Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Speaker 2: Chuck and Jerry's here and this is the Don't turn
Speaker 2: it off. It's actually more interesting than it sounds.
Speaker 1: Edition. Yeah. Can I just write off the bat shout
Speaker 1: out Olivia? Uh, this was a I don't know, it's
Speaker 1: not the most fun topic. But she really dug in
Speaker 1: and it's great.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, she's amazing at it actually, And this is yeah,
Speaker 2: she figured it out, like there is something interesting in
Speaker 2: intellectual property and she found it so.
Speaker 1: Uh great, hudos, Ip.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we are talking about intellectual property today. Everybody's heard
Speaker 2: that term. You have to have been living under rocks
Speaker 2: and not heard it. But we'll still tell you what
Speaker 2: we're talking about, because we're those kind of people. I'm
Speaker 2: just teasing everybody.
Speaker 1: We're not talking about the Great Book The Yellow River
Speaker 1: by Ip Freely no, no.
Speaker 2: Okay no, or a building by Impay, nothing like that,
Speaker 2: although that would fall under I'm sure some sort of
Speaker 2: intellectual property protection. Intellectual property is basically the fruit of
Speaker 2: your mental labor. It can be an invention, it can
Speaker 2: be a.
Speaker 1: Slogan, yeah, screenplay, song.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it can be a movie you wrote, it
Speaker 2: could be a way to do business like business methods.
Speaker 2: It's gotten so crazy now that types of strains of
Speaker 2: certain kinds of bacteria can be protected.
Speaker 1: And the whole algorithm.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's another one, Like it just keeps going and going.
Speaker 2: But anything that you can imagine, it doesn't even have
Speaker 2: to be a tangible thing, Like an algorithm is not tangible.
Speaker 2: Even when you put it down into code. It's not tangible.
Speaker 2: It's an idea that you can make a computer you
Speaker 2: to do really neat tricks with, but it's intangible. And again,
Speaker 2: coke is it. It's a slogan that's not at all tangible,
Speaker 2: and yet it's treated in most developed countries in the
Speaker 2: world or most industrialized countries in the world as the
Speaker 2: same thing as a property like your car or your
Speaker 2: house or your wedding ring. Like it's protected, and the
Speaker 2: way that it's protected is in really weird ways. Intellectual
Speaker 2: property and intellectual property law are a very unique animal.
Speaker 2: But what they all boil down to, Chuck is that
Speaker 2: if you get some sort of protection for your slogan,
Speaker 2: for your invention, for the screenplay you wrote, the government
Speaker 2: says that's yours. You are the only person who has
Speaker 2: any claim to it for X number of years, and
Speaker 2: congratulations on the thing you came up with using your creativity.
Speaker 2: And the whole purpose of having protection for intellectual property
Speaker 2: is to spur creativity, to spur discovery, to spur invention,
Speaker 2: to get it going. Because if you if you incentivize that,
Speaker 2: if you say, hey, if you come up with the screenplay,
Speaker 2: we're gonna make it so that no one else can
Speaker 2: just come along and make the movie that you wrote,
Speaker 2: that's yours, it's gonna make you want to keep pursuing
Speaker 2: a career of writing screenplays. But if you wrote a
Speaker 2: screenplay and you wrote it and it just didn't belong
Speaker 2: to you from the moment you finished the last sentence,
Speaker 2: and anybody could come along and make the movie and
Speaker 2: not give you a dime for your creativity, for your labor,
Speaker 2: you probably wouldn't do that, And so the public domain,
Speaker 2: the cultural public domain, would suffer as a result. We
Speaker 2: wouldn't have movies, we wouldn't have algorithms, we wouldn't have
Speaker 2: coca is it amazing? Slogans like that. We would be
Speaker 2: culturally bereft. If it were not for intellectual property protection,
Speaker 2: and yet it is one of the most insidious legal
Speaker 2: protections around today because it's been so thoroughly perverted from
Speaker 2: its original intent.
Speaker 1: Wow, it's been a while since who had one of those.
Speaker 2: I feel pretty strongly about IP.
Speaker 1: Here's a stat that LVIA found for US, which I
Speaker 1: think is pretty interesting as far as like how big
Speaker 1: IP is. And I think that this is from the
Speaker 1: US Patent and Trademark Office, And things have been ticking
Speaker 1: up as far as IP and how valuable it is
Speaker 1: and how you know how much people are registering IP
Speaker 1: and buying up IP since the nineties, and the US
Speaker 1: PTO said by twenty nineteen says a few years old
Speaker 1: that IP intensive industries accounted for forty one percent of
Speaker 1: the US gross domestic product. That's great, and thirty three
Speaker 1: percent of all employment was IP based. Yeah, that's startling.
Speaker 2: We used to invent things. We used to make machines,
Speaker 2: we used to develop airplace and cars and stuff like that.
Speaker 2: But now we invent ideas. Although we still invent stuff too,
Speaker 2: sure of course, but for the most part, that really
Speaker 2: kind of goes to show you like we have come
Speaker 2: to say, like, no, we're trading in ideas, and those
Speaker 2: things are very valuable, and you can build an entire
Speaker 2: industry around certain kinds of ideas, which is pretty nuts
Speaker 2: if you think about it totally.
Speaker 1: So if you're talking about US law, there are four
Speaker 1: kinds of ip that law covers, and we've talked about
Speaker 1: some of these here and there. I think we did
Speaker 1: a whole episode on patents in me. Well. If we haven't,
Speaker 1: we will. Patents are granted by the government, and everyone
Speaker 1: kind of knows what a patent is. I think that's
Speaker 1: when you invent an idea or a process or a design,
Speaker 1: and you can get different kinds of patents. You can
Speaker 1: get design patents or utility patents things like that. If
Speaker 1: you're like if you invented the rebox pump mechanism for
Speaker 1: the rebox shoe that we talked about, you would get
Speaker 1: maybe a design patent and a utility patent that says
Speaker 1: no one else can put an another pump and a
Speaker 1: shoe that kind of thing. So it has to be novel,
Speaker 1: which is the real key, useful and non obvious. If
Speaker 1: it qualifies, and you're generally it depends, but you're going
Speaker 1: to get about twenty years out of that patent. And
Speaker 1: you got to pay for it to get it, and
Speaker 1: it's not cheap to get a patent. You have to
Speaker 1: pay an attorney to do all the legwork and that's
Speaker 1: never cheap. Right.
Speaker 2: The next one, Chuck, is trademarks, which everybody knows what
Speaker 2: a trademark is, especially if you grew up in the
Speaker 2: second half of the twentieth century. That's when trademarks were
Speaker 2: everywhere and kind of what we wore on our T
Speaker 2: shirts and stuff. Right, Coke, is it who didn't have
Speaker 2: that T shirt or a bud Light T shirt with
Speaker 2: Spuds Mackenzie surfing on it?
Speaker 1: I had has puts mckenzy shirt.
Speaker 2: So trademark is basically a brand name, kim be a slogan,
Speaker 2: and it is something that you specifically associate with a
Speaker 2: specific company or a specific brand. Yeah, and you actually
Speaker 2: don't even have to trademark or register your trademark just
Speaker 2: from using you know, the Spuds Mackenzie drawing that you
Speaker 2: see everywhere are used to you're exercising your right to
Speaker 2: use that trademark and you can actually enforce in action
Speaker 2: against infringement on it. So if you haven't registered something,
Speaker 2: you'll see the TM That means that hey, this is
Speaker 2: our trademark. Don't mess with it. We haven't gone to
Speaker 2: the trouble of registering it. A registered trademark is that
Speaker 2: a capital are in a circle.
Speaker 1: That means that they.
Speaker 2: Actually did go to the trouble of registering it, and
Speaker 2: you really better not mess with them.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Like an example is when you've seen court cases
Speaker 1: plenty of times where you'll see a company go in
Speaker 1: and say, here are one hundred and fifty examples of
Speaker 1: where we used this over the years. That's people trying
Speaker 1: to argue that they that's their trademark because they didn't
Speaker 1: copyright it or they didn't trademark it.
Speaker 2: That's why McDonald's had a legitimate case against McDowell's.
Speaker 1: Right. Oh man, great movie.
Speaker 2: There is also copyrights. That's another big one. I think
Speaker 2: everybody's pretty familiar with that. But that screenplay that you wrote,
Speaker 2: or the computer program that you came up with that
Speaker 2: you coded essentially a creative work, and you, as the
Speaker 2: copyright owner, you as the creator, have the sole right
Speaker 2: to do as you please with that, to turn that
Speaker 2: software into something that you sell over and over and
Speaker 2: over again, turn that screenplay into a movie. Like it's
Speaker 2: totally up to you, and nobody else can do it
Speaker 2: while you hold that copyright, and copyrights are the ones
Speaker 2: that last the longest. I don't know if we said
Speaker 2: trademarks never run out.
Speaker 1: Right, we didn't say it.
Speaker 2: As long as you're using as a trademark, you never
Speaker 2: your exclusivity never runs out. With patents, like you said,
Speaker 2: I think twenty years. With copyrights, it's seventy plus years
Speaker 2: after creation.
Speaker 1: Typically, I think it's seventy years after the death of
Speaker 1: the creator.
Speaker 2: Right, that's plus the creator's life is ensconced in that
Speaker 2: plus symbol.
Speaker 1: All right, Okay, I got you, and we'll talk about
Speaker 1: that later. That came from nineteen seventy eight. As far
Speaker 1: as screenplays and stuff, I think you can get a copyright,
Speaker 1: but the WGA has registration methods. You can register your
Speaker 1: script but you don't even have to do that stuff.
Speaker 1: But you would be wise too, because then you would
Speaker 1: have to if you haven't, you would have to prove
Speaker 1: that it was your id for idea first and someone
Speaker 1: didn't rip it off.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's that other way to do, which is mail
Speaker 2: it to yourself in a sealed world. I don't know,
Speaker 2: but it seems like if you don't have to go
Speaker 2: to the trouble of registering it. That would help your
Speaker 2: claim quite a bit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the poor person's copyright. I've heard that before. Sure.
Speaker 1: And what else? We got trade secrets and that's recipes, strategies,
Speaker 1: customer customer information, which is big any kind of process,
Speaker 1: like industrial process that you don't want another competitor to
Speaker 1: know about. And I don't think you need to register
Speaker 1: these either. No, And I meant to look up whether
Speaker 1: or not that's an actual downside because then you have
Speaker 1: to disclose things.
Speaker 2: No, you, oh, if you, if you registered it, that
Speaker 2: might be why you don't have to register it, because
Speaker 2: I wonder if we said or not. One of the
Speaker 2: reasons that patents are so beneficial is because you have
Speaker 2: to disclose exactly how that thing works, so that after
Speaker 2: your patent runs out, somebody can come along and make
Speaker 2: the same thing from your your patent. Trade secrets, Yeah,
Speaker 2: you would not want to do that because they never
Speaker 2: run out. Just like trademarks, they're your secrets for as
Speaker 2: long as you actively work to keep them secret, like
Speaker 2: you make employees and sign NDA's remember that episode that
Speaker 2: was a good one. Yeah, or you you keep the
Speaker 2: recipe to Kentucky Fried Chicken's original chicken like under lock
Speaker 2: and key with armed guards standing outside. That would be
Speaker 2: a pretty pretty good demonstration of actively protecting your trade secrets.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they don't need to register it. They have guns.
Speaker 2: Exactly exactly where this.
Speaker 1: All started is pretty interesting. We'll kind of quickly go
Speaker 1: through the history. It could go as back as far
Speaker 1: as ancient Greece, but as far as ip as we
Speaker 1: think of it today. You can point to fourteen twenty
Speaker 1: one in the Republic of Florence and June nineteenth of
Speaker 1: that year when the government said, hey, Filippo brune Shelley, Nope,
Speaker 1: Brune Leschi ski ski.
Speaker 2: Remember it's is it really sound with the ch in Italian?
Speaker 1: Filipo brune Leski There you go. Okay, I'm doing the accent,
Speaker 1: you guys. We heard from Italians it said, keep doing it.
Speaker 2: There you go.
Speaker 1: Filippo was an architect and had a patent for a
Speaker 1: technique to move marble over a barge, and they said, hey,
Speaker 1: this was really smart and you should make money off
Speaker 1: this and only you, and that kind of kicked the
Speaker 1: whole thing off and over the next you know, one
Speaker 1: hundred years or so, governments across Europe started sort of
Speaker 1: doing the same things and getting together these ideas that
Speaker 1: you should be able to patent and own processes and ideas,
Speaker 1: including the Venetian Patent Statute of fourteen seventy four yeah,
Speaker 1: which said, hey, it's up to us and our government
Speaker 1: can grant you a ten year monopoly on the use
Speaker 1: of a technology that you have made up, and if
Speaker 1: you violate it, you can get fined or you can
Speaker 1: get like a public citation.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And again, by using government power to protect people's
Speaker 2: inventions and ideas help spur creativity and discovery and new inventions.
Speaker 2: And it wasn't just the Venetians who figured this out.
Speaker 2: About one hundred and fifty years later, England said hey,
Speaker 2: we're going to pass our Statute of Monopolies and it
Speaker 2: basically said that if you have a new invention, you
Speaker 2: have a monopoly to it for a certain period of time,
Speaker 2: very similar to what we have now for patents. But
Speaker 2: what's interesting about that is that that actually rolled back
Speaker 2: even more draconian law where basically the king could hand
Speaker 2: out patents or sell patents exactly to whoever they wanted,
Speaker 2: and you could get a patent on vinegar, so like
Speaker 2: there existing stuff. If you were a friend with the king,
Speaker 2: you could be the sole producer of vinegar if the
Speaker 2: king gave you a patent for vinegar. And the Parliament said,
Speaker 2: this is actually stifling progress and discovery. We're going to
Speaker 2: say this is limited to new inventions and for a
Speaker 2: limited period of time, which were two really good kind
Speaker 2: of points to add to that whole idea.
Speaker 1: Totally well, and it prevented you know, they were definitely
Speaker 1: getting kickbacks and or just outright selling stuff, right, the
Speaker 1: king selling Yeah, the king was so here. In the US,
Speaker 1: our Constitution's Patent and Copyright clause gives Congress the power
Speaker 1: to quote promote the progress of science and useful arts
Speaker 1: by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the
Speaker 1: excls right to their respective writings and discoveries. This was,
Speaker 1: I think past. I think the first patent was in
Speaker 1: seventeen ninety granted to one Samuel Hopkins, who is producing
Speaker 1: it had a method of producing potash. And they're like, hey, congratulations,
Speaker 1: you are patent number one.
Speaker 2: He said, wow, gee, that's amazing. I've never been first
Speaker 2: at anything.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 2: He's done his shoelaces, that's right.
Speaker 1: He was first on the internet, commenting all the time,
Speaker 1: but no one counts that.
Speaker 2: So this whole thing, if you, if you stop and
Speaker 2: think about it's all legal fiction. Like the government is
Speaker 2: saying you have a monopoly on it, but that's that
Speaker 2: doesn't there's no actual concrete anything going on here. They're
Speaker 2: just saying nobody else can use this thing that you
Speaker 2: came up with. We're the government, we're saying so. But
Speaker 2: the whole concept of protecting intellectual property actually is rooted.
Speaker 2: It has a philosophical basis. There's a few different justifications
Speaker 2: for it. The first came from well, I don't know
Speaker 2: if it's the first, but the first in this list
Speaker 2: came from Hegel, the German philosopher, who said that intellectual
Speaker 2: property is an extension of you. Like if you go
Speaker 2: out and you buy some seeds, and you buy some land,
Speaker 2: and you grow crops from those seeds on that land,
Speaker 2: those are your crops. You mixed your labor with your
Speaker 2: own resources and created something, and that's yours. Why would
Speaker 2: it be any different for your ideas? You used your resources,
Speaker 2: say schooling or inspiration, and you used your brain power
Speaker 2: to turn it into an idea or a thought. That
Speaker 2: you could tell other people. I can't do that, but
Speaker 2: you know other people can. According to Hegel, why would
Speaker 2: you not own that as well just as you would
Speaker 2: those crops.
Speaker 1: Now, what's the difference between that and Lockian?
Speaker 2: Lockian is there's actually not a lot of difference, to
Speaker 2: tell you the truth.
Speaker 1: So that's just another, you know, similar school of thought
Speaker 1: from another philosopher.
Speaker 2: Yeah, an earlier philosopher too, by a couple hundred years,
Speaker 2: I think, But it's essentially the same thing from what
Speaker 2: I can tell.
Speaker 1: Well, there's also a utilitarian which means your INCENTIVI is
Speaker 1: to create something, which is what you've been talking about,
Speaker 1: and the fact that you know, no one's going to
Speaker 1: spend a lot of time doing this stuff. If that
Speaker 1: they it's all about money. If you don't have the
Speaker 1: incentive eventually of fortune, then you're not going to spend
Speaker 1: your time doing it.
Speaker 2: Probably, yes, And I understand the difference now if I
Speaker 2: kind of make correct myself. Locke was the one who
Speaker 2: is essentially saying, you just like mixing seeds with land
Speaker 2: and growing crops. You same thing with your thoughts. Hagel
Speaker 2: was saying, like, you own your thoughts just as much
Speaker 2: as you own your body, you own your thoughts, and
Speaker 2: that they're your thoughts and they should belong to you.
Speaker 2: So there's definitely a distinction between the two. I was confused.
Speaker 2: Has happened sometimes.
Speaker 1: So let's take a break, good idea. All right, we'll
Speaker 1: be right back. All right, we're back everyone, and we're
Speaker 1: here to talk about some criticisms of the whole concept
Speaker 1: of IP. And things have really changed a lot since
Speaker 1: the Internet age and the tech boom as far as
Speaker 1: IP goes, things really really ramped up and took off.
Speaker 1: And there's a legal philosopher named Samir Chopra and Livia
Speaker 1: found this article in aon and basically said that, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of grouping all this stuff together and it's not
Speaker 1: just choprah like other critics will argue the same thing.
Speaker 1: If you say trademarks and copyrights and patents and trade
Speaker 1: secrets and everything is all the same thing, which is IP,
Speaker 1: it really just sort of diminishes each one's specific purpose
Speaker 1: because they all have a specific purpose. And calling it
Speaker 1: just intellectual property, you like, using the word property even
Speaker 1: makes it sound like you're a thief, that you're taking
Speaker 1: something tangible, when in fact it still exists, Like you,
Speaker 1: if you download a song for free, you're not taking
Speaker 1: that song from the artist. You're just getting that song
Speaker 1: for free, and that song still exists and the artist
Speaker 1: still owns it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. That was a big part of Chopra's point that
Speaker 2: calling it intellectual property theft or crime makes it a
Speaker 2: moral thing, whereas if you just call it copyright infringement,
Speaker 2: it sounds like a bureaucratic issue, you know what I mean. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: that makes sense, and that that's unfair semantically to kind
Speaker 2: of put it all together. But even more so, they
Speaker 2: don't all really relate to one another as easily as
Speaker 2: you would think by being all lumped together under one term.
Speaker 2: And so, like most legal protection and probably all legal
Speaker 2: protection of intellectual property around the world, they say, well,
Speaker 2: there's actually we'll put some limitations on here. One of
Speaker 2: the big ones is that there's a time limitation on it. Yeah,
Speaker 2: And again the reason why is because they're they're saying,
Speaker 2: there's a very difficult balance that's being struck here. One
Speaker 2: is that you want to foster discovery. You want to
Speaker 2: incentivize people to go out and invent new things and
Speaker 2: come up with new ideas, because everyone benefits from that.
Speaker 2: But at the same time, you don't want to incentivize
Speaker 2: it so much that you actually disincentivize it by giving
Speaker 2: people too long of a monopoly. So you give them
Speaker 2: twenty years for a patent or something, right, which works
Speaker 2: out because you know, I think about it, Think about
Speaker 2: if the first mobile phone had like a seventy year
Speaker 2: patent where we be right now? You know, so twenty
Speaker 2: years seems fair, I guess in that context.
Speaker 1: Well, also that gives you that's basically saying like, you
Speaker 1: got this amount of time to do something with it.
Speaker 1: M yeah, go, nobody else is going to do it, Yeah,
Speaker 1: should do it for sure.
Speaker 2: There's also like with copyright law as well, there's like
Speaker 2: fair use, like we talked about in the Mad episode
Speaker 2: how parodies allowed, or you can comment on it that
Speaker 2: there's there are some exceptions to the rule. It's not
Speaker 2: just like ironclad, and for good reason, because again, this
Speaker 2: is a very difficult balance to strike.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and we've had our struggles with that over the
Speaker 1: year in our own show when we're doing an episode
Speaker 1: on something where it would be like hip hop or something,
Speaker 1: or record scratching, like those really lend themselves to playing
Speaker 1: examples and we've never been super clear on the actual law.
Speaker 1: We could probably get away with it, but we different
Speaker 1: companies we've worked for over the years had different tolerances
Speaker 1: for just getting you know, even having to suffer through
Speaker 1: the hassle legally of seeing if it's okay to do that,
Speaker 1: So we've always just not done it generally.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean we have a few times, like I
Speaker 2: think the Disco episode we did, but we were clearly
Speaker 2: commenting on the stuff. We weren't just using it for fun, like.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and there's also a time limit that we were
Speaker 1: never sure, like you can play so many seconds, you
Speaker 1: have to comment on it. And Jerry was always the
Speaker 1: fun killer. You know, Mom had to come in and say, guys,
Speaker 1: you can't do that. And not a great position for
Speaker 1: Jerry to be in.
Speaker 2: No, but a highly natural one. It felt right.
Speaker 1: The other thing we should talk about is the cost
Speaker 1: to consumers, which is there are people that say, and
Speaker 1: of course this is when we're going to talk about
Speaker 1: pharmaceuticals because that's a big part of IP. But there's
Speaker 1: an econoistman named Dean Baker and others who say, like,
Speaker 1: you know, the effect of this IP law is really
Speaker 1: making the one percent just even more rich, and there's
Speaker 1: a transfer of wealth to the tune of about a
Speaker 1: trillion dollars a year because largely because of pharmaceutical companies,
Speaker 1: they're a big chunk of that trillion dollar. When you
Speaker 1: grant a monopoly on a drug, and sometimes even the
Speaker 1: government funds that to help make it happen. But then
Speaker 1: this one company has this drug and they can charge
Speaker 1: whatever they want for it, and then all of a
Speaker 1: sudden there's a trillion dollars being you know, put in
Speaker 1: this rich person's pocket and then transferring it to another
Speaker 1: rich person's pocket.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, and the trillion dollars he calculated, is that's
Speaker 2: the amount we pay a year beyond what we should
Speaker 2: be paying.
Speaker 1: Yeah, pharmaceuticals mainly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a really good, easy example, he calculated. They
Speaker 2: make up about three hundred and eighty five billion of
Speaker 2: that trillion trillion. But there's also other stuff too. There's
Speaker 2: like types of fertilizer and types of seed that are
Speaker 2: patented that because they own a patent, And if you
Speaker 2: want this life saving medicine and you want this one
Speaker 2: kind of seed, you have to pay whatever price we
Speaker 2: want because we're the only ones who can sell it.
Speaker 2: Because we have a government sanctioned monopoly. That all of
Speaker 2: that adds up to about a trillion dollars more a
Speaker 2: year that we're paying. And like I said, the pharmaceutical
Speaker 2: companies in particular are they're an easy target. But the
Speaker 2: reason they're an easy target is because they demonstrate so
Speaker 2: thoroughly the problems with intellectual property protections. And that is
Speaker 2: like you were saying, they make ridiculous amounts of money.
Speaker 2: They charge whatever they want to charge because they're the
Speaker 2: only ones making this drug for X number of years,
Speaker 2: like twenty years or something like that. Right, and then
Speaker 2: to add insult to injury, they have tons of government funding.
Speaker 2: In the United States, the National Institutes of Health kicking
Speaker 2: forty billion dollars for research, and I think the pharmaceutical
Speaker 2: industry total spends about another ninety billion. There's a lot
Speaker 2: of money on research, but they found that they in
Speaker 2: twenty twenty, the ten largest pharmaceutical makers spent more on
Speaker 2: selling and marketing existing rugs than they did on research
Speaker 2: for new drugs. They also spent seven hundred and forty
Speaker 2: seven billion dollars between I think twenty two thousand and
Speaker 2: one and twenty twenty and stock buybacks and dividends and
Speaker 2: stock buybacks are not the worst thing in the world.
Speaker 2: There's definitely worse things you could do with your corporate cash.
Speaker 2: You're essentially paying back loans that investors gave you. Nothing
Speaker 2: inherently wrong with stock buybacks. But pharmaceutical industry, it's a
Speaker 2: different example. And one of the things they could be
Speaker 2: doing with that extra money, rather than upping their share price,
Speaker 2: is pouring it into more and more research and development,
Speaker 2: because there's a lot of diseases that still need to
Speaker 2: be cured, and they're instead spending it on ads that
Speaker 2: you see on nightly news.
Speaker 1: Yeah. True, that is why there are some people out there.
Speaker 1: And LVIA found this one guy from Columbia University and
Speaker 1: economist named Joseph Stiglitz's great name, that said, what we
Speaker 1: should be doing is giving out big cash p for
Speaker 1: a new discovery, a new pharmaceutical discovery that's like a
Speaker 1: game changer, and instead of spending your money on advertising
Speaker 1: and marketing or on like drugs for balding and a
Speaker 1: rectile dysfunction. Not saying that those aren't issues. I don't
Speaker 1: want to diminish anyone's problems with any of those things.
Speaker 1: To be clear, but a cure for cancer would be better.
Speaker 1: I think we can all agree. And or you know,
Speaker 1: drugs to treat malaria when developing countries are being ignored
Speaker 1: because they're concentrating on something like a cure for baldness.
Speaker 1: So like, let's give a cash prize instead of a
Speaker 1: monopoly and say, hey, we'll give you I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: just throwing out numbers. This it wasn't from Stigletz, but here,
Speaker 1: we'll give you five hundred million dollars if you come
Speaker 1: up with a cure for cancer. And then that's just
Speaker 1: a cash award given to your company. And then it's
Speaker 1: open source and any pharmaceutical company in the world can
Speaker 1: make this stuff and get it out there super fast
Speaker 1: and competitively speaking, probably cheaper.
Speaker 2: Yes, And if you they threw out that five hundred
Speaker 2: million figure the pharmaceutical industry, we'd be like, huh, yeah,
Speaker 2: that's lunch. So Stiglay, you're like a doctor evil five
Speaker 2: hundred million dollars totally. So Stiglas is saying, like, you
Speaker 2: don't want to just do away with the patent and
Speaker 2: trademark protection, like you want to keep that because it
Speaker 2: does incentivize research in other areas. What he was saying
Speaker 2: is identify the really terrible diseases that don't have a
Speaker 2: financial incentive to have research and development money thrown at.
Speaker 2: I'm like malaria. It's one of the top ten killers
Speaker 2: in the world, but it kills people in less developed,
Speaker 2: lower income countries who don't have the money to spend
Speaker 2: on that kind of drug, so the malaria is allowed
Speaker 2: to run rampant. What Stiglas is saying is governments can
Speaker 2: get together, or the US could do it alone and
Speaker 2: say we'll give you five hundred billion dollars for a
Speaker 2: cure familaria and then the other stuff you guys keep going,
Speaker 2: you know, and doing and making your money off of.
Speaker 2: But how about an extra five hundred billion nothing to
Speaker 2: sneeze at. So exactly, it's a it's a good idea,
Speaker 2: but I think there's a flaw in it to chuck,
Speaker 2: and that is that if the US government did this
Speaker 2: and made it open source like he's suggesting, like you said,
Speaker 2: then the rest of the world would benefit from the
Speaker 2: US government funding. We'd become the drug research funders for
Speaker 2: the world. The rest of the world would become free
Speaker 2: riders who would just get the recipe for free because
Speaker 2: the US government handed out that prize to the company
Speaker 2: that created it or discover.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you'd have to get together and sign a pact
Speaker 1: with like most of the major countries of the world
Speaker 1: or something. Yeah, that they all do the same, Okay,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I mean it would have to be
Speaker 1: a global push because that's and in fact, that kind
Speaker 1: of segues into our next section, which is the global
Speaker 1: globalist world that we live in. It becomes a little
Speaker 1: sticky because IP law I think generally just covers the
Speaker 1: country that you're in. I think when you get a patent,
Speaker 1: you have to get it in different countries if you
Speaker 1: want to sell it in different places. And there's a long,
Speaker 1: long history of countries not respecting IP law from other
Speaker 1: countries and stealing stuff. China is a big one. And
Speaker 1: in the case of China, it's sometimes it's hey, why
Speaker 1: don't you give me We'll let you do business in China.
Speaker 1: You know, people we have over here will let you
Speaker 1: do business here if you give us. If you like,
Speaker 1: open source your stuff only to us.
Speaker 2: Right, right, you have to partner with the Chinese business
Speaker 2: who will have full access to your intellectual property if
Speaker 2: you want access.
Speaker 1: Right or they'll just steal it, which also happens.
Speaker 2: That's a big one. There was an operation that was
Speaker 2: funded and supported by China's government between twenty nineteen and
Speaker 2: twenty twenty two where Chinese hackers stole trillions of dollars
Speaker 2: worth of intellectual property from just thirty companies, just took it.
Speaker 2: They had everything to create pharmaceuticals, create guided missile systems,
Speaker 2: like just they got everything, and there's not a lot
Speaker 2: you can do about that, Like there's there's basically nothing
Speaker 2: you can do about those things. Now China has those now.
Speaker 2: And the big argument against that is that if China
Speaker 2: can just steal ideas, it doesn't have to spend tons
Speaker 2: of money on research and development, So that means that
Speaker 2: it can make those products cheaper than the people who
Speaker 2: actually whose idea it was and did spend that money
Speaker 2: on research development in price the legitimate owner right out
Speaker 2: of the market. And that is about as unfair competition
Speaker 2: as you can possibly ever encounter.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but it's also something that has been going on forever.
Speaker 1: It's not new. China's not the first country to do this.
Speaker 1: Liba points out that when economys are emerging, and especially
Speaker 1: during like tech boom, and they're catching up to richer countries,
Speaker 1: then they will steal ideas, I mean everything from I
Speaker 1: mean it happens all the time and has for decades.
Speaker 1: The lawsuit guitars like Japan made knockoffs of like Gibson
Speaker 1: and Fender guitars in the seventies and eighties and sold
Speaker 1: a ton of them, and they were really good guitars.
Speaker 1: And I think there may be a short stuff in
Speaker 1: there about the lawsuit era, but it's always happened. Even
Speaker 1: in the United States, we did the same thing, and
Speaker 1: from the very beginning of our copyright law in the
Speaker 1: eighteenth century, we very much explicitly exempted foreign works from
Speaker 1: protection so we could go out and steal things like
Speaker 1: the power loom and stuff like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, those two Carnegie and Dominic guys are saying like
Speaker 2: this is just part of the trajectory that developing economies
Speaker 2: hit upon at some point in time. It's just way
Speaker 2: easier to steal the ideas and use those to grow
Speaker 2: your economy. But they said that trajectory also usually includes
Speaker 2: more strictly enforced IP protections on the other side of
Speaker 2: that development. And apparently China is starting to show signs
Speaker 2: of that that they're taking IP protection a little more seriously,
Speaker 2: at least according to the Carnegie people. But yeah, that's
Speaker 2: one of the reasons why we're in a trade war
Speaker 2: with China is because of hacks like that.
Speaker 1: Should we take a break? Hacks like that was almost
Speaker 1: the name of our show. We'll be right back, man.
Speaker 2: I'm still cracked up about hacks like that. So one
Speaker 2: of the things about intellectual property protection is that it
Speaker 2: is kind of grown in lockstep as American industry has.
Speaker 2: Because as American industry grows and comes up with more
Speaker 2: and more valuable intellectual property, they like to go to
Speaker 2: the government and say, hey, why don't you guys come
Speaker 2: up with stricter and stricter laws giving us longer and
Speaker 2: longer monopolies to those ideas to that intellectual property. It's
Speaker 2: basically the snake starting to eat its tail, where the
Speaker 2: government has now become Charles the First and the corporations
Speaker 2: are like all of Charles's first friends getting patents on
Speaker 2: vinegar and stuff like that. It's not quite that egregious,
Speaker 2: but it's the same contours the same idea. Basically, where
Speaker 2: incredibly wealth wealthy people are given unfair, anti competitive advantage
Speaker 2: over say startups or people who have even better ideas
Speaker 2: through these monopolies.
Speaker 1: Contour is one of my words, like cellar door. It's
Speaker 1: not a combination. But oh yeah, yeah, the word contour
Speaker 1: just I don't know, that's velvety to me.
Speaker 2: Hack likes that.
Speaker 1: So you're saying copyright law like it's just sort of
Speaker 1: extended over the years as far as how long you
Speaker 1: could own these ideas. In the seventeen ninety when we
Speaker 1: first started out, it was fourteen years, you could renew
Speaker 1: for another fourteen and then you know, over the ensuing
Speaker 1: like a couple of hundred years. Basically, it just grew
Speaker 1: and grew and grew until nineteen ninety eight with the
Speaker 1: Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. That's when the seventy
Speaker 1: years after the person's death was put in place, or
Speaker 1: if your corporation ninety five years from the original publication
Speaker 1: or one hundred and twenty years from creation, whichever is
Speaker 1: less a little confusing, but it makes sense if you
Speaker 1: think about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that actually brought the United States into line
Speaker 2: with international agreement on copyright limitations in time frames. I
Speaker 2: think there was lower than other countries. What other countries
Speaker 2: were at but regardless, people just kind of smelled a
Speaker 2: rat and snuck around, actually ironically a souda mouse. It's
Speaker 2: all frequently called the Mickey Mouse Protection Act because around
Speaker 2: that time, Disney was supposedly in danger of losing the
Speaker 2: rights to Steamboat Willie version of Mickey Mouse in twenty
Speaker 2: twenty three, and they were lobbying very hard to make
Speaker 2: that not happen, to get the Sunny Bono Copyright Term
Speaker 2: Extension Act passed, which was successful. But I've also read
Speaker 2: that Disney wasn't quite behind it like people say, and
Speaker 2: that even if Steamboat Willie does come into public domain
Speaker 2: this year, I don't think he did. But even if
Speaker 2: he did, just that specific version of Mickey would be
Speaker 2: in the public domain. And the Mickey that we know
Speaker 2: in love will probably never be in the public domain
Speaker 2: because not only does he have copyright protection, Disney also
Speaker 2: uses him like a trait, like a slogan or like
Speaker 2: a brand name. It's like he has trademark protection, and
Speaker 2: trademark protection never runs out as long as you keep
Speaker 2: using it. So Mickey will probably never enter the public
Speaker 2: domain even if Steamboat Willie did. I didn't see that
Speaker 2: he did.
Speaker 1: Though I don't know. I don't think so, but this
Speaker 1: just occurred to me that with every year we do
Speaker 1: our show, we can look for a Halloween podcast story
Speaker 1: from a year later in history.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's why we ended up doing Philip K. Dick
Speaker 2: a couple of years ago, because he finally started to
Speaker 2: come into the public domain.
Speaker 1: I love it. And by the way, people that wrote
Speaker 1: in that either had ideas or wrote their own stories.
Speaker 1: I haven't looked yet, but I say those emails and
Speaker 1: we're going to take a look at those, all right.
Speaker 1: The next thing we should talk about is in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety eight the Dilgital the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which basically,
Speaker 1: the way I understand it is that it covered the
Speaker 1: Internet such that it created a way for someone to say, hey,
Speaker 1: you're using my thing on your website, go take it down.
Speaker 1: I want to officially register that you are taking my stuff,
Speaker 1: and as long as they take it down, then they
Speaker 1: are not penalized. Right.
Speaker 2: That was a kind of a big deal because it
Speaker 2: allowed the Internet to start to flourish, and it kept
Speaker 2: people who ran social media sites or YouTube or something
Speaker 2: like that from worrying that they were going to get
Speaker 2: their pants sued off and allowed for the spread and
Speaker 2: really kind of boosted the economy quite a bit, as
Speaker 2: you can imagine.
Speaker 1: Sure.
Speaker 2: One of the problems though, with these long protections, and
Speaker 2: sometimes in some cases like trademarks like limitless protection, is
Speaker 2: that so seventy years beyond the lifespan of the creator.
Speaker 2: That is a long time. Yeah, as you can tell
Speaker 2: from like the Halloween stories we pick, like sometimes we
Speaker 2: have no idea what they're talking about because the the
Speaker 2: language they're using is English, and you understand that they're
Speaker 2: English words, but the context is so old that it
Speaker 2: doesn't really make sense. Just like remember that one thing
Speaker 2: about how I thought the guy was reading tea leaves
Speaker 2: or something like that to see who's coming in and
Speaker 2: yeah and yeah. So that's a really good example of
Speaker 2: one of the problems of it, because when we use
Speaker 2: those stories, we are building on them. We're taking the
Speaker 2: we're taking them and putting our own spin on them.
Speaker 2: We're making silly voice sales, yes exactly. We're creating something
Speaker 2: new using that original work as a building block. And
Speaker 2: that's one of the purposes of creating protections for creative stuff,
Speaker 2: so that eventually it will spread out into the public
Speaker 2: domain and people can do new, amazing things with them.
Speaker 2: The problem is if it's seventy plus years before you
Speaker 2: can do that, it's not as easy to make new
Speaker 2: ideas from as it would be if it were twenty
Speaker 2: years old or ten.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this one I understand in a way because like,
Speaker 1: how many great films have we gotten based on the
Speaker 1: works of Shakespeare? Which is Lvia points out that who
Speaker 1: was it Jennifer Jenkins, director of Duke University Center for
Speaker 1: the Study of the Public Domain. That's pretty specific. Sure,
Speaker 1: that's an argument that Jennifer Jenkins makes, which is like,
Speaker 1: we wouldn't have you know, these great adaptations of the
Speaker 1: works of Shakespeare's films and stuff like that, which is true.
Speaker 1: But I also can see a world where like come
Speaker 1: up with a new idea, you know.
Speaker 2: Well supposedly it might have been Shakespeare said it. There
Speaker 2: are no new ideas on nothing new under the sun. Like, yeah,
Speaker 2: all the ideas have been essentially come up with, and
Speaker 2: everything else is just basically a remix of it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's like seven real movie plots essentially, I over
Speaker 1: seven dramatic I can't remember how many it is, but
Speaker 1: that there is an argument to me and made that
Speaker 1: there are really only seven different stories you can tell
Speaker 1: and everything else is a version of those.
Speaker 2: Yes, and we don't protect those specific seven ideas, we
Speaker 2: would be totally messed if we if we did, right,
Speaker 2: the protections are more nuanced than that. It's like how
Speaker 2: that story develops, what the characters are doing in it,
Speaker 2: that's what's protected. And so in that sense, yes, you
Speaker 2: are coming up with a new idea rather than just
Speaker 2: remixing a Shakespeare play. And I agree with you. I
Speaker 2: I have the same that same kind of quibble with that,
Speaker 2: the idea that you can't that is too long to
Speaker 2: remix stuff, even though we do that every Halloween.
Speaker 1: Uh. The Internet is very tricky though, because on one hand,
Speaker 1: you want like uh, the idea of like the paywall.
Speaker 1: You want people to hear your stuff and see your stuff.
Speaker 1: But if you are and Olivia's is a great example,
Speaker 1: if you're like a reporter in the South Sudan covering
Speaker 1: something very important to you, you want everyone that you
Speaker 1: can think think of to find this and discover it.
Speaker 1: But you also, like it costs money for you to
Speaker 1: be there and to be on the ground in the
Speaker 1: South Sudan for a year doing this intensive reporting, like
Speaker 1: a company needs to be paying you to do that
Speaker 1: and to fly there and to stay there and per
Speaker 1: diem and all that stuff, and they're not doing that
Speaker 1: the goodness of their hearts. So they may say, well,
Speaker 1: we got to put this behind a paywalk because we
Speaker 1: got to make money.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And when the Internet came along in the beginning,
Speaker 2: it followed a hacker ethos, which was that it should
Speaker 2: be free and open to everybody. Information is now easiest
Speaker 2: pie to disseminate, and we should it should all be
Speaker 2: free and unfettered. And we actually see that that colliding
Speaker 2: with what you were just talking about, how you know
Speaker 2: someone's reporting is valuable and is worth money, with colliding
Speaker 2: with the idea that information should be free on the internet.
Speaker 2: With Canada right now, where I think Canada passed a
Speaker 2: law that says that if you are like a social
Speaker 2: media aggregator and news aggregator, you have to pay the
Speaker 2: creator of that news some form of compensation for aggregating
Speaker 2: that news because you're making money off of it. But
Speaker 2: you're just taking their work for free, right And Canada
Speaker 2: is in a real pickle right now because Google and
Speaker 2: Facebook said, okay, well, we're just not going to be
Speaker 2: available in Canada anymore because we're not going to pay
Speaker 2: that and what's Canada going to do? So that seems
Speaker 2: like that is very ironic. The free Internet, in the
Speaker 2: form of the most profitable, most expensive and valuable companies
Speaker 2: in the world, is crushing the journalistic value that's brought
Speaker 2: by people who create news and come up with the
Speaker 2: articles that those companies make their money off of. It's
Speaker 2: a terrible jam.
Speaker 1: It really is. And over the years, of course, we've
Speaker 1: had sort of activist crusaders like Aaron Schwartz, who in
Speaker 1: twenty eleven was indicted for downloading one of our favorite websites,
Speaker 1: jastore jstr database. What does that stand for? Actually, I
Speaker 1: don't even know.
Speaker 2: I can't even possibly come up with anything on this
Speaker 2: short and notice chuck believe me.
Speaker 1: But anyway, Schwartz downloaded millions of academic articles from the
Speaker 1: jastore database, which is behind a paywall, and the idea,
Speaker 1: you know, presumably, was that he was going to share
Speaker 1: those and he even had a manifesto, the Gorilla Open
Speaker 1: Access Festo, where he's like, there's a moral imperative to
Speaker 1: have these academic articles available to the world and to
Speaker 1: someone who might not have the money in the global South,
Speaker 1: these institutions that can't pay for these journals, maybe like
Speaker 1: we should get it out there. And Jaystore did not
Speaker 1: press charges. Yeah, but US attorneys came after him and
Speaker 1: he took his own life at the age of twenty
Speaker 1: six and twenty thirteen before the trial started.
Speaker 2: Yeah, US attorneys Carmen Ortiz and Steven Hayman really aggressively
Speaker 2: pursued charges against him. And it's kind of explained that
Speaker 2: he was the scapegoat in the post WikiLeaks world. They
Speaker 2: were seeking to make an example out of him. And yeah,
Speaker 2: he took his life at twenty six, and like a
Speaker 2: real luminary was lost, especially if you stop and consider
Speaker 2: what he was doing, and especially if you stop and
Speaker 2: consider that Jay Store was like, you gave the articles back,
Speaker 2: We're not going to press charges. And if you want
Speaker 2: to know like a little peak behind what Aaron Schwartz
Speaker 2: was doing, if you're like that's a weird thing to
Speaker 2: die over scientific journal articles, who cares. There's an amazing
Speaker 2: article from Prisonomics that Alec Mayasi wrote in twenty thirteen
Speaker 2: called why is Science behind a paywall? And everyone should
Speaker 2: read that because it's about the scientific journal publishing racket
Speaker 2: that is basically keeping science in the hands of just
Speaker 2: the wealthiest universities in the world and out of everybody
Speaker 2: else's hands because they make time of money off of it,
Speaker 2: even though science is supposed to be spread everywhere far
Speaker 2: and wide, so people can try new things based on
Speaker 2: those findings.
Speaker 1: Because money's the root of all evil.
Speaker 2: Right, there's an article that I think Dean Baker wrote
Speaker 2: his ip the Root of All Evil?
Speaker 1: Oh, interesting, we're talking about earlier. Yeah, So enforcing this stuff,
Speaker 1: especially on the Internet, has been very tricky over recent years.
Speaker 1: When you talk about websites like BitTorrent and Napster. Back
Speaker 1: in the day, lime wire is what I use, remember LimeWire.
Speaker 2: And what was the other one with the why? I
Speaker 2: can't remember, but yes.
Speaker 1: I don't know. Someone will write in let us know.
Speaker 1: But Napster if you don't know about that, and you're
Speaker 1: pretty young and you were a kid when that happened,
Speaker 1: that was sort of one of the first free music
Speaker 1: downloading sites, and it was all over the news at
Speaker 1: the time because it devastated the music industry in a
Speaker 1: lot of ways, and a lawsuit shut them down in
Speaker 1: two thousand and one. But this was a case where
Speaker 1: the world and the internet and the music industry pivoted
Speaker 1: eventually when things like Spotify and Pandora came along and said, hey,
Speaker 1: we can't police this. You cannot shut down people trading
Speaker 1: music online. The genie has left the bottle. It's too late.
Speaker 1: But why don't we get together and at least we'll
Speaker 1: start these services where people can sign up and they
Speaker 1: can pay for this stuff, because we think people will
Speaker 1: do that. They may not buy your records anymore, but
Speaker 1: they'll pay ten bucks a month or whatever for unlimited music,
Speaker 1: and then we'll give you a tiny little piece of it.
Speaker 1: And they said, all right, I guess that's the best
Speaker 1: we can do. This is a stat Livia found in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty two inflation adjusted dollars revenue from and this
Speaker 1: is just music sales like selling a CD or whatever.
Speaker 1: At the time in nineteen ninety nine it was twenty
Speaker 1: six almost twenty six billion dollars, which was the peak,
Speaker 1: went all the way down to eight point three billion
Speaker 1: in twenty fourteen and twenty fifth, and as backup as
Speaker 1: of a couple of years ago, to about sixteen billion,
Speaker 1: which is still you know, a little more than a
Speaker 1: little less than half. I guess of the peak because
Speaker 1: of largely because of like paid subscriptions and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: But that's a huge decline and the only reason music, Like,
Speaker 1: if you complain about the price of concert tickets, it's
Speaker 1: because you stopped paying for recorded music. That's there's a
Speaker 1: direct line you can draw between musicians having to make
Speaker 1: money somehow and you stealing their music.
Speaker 2: That's the thing. It's not necessarily the musicians making that money.
Speaker 2: Like there's huge companies that make most of the money
Speaker 2: on a ticket these days, and.
Speaker 1: That's a like a concert ticket.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's why tickets sales and prices are so jecked,
Speaker 2: Like you can go on to Ticketmaster or something like
Speaker 2: that and the show won't be sold out, and yet
Speaker 2: they're suddenly at scalper prices for some reason. It makes
Speaker 2: no sense. It's a total racket. And that's the reason
Speaker 2: why it's a record because again, like you said, they
Speaker 2: stopped making as much money off of recorded music, so
Speaker 2: they figured out how to make as much money as
Speaker 2: they could off of live music. Where before, Yeah, that
Speaker 2: was like that was the artist's piece, the live thing,
Speaker 2: Like the record company got the record money you go
Speaker 2: off and do your tour. We don't care. Have as
Speaker 2: much fun as you like. And when the record company's
Speaker 2: pie was removed by Napster completely just chattered. They moved
Speaker 2: over to Live and now they have a stranglehold on
Speaker 2: ticket prices, which is awful.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean back in the day it was ticket
Speaker 1: prices were low because you toured to support the album sales. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you put out a record, you go on a big tour,
Speaker 1: you charge like eight to fifteen dollars, and you sold merch.
Speaker 1: You got some money, merch money, and you sold a
Speaker 1: ton of records. Once the record thing went away, they
Speaker 1: had to make money and then all the other you know.
Speaker 1: Of course, you know, not knocking them because we work
Speaker 1: with these people, but promoters and venus and they all
Speaker 1: take a big piece public service announcement. If you'll allow
Speaker 1: really quickly, please when you go to buy a stuff
Speaker 1: you should know live ticket, please please please only go
Speaker 1: and make sure you're looking at your computer screen, make
Speaker 1: sure you're going to the ven you only because when
Speaker 1: you type in stuff you should know live Boston, the
Speaker 1: first thing that pops up might be a scalper site
Speaker 1: and you might not realize it's a scalper site because
Speaker 1: they don't look like, you know, shady guys and leather
Speaker 1: jackets on the corner anymore. It looks like, oh, this
Speaker 1: is just the place where you buy the tickets to
Speaker 1: Josh and Chuck show. And we had a few people
Speaker 1: that wrote in and said like, hey, I just paid
Speaker 1: two hundred dollars for this ticket blah blah blah blah blah,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, you went to a scalper site and
Speaker 1: they said, no, I didn't. And I said, I guarantee
Speaker 1: you did, because our tickets are not more than like whatever,
Speaker 1: like thirty five bucks or something. So just people should
Speaker 1: know that we never have a chance to say that.
Speaker 1: So please don't buy scalper ticket unless you just can't
Speaker 1: get a ticket and you're loaded and don't care.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's the original price is thirty five dollars.
Speaker 2: And then there's you know, whatever fees the venue puts
Speaker 2: on it, and then once you get out of away
Speaker 2: from the venue, it just keeps going more and more
Speaker 2: people put more and more egregious fees on it. So
Speaker 2: I think the best thing to do is to either
Speaker 2: if you can go to the box office and buy
Speaker 2: them directly. That is far and away your cheapest as
Speaker 2: close as you're going to get to face value. And
Speaker 2: if you can't do that, look for pre sales. We
Speaker 2: always have pre sales, a couple of days of pre
Speaker 2: sales first where that has the least amount of fees
Speaker 2: attached to it. There's the fewest cooks in the kitchen
Speaker 2: at that point, and then after that and regular sales
Speaker 2: when it just turns into the wild West.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, we love these live shows, but I
Speaker 1: gotta say once my eyes were really open once we
Speaker 1: started doing it as to how it all works. It's
Speaker 1: really really kind of like, uh, okay.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because we can't do anything about it. It's like, oh,
Speaker 2: you guys can sell the tickets yourselves then, and no,
Speaker 2: we can't. We can't possibly do that. Where you have
Speaker 2: to deal with the people that you have to deal with,
Speaker 2: and there are some that are better than others. There's
Speaker 2: some that are there's promoters and ticket sellers that are
Speaker 2: aware that there is a lot of terribleness to their
Speaker 2: industry and they're trying to do the opposite, and you
Speaker 2: can seek them out, but they're not in every city.
Speaker 2: You're eventually going to run into having to work with
Speaker 2: people that you don't want to work with, and that's
Speaker 2: just part of being on tour.
Speaker 1: That's right. And this all started because of Napster and
Speaker 1: me talking about Napster.
Speaker 2: That's right.
Speaker 1: I don't know how to close that loop other than
Speaker 1: to say I don't know.
Speaker 2: We could just end the episode.
Speaker 1: I mean, I got nothing else.
Speaker 2: Okay, I got nothing else either. If you want to
Speaker 2: know more about intellectual property protection, there's a lot of
Speaker 2: really interesting, if not kind of dry, articles out there
Speaker 2: about it. And since I said dry, it's time for
Speaker 2: a listener mail.
Speaker 1: It's time for Chuck. This is I just thought a
Speaker 1: pretty cool little tidbit from Nicole Adreon. Hey guys, wanted
Speaker 1: to say thanks for the show. Love listening while I
Speaker 1: drive and learning something new, and you always infuse some
Speaker 1: laughter into my day. It just listened to the episode
Speaker 1: on the Manhattan Grid. It's an oldie but a goodie,
Speaker 1: and as a gal who grew up in the shadows
Speaker 1: of New York City on Long Island, spent quite a
Speaker 1: lot of time there and hold it near and dear
Speaker 1: to my heart. One thing you missed out on, though,
Speaker 1: was a little explanation on Broadway. You mentioned that it
Speaker 1: does not stay consistent with a grid. And here's the thing.
Speaker 1: The reasoning for this is because it was a deer
Speaker 1: run that indigenous people used to hunt prior to the
Speaker 1: Dutch coming in and colonizing the island. There are also
Speaker 1: some really interesting studies and maps that were created to
Speaker 1: assess what plants were native to the island before it
Speaker 1: became a concrete jungle. So Broadway, like that little diagonal
Speaker 1: thing was a deer run and it became a road eventually.
Speaker 2: I guess that's very cool.
Speaker 1: Pretty cool anyway, thanks for the opportunity to learn. We'd
Speaker 1: love to hear an episode on the high Line. It's
Speaker 1: got a great history. And that again is from Nicole ad.
Speaker 2: Thanks Nicole. We love learning stuff we didn't know about.
Speaker 2: Thanks for taking the time to write in and tell us.
Speaker 2: And if you want to be like Nicole and just
Speaker 2: be super cool with some great info, you can send
Speaker 2: us an email to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1: Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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