Stuff You Should Know - How Intellectual Property Works

Episode Date: October 12, 2023

Intellectual 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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here and this is the Don't Burn It Off. It's actually more interesting than it sounds addition. Yeah, and can I just write off the bat, shout out, Livia, 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, she figured it out. Like there is something interesting in intellectual property and she found it so Gritos 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 I am pay. 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. It's on. 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 they'll mean 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 use 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 incentivize that, if you say, hey, if you come up with the screenplay, we're going to make it so that no one else can just come along and make the movie that you wrote. That's yours. It's going to 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 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 cocos 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 in Austin, too, you had one of those. I feel pretty strongly about IP. Here's a stat that Livia 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 much people

are registering IP and buying up IP since the 90s. And the US PTO said by 2019 and and says if you resolve that IP intensive industries accounted for 41% of the US grossed domestic product in 33% of all employment was IP based. Yeah, that's startling. We used to invent things, we used to make machines, we used to develop airplanes 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. We've talked about some of these here and there. I think we did a whole episode of patents, didn't we? 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 patterns, you can get design patterns or utility patterns, things like that. If you're like, if you invented the re-bucked pump mechanism for the re-buck shoe that we talked about, you would get maybe a design pattern and a utility pattern that says, no one else can put another pump in 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 gonna get about 20 years out of that patent. And you gotta 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 leg work 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 20th century, that's when trademarks were everywhere and kind of what we wore on our t-shirts and stuff, right? Coke is it. Coke is it? Coke isn't that t-shirt. Or a Bud Light t-shirt with Spudsmakensi surfing on it. Yeah, I had a Spud's Mackenzie shirt. So trademark is basically a brand name,

Kimbea 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 trade mark or register your trademark just from using the Spud's Mackenzie drawing that you see everywhere or used to. You're exercising your right to use that trademark and you can actually enforce 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 into the trouble of registering it. Our registered trademark is that our capital R 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 150 examples of where we use 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's 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. It's 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 20 years, with copyrights, it's 70 plus years after creation typically. I thought, I think it's 70 years after the death of the creator.

Right, that's plus. The whole creator's life is in sconce in that plus symbol. All right, okay, I got you. And we'll talk about that later that came from 1978. As far as screenplays and stuff, you 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 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 envelope.

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 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 would have to disclose things. No, you, oh, if you, if you registered it, that might be why you don't have to register it. 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 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 NDAs. Remember that episode? That was a good one. Or 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 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 quickly go through the history. It could go as far as ancient Greece, but as far as IP, as we think of it today, you can

point to 1421 in the Republic of Florence. And June 19th of that year when the government said, hey, a Philippe Burrunez-Shelé. No. Brunelleshi. Ski, ski, remember? Is it really? Kit, kit, sound with a CH in Italian. Felipe Bruno Leschi. There you go. Okay. I'm doing the accent, you guys. We heard from Italians, it said, keep doing it.

There you go. Felipe 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, 100 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 Neeshan Patent Statute of 1474, which said, hey, it's up to us and our government can grant you a 10-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, like by using government power

to protect people's inventions and ideas, helps spur creativity and discovery in new inventions. And it wasn't just the Venetians who figured this out. About 150 years later, England said, hey, we're gonna 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

to whoever they wanted and you could get a patent on vinegar. So like there were 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 is 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 exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries This was I think past I think the first baton was in 1790 granted to one Samuel Hopkins Who is producing ahead of 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 to anything That's right. He's done a 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, 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 where the government were saying so but the whole concept of protecting intellectual property uh... actually is rooted it has five philosophical basis there's a few different um... 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 have, 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 other people can, according to Hagle, 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. Okay, so that's just another,

so much school of thought from another philosopher. Yeah, an earlier philosopher, two by a couple hundred years, I think. But it's essentially the same thing from what I can tell. Well, there's also utilitarian, which means you're incentivized 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 they, it they talk about money. If you don't have the incentive eventually of fortune, then you're not gonna spend your time doing it probably. Yes, and I understand the difference now if I just kind of make correct myself.

Lock was the one who was essentially saying, you just like mixing seeds with land and growing crops, you same thing with your thoughts. Hegel 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 as happens sometimes. So let's take a break. Good idea.

All right, we'll be right back. Today's episode is sponsored by AirBnB. Maybe you've stayed in an AirBnB before and thought to yourself, this actually seems pretty doable. Maybe your place could be an Airbnb. It could be as simple as starting with a spare room or your whole place when you're away. You could be sitting on an Airbnb and not even know it.

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Find out more at Airbnb.ca slash host. That's Airbnb.ca slash host. I'm Dr. Laurie Santos, host of the Happiness Lab podcast. Making new friends and maintaining old friendships is a great way to boost your happiness. There are lots of sources of well-being standing around you, you just have to tap into it. But sadly, we don't always feel up for being sociable. If I was approaching a stranger, my heart would raise, I'd feel like I was going to throw up, I just had so much anxiety around it, So in a new season of the show, I'll tackle how to make firm friendships firmer

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and one very memorable red swimsuit. I found myself in Pamela Anderson's attic as you do. I put that red swimsuit in a safe because it seemed everybody wanted it. We're digging deep to better understand with these moments taught us about the world and our place in it. I want you to really smell the axe body spray that emanated during this time. It was presented more as kind of like a crime topic. Okay, and that's not a love story. Not a love story. It had been branded on the uterus of every single woman

from C to shining sea. Listen to In Retrospect on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. 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 is a legal philosopher named Samir Chopra and Livy found this article in Aon and basically said that, you know, kind of grouping all this stuff together and it's not just Chopra, 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, 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 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 it 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 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, 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. here. One of the big ones is that there's a time limitation on it. And again, the reason why is because there's a very difficult balance that's being struck here. One is that you

want to foster, discover, 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 20 years for a patent or something. Right. Which works out because, you know, if, think about it, think about if the first mobile phone had like a 70 year patent, where we'd be right now, you know? So 20 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

Mm-hmm. Yeah, go on. Or we're all somebody else is gonna do it. Yeah, I 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 Mm-hmm how parodies allowed or you can comment on it, that there are some exceptions to the rule. It's not just like iron, clad. 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 a 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 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 at the disco episode we did, but we were clearly commenting on the stuff we weren't just using it for fun. Yeah, there's also a time limit that we were never sure, like you can play so many seconds. You have to comment on it. It's not. 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 uh... there are people that say

uh... and of course this is when we're gonna talk about pharmaceuticals because that's a big part of ip but they're there's an account is made in dean baker and others uh... who say like you know the effect of this i p-laws really making the 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

dollars 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 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, a higher price. Pharmaceuticals mainly. Yeah, that's a really good easy example.

He calculated they make up about 385 billion of that trillion. Not the trillion. But there's also other stuff too. There's like types of fertilizer and types of seed that are patented that, right. 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 20 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 kick in 40 billion dollars for research and I think the pharmaceutical industry total spends about another 90 billion that's a lot of money on research, but they found that in 2020, the 10 largest pharmaceutical makers spent more on selling and marketing existing drugs than they did on research for new drugs. They also spent $747 billion between, I think, 2021 and 2020 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 like nightly news.

True, that is why there are some people out there and Livy found this one guy from Columbia University in the condom's name Joseph Stiglitz, great name. This said what we should be doing is giving out big cash prizes 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 drugs for balding and erectile 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 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 from Stiglets but here we'll give you 500 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 they threw out that 500 million figure the pharmaceutical industry would be like, yeah, I'm in 500 billion. That's industry would be like, huh, yeah. I made 500 billion. That's a lunch. So, um,

it's still, that was low. He, uh, he, you're like a Dr. Evil, 500 million dollars. Totally. So, Stiglitz was 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 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 them, like malaria. It's one of the top 10 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 Stiglis is saying is governments can get together or the US could do it alone and

say we'll give you $500 billion for a cure for malaria. And then the other stuff you guys keep going and doing and making your money off of, but how about an extra $500 billion? Nothing to sneeze at. So it's a good idea, but I think there extra 500 billion? Nothing to sneeze at. So it's a good idea, but I think there's a flaw in it too, Chuck. And that is that if the US government did this and made it open source like he's suggesting, like you said, then there, 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 discovered it. Well, yeah, you'd have to get together and sign a pact with like most of the major countries of the world or something, 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, the 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 will let you do business in China you know people we have over here will let you do business in China, you know, when people we have over here, we'll 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 2019 and 2022, where Chinese hackers stole trillions of dollars worth of intellectual property from just 30 companies. Just took it. They had everything to create pharmaceuticals, create guided missile systems like 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 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, and 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. Libya points out that when economies are emerging,

and especially during tech booms, 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 it has for decades, lawsuit guitars. Like Japan made knockoffs of like Gibson and Fender guitars in the 70s and 80s 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 18th 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 endowment 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. Right.

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 Endowment 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? Yeah, let's. Hacks like that was almost the name of our show. We'll be right back. Today's episode is sponsored by AirBnB. Maybe you've stayed in an AirBnB before and thought to yourself, this actually seems pretty doable.

Maybe your place could be an AirBnB. It could be as simple as starting with a spare room or your whole place when you're away. You could be sitting on an Airbnb and not even know it. Maybe a music festival or big tournament is coming to town and you want to get out of town, you could Airbnb your home and make some extra money. Maybe you have a vacation plan for this summer. When you're away, your home could be an Airbnb.

Whether you could use a little extra money to cover some bills or for something a little more fun, your home might be worth more than you think. Find out more at airbnb.ca slash host. That's airbnb.ca slash host. I'm Dr. Laurie Santos, host of the Happiness Lab podcast. Making new friends and maintaining old friendships is a great way to boost your happiness. There are lots of sources of well-being standing around you, you just have to tap into it. But sadly, we don't always feel up for being sociable.

If I was approaching a stranger, my heart would raise, I'd feel like. I was gonna throw up, I just had so much anxiety around it. So in a new season of the show, I'll tackle how to make firm friendships firmer right through to the joy you can find in talking to total strangers. I'm very much enjoying your animal prints golf, madam. You're wonderful. The steps to becoming more social might surprise you, but trust me, there are things you can introduce into your daily routine right away. I do your purple hair, madam. Your paw. So listen to the Happiness Lab on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your shows. We're supposed to learn from our own mistakes, but other people's errors can be instructive too.

An history is a treasure trove of mishaps and meltdowns that can teach us all. What happened when a zealous scientist tried to inject snow into a hurricane? How did the world greatest illusionist trick his audience after he had died? Why did the inventor of Mother's Day try to take it all back? And how did we get the story of the Segway bosses on timely death on a Segway? So very wrong. I'm Tim Halford, host of Corsionary Tales, the podcast that mines the greatest fiascoes of the past for their most valuable lessons.

Some stories will delight you, others may scare you, but they'll all make you wiser. Listen to Corsionary Tales on the iHeart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts 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 I and the corporations are like all of Charles I's 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 wealthy people are given unfair, anti-competitive advantage over, say, startups, or people who have even better ideas through these monopolies. Contours is one of my words, like, Celler Dore. It's not a combination, but the other word, contours, just I don't know that it's velvety to me. Heck likes that.

So like you were 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 1790 when we first started out, it was 14 years, you could renew for another 14 and then over the ensuing like a couple of hundred years basically it just grew and grew and grew until 1998 with the Sunny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. That's when the 70 years after the person's death was put in place or if you're a corporation, 95 years from the original publication or 120 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 and time frames. I think it was lower than other countries, what other countries were at, but regardless, people just kind of smelled a rat and snuck around, actually, ironically- The rat was a mouse. So, it's out of mouse. It's frequently called the Mickey Mouse Protection Act because around that time, Disney was supposedly a endanger of losing the rights to Steamboat Willie version of Mickey Mouse in 2023, and they were lobbying very hard to make that not happen to get the Sunni Bono Copyright Tourment

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 and love will probably never be in the public domain because not only does he have copyright protection, Disney also use them like a slogan or like a brand name? So 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 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 1998, the digital, 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 suit off and allowed for the spread. And really kind of boosted the economy quite a bit as you can imagine. One of the problems though with these long protections and sometimes in some cases like trademarks, like limitless protection, is that so 70 years beyond the

lifespan of the creator, that is a long time. 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 to us. Like remember that one thing about how I I thought the guy was reading tea leaves or something like that to see who's coming in. Right, we're totally wrong. 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 them and putting our own spin on them. We're making silly voices. 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 70 plus years before you can do that, it's not as easy to make new ideas from as it would be if it were 20 years old or 10. 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 Livia 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 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 all the ideas have been essentially come up with and everything else is just basically a remix of it. Yeah, there was like seven real movie plots essentially or seven dramatic, I can't remember how many of this, but that there is an argument to me I made that there are really only seven different stories

that you can tell. But I get what? 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 did. Right, right, 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 have the same, that same kind of a quibble with that, the idea that you can't. That is too long to remix stuff, even though we do that every Halloween. The internet is very tricky though, because on one hand, you want the idea of the paywall. You want people to hear your stuff and see your stuff, but if you are in Livia, this 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 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 heart. So they may say, well, we got to put this behind a paywalk so 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 as easy as pie to disseminate. And we should, it should all be free and unf to everybody. Information is now as easy as pie to disseminate. It should all be free and unfettered. We actually see that colliding with what you are just talking about, how someone's reporting is valuable and is worth money colliding with the idea that information should be free on the internet with Canada right now, where Canada passed a law that says that if you are a social media aggregator, a news aggregator, you have to pay the creator of that news

some form of compensation for aggregating that news because you make a money off of it, but you're just taking their work for free. 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 gonna do? So that that seems like that fair. It's 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 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 Swartz, who in 2011 was indicted for downloading one of our favorite websites, JSTOR, JSTOR, 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 JStore database, which is behind the paywall. The idea, presumably, was that he was going to share those. He even had a manifesto, the guerrilla open access manifesto, 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.

We should get it out there, and J. Store did not press charges, but U.S. attorneys came after him, and he took his own life at the age of 26 and 2013 before the trial started. Yeah, US Attorney's Carmen Ortiz and Stephen Heyman really aggressively pursued charges against him and it's kind of explained that he was the scapegoat in the post-Wiki leaks world where we're seeking to make an example out of him and yeah, he took his life at 26, and like a real luminary was lost. Yeah.

Especially if you stop and consider what he was doing. And especially if you stop and consider that J-Store was like, you gave the articles back where I can oppress charges. Right. 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 Priceonomics that Alec Maiazi wrote in 2013 called Why a Science Behind a Paywall. 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 tons 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 is a root of all evil, right? There's an article that I think Dean Baker wrote as IP the root

of all evil. Oh, interesting. We were 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 wires what I use remember lime wire 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 I'll also shut them down in 2001

But this was a case where the world and the 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 $10 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 liviathan in 2022, inflation adjusted dollars revenue from, and this is just music sales, like selling a CD or whatever at the time. In 1999, it was almost $26 billion, which was the peak, went all the way down to $8.3 billion in 2014 and 2015, and is back up as of a couple of years ago to about $16 billion, which is still, you know, a little less than half, I guess, of the peak,

because of largely, because of 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 the direct line you can draw between musicians having to make money somehow and you stealing their music. That's the thing, dude. It's not necessarily the musicians making that money. There's huge companies that make most of the money on a ticket these days. And that's a... Oh, like a concert ticket?

Yeah, that's why ticket sales and prices are so jacked. You can go on to ticket master or something like that. And this 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 racket is because, again, like you said, they stop 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? And then 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 shattered. They moved over to live. And now they have a stranglehold on ticket prices, which is awful. Yeah, I mean, back in the day, ticket prices were low because you toured to support the album sales. You put out a record, you go on a big tour, you charge like $8 to $15. 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 venues, 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, please only go and make sure you're looking at your computer screen, make sure you're going to the venue 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 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 $200 for this ticket 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 you did because our tickets are not more than like whatever, like $35 or something. So just people should know that we never have a chance to say that. So please don't buy scalper tickets unless you just can't get a ticket and you're loaded and don't care. Yeah, and that's the original price is $35 and then there's, you know, whatever fees the venue puts on it. And then what 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, that's 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 worked. It's really, really kind of like, oh, okay. Yeah, it's, because we can't do anything about it. It's like, oh, you guys can sell the tickets yourselves then? No, we can't. We can't possibly do that. So 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't seek them up 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 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 Adrienne. 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 bit of goodie. And there's a gal who grew up in the shadows

of New York City, El Mange Island. It's been 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 the 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. That's very cool. Pretty cool. Anyway, thanks for the opportunity to learn. We'd love to hear an episode on the Highline. It's got a great history, and that, again, is from Nicole. Adrienne. Thanks to Cole, 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 stuffpodcast.ad to stuffpodcast.com. Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Sometimes the pop culture we love just teens hits differently in retrospect. Maybe it's a tabloid story we couldn't get enough of or an illicit student teacher relationship on our favorite show. We're Suzy Bannock-Harem and Jessica Bennett, posts of the new podcast in retrospect.

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