Why Patents Exist with Professor Adam Mossoff

Why do patents exist in the first place? What function do they serve in society? And what is their historic origin story? In this month’s episode, with the help of Professor Adam Mossoff, we zoom way out, turn the time dial back a bit, and focus on the genesis of patents.

There’s a special kind of magic that happens when individual incentives align with societal good. Abraham Lincoln, who believed that the creation of the patent system was only surpassed by the discovery of America and the invention of the printing press in terms of the three greatest advancements in human history, once said, “The Patent System added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius.” The recognition and protection of mental labor and the fruits of the mind as natural property rights enabled any inventor – big or small – to profit from their discoveries and partner with those possessing the resources necessary to scale and bring new products and services to the marketplace. The exchange of this protection for an enabling public disclosure enhanced society and accelerated the pace of innovation by facilitating the open exchange of information and created the greatest free library of science and technological information in the world. And because the economy grows and society flourishes when innovation is encouraged, society was transformed in the 19th and 20th centuries as demonstrated by the scientific and technological revolutions that define our modern society and by virtue, created the greatest hockey stick graph in history.

But somewhere along the way, we lost sight of this. Patents became a victim of their own success. Their impact on society, the economy, and innovation became both ubiquitous and too often unseen at the same time. This episode is the start of our effort to help undo this collective societal amnesia about the significance of patents.

** Episode Overview **

• CliffsNotes Patent History, from conceptual origins in Ancient Greece through the pre-revolutionary English system and the origin of the word "patent", itself. 
• The U.S. Patent System, its democratization of invention, and its significant break from its predecessors, championed and breathed into existence by the collective wisdom of the likes of George Washington, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson. 
• Embedded in Democracy. The prominent role patents played in the Federalist Papers, the Constitution, the first ever State of the Union Address, and as the third ever act of the first Congress. 
• Innovation Bridge or Blockade? How the differences in the U.S. system played out internationally across the Industrial, chemical, pharma, biotech, computer, and mobile revolutions.
• Trolling the Founders. How the fundamental virtues that made the U.S. system unique and proved successful over its history have now tragically become the primary attack vectors used by its opponents.

** Connect With Our Guest **

You can follow Adam on Twitter at @AdamMossoff, where he posts regularly on patent and innovation policy, including his excellent “this Day in Innovation History” tweets.

** Follow Aurora Consulting **

⦿ Home: https://www.aurorapatents.com/
⦿ Twitter: https://twitter.com/AuroraPatents
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⦿ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aurorapatents/
⦿ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aurorapatents/

Thanks for listening! 

---
Note: The contents of this podcast do not constitute legal advice.

Transcript

00:00 Good day, and welcome to the Patently Strategic Podcast, where we
      discuss all things at the intersection of business, technology, and   
      patents. This podcast is a monthly discussion amongst experts in the  
      field of patenting. It is for inventors, founders, and IP             
      professionals alike, established or aspiring. And in this month's     
      special pre Independence Day episode, we're talking about why patents 
      exist.                                                                
                                                                            
00:24 And we're doing so with the help of distinguished guest and friend of 
      the podcast, Professor Adam Mossoff. There's a special kind of magic  
      that happens when individual incentives align with societal good.     
      Abraham Lincoln, who believed that the creation of the patent system  
      was only surpassed by the discovery of America and the invention of   
      the printing press.                                                   
                                                                            
00:41 In terms of the three greatest advancements in human history, once,   
      said the patent system added the fuel of interest to the fire of      
      genius. The recognition and protection of mental labor in the fruits  
      of the mind as natural property rights enabled any inventor, big or   
      small, to profit from their discoveries and partner with those        
      possessing the resources necessary to scale and bring new products and
      services to the marketplace. The exchange of this protection for an   
      enabling public disclosure enhanced society and accelerated the pace  
      of innovation by facilitating the open exchange of information and    
      created the greatest free library of science and technological        
      information in the world.                                             
                                                                            
01:21 And because the economy grows and society flourishes when innovation  
      is encouraged, society was transformed in the 19th and 20th centuries,
      as demonstrated by the scientific and technological revolutions that  
      define our modern society, and by virtue created the greatest hockey  
      stick graph in history. But somewhere along the way, we lost sight of 
      this. Patents became a victim of their own success, their impact on   
      society, the economy and innovation became both ubiquitous and too    
      often unseen at the same time.                                        
                                                                            
01:51 To help in doing our part in starting to undo this collective societal
      amnesia about the significance of patents, we're going to zoom way    
      out, turn the dial back just a bit, and focus on why patents exist in 
      the first place and why they still matter now more than ever. We start
      this episode by looking at the evolution of the idea with a brief     
      history of patents, from their conceptual origins in ancient Greece,  
      all the way up through the prerevolutionary English system and the    
      origin of the word patent itself. We then heavily focus on the history
      of the US.                                                            
                                                                            
02:21 Patent system, its democratization of invention, and its significant  
      break from its predecessors, championed and breathed into existence by
      the collective wisdom of the likes of George Washington, James        
      Madison, and Thomas Jefferson. We examine the prominent role patents  
      played in the Federalist Papers, the Constitution, the first ever     
      State of the Union address, and as the third ever act of the first    
      Congress, and how loudly this signals the undeniably inextricable link
      between the Founders notions of the core principles of democracy and  
      the societal good that comes from innovation and intellectual property
      protection. We look at how these differences played out               
      internationally across the industrial, chemical, pharma, biotech,     
      computer, and mobile revolutions, and we do so through the lens of the
      most controversial and fundamental question in the patent debate,     
      which is whether patents promote innovation or hold it back.          
                                                                            
03:11 We bring it all to the present by discussing how the fundamental      
      virtues that made the US. System unique and proved successful over its
      history have now tragically become the primary attack vectors used by 
      its opponents. We're still very fortunate to be doing so with the help
      of Adam Mossov.                                                       
                                                                            
03:26 You might remember Adam from his involvement and exceptional insights 
      shared in our Patent Wars episode earlier this season, as we'll get   
      into much more shortly. If you cared all about patents early US       
      history with the impact that private property rights have had on      
      innovation and economic prosperity, then you're in for a treat. We    
      couldn't ask for a better historical tour guide or contemporary       
      ambassador for this very important topic.                             
                                                                            
03:48 Adam is a wellspring of knowledge in this domain and makes the history
      come to life and connects it with modern times in ways I could only   
      wish all of my history professors had. This is someone who absolutely 
      lives and breathes the past, present, and future of patent law. For   
      those less familiar, Adam is a professor of law at Antonin Scalia Law 
      School at George Mason, where he teaches a wide range of courses,     
      including property patent law, trade secrets, trademark law, remedies,
      and Internet law.                                                     
                                                                            
04:14 Adam is an expert on patent law and innovation policy. He's been      
      invited five times to testify before Congress on legislation          
      addressing patent law and innovation policy, and his research has been
      relied upon by the Supreme Court, the Court of Appeals for the Federal
      Circuit, and by federal agencies. His writings on IP law have also    
      appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes and the New York Times.   
                                                                            
04:36 You can follow Adam on Twitter at adam Mossoff, where he posts        
      regularly on patent and innovation policy, including his always       
      informative on this Date in Innovation History tweets. If you can't   
      tell, we're big fans of Adam's and think this episode makes for a     
      great time. To share that, we're introducing a new regular podcast    
      segment to help keep you informed on the significant events in the    
      patent world.                                                         
                                                                            
04:56 Particularly those events that pertain to the battle that rages on    
      between the ragtag group of rebels fighting to restore our patent     
      system to its former gold standard against the all too powerful forces
      spending billions to destroy the ladder they once climbed up. On this 
      segment that we're calling the Moss Off Minute will build on our      
      Patent Wars episode and features short conversations with Adam,       
      providing updates and quick takes on movements in patent reform,      
      significant court rulings, innovation policy happenings, and          
      occasional Star Wars references. For our first installment, Adam      
      briefly reacts to both the recent Amgen decision as well as the EU's  
      proposed regulatory regime for standard essential patent licensing.   
                                                                            
05:33 Here's Adam now with the first ever Mossov minute. The big news in the
      biopharmaceutical space and patent law was the Supreme Court's        
      decision in Amgen v. Sanofi this past spring.                         
                                                                            
05:46 There was a real concern, a legitimate concern, that the Supreme Court
      was going to throw out a long standing practice of innovators to use a
      type of claim in their patents to claim their invention that is       
      referred to as a genus claim. It's a very broad claim. It's a type of 
      claim that has always existed.                                        
                                                                            
06:10 Samuel Morse's patent, even the parts of it that were upheld by the   
      Supreme Court were genus claims. So the Wright brothers was a genus   
      claim. This is a key part of a patent document to drive innovation.   
                                                                            
06:22 It's been a key part of the way in which the United States has been a 
      leader, an innovator itself in patent law, in providing inventors and 
      innovators the ability to receive secure and reliable protection for  
      their property rights and their new inventions. And the Court was     
      essentially being asked to overthrow these claims, to throw them out  
      of pat law. In fact, the attorney for Sanofi explicitly said that     
      during oral argument that genus claims should be thrown out.          
                                                                            
06:56 Thankfully, and luckily, the Supreme Court did not do that. It did not
      say that genus claims are inherently invalid or suspect or anything of
      that sort. Unfortunately, it did side with Sanofi in this case in     
      limiting and restricting Amgen's patent.                              
                                                                            
07:17 In this case, on it, it's the biotech patent. But thankfully, it      
      essentially reiterated, I think, what was long standing law. It talked
      about the Morris case and Alexander Graham Bell's invention and the   
      case that arose out of that.                                          
                                                                            
07:35 And I think it essentially reiterated that the Court should continue  
      to follow existing practice when it comes to both claiming and with   
      respect to enablement and written description requirements, which was 
      specifically what the case was about. But at the end of the day, it   
      really addressed the way in which innovators could obtain full        
      protection for their inventions. It would have been helpful if they   
      had sided with Amgen.                                                 
                                                                            
07:58 It would have been a much clearer signal to innovators. But given that
      they were being asked to throw out genus claims, and given the tenor  
      of the US. Supreme Court's patent law decisions over the past ten or  
      15 years in which they have been rolling back patent rights,          
      eliminating and narrowing the scope of patent protections provided to 
      innovators in the United States.                                      
                                                                            
08:22 The decision actually was somewhat of a welcome relief of at least the
      Court stepping back from that precipice that it usually is more than  
      willing to jump off of in past decisions. The other big news in the   
      global innovation economy was the surprise leak of a proposed draft   
      regulation that the European Commission in the European Union, the EU 
      is considering, in which it would impose, will create, and then       
      impose. This massive regulatory regime to be imposed upon the         
      licensing and litigation of patents that cover standardized           
      technologies like WiFi and things of this sort.                       
                                                                            
09:13 The concern about this regulatory regime is that it would impose      
      essentially price caps on licensing activities. It would use patent   
      counting for essentially determining what should be your licensing    
      royalties and impose many other costs and hurdles on innovators to    
      both license and ultimately necessarily litigate against infringers   
      their patents that cover standardized technologies. These are called  
      standard essential patents in patent law wonkish terminology.         
                                                                            
09:49 And this is a real concern because the issues have been litigated in  
      courts and the courts have been developing in Europe and elsewhere a  
      fairly robust set of laws and have been developing the evidentiary    
      rules for what counts as legitimate licensing. This is exactly what   
      you would expect in evidence based policy making. It's ground up it's 
      courts receiving evidence, hearing arguments and then ruling on the   
      basis of the law.                                                     
                                                                            
10:20 Given the evidence presented in this instance, then the implementers  
      of these technologies who were heaven unhappy with the court rulings, 
      decided to go to the regulators and legislators in the EU to make     
      arguments that are largely rhetoric based about so called patent hold 
      up and ambush and monopoly pricing by patent owners. And while the    
      policymakers and legislators may not have any ill will or bad intent, 
      they're not constrained by rules of evidence and due process the way  
      courts are. And there so they're more susceptible to being            
      unfortunately misled by that type of rhetoric.                        
                                                                            
11:04 And this is what has happened in this case. It's very significant. It 
      could potentially impact the very foundations of our kind of modern   
      high tech global innovation economy, especially the mobile revolution,
      because these are patents that cover five G and things of that sort.  
                                                                            
11:20 And moreover, it's going to be abused and exploited by China. China   
      will then point to this and say see you're doing this and we can do   
      this too. They have been abusing their patent system and their        
      antitrust laws to benefit their own domestic companies like Huawei and
      HTC.                                                                  
                                                                            
11:37 And they will exploit these types of developments in Europe and if it 
      occurs in the United States as well, to their own advantage,          
      continuing their own abuse of their laws for their own domestic       
      industrial policy purposes, on top of the continuing theft of         
      innovation from the west as well. We'll be including the audio from   
      these updates in each monthly episode. But in an effort to reach an   
      even wider audience, we're also going to be trying our hand at        
      publishing these and other great interviews and explainers as short   
      form videos on Instagram reels, YouTube shorts and even TikTok.       
                                                                            
12:12 Well, at least that is until the Chinese government bans us for       
      speaking openly about IP theft and the fate of a technological future 
      defined by an authoritarian regime actively engaged in human rights   
      violations. But I digress. You can check out these shorts and follow  
      us at aurora patents on all three platforms and be on the lookout next
      month for some great analysis on the recently reintroduced Patent     
      Eligibility Restoration Act and the newly introduced Prevail Act.     
                                                                            
12:35 Now, without further ado, here's our conversation on why patents exist
      with Adam Mossoff. All right, well, thanks for joining us today, Adam.
      It's good to be here.                                                 
                                                                            
12:45 Josh, in one of the interviews that we did with you for the patent    
      reform episode, you also said something then that made me realize that
      you're a pretty good person to talk to about all of this. Beyond the  
      extensive work that you do currently in modern patent law and         
      innovation policy, you got started in this world with a really massive
      deep dive around its history. Could you tell us about your academic   
      research into the primary source materials and what your motivation   
      launching for doing that was, yes, I've always loved history.         
                                                                            
13:24 And in fact, I was doing a lot of study of a very specific, actually, 
      area of history even before I went to law school called intellectual  
      history. And in my formal studies in philosophy I was actually doing a
      lot of research and kind of historical development and evolution of   
      natural law philosophy starting with the presocratics in ancient      
      Greece thousands of years ago kind of tracing its evolution and       
      development up to the Romans and Cicero and up through, then Quinas   
      and the high Middle Ages and the Renaissance and then its evolution   
      into natural rights theory in the 17th and 18th centuries. And so it  
      always been very interested in history and delving into kind of       
      primary historical documents and records to trace intellectual        
      development and the evolution of ideas.                               
                                                                            
14:22 And so when I became interested in the history of patents, it was just
      very natural for me to kind of take that skill set that I'd already   
      developed in graduate school and transfer it over to my study of      
      patents. I was actually kind of prompted, really to start the study of
      history in patent law largely, I think, as a result of two things. One
      is, broadly speaking, our common law system, we rely very much on     
      history as just a matter of legal argumentation.                      
                                                                            
14:58 Appealing to historical sources is the default rule, so to speak, for 
      what lawyers do. In Anglo American legal practice, it's the only time 
      where it's entirely acceptable to say, well, they were doing it       
      before, so it's okay to keep doing it now. The very thing that we tell
      our kids they're not allowed to say is a totally acceptable argument  
      to a judge and then closely related to that first point.              
                                                                            
15:33 The second point is then is that when I first started doing my work as
      a legal academic, I was starting from the perspective that patents are
      property rights. And I was receiving a lot of pushback, especially    
      from legal academics. So this was back in the late 1990s and early    
      aughts, and they were telling me, oh, this whole idea of intellectual 
      property as property is a modern idea.                                
                                                                            
16:01 This is new. So you're the radical item. You have to justify why      
      treating intellectual property as property needs to be done.          
                                                                            
16:09 And I would always say to them, Why is it new? And they kept saying,  
      well, because Thomas Jefferson said that patents are on property. I   
      became really interested in the history through those exchanges       
      because I noticed that people like Mark Lemley and Larry Lessig and   
      many other prominent professors were kept referencing the same one or 
      two sources, the most prominent one being Thomas Jefferson. This      
      letter he wrote in 1811 to an inventor.                               
                                                                            
16:42 And so I said, well, this is all really interesting. Let me look at   
      the historical record. And given my background and my training, I     
      said, I'm going to go look at the original historical sources.        
                                                                            
16:54 So I'm going to go read all the patent decisions in the 19th century, 
      and I'm going to read all the original treatises, and I'm going to    
      read the articles in court opinions, even from the 18th century       
      earlier. And what I found through doing this historical research and  
      kind of tracing the evolution of the development of the way people    
      have been thinking about patents is that actually these claims that   
      patents were originally viewed as monopolies, at least in the American
      context, were not correct. And this, of course, leads to one of my    
      more famous articles, which is actually titled, who Cares What Thomas 
      Jefferson Thought About Patents? Covering the patent privilege in     
      historical context.                                                   
                                                                            
17:35 So it's kind of those two factors, the general reliance on history,   
      which explains why the intellectual property professors were citing to
      Thomas Jefferson and others, because they were just following this    
      kind of classic norm of citing to historical sources. Of course,      
      they're engaging in what legal historians refer to as law office      
      history, which is not the true use of history, but the lawyer's use of
      history, where you selectively find any particular historical source  
      or case that happens to support a preconceived policy position you    
      have. In this instance, they thought patents were monopolies, and so  
      they were just looking for sources to support them in historical      
      record, where I actually was like, I don't know what I'm going to     
      find.                                                                 
                                                                            
18:18 When I started my historical research, I thought maybe Thomas         
      Jefferson was his views did reflect the dominant view at the time.    
      That's one of the really fun, cool things about doing historical      
      research. It's a bit like mining.                                     
                                                                            
18:32 I sometimes refer to being in the law mines. You never know what      
      you're going to find when you start digging and reading the original  
      sources. You have to keep an open mind about it.                      
                                                                            
18:40 You have kind of a supposition or a theory that tells you what you    
      think you might find, but you have to be really be honest and remain  
      committed to what the actual factual sources are actually telling you 
      as you're reading them. It's a lot of fun. There's another whole new  
      layer to it, too, which is the intellectual context of the earlier    
      period is often very different from what we're reading.               
                                                                            
19:02 What you know now, one historian referred to doing historical research
      as a bit like visiting a foreign country, which makes it very         
      dangerous, especially because you're reading text in English, but     
      words don't even necessarily have the same meaning. In fact, that was 
      my article. Who cares what Thomas Jefferson thought about Patents? The
      subtitle is rediscovering the patent privilege in historical context. 
                                                                            
19:27 Because what I found was that people were finding the word privilege  
      in the historical record and were reading it out of context, imposing 
      kind of a modern interpretation or sense on that term as opposed to   
      the actual meaning of that as a legal term of art within this kind of 
      broader kind of natural rights defined theory of civil rights and     
      natural rights in the 18th century and 19th centuries as defined in   
      our Constitution. As represented in our constitution, in the          
      privileges or immediates clause in article four, and in privileges and
      immediate clause in the 14th amendment. So this next question, I kind 
      of want to tarantino this a bit and kind of work back from the ending.
                                                                            
20:10 You mentioned private property rights. And we're going to come back to
      that for sure because I don't think it could be any more important to 
      this conversation. But I do want to go back in time first for some    
      context and hopefully give listeners kind of a Cliff Notes like origin
      story on the history of patents.                                      
                                                                            
20:29 And while I do know that this sounds like the sort of question that   
      could be a remedy for people with insomnia, I do think it's a really  
      important concept, because the concept of a patent hasn't always meant
      the same thing, it hasn't always had the same motivations, and it     
      certainly hasn't always had the same the same outcomes. Right. Patents
      didn't start in the US.                                               
                                                                            
20:52 Or even in England, did they? Right. Well, I mean, the term patent    
      even comes from England's letters patent open. This legal device that 
      is used was by the Crown and which actually the United States still   
      has as the way to start property rights.                              
                                                                            
21:12 All even property rights and land start with an originally a patent   
      grant from the government, because it's the way you kind of start the 
      legal protection of something. If you step back even more from the    
      framing of patents, the recognition that you can incentivize people   
      with an exclusive grant. You know, regionally, a monopoly type        
      protection goes all the way back to ancient Greece, where individuals 
      would petition the various city state governments for various monopoly
      protections as a way to incentivize and or justify I spent all this   
      time creating this, please give me protection in it.                  
                                                                            
22:05 And that will ensure I have a reward for the benefit that I'll give to
      everyone as a result of having created it. And so that's what you had 
      in ancient Greece and then Venice is the first country or country,    
      city, state, that in the Middle Ages, the high Middle Ages at the     
      right of turn of the Renaissance that really kind of institutionalizes
      this practice. So it's no longer like a one off petition by a         
      particular individual.                                                
                                                                            
22:37 They actually enact a statute that provides for various exclusive     
      rights to people who kind of create new novel technologies. For those 
      who know about the Renaissance a little bit, you'll know that a lot of
      our early technologies were coming out of Italy. Italy was kind of the
      fountain head of the Renaissance in art and machinery, leonard DA     
      Vinci, our Renaissance man, still to this very day.                   
                                                                            
23:06 He did everything painting machine, concepts of modern tanks and      
      helicopters and everything. Early Silicon Valley? Yes. Or early US.   
                                                                            
23:22 Massachusetts. Boston was the first. Really? Silicon Valley.          
                                                                            
23:27 United States was the Massachusetts Boston area. So they create a     
      statute where they set forth various statutory conditions, or if you  
      really have created something new and you get a set period of time if 
      you meet these requirements. Those are very often identified as the   
      first patents because they kind of reflect various features that we do
      now have, although they were still very different from what we have   
      now.                                                                  
                                                                            
23:53 But they reflect various key features, one of them being that they    
      were institutionalized, meaning they were set forth in a law, that the
      law set forth various requirements to apply to inventors. It provided 
      for an exclusive term, and it had to be something that was new. That  
      is often identified as pretty much the very first patent system that  
      you might be able to identify as a patent system, although that's     
      speaking still a patents in a very generalized, abstract sense,       
      because what the United States eventually has as patents is still     
      vastly different from what you even had in Venice or even in England  
      after that.                                                           
                                                                            
24:43 And then I guess the next big step, since this is just supposed to be 
      the Cliff Notes version, of course, is then the development in        
      England, where the English crown was very interested, as it just does 
      a matter of economic policy, of kind of promoting the economic        
      development of the realm at that time. England was more of a backwater
      type country than the rest of the continent in the 15th and 16th      
      centuries. And so the crown uses its royal prerogative to issue       
      letters, patent open letters.                                         
                                                                            
25:20 This is law French. So just patent means open. And following French,  
      they put the adjective after the noun.                                
                                                                            
25:27 So it's really an open letter in standard English and to entice people
      from the continent to comments, start practicing new manufacturers and
      other technological skills in the realm. And so the English crown says
      if you come to England and start in England, a new practice. And      
      they're referred to as inventors at that time because an inventor just
      meant new to the realm in English at that time, didn't mean new to the
      world, just meant new to the realm.                                   
                                                                            
26:03 So it could be something that you've been well known and already being
      practiced in Europe, meaning the continent. But just as long as you   
      come to England, we'll give you a 14 year period of monopoly where you
      have this protection from the Crown, where if anyone starts to compete
      with you, you can actually go to the Privy Council, which is the      
      Crown's Court, and have it get an order for them to stop. And of      
      course, an order from the Crown is a pretty serious deal.             
                                                                            
26:35 Right. So if you violate that, you get thrown in the Tower of London  
      and worse things happen to you after that, potentially. So this       
      carried a lot of force.                                               
                                                                            
26:46 And of course, letters Payton were used not just for enticing         
      manufacturers. I mean, as I said, this was kind of the standardized   
      legal mechanism by which the Crown exercises prerogative. So this was 
      how the Crown also granted franchise grants to create markets, local  
      markets, which had to have the authority of the Crown to exist.       
                                                                            
27:05 And then they were monopolies. So when Crown created a market, you    
      couldn't create a competing market. They can use this to create       
      bridges, to incentivize people to create bridges, and also inns and   
      highways and all sorts of other things that kind of affected the      
      economic development of the realm at large.                           
                                                                            
27:25 And of course, the Crown, this being an exercise of the prerogative as
      kings and queens are won't to do, at least in old of yesteryear, they 
      tend to use unrestricted, unrestrained powers. I know we're all       
      shocked to hear that. That's the breaking news to come out of this    
      one.                                                                  
                                                                            
27:46 Yes, exactly. I'm like, oh my God. Instead of granting these grants to
      people who were bringing new manufacturers over to England, queen     
      Elizabeth starts to give them to court favorites.                     
                                                                            
28:08 And some of the more kind of infamous ones were playing card          
      monopolies, where they've been playing cards for a very long time. And
      she grants one to a man called Darcy, who is just a court favorite.   
      And of course, he then starts to shut down other people making playing
      cards.                                                                
                                                                            
28:27 This leads to and becomes part and parcel of the constitutional       
      conflicts, actually. So patents played a very key part of what were   
      wide ranging constitutional conflicts in the 17th century. England in 
      the 17th century is a period rife with conflict, where they are       
      defining and slowly imposing limits on the Crown.                     
                                                                            
28:49 And this is kind of pre natural rights revolution. So they're largely 
      fighting over what was then defined as the traditional rights of      
      Englishmen. And at that time, the traditional rights of Englishmen    
      were defined.                                                         
                                                                            
29:00 You could practice your trade, you had a traditional right of it being
      Englishman, you could practice your trade. And so if the Crown gave a 
      monopoly that shut down your trade, the Crown was claiming a          
      prerogative to do something that violated your traditional rights of  
      being an Englishman. It's kind of cool that patents were kind of      
      caught up in these broader constitutional debates in England about    
      what's the scope of government power and what are the limitations on  
      the government, and what defines legitimate authorized government     
      action.                                                               
                                                                            
29:32 And through a few early court cases in the early 17th century, they   
      try to impose some limits on the Crown. King James, who follows Queen 
      Elizabeth, continues to abuse letters patent. So eventually Parliament
      steps in and passes what's called the statute of monopolies, 1623,    
      which is a statute that limits the Crown's ability to grant letters   
      patent and limits them to the first and true inventor for only 14     
      years.                                                                
                                                                            
30:03 That's pretty much all that it sets forth has a few other things. If  
      you wonder why we have trouble damages for willful infringement,      
      that's because in statue monopolies, if you can show that a person was
      deliberately infringing your letter patent, you could get trouble     
      damages again. Because why? Because of history.                       
                                                                            
30:23 That's what they did in 1623. So we're still doing it to this day.    
      Now.                                                                  
                                                                            
30:31 Again, inventor in that term didn't mean inventor the way we mean it  
      now. It meant just new to the realm. If someone was bringing something
      from the continent to England, you could still get a patent under the 
      statute of monopolies.                                                
                                                                            
30:45 But that still doesn't cure the problems. Patent disputes are still   
      being viewed through a lens of this is a letter patent, so they're    
      still being for instance, disputes with them are still being resolved 
      by the Privy Council, which is the Court of Prerogative of the Crown's
      prerogative not through the common law courts, the King's Bench and   
      the Court of Common Pleas. So this doesn't happen until the 18th      
      century, where eventually the Preview Council cedes jurisdiction to   
      the common law courts.                                                
                                                                            
31:17 The common law courts then develop the specification requirement. You 
      have to describe your invention. This is when you start to have in the
      18th century sorry, it's the 18th century, 17 hundreds 18th century.  
                                                                            
31:36 And the 18th century is when the common law courts then take over and 
      they develop through common law adjudication specification            
      requirements. They develop what we now patent lawyers know as the quid
      pro quo, this kind of contract theory, you're receiving a patent in   
      exchange for disclosure of the invention, teaching the art. But       
      through this process in England, they're still viewed and viewed as   
      kind of being these personal monopoly grants, or at least they're no  
      longer being defined as monopolies per se.                            
                                                                            
32:04 They're now being recognized as property rights because that was the  
      domain of the common law courts, but they're still being recognized as
      personal property rights. So this is still a grant from the Crown and 
      it's a personal grant to you. So it wasn't a full property.           
                                                                            
32:18 Right. So if the Crown gives you something today, king Charles would  
      gives you something, it's for you. So if he gives you Josh something, 
      you can't give it to Ashley, you can't give it to me.                 
                                                                            
32:31 He gave it to you. And if you try to give it. Away.                   
                                                                            
32:35 That's not possible, right? In old kind of Seinfeldian terms, there's 
      no regifting of the patent. If you got the patent, then you had to set
      up the manufacturing facility. You had to do all the                  
      commercialization.                                                    
                                                                            
32:53 You couldn't license it to other people. You couldn't transfer it. You
      couldn't create a market around it.                                   
                                                                            
32:57 You couldn't use it for venture capital financing and things of that  
      sort, at least in the sense of the modern development of this         
      commercialization function of patents. This is all kind of what the   
      United States embraces, because we in the United States say, no       
      patents. We're going to treat these like property rights, because we  
      really have rejected this notion of a royal prerogative grant in any  
      way, shape, or form that's personal to someone.                       
                                                                            
33:25 This is purely a property right. In fact, early courts recognize this 
      is why, for instance, the power to authorize the protection of patents
      is not placed in the executive. So if they really were following the  
      English model, the founders would have made it part of article two,   
      but they put in article one the power of Congress as the              
      representatives of the people to protect their rights.                
                                                                            
33:50 That was a key aspect of that. And part and parcel of that was also   
      defining in the statutes that these are, in fact, property rights.    
      They didn't call them property rights, but they said you had the right
      to use, make, and dispose of the invention starting in the very early 
      1790 statute, the very first one that's enacted.                      
                                                                            
34:09 And those were the key features of what makes something a property    
      right. And therefore, in many respects, the patent system reflects    
      what we talked about earlier, the declaration independence, the       
      recognizing the rights of individuals and true split from England and 
      kind of embracing kind of the protection of individual rights. In this
      instance now, the rights of inventors, we embraced a true invention   
      standard.                                                             
                                                                            
34:35 So still, like in England, even at that time, it didn't have to be new
      to the world, just had to be new to England. And we said, no, it has  
      to be new to the world. You actually have to be the inventor of it.   
                                                                            
34:46 You have to be the creator of it. So it becomes very much imbued with 
      this lockhean notion of you have engaged in productive labor, mental  
      labor, which is even more your own labor than even your physical labor
      is. And that's what creates this entitlement that you have to have a  
      right protected by the government, and that right is a property right,
      and that's key and essential to a free and flourishing society.       
                                                                            
35:15 Yeah. Thank you. Sorry.                                               
                                                                            
35:19 You asked a long question. No, that's okay. That's quite all right.   
                                                                            
35:25 But that split from England is a really great segue to kind of where  
      I'd like to go next. So we go from ancient Greece to Venice to        
      England, and we're kind of up to we got a statue of monopolies, and   
      we've got to have this seeds of what we recognize as a modern patent  
      system, but we still have a ways to go. So income, those troublemaking
      Americans, right? These early Americans, they're on the heels of      
      they've just won the Revolutionary War and they're busy forming a new 
      government.                                                           
                                                                            
36:00 And it's pretty cool. They're literally starting from scratch, and    
      they're getting to work out the here's what I would do if I could     
      start my own country conversation that many of us would sort of love  
      to have. But it's not in the hypothetical on Twitter or cocktail party
      conversation.                                                         
                                                                            
36:18 The stakes could simply not be higher. Right. They had just fought a  
      bloody revolution, and now they're trying to come up with enduring    
      political structures and trying to jump start trying to jump start an 
      economy, right, because they want this thing to last.                 
                                                                            
36:35 And so there are clearly a lot of really important decisions to be    
      made. But interestingly, right towards the top of that list for them  
      is securing intellectual property rights to promote innovation. Could 
      you talk a little bit about how that played out? Sort of like from the
      Federalist Papers on? Yeah.                                           
                                                                            
37:00 So it is kind of pretty cool to realize how innovative the founders   
      were, not just kind of in their broader embrace of natural rights     
      philosophy and other theories that had been developing at the time.   
      Like, they all had read Montesquieu. Montesquieu is the person from   
      whom they learn about really, truly the separation of powers,         
      principle and federalism and things of this sort.                     
                                                                            
37:33 They're true political pioneers, but they were also innovative        
      pioneers, even in patents, as I kind of mentioned. But they weren't   
      just deducing from on high like, oh yes, Locke tells us, productive   
      labor, and this means property. The founders were very practical      
      people.                                                               
                                                                            
37:53 They were practical statesmen. They weren't philosophers. They weren't
      writing treatises and philosophy.                                     
                                                                            
37:58 They were writing practical works on how you have a government, how   
      you get institutions started. And so it's very revealing. And we've   
      lost the sense of the significance of this that they put into the     
      Constitution in article one, section Eight, clause Eight, that        
      Congress is authorized to protect.                                    
                                                                            
38:20 It doesn't even use, by the way, the words patents and copyrights,    
      just as the exclusive right to our authors and create inventors. And  
      this is the very first time that the protection of what we now call   
      intellectual property, that phrase didn't evolve until a few decades  
      later in the United States is put into a country's founding document  
      that in and of itself is tremendously significant and hugely          
      important. It wasn't even debated.                                    
                                                                            
38:58 Madison's notes from the Federal Convention of 1787 at the convention,
      you know, in Philadelphia over that summer, where, you know, they     
      wrote the the Constitution, you know, when the you know, when the     
      clause was proposed, madison notes that it was adopted without debate.
      So there's almost no there's nothing on it from the convention. What  
      happens otherwise? Well, I mean, they debated a lot of stuff.         
                                                                            
39:26 There's notes behind me on my bookshelf. His book. That book is this  
      big.                                                                  
                                                                            
39:30 But it was very interesting that this was something they didn't       
      debate, that a lot of them recognized that this was something that was
      important and in part, they recognized was important from their       
      experiences. So, for instance, George Washington was himself what we  
      now call an angel investor. So he personally funded inventors to work 
      on inventions, especially some people working on steamboat            
      technologies.                                                         
                                                                            
40:07 But also what a lot of people don't know is that two very significant 
      early American innovators and creators actually went to the           
      Constitutional convention to tell them, we have been unable to get    
      effective protection of the rights of our creations. So one of them   
      was Antenna Webster, who had come up with his first American          
      dictionaries. Why? It's.                                              
                                                                            
40:33 Webster's Dictionary. Very famous. And he had been going around to    
      various states and registering it for copyright, because a lot of     
      states had adopted copyright statutes at that time.                   
                                                                            
40:47 By the way, those copyright statutes were explicitly lock in. They say
      in their preambles that the creation of the artist is a product of the
      labors of the mind. It is theirs, and they have a right to the fruits 
      of their mind.                                                        
                                                                            
41:04 But he was having to go to each state and get protection directly. And
      every state had variations in their copyright statutes. And this was a
      dictionary that was being sold throughout all 13 states at that time. 
                                                                            
41:22 So it was a national product. And John Fitch, who was one of the early
      steamboat inventors, of course, Robert Fulton is the one who we all   
      recognize as the inventor, the steamboat, because he's really the     
      inventor of the first practical steamboat. He's the one who figures   
      out the actual steamboat technology that works.                       
                                                                            
41:43 Just like Thomas Edison. It was actually not the inventor the of light
      bulb. He's an inventor of the first light bulb that actually works.   
                                                                            
41:48 There were a lot of light bulbs before him that just didn't work as   
      well. And Fulton was the same way. Fitch Robert Fitch was john Fitch  
      was an early steamboat pioneer.                                       
                                                                            
42:02 In fact, he actually demonstrated his steamboat on the Delaware River 
      to the convention delegates. So they actually took a break from just  
      debating and writing the Constitution to go down to the Delaware.     
      Fitch does a demonstration for them of his steamboat.                 
                                                                            
42:19 But one of his points for his demonstration was, notice my steamboat  
      goes between two states here, goes between Delaware and Pennsylvania, 
      right? And both of those states have different laws with respect to   
      this. And so it was made very clear to the founders very early on that
      people like Webster, people like Fitch, were going to be the          
      fountainhead of the United States. These were the innovators and      
      creators that were going to create a self sufficient, growing economy,
      what we now call our innovation economy.                              
                                                                            
42:56 And they needed to be protected. And that the types of products and   
      services that they were going to be inventing were not just products  
      and services that they invented and therefore they had a right to     
      them, but they had to be nationally protected because the products and
      services were going to be used on a national level. So this wasn't    
      like a farmer in Virginia who was only selling his corn in Virginia.  
                                                                            
43:17 This was someone who was going to be moving a steamboat between       
      Virginia and Pennsylvania and New York or selling a book, a dictionary
      in all the states. And so this had to be a national protection. This  
      had to be protected at a national level.                              
                                                                            
43:36 And in fact, this is the last sentence in federalist number 43 where  
      Madison comments on the patent Copyright clause. In fact, that's the  
      longest commentary, public commentary we have by a founder, by a      
      framer, I should say, because Jefferson is not a framer. He was in    
      France at the time.                                                   
                                                                            
43:55 But is the five or six sentences that we have in Federalist Papers    
      number 43, where Madison says at the very end of it, he says the      
      states cannot provide effectual protection for inventions and artistic
      works, and so it has to be protected at the national level. And this  
      is after, of course, he gives his fundamental justification, policy   
      justification, that these are actually fundamental property rights. He
      also says that it's basically self evident right, that these things   
      would, I think, scarcely be questioned because the utility of this.   
                                                                            
44:39 So that's his first sentence in federalist number 43, which is about  
      the powers delegated to Congress more generally in article One,       
      section Eight. So article One, Section Eight, is the section of the   
      Constitution where Congress is authorized to all of its powers that it
      has has no other powers outside of that section. So that's where      
      Congress can create an army and a navy, it can create a post office,  
      it can declare war, it can print money.                               
                                                                            
45:07 And by the way, this is where patents, copyrights are put right. This 
      is on par with the creation of an army and a navy to protect our      
      rights as a country. This is where Congress is given the authority to 
      borrow money.                                                         
                                                                            
45:15 This is where Congress is given the authority to create courts. The   
      only court that is mandated by the Constitution is the Supreme Court  
      in the United States. All of the courts are created by statute, by    
      Congress.                                                             
                                                                            
45:33 So they're creating the courts to resolve our disputes. This tells you
      how significant patents and copyrights are viewed by the founders.    
      Federalist 43 is part of a couple of essays where he's just kind of   
      giving short little summaries and descriptions of these various       
      powers.                                                               
                                                                            
45:55 And one of them is article one, section eight, clause eight which is  
      the Patent and Copyright Clause or sometimes called the Copyright     
      Patent and Copyright Clause. And the very first sense of this is the  
      utility of this power will scarcely be questioned, which shows you    
      Madison's failure of imagination, but also how deeply baked into them,
      that this was self evident and didn't warrant a whole lot of          
      conversation. Well, there's an ex sentence.                           
                                                                            
46:24 He says, the right of authors at common law has already been          
      recognized in England. And by the way, what he means there is that the
      copyright is a property, right? And then he says the very next        
      sentence, he says, the rights of inventors are justified on the same  
      grounds, even though they were statutory in England, not at common law
      and statute of monopolies. And then the very next sentence he says, in
      both cases, both cases being pats and copyrights, the claims of the   
      individual and the public good fully coincide, which is this really   
      important recognition of the Founders that protection of the core     
      rights of life, liberty and property is not just in the interests of  
      the individuals.                                                      
                                                                            
47:09 This is the basis of how you have a flourishing society and that they 
      viewed them as intimately linked and going hand in hand. And this is, 
      in fact, I think, captured beautifully by the Declaration of Pendants 
      that Josh referenced earlier, where Jefferson says the right to life, 
      liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And they really meant that.     
                                                                            
47:29 Now, they saw property as necessarily part of that logical            
      progression. So he was kind of jumping over property not because he   
      was downplaying it in any sense. He was just getting to the ultimate  
      goal, because for them, they didn't think of property, individual     
      rights as being some type of kind of abstract moral duty that had zero
      connection to one's life.                                             
                                                                            
47:53 They viewed this as fundamentally part of what it means to not just   
      live a happy life as an individual, but that all of the happy lives as
      individuals add up to a flourishing society that is peaceful and      
      growing and successful. The proof is in the pudding. This is what, you
      know, what we've had.                                                 
                                                                            
48:14 And and so this is clearly how they're viewing patents, through this  
      framework that they viewed all rights, and particularly property      
      rights through that this was something that was key and necessary,    
      that the good and the practical go hand in hand. And this is          
      something, by the way, that is deeply part of Western philosophy,     
      reaching all the way back to the Greeks, right? So going back to      
      Aristotle, the whole point of living a good life, the whole point of  
      virtue, is, in Aristotle's terms, eudaimonia, which used to be        
      translated as happiness, but that in English doesn't really capture   
      fully because we think of happiness as more of a feeling and can be   
      fleeting. So it's now translated more precisely as flourishing, which 
      captures more broadly that kind of happiness over the long term and   
      all senses of it, not just physical success, but also kind of         
      spiritual and emotional achievement.                                  
                                                                            
49:18 And that's what protection of rights leads to and secures for us. And 
      they clearly viewed patents as part of this, why they put in the      
      Constitution. They saw this as connecting deeply with the success of  
      individuals and the success of our country.                           
                                                                            
49:34 Literally the only place the word right appears in the Constitution.  
      Yes. Which is significant.                                            
                                                                            
49:41 It's hugely significant. Yeah, it's tremendously significant, right.  
      Because pre bill of Rights.                                           
                                                                            
49:46 So the Constitution is written in 1787, before the Bill of Rights is  
      adopted in 1790. It's the only place where the word right is ever     
      you'll ever find. So flash forward a little bit.                      
                                                                            
50:02 We've got a Constitution in place. Washington is delivering the first 
      ever State of the Union. It's a pretty short address, but what's one  
      of the things he asks Congress to do immediately pass patent copyright
      statutes.                                                             
                                                                            
50:18 Again, because, like I said, he was an innovator himself. He          
      understood the importance of innovators as driving of the US. Economy,
      of helping make us an economically independent country and ultimately 
      being a key to our success as a flourishing society.                  
                                                                            
50:42 And as I said, he understood this through his own kind of investment  
      activities. Washington wasn't an inventor. Jefferson was an inventor. 
                                                                            
50:49 And he understood this as well, which is why he was also put on the   
      first committee to review patent applications. But Washington also, he
      deeply understood the importance of this as well. The first recipient 
      of multiple patents is a man named Oliver Evans, who received a whole 
      slew of different patents.                                            
                                                                            
51:12 And he, like, the very first recipient of the very first patent.      
      Samuel Hopkins licensed his patents, and one of his patents was on a  
      new process of manufacturing. And Jefferson.                          
                                                                            
51:27 I'm sorry. Washington has a mill at Mount Vernon. In fact, you can    
      still visit that mill still there.                                    
                                                                            
51:35 And at the mill, he wanted to use Evans process. He was president at  
      the time. Now, in England, when the government grants a patent, the   
      government officials have an automatic it was called at that time, the
      Crown's, right? Or the crown's privilege.                             
                                                                            
51:53 Essentially, what the Crown giveth the ground, can use it and take it 
      the way. So the idea was, yeah, I've given you this privilege, and    
      it's my privilege to give, so I get to use it, too. That's part of    
      what needs to be a privilege.                                         
                                                                            
52:07 Right? It's like, what do we as parents have kids, right? The dad tax,
      right? I'm going to take a little bit of your food. We talk about this
      often. Yes.                                                           
                                                                            
52:11 I'm going to have a little sip of your soda. But the United States    
      immediately said, no, these are property rights. We have to respect   
      these.                                                                
                                                                            
52:25 And so Washington, as President, enters into a license agreement with 
      Evans to use his patent in technology in his mill. Like I said, he    
      could have, as a government, as the President used it and claimed, I'm
      the President. I'm using it as president.                             
                                                                            
52:44 It's helping as president. But even then, he was George Washington.   
      There were tons of debates, and he was starting to be attacked by some
      of the political opponents.                                           
                                                                            
52:54 But he was revered. And if he just took evans pat and started using   
      it. Evans wasn't going to sue him.                                    
                                                                            
53:00 Right. This is George Washington right. It shows you his commitment to
      this, his own personal belief in the importance of what patents       
      represented.                                                          
                                                                            
53:13 That he was willing as an individual to license Evans patent on this  
      manufacturing process that he then used at his mill while Washington  
      was president. So our government isn't known to move super quickly.   
      You could argue that was a design feature of the whole thing.         
                                                                            
53:33 Study some of the founders. So Constitution is 1789, ish first, State 
      of the Union is 1790. How soon do we have a patent statute? So the    
      very first patent statute is the Patent Statute of 1790, copyright    
      Statute of 1792, some of the very early, very first legislation.      
                                                                            
53:55 So as you said earlier in his first address to Congress, president    
      Washington said you need to enact patent and copyright legislation. I 
      always like to tell people congress spent months debating about what  
      they were going to call President Washington. Did they call him His   
      Excellency, His Highness, Mr. President, his Honorable President and  
      they immediately enacted the patent copyright clauses because it was  
      in the Constitution they're authorized to do it.                      
                                                                            
54:24 It was recognized as a key and important feature of what they needed  
      to do in order to get their country going. Even while the founding    
      generation was starting to split between the Democratic Republicans   
      and the Federalists, this crossed party lines and they recognized that
      this was essential to what it meant to have a successful country.     
      Truly remarkable, isn't it? We're talking about something that's a    
      product of the minds that gave birth to the, to the country.          
                                                                            
55:03 And you know, it's, it's, it's embedded in the founding documents. It,
      it's, it's a focus of the early debates. It's like, it's the concept  
      of intellectual property protection, even if they wouldn't have called
      it that at the time.                                                  
                                                                            
55:17 It was so inextricably linked with their concept of democracy and a   
      pro growth economy that it was there from the beginning. I think      
      that's hugely profound when we talk about the significance of, of     
      patents mattering, you know, today that, you know, part, part and     
      parcel with democracy and with a pro growth strategy. It was right    
      there.                                                                
                                                                            
55:49 And I don't know, I just kind of building on what you said already,   
      but I think that's huge. Yeah. So historians refer to have a phrase   
      called American exceptionalism.                                       
                                                                            
56:06 It captures this kind of radical break that the founding era          
      represents. Even Americans went through a radical transformation in   
      how they thought of themselves and how they thought of rights and the 
      nature of government. Tween approximately 1750s and 60s, where they   
      still thought of themselves as British subjects.                      
                                                                            
56:37 They thought of themselves as British subjects. We have the rights of 
      Englishmen. The Crown is our protector of our rights.                 
                                                                            
56:47 They were imbued with Lockheed philosophy at that time. But Locke was 
      still being in England especially kind of translated through the prism
      of British common law and the unwritten British constitution through  
      the Magna Carta and the notion that Magna Carta gives us due process  
      which is somewhat of an historical myth created by this whole         
      revolution in the 17th and early 18th centuries in England. Because   
      where they take these ideas from natural rights theory of limited     
      government due importance and fundamental point of due process and    
      protection of rights of life, liberty.                                
                                                                            
57:22 And they say, oh yeah, that's what was always the when we talked about
      the traditional rights of Englishmen, that's what we meant. Even      
      though that's not really what they were talking about if you go back a
      couple of hundred years. So Americans in the 1750s and 60s still      
      thought of themselves as British subjects by 1776.                    
                                                                            
57:41 They are not British subjects anymore. They are not talking in terms  
      of the rights of Englishmen, they are talking in terms of natural     
      rights. The Declaration of Pendants announces that all men are created
      equal and have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of          
      happiness.                                                            
                                                                            
58:01 This kind of radical transformation is exceptional. It becomes        
      exceptional to the United States and to this very day it still        
      represents a very different mindset. It's come to dominate the rights 
      revolution much of how the world thinks.                              
                                                                            
58:15 But it starts in the United States and what a lot of kind of people   
      today don't remember because we're so caught up in the various        
      technical details and specific aspects of the patent system and the   
      particular details of the patent fights is the patent system was very 
      much part of American exceptionalism. It was not like this kind of    
      continuation of oh yeah, we were just taking this from England because
      this is what we're doing. One sees this often in a lot of Supreme     
      Court opinions and professors articles.                               
                                                                            
58:49 There's always this throwaway line that oh yeah, the US just kind of  
      picked up the patent system from England. Well yeah, we did in the    
      same sense we picked up our government from England too. We had sects 
      of our government from England but we also changed a lot of our       
      government and we did the same in our patent system and I've mentioned
      some of it the shift from a personal privilege grant to a property    
      right.                                                                
                                                                            
59:08 Property right means something is commercializable. But Josh, you     
      mentioned it too. They viewed the protection of patents as part and   
      parcel of the broader framework of the protection of the rights of    
      life, liberty and property through the rule of law and through the    
      institutions of government that are stable and are accessible to all  
      individuals and are defined by the rule of law and by due process.    
                                                                            
59:38 So they were accessible to all individuals any person could invent.   
      You didn't have to be an aristocrat, you didn't have to be someone    
      with history. Any person could invent.                                
                                                                            
59:48 And so Sandal Hopkins and Oliver Evans, I mean, these were just       
      general, regular people, but they treated patents like they treated   
      the function of government to protect property rights and land in the 
      sense of it was very easy. To go to the county recording office and to
      file your claim to claim to create a title V through a patent grant,  
      through the state government by showing I've been laboring on this    
      land. I'll file an affidavit this as I've been farming this land and  
      now it's mine, or through the Homestead Act, which is set up a very   
      specific process of farming and maintaining land for five years.      
                                                                            
60:32 And then you would file an affidavit and things of the sort, and for a
      few dollars you would then get the title deed and they replicated that
      in the patent system for the exact same reasons. What creates the     
      right to the patent is the action itself of creating the invention.   
      And that is simply the job of the government to recognize that right  
      now the legal right doesn't exist until the government secures it, but
      the moral claim exists.                                               
                                                                            
61:03 This is what I found in the older cases. These are things people miss 
      because we've lost a lot of the framework in terms of art that they   
      use in the 18th and 19th centuries, early American legal scholars and 
      judges and Congresspersons thought in this term and distinction       
      between what they refer to as in Kuwait rights and Kuwait rights. In  
      Kuwait right were your moral rights, your rights of life, liberty,    
      property, contract rights that arose as rights.                       
                                                                            
61:36 And they were in Kuwait insofar as they weren't secured under the law.
      And so the job of the law was to perfect your in Kuwait rights by     
      making them Kuwait, by then securing them under the law and making    
      them truly protectable to you through the institution whose job is to 
      protect your rights. And they provide that exact same framework.      
                                                                            
61:54 So Chief Justice Marshall and others talk about the act of invention  
      as creating the incoate right to a patent, to which then the inventor 
      perfects by securing a patent and therefore making their right coate. 
      Josh, you're exactly right. This is this view just part and parcel of 
      having a government that protects all people's rights and protects    
      them equally and through institutions that are accessible to all      
      through due process.                                                  
                                                                            
62:26 You just hit on this thumb in talking about it not being remembered   
      how radical of a break the US system was from the English system. I'd 
      love it if you could elaborate more on the specifics of that          
      departure. What was unique about the early US system and how did it   
      solve some of the biggest problems that came with its predecessors we 
      talked about and particularly the English system.                     
                                                                            
62:46 Yeah. So I often contrast the US. Against English system and I make   
      English system look bad.                                              
                                                                            
62:53 But the English system was good too, because you have to see what the 
      English system, what came before it. So each stage, the next stage is 
      better than what came before it. So the English were innovative and   
      very farsighted for their contacts, right? So in recognizing that we  
      have to take patents out of this kind of domain of pure,              
      unadulterated, willy nilly, arbitrary prerogative of the crown, put it
      in a statute, define it, get it into the common law courts, and start 
      protecting it in some aspects, like a property right, making an       
      exclusive right that is, protectable to the person.                   
                                                                            
63:39 But like I said, it still had vestiges of this kind of royal          
      prerogative that it arose out of, by the way. But this is why, in very
      many respects, why the Industrial Revolution starts in England, and   
      historians and scholars have recognized this. The evolution of steam  
      engine technology and many other technologies were protected by       
      patents.                                                              
                                                                            
64:04 These were significant advances over the types of personal privilege  
      grants or no protections whatsoever, or the kind of the guild system  
      protections that had existed through the Middle Ages and up through   
      some aspects of that time period before the English system wasn't     
      advanced, but it had limitations. And as I said, these vestiges of a  
      personal grant from the Crown. And so this meant, for instance, it    
      wasn't a full property, right, in the sense that you could            
      commercialize it.                                                     
                                                                            
64:38 And that's our kind of term. We taken commercial and turned it into a 
      verb. So what we mean by that means that you can use it as collateral 
      for a loan, right? So if you default on a loan, it gets transferred to
      someone else, right? So if something's personal to you can't transfer 
      it to someone else.                                                   
                                                                            
64:53 So you can't offer it up as collateral for a loan if you default on a 
      loan. So it's not the basis for investments in what we now call       
      venture capital and things of this sort. You can't license it to other
      people.                                                               
                                                                            
65:03 You can't transfer it to other people to say, okay, you manufacture it
      and you sell it, and you do this. I'll just be the inventors. You     
      can't embrace the division of labor, which Adam Smith in The Wealth of
      nations gloriously published in 1776, the same year as the Declaration
      Independence.                                                         
                                                                            
65:20 I mean, talk about in this historical happenstance that just perfect, 
      right? Who recognizes in The Wealth of nations, right, that it's the  
      division of labor specialization which is the key to the vast value   
      creation, wealth creation you have in a society where people can      
      specialize and focus on particular trades and then trade with other   
      people and then therefore create massive amounts of wealth through    
      much more cheaper goods. The example he uses is a Pin, and he kind of 
      walks through, like how digging the ore out of the ground and carrying
      that ore to a factory and having that ore worked and manufactured and 
      put into a pin. And then the pin taken to a wholesaler, and the       
      wholesaler distributed a realtor.                                     
                                                                            
66:06 And through all of this, he says if you look at each of these steps,  
      if one person had to do it, the pin would cost. Hundreds and hundreds 
      of British pounds. He says it costs mere pence.                       
                                                                            
66:16 Right. And the reason why is because each of these people are         
      specializing in trading their labor and pan owners couldn't embrace   
      that. So, like James Watt, who eventually is recognized as the        
      inventor of the steam engine, even though he didn't invent the steam  
      engine, he invents the mechanisms that make fully practical and usable
      the steam engine.                                                     
                                                                            
66:39 So he invents the condenser and the regulator. So the two shelled     
      condenser for condensing the steam back into liquid so that it can    
      then be transferred to be heated and steamed again. So there was      
      massive amounts of heat through the condensing process before, so it's
      very inefficient and you're losing a lot of energy and making the     
      energy.                                                               
                                                                            
67:06 So if you got more energy going in than you got coming out, you don't 
      have an efficient process. But he also invents the regulator, which is
      even more important, right, which is the automatic device that        
      prevents the steam engine blowing up from the pressure building up.   
      James Watt, he was like the equivalent of an academic researcher.     
                                                                            
67:26 He wasn't a business person, he wasn't, you know, but so but he got   
      the patent, but the patent was for him. James Watt, so he had to team 
      up with Bolton, who was the businessman. He couldn't just transfer his
      patent to Bolton because that's not what wasn't allowed in the 18th   
      century in England, because, yes, it's a legal property, right.       
                                                                            
67:46 But it's a property, right, that comes from the Crown, so it's still a
      personal privilege property type property. Right. That's why all the  
      lawsuits are Bolton and what for all the patent infringement lawsuits,
      because the two of them were the kind of the co owners of this process
      of ultimately putting this into practice.                             
                                                                            
68:08 It still had all of these vestiges. It also still had the vestiges of 
      this kind of prerogative process. So, as I mentioned earlier,         
      originally, disputes over patents were decided by the Privy Council,  
      which was the Special Kings Court, and patents themselves were issued 
      by the King's Chancellors.                                            
                                                                            
68:31 So these things weren't written down, they weren't governed by        
      statutes, because this was still something that the Crown basically   
      decided, how I'm going to do this? And it was extremely expensive. And
      basically, if you think of it, who had the access to the King's Court 
      and the massive amounts of money to pay for getting the Chancellor to 
      review your patent application and things of the sort. So this was    
      largely limited to the Aristocrats, or at least the nouveau rish.     
                                                                            
68:58 And so your average British subject, your peasant and things of the   
      sort, they didn't really have access to the system in any meaningful  
      way. Yeah. Really a system for the wealthy in the elite.              
                                                                            
69:12 Right. The established one of the things I think is super, because    
      that's the system it came out of because it came out of Queen         
      Elizabeth looking around her, saying, yeah, you Darcy, I like you,    
      you've been kissing my ass really nicely, so I'm going to give you a  
      patent grant. Yeah, exactly.                                          
                                                                            
69:36 I think it's pretty cool because they went a step further though,     
      right? Beyond making it affordable for anybody. The language actually 
      said that patents could be granted to he, she, or they. So beyond not 
      just being opening it up, beyond the wealthy, this was a time when    
      women, people of color, couldn't own property or vote.                
                                                                            
70:02 And we've opened up the patent system. Yeah, exactly right. So all of 
      this was building up to getting more into the nitty gritty details of 
      how significant of a break the US.                                    
                                                                            
70:17 Patent system was from England and why it's part and parcel of        
      American exceptionalism. Because they really did shed all of these    
      leftover vestiges of the royal prerogative. As I said, they put the   
      authority to secure patents in Congress, not the Executive.           
                                                                            
70:38 They would have put in the Executive if they wanted to continue to    
      follow these practices. Congress, as the People's Representative,     
      enacted a statute that applies to every individual. As you said, it   
      says he, she and they recognizing multiple inventors and women they   
      made, and as I said, they created processes.                          
                                                                            
71:03 So even when they created, even under the initial three person        
      commission that they created to review patent applications, it wasn't 
      this expensive process. And Jefferson and the other individuals who   
      were on the committee were setting out various procedures and         
      requirements for what people had to do to submit to them. And these   
      procedures were being written down and were being eventually and some 
      of them were eventually codified in the 1793 Patent Act.              
                                                                            
71:31 And in fact, the Patent Office is the very first regulatory agency    
      that's created by the federal government. Because eventually they     
      said, look, the Secretary of State and the Secretary, this is too     
      much. We had too many other job responsibilities.                     
                                                                            
71:48 We can't be reviewing patent applications. So we need to put this in a
      separate office that's run by an individual who's designated job to do
      this, the Commissioner of Patents. But they created this office       
      through the prisma.                                                   
                                                                            
72:04 It has to be governed by the rule of law. So immediately the office   
      created regulations for how they're going to function and operate.    
      They set fee rates at very low levels.                                
                                                                            
72:15 They allowed anyone to apply. And historians have found patents that  
      have been were filed by slaves because they were an individual who    
      invented something and they filed for the patent, their name had to be
      on the patent grant. There were some other cases of slave owners, like
      lying and claiming to have invented something their slaves invented,  
      but they were lying.                                                  
                                                                            
72:43 And if they had been found out that those patents would have been     
      invalidated. It's only after the fact that we now know this. They     
      created the true invention standard like this really is.              
                                                                            
72:54 It has to be novel to you. You actually have to be the inventor of    
      this. So if we find what we now call prior art.                       
                                                                            
73:01 This wasn't a term that really had that yet. But if you find prior art
      in some obscure corner of the world, that counts. And there's a story 
      that Isaac Singer, when he was in his patent battles with Elias Howe  
      over and started the sewing machine war in the 1850s, that he         
      allegedly went so far as trying to find prior art in China to try to  
      invalidate house.                                                     
                                                                            
73:26 So they took it really seriously, and the courts recognize this. So   
      England continuing to also to follow the idea that this is not fully, 
      at the end of the day, rooted in kind of a lock in theory that you    
      produced to this. You're the inventor of it.                          
                                                                            
73:40 England followed a first to file system. You didn't have to be the    
      real inventor of it. You just had to be the first person to file for  
      the patent.                                                           
                                                                            
73:52 And Charles Goodyear, who's the person who invents the process for    
      making stable rubber as we now know it, he calls it vulcanized rubber.
      Vulcanization meaning heating. It was a heating process with balding  
      chemicals.                                                            
                                                                            
74:10 He actually lost his patent in England because he made the mistake of 
      sending a chunk of his rubber to an English scientist at that time who
      was also researching the project. His scientist reverse engineered his
      process and beat him to the British patent office and filed for       
      patent. And when Goodyear filed for his patent in England and then    
      sued, saying, I get the right to the patent, the English courts were  
      like, you Americans.                                                  
                                                                            
74:35 You think you get the patent. You don't. This guy beat you.           
                                                                            
74:38 You were first to file. And this was like written up in newspapers at 
      the time, and people really were angry about it. This is one of the   
      reasons why we break from England, because here we protect the real   
      rights of real inventors.                                             
                                                                            
74:49 By the way, Charles Goodyear is your good example. He was just this   
      crazy guy. He wasn't rich.                                            
                                                                            
74:54 He was actually very poor. He invented the process of vulcanizing     
      rubber in the kitchen. The story is he ruined his wife's pots and pans
      because he was using his stove.                                       
                                                                            
75:06 He was a destitute little person in this little town in Connecticut   
      coming out of nowhere. And he comes up, he finds the solution to      
      actually what was a vast technological and economic problem at the    
      time. In fact, the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars had  
      already been lost in people investing in other people's claims to have
      solved the problem of creating this kind of stable product of rubber  
      that doesn't become brittle when it becomes cold and melt when it     
      becomes hot.                                                          
                                                                            
75:41 And he kind of came out of nowhere. In fact, when he first came out of
      nowhere with his patent, people didn't believe it because there was in
      the early 1830s, there was kind of this their own version of what we  
      know, our.com bubble. At the early at the turn of the 21st century    
      where people had invested in all these people who claimed to have     
      solved the problem and people had lost a lot of money.                
                                                                            
76:02 And so when he kind of came out of nowhere with his solution, people  
      are like, I don't believe and published patent actually helped him    
      because he was able to say, look at my patent, you can read my patent,
      you can make the invention. And he was willing to license other people
      to make it and they were willing to take the risk and invest in it.   
      And the rest is history in terms of driving the industrial revolution.
                                                                            
76:24 So all of these features, as you said, the accessibility, allowing all
      individuals to get it, the due process and the rule of law, all of    
      this was essential. In fact, a very prominent economic historian,     
      Zerina Khan, has come up with this beautiful phrase for the US. Patent
      system.                                                               
                                                                            
76:43 She's referred to as the democratization of invention. And that just  
      kind of captures perfectly all of what I've been describing as typical
      academic and lots of words and lots of details. And she has kind of   
      captured it perfectly with this phrase, the democratization invention,
      which is the title of a book she published in 2005 in which she       
      describes some of these details.                                      
                                                                            
77:05 Could you similarly talk about the elimination of the working         
      requirement? Because I think that's another huge piece to the         
      democratization. No spoilers, but just if you could talk about the    
      elimination of the working requirement. Yeah, so the working          
      requirement arose out of the original function of letters patent.     
                                                                            
77:23 So this tool of the crown to promote the economic development of the  
      realm and the only way the economic development of realm is going to  
      get promoted is people actually come to the realm and start working   
      their trades, right? And so the idea of a letter patent originally    
      was, okay, I've granted you a monopoly. The condition of the monopoly 
      is you start working it because it wasn't that it was new, it was new 
      to the realm. So it could have been in books and used widely in       
      continental Europe.                                                   
                                                                            
77:52 But the point is we need to get the economy of England going and the  
      only way that's going to happen is if you work it. So this is my      
      enticement to you and my gift to you as the king or queen is to give  
      you a monopoly so that you have some time period to set up your trade 
      and profit from it. In the English realm, in the Commonwealth, for a  
      very long time in England, up through the 18th century, you had the   
      working what was called the working requirement.                      
                                                                            
78:24 If you didn't work your invention, you lost her letter paid. And this 
      starts to be displaced in the 18th century in England through the     
      recognition of the quid pro quo, the bargain theory that you are fully
      describing your invention. And it's a new invention, so that anyone   
      who reads it can make and use it.                                     
                                                                            
78:51 Then you don't have to work it because anyone who's making use it can 
      read it and figure out how to make it from there. This is what the US 
      picks up and says yes. So the patent is like a title deed and it fully
      describes and defines the scope of your what is the asset to which you
      have your property? Right in and insofar as you properly describe it. 
                                                                            
79:19 And in modern terms enable someone how to make and use it, then you   
      have fulfilled the requirement of showing that you actually have come 
      up with this invention and you have made it available to people. This 
      is again part and parcel. You can also see why also this privilege    
      grant that had to be worked by, for instance, James Watt personally,  
      right? Why he had to work it personally is because it was all         
      connected to the working requirement.                                 
                                                                            
79:48 Because again, this was the part and parcel of it being a personal    
      privilege grant where the US says, no, this is a property right, the  
      value of it is the new invention. And like any property right, then   
      the value of it is you go out into the marketplace with it and like   
      Charles Goodyear, who never manufactured rubber, he tried for a little
      bit and gave up because he just was very bad at it. And so he         
      recognized actually I should just let other people do it and fund my  
      research efforts.                                                     
                                                                            
80:13 And he was crazy about rubber and that's all he really wanted to do   
      anyway. The patent becomes the basis for licensing activities where   
      then anyone can read the patent and say, okay, I know what your       
      property right is, I know what your invention is. And this is         
      essential to my understanding of then that this is something new and  
      valuable and I'm willing to enter into a commercial agreement with you
      to manufacture it and to sell it.                                     
                                                                            
80:30 And this is eventually what we start to call it the bargain theory.   
      You disclose your invention. This is really, then, the ultimate       
      culmination of the slow process over several hundred years that starts
      in England where we move away from trade secrecy and a guild system   
      and monopoly grants directly from the government as the basis for     
      protection of new inventions and new technologies, where people then  
      have the ability to secure full legal property.                       
                                                                            
81:12 Right. Protection in new inventions and through that property right,  
      protection like any other property right, where you can go to a county
      recording office and read anyone's title deed to know exactly what the
      needs and bounds are of their property and where their property is    
      located. You can go to the patent office and read the patent and fully
      know what that property interest is.                                  
                                                                            
81:37 And that then is the value of the patent because then the person who  
      reads it can invent off of it. I can enter into a license agreement   
      with you because I know what you're trying to sell me. You're not just
      trying to sell me the Brooklyn Bridge.                                
                                                                            
81:52 You're actually trying to sell me something that you actually have a  
      property right in. And this becomes part and parcel of actually how we
      promote the progress of useful arts, because a lot of people think in 
      terms of, oh, the point is that we're just dangling this little carrot
      of a monopoly or to inventors to get them to invent. They disclose it,
      and then we all are just waiting for it to fall off the patent term   
      for it to fall into the public domain.                                
                                                                            
82:17 And that's actually not what is really the core function of the patent
      system. It's that disclosure function from the get go and the         
      licensing and property rights that follow from that during the patent 
      term. That's what facilitates the fast distribution of new innovations
      through society, growing our innovation economy, helping create a     
      flourishing society as historically has happened.                     
                                                                            
82:39 And so patents really are not a blockade. They're a facilitator of    
      access. They're a promoter of access to technologies.                 
                                                                            
82:46 And also because the person who invents something, then the next      
      person says, I have a new way of doing that. And if insofar as it's   
      new, they can get a patent on it. And then what they do is they turn  
      around and they get a license from the original patent owner because  
      the patent owner wants to make money, even more money off of that.    
                                                                            
83:02 And this is why, to this very day, billions of dollars daily are      
      traded over intellectual property assets. To be frank, the founders   
      weren't thinking in these terms. They had bigger problems to deal with
      in terms of getting our government going.                             
                                                                            
83:25 But this shows you, again, how incredibly intricate and integrated it 
      all is. You create a system where you say, these are property rights. 
      This is what it means to have property rights.                        
                                                                            
83:35 You protect them within a system, the rule of law with stable and     
      political, legal and political institutions that anyone has access to 
      as a citizen. And it creates all of these what economists call dynamic
      efficiencies, all of these unintended benefits, all of these          
      unintended additional values, creation that just make individuals     
      better off and society better off. And anyone who knows the history of
      invention, innovation, also knows that's just the story of history of 
      invention, right? Most inventors don't even know the real value of    
      their inventions.                                                     
                                                                            
84:16 Dr. Irwin Jacobs the inventor of what is CDMA technology, and people  
      may not know that, but that's two G, three G, four G, five G. The G is
      just the generation, right? So that is the digital transmission       
      technology that is the foundation of the entire mobile revolution.    
      Vince that 1988.                                                      
                                                                            
84:36 And he has said many times, he's like, we were just thinking in terms 
      of trying to make video conferencing easier for, you know, easier for,
      you know, for businesses. We had no idea, like, that, you know, we    
      were going to be creating these devices that, you know, you could     
      check your email and watch movies and share videos of cats riding     
      roombas and all sorts of stuff or stories. I always like to tell is   
      Alexander Graham Bell thought one of the really cool and important    
      uses of his telephone service would be for people to listen to        
      concerts so that you could run wires from concert halls.              
                                                                            
85:14 So people didn't all have to go to concert halls because they're only 
      so big anyway. So people could run wires from concert halls and people
      could listen to music in their homes through this telephonic device.  
      And Thomas Edison thought that one of the primary functions of the    
      phonograph would be for people to record messages.                    
                                                                            
85:38 So instead of writing long letters, you would use the phonograph      
      record essentially a version of a recording voicemail message for     
      someone and give the phonograph to someone and they would take it to  
      the other person and they would play it back and listen to it, right? 
      So he thought of as a way that people would transmit information,     
      business persons would more easily and efficiently communicate with   
      each other. What actually happens? Actually, the telephone becomes the
      device by which business people actually more efficiently and easily  
      communicate information to each other. And what does the phonograph   
      become? The phonograph becomes the record player becomes the device by
      which people listen to music in their homes.                          
                                                                            
86:17 So even the inventors don't even realize where their technologies are 
      going to and how it's deployed in the marketplace? No. It's amazing,  
      isn't it? And that's what I really love, that phrase, democratization 
      of invention and consequently innovation. Because if you're trying to 
      build a giant's shoulders to stand on, the best way to do that is to  
      open up that process to the masses and get the biggest volume of      
      disclosure and iteration amongst the largest group of people, right?  
      And so when you look at these things in totality, when you create a   
      system that's accessible to everyone and you eliminate working        
      requirements so that people don't have to have factories or           
      marketplaces to sell things, and you introduce a transferable         
      property, right? To build a bridge from the smallest inventor to the  
      folks who have the real capital to do this thing.                     
                                                                            
87:11 And you unleash it on so many people that there is this massive       
      amounts of disclosure. So there's the intentional invention and then  
      there's sort of the things that we run into indirectly like you were  
      talking about. It's amazing the thrust of that.                       
                                                                            
87:29 When you put all those pieces together, the sum is truly greater than 
      its parts. Beautifully stated, Josh. Perfectly stated too.            
                                                                            
87:38 Yes. And the founders were forward looking in other ways too, that I  
      haven't even mentioned, for instance, in England being very much about
      following past practices and traditions, modifications on their edges,
      but primary. That's the very nature of an unwritten constitution, by  
      the way.                                                              
                                                                            
88:02 The founders are the creators of what we now call constitutionalism   
      which is this idea of having a written foundational document that we  
      call the constitution that starts with the founders of our country.   
      That before, you know, before the United States, that really doesn't  
      exist in, in the world the, the way that we now have it, where now    
      today, like, you think, like it's insane not having a foundational    
      written document. It's how much they radically they change the world. 
                                                                            
88:28 In England, you could only get patents on machines or the products of 
      machines or what we call manufacturers. Whereas the United States     
      recognized in the very first patent act in 1790 that one of the things
      you could get a patent on was what we now call process. They called it
      an art at the time, but so a process.                                 
                                                                            
88:49 In fact, the very first patent that issues to Samuel Hopkins is a     
      process patent. It's a patent on a process of making potash. That     
      patent would not issue in England, because in England, you couldn't   
      get patents on processes.                                             
                                                                            
89:02 They didn't view those as patentable inventions. They were thinking in
      terms of very kind of concrete things, a machine like steam engine or 
      the byproduct of a machine, a shoe or something. And we said, well,   
      no, but the process has to be invented, too.                          
                                                                            
89:17 And that's a valuable value creation itself. And this is really true, 
      because at the end of the day, this is me now stepping back into      
      philosophy mode. Everything has to be invented for humans.            
                                                                            
89:28 We're not born into this world with instincts the way that lions and  
      tigers and others are, right? The lion doesn't need to learn gazelle's
      food. It just knows it right. We have to learn what is food and what  
      is not.                                                               
                                                                            
89:44 And not just that. We're not born with instincts like don't eat the   
      poison berries. We have to learn this by watching someone at one point
      eat a poison berry and they die.                                      
                                                                            
89:53 And then we're like, okay, don't eat those, right? Eat the other      
      berries. Eat the bottle, big cherries. And then we have to learn      
      processes of how to make food, how to grow cherries, how to grow      
      wheat, how to grow I mean, the husbandry and the process of farming   
      itself, for instance.                                                 
                                                                            
90:14 These are processes. We have to learn this. And these are inventions  
      in and of themselves.                                                 
                                                                            
90:19 And it was very far reaching and forward looking of the founders in   
      the first congress to recognize that is a protectable invention in and
      of itself. And it's that kind of forward reaching, forward looking    
      approach, right? We are creating the legal system for the new values  
      that are going to be created that we can't even conceive of yet. That 
      is the reason why then the United States becomes the protector and of 
      the new biotech innovations in the 20th century and becomes the       
      protector of the new computer and innovations in the late 20th century
      as well.                                                              
                                                                            
91:00 In fact, as I identify as an historical pattern, the industrial       
      revolution happens starts in England, finishes in the United States,  
      the pharmaceutical revolution starts in Germany. So it's the Bayer and
      all these companies were originally were dye manufacturers through the
      chemistry revolution of the late 19th century. When you have          
      Mendelssohn and finally agreeing on scientists, finally agreeing on   
      the atomic theory as the foundational structure of matter and the     
      table of elements Mendelson's, invention, you can start getting       
      incredible new practical applications of it.                          
                                                                            
91:46 And one of the very first ones is discovery working of dyes and from  
      dyes figuring out chemicals that actually affect people and make      
      people better like aspirin comes from there soon core that all happens
      in Germany and medicine is Russia, but it ends the United States, it  
      shifts to the United States. In the 20th century, that historical     
      pattern disappears. By the end of the 20th century, the biotech       
      revolution starts in the United States, the computer revolution starts
      in the United States, the mobile revolution starts the United States. 
                                                                            
92:20 And so we are now no longer finishing the practical applications of   
      more fundamental scientific revolutions. We are actually the source of
      both the scientific and the practical application in real world       
      innovation in society and that is being facilitated. And Josh, your   
      beautiful phrasing of it is the patent system is serving that bridge  
      from the individual inventor in the lab and in the garage to the      
      marketplace.                                                          
                                                                            
92:50 And so now our researchers and our discoverers are getting funding    
      upfront at that early research stage because they're going to get a   
      patent. Because that patent is going to serve as the property, right, 
      as the basis for contracts and commercialization activities and       
      licenses to then deploy in the marketplace. Yeah, absolutely.         
                                                                            
93:08 And I think that kind of answers honestly my next question, which was 
      just the fundamental debate around pads, has always been whether they 
      promote innovation or hold it back, right, bridge or blockade. And    
      certainly some of the earlier systems we talked about weren't         
      necessarily economic accelerants. You could argue that it was like    
      early croning capitalism to some extent with some of the stuff that   
      was going on in England and whatnot.                                  
                                                                            
93:36 But how do you feel economists and historians look at the economic    
      innovation impacts of America's experiment in this sort of            
      democratizing of the patent system? Yeah, that's a great question.    
      It's a great way to end our kind of conversation because patents have 
      always been intellectual, property more broadly have always been      
      controversial because what property rights have always been           
      controversial even in the founding era and there are philosophers     
      starting to attack it. Pierre Joseph Prudone writes his track and     
      friends, his track is called what is property? And he's the person who
      famously said what is property? Property is theft.                    
                                                                            
94:18 Prudone is one of the intellectual fathers of Marx. So Marx is        
      basically a mixture of prudonian, anarchist, socialist thinking and   
      hegelian thinking. So he very innovatively combines these two into    
      what becomes known as Marxism.                                        
                                                                            
94:40 And this is all occurring at the same time. That we're talking about, 
      the founder is setting forth protection of individual rights and      
      private property, not just in land, but in new inventions. And so     
      patents have always been controversial.                               
                                                                            
94:51 They've always been attacked as being monopolies and stifling         
      innovation and stifling people and being antidemocratic and people.   
      Samuel Morris, the inventor of the telegraph, electromantic telegraph,
      and the code that goes on it that we now call Morse code named after  
      him, but he's primarily the inventor of the telegraph in which his    
      code worked, but the two went hand in hand. He got patents on both.   
                                                                            
95:15 Actually. The person that he ended up in massive litigation with,     
      O'Reilly, when he copied Morris's telegraph, he called his competing  
      telegraph line the people's line. This is the 1840s, right? So this is
      always this notion, I'm bringing it to the people and stopping these  
      monopolists from hoarding it and stifling the dispersal of all of this
      great new technology and new values.                                  
                                                                            
95:48 So it's always been controversial. And unfortunately, as I mentioned, 
      with the 1790 Patent Act, it cut across party lines both between      
      Federalists and and what were then the Republican Democrats, the      
      Jeffersonians, that that know you, they wanted to protect patents and 
      copyrights. Opposition to patents cuts across party lines, too.       
                                                                            
96:09 So you have people on the left who are opposed broadly to property    
      rights, also oppose property rights interventions. That's not         
      surprise. But you also have people on the right libertarians, and this
      is even true historically, not all libertarians, but some view patents
      as all these are these monopoly grants.                               
                                                                            
96:29 They're clamping down on ideas, and this is preventing the free       
      market. And they view them through this old lens of kind of the royal 
      monopoly grants of which they originally were. And unfortunately, that
      creates sows a lot of confusion because you have people who normally  
      nominally stand for the free market and for property rights, saying IP
      is not a property right, and joining with leftists oftentimes and     
      filing amicus briefs and things of this sort where they both argue    
      that the patent should be rolled back and they should be, or ideally  
      eliminated.                                                           
                                                                            
97:03 In their mind. The problem with a lot of these approaches and the     
      general tax is, you know, a lot of them start from the premise, well, 
      intellectual property, it's weird. It's it's something different.     
                                                                            
97:20 You know, you people who are trained in economics, oh, it's not       
      rivalries, and it's not exclusive like land is and things of this     
      sort, all these things. So it's an OD thing. So all of that adds up to
      a very simple point.                                                  
                                                                            
97:33 It starts from the presumption that intellectual property is guilty   
      until proven innocent. So it starts from the presumption you can't    
      have it unless you can prove it does lead to innovation. You can show 
      causally.                                                             
                                                                            
97:45 We have to have that study. You hear this constantly from scholars.   
      You hear this from government officials all the time.                 
                                                                            
97:52 Oh, where is the study that shows causally? The link between having. A
      patent and x percentage of innovation or x percentage of economic     
      growth in society. I push back against that at what a philosopher or  
      economic would call the meta level, right? Which means I question the 
      very foundational assumption of that, of that, of that request or of  
      that demand, because we don't have any evidence that protection of any
      specific right causally is linked to innovation and economic growth,  
      including property rights and land.                                   
                                                                            
98:32 You will search in vain for the economic study, which proves without a
      doubt holding constant for every what economists call confounding     
      variables, all the various things that could influence it, right? That
      proves with absolute certainty, as a matter of causality, that having 
      property rights in land leads to economic growth and x number of      
      property rights leads x amount of percentage of economic growth. There
      is no study. What we have are massive amounts, massive amounts of     
      correlations and historical evidence and historical development that  
      if you protect property rights, it leads to economic growth and       
      successful societies assuming other things like rule of law, stable   
      and political legal institutions, equal protection, due process and   
      things of this sort.                                                  
                                                                            
99:26 So that's what we have and that's all that we ask for, because that's 
      all you can show. And it's important, right? The founders didn't say, 
      oh, until we have the empirical study, we can't create the United     
      States of America to show that the rights of life, liberty and        
      property are going to be right. They knew already, having observed    
      even their limited time period in the 18th century.                   
                                                                            
99:47 But also, if you read the Federalist Papers, they are imbued with     
      history. I mean, the founders were students of human history. They    
      knew all about all the Greek city states and the sweet, and the Swiss 
      city states and the various Venetian city states and everything that  
      had happened over the span of the past 2000 years.                    
                                                                            
100:11 And they were bringing that knowledge to bear in their thinking about 
      how to create a government. And a lot of what that history told them  
      was the protection of rights is fundamental to having a flourishing,  
      successful society where you write it down in a constitution, you have
      the rule of law, you protect equal protection of rights and things of 
      that sort. Now, they weren't perfect, they made mistakes.             
                                                                            
100:34 We know that there are errors in the constitution. But when you look  
      at where they were coming out of and what the rest of the world was   
      still doing at that time, they were incredible achievers. And we      
      should recognize that achievement for what it is.                     
                                                                            
100:48 And patents are the same. Patents are the same. They're the exact     
      same.                                                                 
                                                                            
100:53 The exact same historical and broad economic evidence or correlation  
      of countries that protect patents and other intellectual property     
      rights, including trade secrets and trademarks. But the broad array of
      intellectual property, when you have the rule of law, when you have   
      stable legal and political institutions as part of the rule of law,   
      equal protection and due process. When you have patents added to that 
      mix, just like with regular property rights and land and farms and    
      things of that sort, you have economic growth and innovation,         
      repeated, consistent, strong both historical correlations and even    
      recent economic study correlations, strong correlations, the exact    
      same strong correlations we see with other property rights.           
                                                                            
101:48 In other words, patents are property rights, just like the founder    
      said. Therefore we treat them the same as any other property. Right   
      now we think, oh, these are weird property rights because they came,  
      they're like new.                                                     
                                                                            
101:59 Well, yeah, and they're relatively new because they arose and they're 
      correlated with the Industrial revolution. They helped make the       
      Industrial Revolution, they helped make the Biotech revolution, as    
      Ashley mentioned earlier in the computer revolution. But all property 
      rights are relatively new at some point or other, right? So if you go 
      to the founding period at that point, the types of property rights    
      that we now think of as kind of old and established and totally taken 
      for granted, like property rights and land, those are relatively new. 
                                                                            
102:30 Those property rights as they existed and were protected as property  
      rights, really only existed for a couple of hundred years at that     
      point, fully as we now know them. And there's tons of other types of  
      property that exist and types of legal institutions that exist now.   
      They're totally new that we don't say, oh, that's guilty until proven 
      innocent.                                                             
                                                                            
102:47 Like corporations, corporate forms and credit and rights of privacy   
      and even the broader sense of the right of free speech and things of  
      this sort. Right. So the newness of something doesn't mean it's       
      suspicious or problematic.                                            
                                                                            
103:04 It shows that it's part and parcel of what the last 200 years has     
      represented to human existence, which is it's an unveritable miracle. 
      So historically, if you look at the graph of the past 4000 years of   
      relatively modern human existence, human growth, as Joshua show, is   
      flat. It's relatively flat.                                           
                                                                            
103:28 And then all of a sudden you get to the 19th century and it's like    
      starship that just went up. It doesn't blow up, it goes straight up.  
      Starting in the 19th century.                                         
                                                                            
103:38 Greatest hockey stick graph ever. I know, and it's incredible. And    
      what happens in the 19th century? You could say what's industrial     
      Revolution? Yeah, but what was the foundation of the Industrial       
      revolution? The foundation of this revolution was a property rights   
      system, an intellectual property right system, the rule of law, the   
      limited government, full democratic access to government in the       
      protection of individual rights of life, liberty and property,        
      including intellectual property.                                      
                                                                            
104:09 All of this adds up to and this is kind of I'm sorry for being a bit  
      long winded on this, but all of this adds up to the point that this   
      kind of idea that patents blockade innovation from my perspective, if 
      you hold the full context of what we understand about property rights 
      generally in the history of even just the past few hundred years.     
      There's just nothing that supports this view. And it's really revealed
      by the fact that they always have some anecdote.                      
                                                                            
104:39 Well, I know of someone or something that was stopped from doing      
      something. It's like, well, I could come up with same anecdotes about 
      regular property. I teach real property cases to my students every    
      year about guys who chase kids with iron pipes off their property,    
      right.                                                                
                                                                            
104:53 And things like that. It's like we don't there oh, my god. Property   
      rights and land is a threat to children.                              
                                                                            
105:01 If you just hold context and really view intellectual property,       
      recognize intellectual property is a property right, like anything    
      else. And thus, it's what's facilitated access. It's what's           
      facilitated innovation.                                               
                                                                            
105:13 It's what's facilitated not just people inventing, because people have
      always been invented. It's what's actually facilitated the deployment 
      of inventions, the creation of innovation out of inventions, and the  
      ability for everyone from the inventor to benefit from the fruits of  
      their labors to the society itself. All the people who could never    
      have conceived of that product, could never have conceived of the     
      various business mechanisms, the factories, the complex disaggregated 
      supply chains that make our smartphones now globally and everything   
      else to benefit from those things.                                    
                                                                            
105:47 And that's incredible. It's just this idea that patents represent this
      kind of trade off. Oh, we blockade access because we grant these      
      exclusive rights that prevent access as the only way to incentivize   
      people to invent is pure, just, unadulterated ideological theory that 
      people are imposing on the facts of the world and on the facts of how 
      our actual economy and society have been functioning.                 
                                                                            
106:20 And to kind of tie it all back, to go back to our original discussion,
      and so the people who take that framework really are starting from the
      premise, my theory says your facts are wrong. That just can't be the  
      case. Now, I understand why a lot of people are confused, because so  
      many people have been saying this for so long, it's become            
      conventional wisdom.                                                  
                                                                            
106:40 But I think it's really important to kind of start from that original 
      premise that don't even try to argue it on those terms because it's a 
      mistaken theoretical framing that we don't argue and justify regular  
      property rights or the rights of liberty or the other types of rights 
      on these grounds. And patents are no different. And that was the great
      insight of the founders.                                              
                                                                            
107:06 Patents are no different than any other. Right? Yeah. True to         
      beautiful harmony between bargain theory and natural rights theory.   
                                                                            
107:14 And it's impossible to know what our world would look like void of the
      patent system that we have. But what we can definitely say is that    
      sort of explosive, the notions of patent systems goes all the way back
      to ancient Greece, where we started, and we didn't see these kinds of 
      periods of explosive growth prior to we do know what the world looked 
      like before the US. Patent system.                                    
                                                                            
107:40 And we talked about that sweet looking hockey graph with its first    
      data point starting right around 1790. Well, we can't say for sure    
      what the world would look like without our patent system. We know what
      it's looked like with our patent system, and we know what it looked   
      like with prior iterations of patent systems that did not have the    
      democratization component.                                            
                                                                            
108:00 I think you can draw a pretty strong conclusion. I mean, there are    
      more specific studies. I'm happy to talk about them.                  
                                                                            
108:08 I just don't want to talk about them with the mistaken premise that   
      I'm working from the premise that this overcomes the presumption that 
      patents are not proven already as being valid. But so, for instance,  
      Ashley mentioned the biotech revolution. So there's your kind of      
      classic example that really confirms the value of patents as property 
      rights, not as monopoly grants, because it is a little bit            
      anachronistic to say what they had in Greece as patents.              
                                                                            
108:37 They really didn't, because patents today mean something different.   
      And so this is you have to be careful when you say, well, these kind  
      of precursor patents. Yeah, but then people get confused.             
                                                                            
108:45 Well, what is the patent then? Is it these kind of early monopoly     
      grants? Is it sole monopoly grant? No. There was this break in 1790   
      with the first patent act, and that really is significant. But the    
      biotech revolution occurs in the United States.                       
                                                                            
109:01 And Ashley mentioned this earlier, and I referenced it because the    
      United States took the lead in recognizing as patentable these new    
      genetically modified organisms and new methods of kind of creating    
      what are called monoclonal antibodies, which is the basis for         
      diagnostic tests and genetic manipulation of DNA and things of this   
      sort. We took the position that this is actually patentable inventions
      for the same reason the founders took the position that processes were
      patentable inventions. The rest of the world hesitated because they   
      were like, oh, I don't know, this is like life, and this could lead to
      Frankenstein and all sorts of stuff.                                  
                                                                            
109:38 And so Canada and Europe and all the other countries that had modern  
      patent systems said, we're not going to protect this. And then there  
      was a period of about ten to 20 years where the United States was     
      providing reliable and effective and dependable patent protection, the
      things that the rest of the world was not doing. The rest of the      
      modern world.                                                         
                                                                            
109:57 And where is the biotech revolution happening in the United States? In
      fact, it continues to still happen in the United States. As a result  
      of this, to this very day, almost two thirds of all new drugs are     
      invented in the United States. There you go.                          
                                                                            
110:15 Other countries patent systems, or we revolutionized other countries  
      patent systems. By the late 19th century, other countries were like,  
      oh, my God, what's happening in the United States? And they kind of   
      looked at us and said, they've got that interesting patent system. We 
      maybe should start copying some aspects of that.                      
                                                                            
110:28 And they did not all aspects of it but they copied a lot. Most modern 
      patent systems have a lot of elements that we are the US kind of      
      innovated. And so you have other countries with same similar types of 
      patent systems but those protections were denied to biotech innovators
      in the 1980s and look what happens in the United States, it happens   
      here.                                                                 
                                                                            
110:51 Venture capital flows into biotech innovators know that if they spend 
      years of their life inventing, they'll be able to reap the fruits of  
      their inventive labors. Venture capitalists know that they can invest 
      in this. The whole startup economy arises in the biotech space because
      of this spin outs from universities thanks to Baidol.                 
                                                                            
111:12 And there you go, right, exhibit A. But we don't have to have that.   
      That's like icing on the cake. We already have the evidence that's    
      just like the nail in the coffin for us because the actual and I      
      couldn't call the coffin that's the golden goblet that's already been 
      made by the patent system historically over the past 200 years for    
      sure.                                                                 
                                                                            
111:39 I think the point I failed to make and then I promise I'll let you go.
      The point I failed to make and one of the reasons why I wanted to talk
      about some of the historical context stuff, why I thought it mattered.
      And if this is totally off base in an illogical conclusion, feel free 
      to completely shoot it down.                                          
                                                                            
111:54 But where I was going with some of that was there were earlier notions
      of protecting an invention, whatever we want to call it, even remove  
      the language of the word patent or the language of the word           
      intellectual property. There were earlier concepts of protecting an   
      invention, but it wasn't until later on that the US added these other 
      democratized elements of sort of being accessible to all of being a   
      transferable property, right? Of eliminating the working requirement  
      that we saw a system that embraced protecting inventions with an      
      economic correlate in an innovative correlation potentially as well.  
      And one of the things that I find sort of almost offensive about some 
      of the modern arguments against patenting is that people immediately  
      go to patent trolls and we talked about this earlier but it's like    
      it's these virtues of the US system around accessible to all,         
      elimination of working requirement and transferability of the         
      property, right? That's essentially the sort of things that get cast  
      as trolling now for NPEs.                                             
                                                                            
112:59 But these things were absolutely integral to the early success of the 
      system and were founding virtues of the system. So one of the things  
      that's like the biggest attack vector now was actually one of the     
      foundational virtues like these concepts of accessible to all and     
      transferable property rights and elimination of working requirements. 
      These didn't happen in courtrooms, these weren't the byproducts of    
      attorneys later on.                                                   
                                                                            
113:28 They weren't abused systems. This is the system as designed. And what 
      we saw that happened after that was explosive growth.                 
                                                                            
113:40 And so that's why I was kind of trying to juxtapose the virtues or    
      lack of virtues of some of the earlier systems. So some of the things 
      that were added to the US. System that I believe were key ingredients 
      to that economic and innovative acceleration that's now unfortunately 
      become the attack vector of opponents of patent systems.              
                                                                            
113:59 Does that all kind of make sense? Yeah, you're right. I disagree with 
      you a little bit on the margins. You really framed it very beautifully
      and very succinctly and nicely.                                       
                                                                            
114:15 Patent troll is just a new variation of an old attack that has long   
      existed. In the 19th century, they called them sharks. That was       
      actually the term for the people who were buying and selling patents  
      and were suing people who were infringing their patents.              
                                                                            
114:28 And back then, it was the railroad companies that were largely being  
      sued and established industries that were being sued by new           
      innovators. And they spent a lot of money lobbying to create this     
      narrative of patent sharks. And there were actually were bills        
      introduced in congress in late 19th century actually get rid of our   
      patent system.                                                        
                                                                            
114:47 Even so, these fights are old. They're old in the art, as we would    
      say, in patent law. And they were attacking the very virtues of the   
      system that you've identified, Josh, and you stated very beautifully. 
                                                                            
115:01 The framing, the institutional features, and the procedures and the   
      various legal rules of what it means to protect a legal entitlement as
      a property right are really key. This isn't merely an issue of, like, 
      labels or rhetoric. These words mean something, especially in the law.
                                                                            
115:24 And that's important because that provides a legal foundation or      
      platform, just like contracts and property rights more broadly do for 
      economic activity and for activities that lead to flourishing lives   
      generally. The only thing that I would slightly disagree with you on  
      is that it's not just those features. The founders were radical when  
      it came to inventions.                                                
                                                                            
115:46 I don't really think that those earlier systems protected inventions. 
      Right. The term invention means something now that it didn't mean from
      18th century on, 18th century going backward.                         
                                                                            
116:01 Invention just meant at that time something kind of new to a society. 
      It didn't mean something actually new as such, something that was     
      actually created by a particular individual. It could have just been  
      something that you brought from some other place, something you       
      brought from France to England, or something that you brought from    
      Sparta to Athens.                                                     
                                                                            
116:26 This modern notion of invention as being the actual creation of       
      something new. The US. Novelty requirement that we threw away in 2011 
      with the American vents act, which was very much animated by this     
      lockhean notion that the person who creates something in lockheed     
      metaphor terms, they've mixed their labor with the materials of the   
      world and they've created a right to it that was very much a US.      
                                                                            
116:54 Innovation. And in fact, that very word innovation has also shifted in
      meaning, as I said at the very beginning, too, to bookend, our        
      conversation. Sometimes reading historical documents is a bit like    
      visiting a foreign country.                                           
                                                                            
117:10 And it's even more dangerous when that foreign country is writing in  
      the same language as you, because your presumption is, oh, all of     
      these terms mean the same thing. So the word innovation existed in the
      18th century, 17th century, even the 19th century. But if you read    
      someone being referred to as being innovative in an 18th century text,
      that was not a compliment.                                            
                                                                            
117:30 That was actually a pejorative insult. It was a pejorative term to be 
      innovative meant was meant to be devious, to be scheming. Like        
      philosophers engage in innovation.                                    
                                                                            
117:44 In fact, there's lots of writings by the founders where they're       
      referring to other founders. That's just him being innovative. And you
      think, so complimentary.                                              
                                                                            
117:54 It's like, no, that was like a whole body slam. Yeah. So, yeah,       
      innovation was a pejorative term.                                     
                                                                            
118:08 Innovation. Its term is radically changed in 1940s by and I'm blanking
      on his name. I'm never really good with names, except for inventors.  
                                                                            
118:18 It was the head of Bell Labs. I'm blanking on his name at the moment, 
      but he went in the late 1940s, Bell Labs realized that they needed to 
      get the public behind them because they were starting to be attacked  
      by the US. Department of justice and antitrust attacks and things of  
      this sort.                                                            
                                                                            
118:37 So they realized, we need to let people know what we do. They went    
      kind of on an international or national I shouldn't say a national PR 
      campaign, where he goes around speaking science societies and legal   
      associations and stuff around the country, trying to describe what    
      they've been doing at Bell Labs, where they're inventing the          
      transistor, they're inventing microwave technologies. They're         
      inventing digital transmission technologies.                          
                                                                            
119:06 So much of the modern world has come out of the Bell Labs because it  
      was an invention factory. And he's like, the word invention doesn't   
      really fully capture what we do because inventions have always been   
      around. So what are we doing that's different? So he actually decides 
      that the term innovation kind of captures exactly what they're doing, 
      which is what Bell Labs was doing.                                    
                                                                            
119:25 Bell Labs was taking inventions and making them real world products   
      and services that benefited people. So it wasn't just something that  
      some scientist was putting on a book. They were getting a patent.     
                                                                            
119:37 They were licensing it. They were deploying it into the marketplace.  
      And he calls that innovation.                                         
                                                                            
119:43 And it's because of that that innovation comes and they succeed in    
      their campaign. And it's because of that then you have what linguists 
      refer to as a linguistic shift. And innovation no longer means        
      something pejorative and negative.                                    
                                                                            
119:57 It actually becomes positive. This is why my only disagreement with   
      you is on the margins, where you say there was some recognition of    
      protecting inventions in Greece and things of this sort. I mean, there
      was some recognition that we in Athens needed newer stuff.            
                                                                            
120:18 They may have had that stuff in Persia and in sparta. We want to get  
      that new stuff, too. Whether it comes from people actually here in    
      Athens directly ex nelio, or whether they steal it from Sparta or     
      what.                                                                 
                                                                            
120:30 We don't care because we're trying to beat out Spargo and Persia and  
      even like in the statue of monopolies, where they refer to the first  
      and true inventor, which today we always first invent. No, they meant 
      the first person to bring something to the realm. They didn't mean    
      really something new.                                                 
                                                                            
120:52 They didn't really particularly care if it was new, if it actually    
      benefited the world writ large, is because they were still very much  
      thinking in terms of, well, this is about England beating out France. 
      It was still thought in terms of national economies and national      
      interests, national industrial, domestic policies. And again, this is 
      the insight and the wisdom and the radicalism of the American         
      exceptionalism of the founders.                                       
                                                                            
121:19 Right. They really took seriously this universal notion of the natural
      rights of individuals. Yeah, they were mistaken in some of their      
      applications of it, but these mistakes were eventually fixed.         
                                                                            
121:32 But they did, at least at the theoretical level and at least in the   
      patent system, they understood this is a universalizable principle,   
      this applies to all people. And this is about making all people better
      off, whether you're Americans, whether you're British, whether you're 
      French, this is about anyone, by dint of being human being, can invent
      something. And just like anyone can become a farmer and farm till soil
      and chop down trees and create a farm out in the wilderness, anyone   
      can invent something and that should be protected and secured to them.
                                                                            
122:12 You're right. And then all those other features are just as important 
      because it's all integrated. You can create a patent system, but if   
      you don't do so in a system that respects equal rights, has the rule  
      of law, follows statutes and provides due process, you can build a    
      patent system all you want, but nothing's going to come of that.      
                                                                            
122:33 Eventually, it all goes together. And the features that you're talking
      about, yes, are attacked today because they are virtues. And they were
      virtues exactly.                                                      
                                                                            
122:46 Because also they were protecting and recognizing what it really meant
      to have a new invention and recognizing the legitimate claim that an  
      individual has to that Lockheed metaphor that I always love the fruits
      of their productive labors, which applies just as much to an inventor 
      as it does to a farmer or a machinist or any other craftsman or a     
      person who's practicing an art or trade. And is Abraham Lincoln so    
      beautifully said, who believed that the patent system was the third   
      greatest invention in the history of the world, that the patent system
      added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius. And he knew of what 
      she spoke because he had a pat.                                       
                                                                            
123:29 All right, awesome. Adam, thank you so much. Appreciate all of the    
      time and context and amazing historical education.                    
                                                                            
123:38 This is awesome. I hope I didn't go on too long at times. No, I get   
      too excited and caught up in all the details.                         
                                                                            
123:45 No, that's okay. There's so much there, and it's so hugely            
      significant. So we appreciate it.                                     
                                                                            
123:56 Always a joy. Always enjoy to chat. Well, I give as good as I get.    
                                                                            
123:59 I mean, your little write up that you sent me was fantastic. If you   
      and Ashley are going to put in such excellent productive labor        
      yourself, I'm just reflecting back on you on our wonderful            
      specialization in divisional labor, the, you know, the exact, you     
      know, value. And as a result, you know, we get really that's that's   
      what makes me excited and fun when interacting with people like the   
      two of you.                                                           
                                                                            
124:28 This was a great excuse, too, for me to do a little bit more of a deep
      dive. And we've always just kind of an aside, I've always wanted to do
      a History of Patents episode, but I wasn't never sure editorially how 
      to make that interesting to a broader audience. And then when you said
      the thing about being a victim of their own success, it was like, oh, 
      my God, that's the answer.                                            
                                                                            
124:50 That's why the history is relevant to today. Yeah, and it's true. You 
      can see in the 19th century, too, and all these people there is like, 
      yeah, properties is there.                                            
                                                                            
125:10 They treat it like mana from heaven. It's all just raining down. We   
      just need to split it up.                                             
                                                                            
125:20 And the person who hoards it is unjust and evil, and it's stealing    
      from other people. It all has to be created. Everything.              
                                                                            
125:38 When I got a little philosophical and he was like, yeah, we have to   
      actually think of stuff and come up with it, because that's how we    
      live. That's our only competitive advantage, is our minds. This is    
      awesome, guys.                                                        
                                                                            
125:53 Yeah, gosh. Absolutely. All right, that's all for today, folks.       
                                                                            
125:56 Thanks for listening, and remember to check us out@aurorapatents.com  
      for more great podcasts, blogs, and videos covering all things patent 
      strategy. And if you're an agent or attorney and would like to be part
      of the discussion or an inventor with a topic you'd like to hear      
      discussed, email us at podcast@aurorapatents.com. Do remember that    
      this podcast does not constitute legal advice.                        
                                                                            
126:15 And until next time, keep calm and patent on.