rejected von Mises's a priori methodology. Columbus was so influenced by the Austrians that he invited von Mises to give FEI's first guest lecture in 1952, excuse me, 1962. So first we're going to talk about the foundation, which is the volitional science, and then we'll look at the intellectual property work, a sketch of that, and then some critical discussion. So the goal is really to convey some sense of Columbus's integrated system and its novelty. In other words, basically in libertarian publications, I don't see anything that really approaches what I'm going to talk to you about today.

2:27Whether or not it makes sense or not is up to you to decide, but it's quite different. So Columbus used many definitions in structuring his theories. Here we have a couple of the more significant definitions in volitional science. For our purposes, the most significant one is the primary property, definition primary property is the individual's thoughts, actions and ideas, ideas are expressed thoughts. Note that these definitions are not based on natural rights theory, Columbus didn't go talk about Locke or any other prior philosopher in making these statements, he was putting it together as an entire theory, sort of a bovo, although of course when you look at the components of property, you can see basically the idea from the American Revolution of life, liberty and property as being the three components.

3:33Note also that Galambos considered that freedom was a product, not a cause. So the anomalous believe that all sciences start with postulates. So we have some postulates here. Postulate one, all men live to pursue happiness. Postulate two, all concepts of happiness are pursued through moral action are equally valid. And we have a couple of corollaries, morally acting man seeks to profit and immorally acting man seeks to plunder and man lives to acquire property. So postulate one was inspired by the Declaration of Independence. If you look at the paper, Galamos believed that Thomas Paine wrote the Declaration of Independence. There's a book on that which makes a good case for it. Postulate 2 is based on the theory of relativity.

4:23All frames of reference are equally valid. So Galamos differentiated between government and the state. By the way, there are a lot more definitions in the paper. Well, he found it very important to differentiate every time he talked about something. If he had different concepts, he endeavored to define different words to mean the different things. So, he wanted to preserve the word government, specifically because it was in the Declaration and reference Paine who he cared a lot about, and government becomes basically a private property protection system where the state is the apparatus of coercion which is generally accredited and insurance is the replacement for the state in principle and a key component of government.

5:23This is one thing that you occasionally see a smattering of in some libertarian literature, but this was like a core principle for Galambos. Galambos favored a justice system focused on the restoration of property through recovery or restitution. The justice system would be backed by a credit system that would virtually immobilize criminals without the use of force. So basically we're looking at, when we look at Columbus's ideas, we're not looking at a way to justify force as we are normally in other systems of thought. And it was basically the idea that you would build a system that's so disincented crime that people wouldn't commit it.

6:11And if they didn't in fact commit it, they would lose access to the rest of society without being imprisoned, they'd be imprisoned in their own house at the worst case. Whether that would work or not is up to question. So he actually, in the 60s, was talking about debit cards when all we had was credit cards and machines that you ran things across. He was talking about computer-connected credit systems where if you committed a crime, your Your credit card or your debit card could be invalidated and every time you went to use it, it would be rejected. I will almost say that all product development follows a plan.

7:00The first step is innovation, the second step is education, third is advertising and fourth is maintenance. The main issue here is what he called a disclosure barrier between the first and second steps. He had a shaded area that he drew on a diagram and he called that the disclosure barrier and that was the representation of the problem that innovators have of transmitting their ideas to anyone else. And he had a whole slew of stories that he told about various innovators who had many problems disclosing their ideas. So Galambos didn't like the current system. So the scheme of patents and copyrights is flawed and arbitrary. Patents are exclusive. You can't have independencies. Copyright protects phraseology rather than the underlying idea. Limited time of protection. He thought it should be permanent. Cosmological discoveries are ineligible, so the theory of gravitation or Maxwell's equations, these kinds of things don't come into the system.

8:12The current system leaves secrecy as the only real protection and the theory of primary property aims to eliminate the need for secrecy. So Columbus would replace copyright and patent system with prototype registration companies. He would eliminate the distinction of patent copyright trademark and all of this would would be proprietarily administered. If an innovator chose not to register, they would run the higher risk of an independency. So remember that in his view, independency was no big problem. If two people came up with an idea independently, they could both pursue it. The natural estate was the sum of all property owned by an individual during his life and thereafter.

9:01So this could be the repository of posthumous income from rents and investments. It could also be a repository of posthumous primary property royalties. It prevented the property being dispersed due to undeserving errors. So whenever you hear something that says that Columbus was looking for somebody's heir to pass the money on to, that's baloney because he didn't believe in that at all. And this can be a source of capital for basic research. So when we talk about Newton's natural estate or any of the major scientists, their natural estates would be huge. And these funds could be used for investing in basic research.

9:49So there are differences between primary property and secondary property. He thought that primary property could only be owned by individuals. You can find much more detail in the paper. Compensation is only due when an income is generated. So if you say a poem to a lover or whatever, I won't use girlfriend because There may be other people in here and I'll be judged by that, but anyway, if you have a lever and you want to say a poem to them, there's no compensation due.

10:39So the compensation question has three components, why pay anything at all, that's what Columbus called gratitude, which is market acknowledgement, to whom should you pay it, and that's to the Antecedents to Produce the Ideas and to whom or how much should you pay and it's basically a positive non-zero amount so there's there's no specific amount stated. Remoteness dilution is a method by which it's similar to a mutual fund company where more people add ideas to a product over time. The percentage of their revenue share for the product stays the same but the number of people People that are receiving compensation goes up and so it's like when you buy a mutual fund, you're adding your money into the total capital of the mutual fund company but you're not, you don't increase the value by doing that.

11:37Let's see. So there's two types of remoteness solution, negotiated and automatic. Negotiated requires negotiation with the innovator. can be set by the entrepreneur. Innovators who have died primary to an implementation of a system like this are automatic by default and that the disbursement of payments would be handled by a clearing house system. So in an analysis of what I've just talked about, political science is strikingly similar to Austrian and libertarian, specifically The same data is of interest with emphasis on property indicating a similar prior theory.

12:25First postulate is reminiscent of the action axiom and the second postulate is similar to Rothbard's non-aggression principle. So the theory of primary property attempts to address some issues. It doesn't rely on justified force and of course in the natural rights theories and and stuff if you do something, steal something supposedly in intellectual property and you get jailed for it, that seems draconian, so this is not a problem. All ideas currently in common use would be automatic remote destitution, so no permission is required. There's no payment for non-commercial use, blah, blah, blah.

13:13I think it's important that the cost of the system would be borne by the users. So Kinsella's criticisms are based on, to Chile as the primary source, without, with limited information, he calls Galamos a nut and a crank, calls proprietary notes going to ridiculous lengths, and discusses some of what he thinks are insane behaviors. There's more explanation in the paper. So antagonists to IP in general claim that there cannot be conflicts over uses, ideas may be replicated, but there are conflicts, even when you don't have patents and copyrights. The innovators themselves are rivalists. Without being a market, they can't get paid for anything else.

14:00You're coming. Secrecy is less desirable. So Galamos couched this in morality and justice, but it's still subject to market reality. He had kind of a utopian system where everything had to come together. He wasn't simply an engineer. He had other inputs. State protection of IP is a mess, but that doesn't mean we can't come up with some market Driven Mechanism, and Columbus' methods achieved the goals that he sought. He had a profit all the time he was teaching, and he eliminated disclosure.