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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, right 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, 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 agree.

Kudos IP.

Yeah, we are talking about intellectual property today. Everybody's heard that term. You'd have to have been living under a rock to 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 Freely no. Okay.

No. Or a building by Im 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, song.

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.

An algorithm.

Yeah, that's another one. 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 property like your car or your house or your wedding ring. 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 this 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 have algorithms, we wouldn't have Coke 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 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 how big IP is. 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 USPTO. Said by 2019, says a few years old, that IP Intensive Industries accounted for 41% of the US gross Domestic Product, that's crazy. And 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 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, 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 patents. You can get design patents or utility patents, things like that. If you invented the reebok pump mechanism for the reebok shoe that we talked about, you would get maybe a design patent and a utility patent 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 generally it depends. But you're going to get about 20 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, chug, 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? Who didn't have that T shirt or a Bud Light t shirt with Spuds McKenzie surfing on it?

I had a Spuds McKenzie shirt.

So trademark is basically a brand name can be a slogan, and it is something that you specifically associate with a specific company or a specific brand. And you actually don't even have to trademark or register your trademark just from, know, the Spuds 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 to the trouble of registering it. A registered trademark is that R 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've used this over the years. That's people trying to argue that 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 it'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, 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 think it's 70 years after the death of the creator.

Right. That's plus the whole 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 1978. 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 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 it, which is mail it to yourself in a sealed I don't know, but it seems like if you don't have to go 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. If you registered it, that might be why you don't have to register it. Because I don't know 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 exactly where this all started is pretty interesting. We'll kind of quickly go through the history. It could go back 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 19 of that year when the government said, hey, Filippo brunes. No, brunelleshi.

Ski. Ski. Remember? Is it really kit sound with ch in Italian?

Filippo Brunelleschi.

There you go.

Okay, I'm doing the accent, you guys. We heard from Italians that 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 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 1474, 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 helps spur creativity and discovery and new inventions. And it wasn't just the Venetians who figured this out. About 150 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 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, they were definitely getting kickbacks or just outright selling stuff, right? 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, passed. I think the first patent was in 1790, granted to one Samuel Hopkins, who had a method of producing potash. And they were 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.

Tripped on 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 stop and think about it's, all legal fiction. Like, the government is saying you have a monopoly on it, but 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 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 Lochian?

Lochian is there's actually not a lot of difference, to tell you the truth.

Okay, so that's just another 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 utilitarian, which means you're incentivized to create something, which is what you've been talking about. And the fact that no one's going to spend a lot of time doing this stuff. 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 may correct myself, locke was the one who is essentially saying, just like mixing seeds with land and growing crops, 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.

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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 Sameer Chopra, and Livia found this article in Aeon and basically said 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, 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 if you just call it copyright infringement, it sounds like a bureaucratic issue. You know what mean?

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

And 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 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. 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 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 20 years for a patent or something.

Right.

Which works out because think about it, think about if the first mobile phone had like a 70 year patent where we'd be right now. So 20 years seems fair, I guess, in that context.

Well, also that's basically saying like, you got this amount of time to do something with it.

Yeah, good.

Or else somebody else is going to.

Do it or 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 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, 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 different companies we've worked for over the years had different tolerances for just getting 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. And there's also a time limit that we were never sure like, you can play so many seconds and you have to comment on it. And Jerry was always the fun 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 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 economist named Dean Baker and others who say, like, the effect of this IP law is really making the 1% just even more rich. And there's a transfer of wealth to the tune of about a trillion dollars a year, 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, like higher price pharmaceuticals, mainly.

Yeah, that's a really good, easy example. He calculated. They make up about 385,000,000,000 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 or 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 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 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 ten largest pharmaceutical makers spent more on selling and marketing existing drugs than they did on research for new drugs. They also spent $747,000,000,000 between, I think, 2001 and 2020 in 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 Livia found this one guy from Columbia University, an economist named Joseph Stiglitz, great name, that 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. Or drugs to treat malaria when developing countries are being ignored because they're concentrating on something like a cure for baldness. So 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 since it wasn't from Stiglets, but we'll give you $500 million 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, we'd be.

Like, yeah, I meant 500 billion. That was low.

You're like dr. Evil. $500 million.

Totally.

So Stiglitz 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 them. 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 malaria is allowed to run rampant. What Stiglist 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. Exactly. 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 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.

Yeah, you'd have to get together and sign a pact with 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 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 is 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, sometimes it's, hey, why don't you give me we'll let you do business in know, and people we have over here, we'll let you do business here if you open source your stuff only to us.

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. They got everything. And there's not a lot you can do about that. 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 whose idea it was and did spend that money on research and 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 is not the first country to do this. Livia 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. It happens all the time and has for decades. Lawsuit guitars, like Japan made knockoffs of Gibson and Fender guitars in the 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. And apparently China's 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.

A brand new historical true crime podcast.

The year is 1800. City Hall, New York.

The first murder trial in the American judicial system.

A man stands trial for the charge.

Of murder, even with defense lawyers Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr on the case. This is probably the most famous trial you've never heard of. When you lay suffering a sudden, violent, brutal death, I hope you'll think of Me, starring Alison Williams. I don't need anything simplified, Mr. Hamilton.

Thank you.

With Tony Goldwyn as Alexander Hamilton.

Don't be so sad, Catherine.

It doesn't suit you.

Written and created by me, Alison Block.

What are you doing?

Let go of me.

Listen to erased the murder of Elma Sand.

She was a sweet, happy, virtuous girl until she met that man right there.

On the iHeartRadio App Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcast.

Join former 9210 star Brian Austin Green, along with Dancing with the Star's. Fan favorite Sharna Burgess and Hollywood air turned life coach Randy Spelling as they navigate life, love and the quest for happiness in the new podcast Oldish.

Have I finally found the secret to happiness and the key to a successful relationship?

Let's hope so, because most of that.

Is with me, Ryan, a father of five who's endured a public divorce and a string of unhealthy relationships. And Sharna, a self proclaimed serial monogamist, have been in a whirlwind romance since meeting in 2020. Now they'll tackle the challenges of blended family life while dealing with relentless paparazzi with the help of their friend Randy, they share their life lessons, pondering the meaning of it all in the world of the oldish.

And even though this Hollywood couple finally found each other, they don't have all the answers. Hold on a second. Well, that's where I come in. I'm prepared to guide you, our listeners, through some of life's funniest, awkward, or difficult moments.

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I'm Moraka, and I'm excited to announce season four of my podcast, Mobituaries. I've got a whole new bunch of stories to share with you about the most fascinating people and things who are no longer with us. From famous figures who died on the very same day to the things I wish would die, like Buffets, people actually take little tastes along the way with their fingers.

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Man, I'm still cracked up about hacks like that. So one of the things about intellectual property protection is that it has 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.

Contour is one of my words. Like cellar door. It's not a combination, but oh, yeah, the word contour just I don't know. That's velvety to me, Heck likes that. So, like you were saying, copyright law, 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 dust out a mouse that's 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 2023. 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 and love will probably never be in the public domain because not only does he have copyright protection, disney also uses him like a slogan or like a brand name. 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 save 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 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 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 pantsuit 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 70 years beyond the lifespan of the creator. That is a long time. As you can tell from the Halloween stories we pick, sometimes we have no idea what they're talking about because 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 thought the guy was reading tea leaves or something like that to see who we were?

Totally wrong.

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. But 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 ten.

Yeah. This one I understand in a way, because 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. 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 come up with a new know.

Well, supposedly it might have been Shakespeare who said it. There are no new ideas, nothing new under the sun. All the ideas have been essentially come up with, and everything else is just basically a remix of it.

Yeah. Was it there's like seven real movie plots, essentially, or seven dramatic? I can't remember how many it is. But there is an argument to be made that there are really only seven different stories that you can tell. But I get what you 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.

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 that same kind of quibble with the idea that it's 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. And Livia 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 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 the goodness of their hearts, so they may say, well, we got to put this behind a paywall 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 easy as pie to disseminate, and it should all be free and unfettered. And we actually see that that colliding with what you were just talking about. Know 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 I think Canada passed a law that says that if you are like 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'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 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 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 2011 was indicted for downloading one of our favorite websites, JStore. 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 a paywall. And the idea, presumably, was that he was going to share those. And 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 JStore did not press charges, but US. Attorneys came after him, and he took his own life at the age of 26 in 2013, before the trial started.

Yeah. US. Attorneys 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 WikiLeaks world. They were seeking to make an example out of him. And, yeah, he took his life at 26, 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 JSTOR was like, you gave the articles back. We're not going to press charges.

Right.

And if you want to know, like, a little peek 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 Pricenomics that Alec Mayasi wrote in 2013 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 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 the root of all evil. Right?

There's an article that I think Dean Baker wrote, is IP the root of all Evil.

Oh, interesting. That's who 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. LimeWire is what I use. Remember LimeWire?

And what was the other one with the Y? 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 2001. 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 $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 Livia found 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 a little more than or a little less than half, I guess, of the peak, 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. There's a 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.

Like a concert ticket.

Yeah, that's why ticket sales and prices are so jacked. 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 the reason why it's a racket is 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 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 it was ticket prices were low because you toured to support the album sales. You would put out a record, you would go on a big tour, you would charge like you sold merch, you got some 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, of course, 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 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, know, shady guys in leather jackets on the corner anymore. It looks like, oh, this is just the place where you buy the tickets to Josh and Chuck's 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, 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 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 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 that 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 presales. We always have presales. A couple of days of pre sales first, where it has the least amount of fees attached to it. There's the fewest cooks in the kitchen at that point, and then after that in regular sale is when it just turns into the Wild West.

Yeah. I mean, we love these live shows, but I got to say, once my eyes were really open, once we started doing it, as to how it all.

Worked, it's really kind of like, okay, yeah. Because we can't do anything about it. It's like, oh, are you guys going to sell the tickets yourselves then? No, we can't. We can't possibly do that. You have to deal with the people that you have to deal with, and there are some that are better than others. 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 listener mail.

It's time for Chuck. This is I just thought, a pretty cool little tidbit from Nicole. Adrian 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, I 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 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. Would love to hear an episode on the High Line. It's got a great history. And that, again, is from Nicole. Adrian.

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 stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com.

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