This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, September 10th, 2014.

I'm Keila Brown.

The patent system has become unmanageable.

Turning a system of protecting intellectual property to one where so-called patent trolls can

lie in wait to sue productive companies over the right to use certain recipes for

innovation.

Eli Durato is a research fellow at the Mercata Center. He's the author of the lead essay in this month's Cato Unbound.

I think that there's an important semantic issue that that dominates the discussions of intellectual property in the

libertarian community, which is, you know, is intellectual property property,

is it regulation, is it a monopoly?

And I think that those are just semantic issues.

I don't think that there's any substance behind them.

And so I kind of want to avoid that question and just discuss the way... of that we all understand and approve of.

So in 1946, the US Supreme Court decided

that your real property, your land,

your property right to it doesn't doesn't extend infinitely high, you know, so you don't get it all the

way to the highest heavens.

And that was necessary, the abridgment of that property right was necessary so that we could have air travel.

That was an overriding consideration, despite the fact that there was this age-old common law doctrine that said that you did own it that high.

So limits to property rights I think are fine in the libertarian tradition.

We don't want to have infinitely strong property rights all the time.

And so the question is, do we have institutions that define the limits of property, including

...