What Meta and Anthropic really won in court

28:32Like this is, I think, the best looking Fairphone yet. It looks like a normal phone. It's like an upper mid-range Android device. It looks great. The colors are fun. I like that it's opinionated with the, you know, the button that does the minimal launcher. But if you want to get it in the U.S., you have to get that de-Google-ified version. Oh, that's the only one in the U.S.? Yes. Oh, that sucks. And that is a problem, right? Because choosing to go without Google services means missing out on a lot of the phone experience, right? Just like everything's in the Play Store. Just good luck, right?

29:09Like most people that I know use Gmail. Yeah. Where do you get apps for this thing? I'm like clicking on this website. Where do you get apps for it if you don't have the Play Store? sideload them. They have a proprietary app store and they have some stuff, but it is, I mean, it is like vanishingly small number of apps compared to the Play Store. Yes, they're sideloading and there's, you know, Android is Android. There's other app stores, but the Play Store and then Play Services provide a whole lot of capabilities to Android apps. Yes. Well, and I think increasingly so does Gemini. And so I think we're now hitting this place.

29:43Like there was also some news this week about uh gemini getting more and more integrated with the system and starting to do some like cross-app stuff like we've been talking about with like the future of siri and so uh the the non-google version of android and the google version of android are getting like much further apart over time and not closer together so i think the case here for something like marina is going to get harder i think because it's like you you're you're just going to have to make a broader set of sacrifices. Because I think like, if I don't want to have a Google account, it's not that hard to get like a Proton email account and use DuckDuckGo.

30:24And like, you can relatively successfully replace most Google services with something else without trying all that hard. But if you believe in all this AI stuff, and especially like the way it might change the way that you use your devices, taking that out is going to make all kinds of other stuff just break. It's like, oh, I don't use HTTP on my web browser. It's like, well, you can't use the internet. And it does feel like a lot of the AI stuff is heading that way. Oh, David, you explained this in your piece about Marina. They're just downloading the apps through Google. They're just piping you to the Play Store, and then they have a clone of Play Services that runs.

30:56Yeah, I mean, I knew they had their own clone of Play Services that doesn't feed any stuff back to Google. I had forgotten that they just take apps from the Play Store. Fair enough. Yeah. I mean, you wrote this three years ago. So you're forgiven for not remembering about the weird open source Android clone. I have thought this company is interesting for a long time. I mean, I'm fascinated by this. And I'm fascinated by the button that turns it into minimal mode on the phone. Like, it's a switch. Love that. Yeah. But, yeah, I mean, this whole, the fact that you have to commit to an entirely secondary operating system, that's a rough ask.

31:36Totally. But I think there's also like something in this combination of like more repairable. You can swap out some parts and this like tiny but growing accessory ecosystem that like there's something there. If you're a person who wants to sort of muck around with your phone from time to time that I just think is very cool. And to Jake's point, this is the first one that is like on its own a pretty compelling phone, which is awesome. This is the thing. I feel like in the past, the Farrah phones have always looked a little bit lesser than. And I think this one, obviously, we'll still have to review it, see if it all holds up.

32:10This is the first one that you look at and it looks like a modern phone. It does not look like you're going to dramatically miss out on things, with the exception of those living in the United States. So that's a bummer, but I'm really excited to see how this pans out. All right. There's one more phone that I'm desperate to talk about this week. It's the Titan 2, which the only way you can describe this is that it's a BlackBerry that runs Android. That's what it is. And it looks exactly like an old BlackBerry that has a screen and a physical keyboard. And I don't know who this is for. It has already raised a million dollars on Kickstarter.

32:44Like, so this is the thing I keep, and it's done big traffic on the site. Like people are into this thing. And I think my overwhelming theory about devices like this for years has been that people have real nostalgia for this stuff, but not actual desire for it, right? It's the same thing as small iPhones, right? Everyone on earth is like, oh God, remember when like the iPhone 5 just like fit perfectly in your hand. Wasn't that so great? And then you present them with a phone that small and they're like, why is this so small? I don't want this. The battery sucks. What are we doing here? I've always assumed that that is the same thing with physical keyboards.

33:23People remember their BlackBerry because it was their first smartphone and it was really exciting. And it was like a simpler time in the tech world. And that was all very cool. But then things like the Clix keyboard come out and they're like sort of a compelling novelty and they're fun and exciting to have and play with, but it's not a thing that is like a mainstream viable product. But then this thing comes out and raises a million dollars on Kickstarter. And so I'm like, there's clearly some people out there who want a giant ass slab of an Android phone with a big keyboard on it. It looks delightful.

33:54There's two things about this that I think are special that we need to talk about. One is that on the backside of it, there's a second screen that shows notifications and a clock. It sort of just looks like an ambient Apple Watch. It's pretty cool. It's interesting. Like normally, you know, you're like, I want to have my phone out but not have it out. So I'd like flip it over. And this way you flip it over, but you still have your phone out. So it's actually you're just not not being rude. You're still being rude, which I think is delightful. And then they also advertise multiple times that they have an infrared port and they do not explain what that means or what you do with it.

34:30You obviously you turn off motion smoothing at the bar, Jake. but but does it is it an outward infrared port or is it an accepting infrared port can i control my phone with a remote oh i see is it an ir window they do not clarify they just say phone calls with my tv remote because that would be pretty innovative uh i don't know if it would be useful but i'm gonna go ahead and say it's an ir blaster i mean that's why this thing has raised a million Yeah. People just want to go to the bar and click around the menus. This is officially the most 2013 phone we've seen since 2013. The standard was called IRDA, I-R-D-A.

35:10And you could very, very slowly beam contact information between dumb phones back in the day. It's a real thing. Yeah. It wasn't great and no one used it, but it was called IRDA. And there was a time in gadget blogging where if a phone didn't have IRDA, the commenters were like, no IRDA. I will say to this thing's credit, I think one very compelling thing about it is that you can buy it right now on Kickstarter for$269. And I think that for like a half novelty of a phone is a perfect price. Two Trump phones or four Titans? Oh, four Titans. It's not close. Give me a Titan and a Fairphone over the two Trump phones.

35:54I'm a happy guy. There is also actual motion footage of this phone existing, which cannot be said. There's not a single frame of the Trump phone existing. All right. Some more gadgets to round out our first segment, which is very gadget heavy. I point out we're all over the place with gadgets. Microsoft and Meta announced an Xbox VR headset that is just a Quest 3S that's green and comes with a controller. One of my favorite things to do this week has been to troll Reddit watching people be confused about what this thing is. It's so funny. So two things are true, right? One, this is the best looking quest there has ever been.

36:36The black and green color like works for the quest in a way the like white beige thing kind of doesn't. Yeah. The combo of Xbox stuff and Quest makes sense. Shipping it with a controller that's already paired makes sense. Like this thing is a gaming machine. They're treating it like a gaming machine. It's going to stream Xbox games. Makes perfect sense. there are so many people who just think this is an xbox that will play xbox games and it turns out it doesn't and we this is what we've talked about before like the list of xboxes that don't play all xbox games is vast and this is one of them it will it will stream some games if you have xbox game pass ultimate which requires jumping through a series of hoops i cannot even begin to describe to you.

37:20And like this thing is, it both is and is not an Xbox in a way that is driving a lot of people on the internet absolutely up the wall. Everything at this point is and is not an Xbox. The state of being an Xbox is probabilistic. This is what I mean. Yes. But this one's called Xbox. Like every morning I wake up and think to myself, am I an Xbox? And I go through the list of what games I support. And yeah, and many days the answer is yes. It's beautiful for you. Is your Samsung frame TV and Xbox. It could be because you can run Game Pass on it, right? So wait, I have not paid a lot of attention to Game Pass.

37:53So this is just a VR headset and it's got the one app in it that runs in 2D, right? So you're in the VR environment and it puts up a big fake TV, a big virtual TV, and then it just runs Game Pass on it. That's right. It's not even running VR games. No, the Quest does that anyway. This is just purely like a branding exercise. And again, I think the branding exercise makes a lot of sense, but it is just, it is just a branding exercise. This is, this is a, like, I don't know. Imagine some celebrity picked a color scheme for a quest and it did that. This is that it's just called an Xbox. So people assume it's going to be an Xbox.

38:32Well, it's an Xbox in the sense that Xbox game pass ultimate is Xbox. If that's an Xbox, we're all Xbox. That's just what I'm saying. Every morning. Yeah. All right. It's very confusing. I'm trying to figure out who is making money here. Microsoft seems to have some very long-term plan here to redefine what the Xbox is, and they are really overshooting for what they can actually deliver on today. That seems to be it. I do not see how Xbox is benefiting from this right now when they're just confusing everybody. So my understanding is that Xbox is it came in second place the last two generations, right?

39:09Yes. The PS4 and PS5 blew the Xbox away, and then the Switch and presumably the Switch 2 is thoroughly gray and that's going to be its whole other thing over there. And it feels like Microsoft is reacting to coming in second place as though they have failed so completely they need to burn it all down. Right? And they're like, we will reconceptualize the very concept of an Xbox and turn it into a PC console gaming situation on handheld, cloud streaming service on VR headsets, and then the actual console is of little value to them. Yeah, I think that's right. Like that's kind of what this all feels like, but I'm just saying the quest three S is not a huge hit for meta, right?

39:48There's been reporting that they've kind of lost interest in quest because their glasses are the success, which we'll talk about in a second. The Ray-Bans and now the Oakley smart glasses feel like their future. And so it's like, okay, an unsuccessful VR headset is being paired with an unsuccessful gaming brand to accomplish what? the thing about it is i actually think in a certain way calling this thing an xbox makes it make more sense because it is a gaming machine like everybody who works on vr stuff will tell you this is not true but vr is a gaming platform it just is but this doesn't play vr games this is this is the same as one of those uh xreal glasses that just picks puts up a fake tv yeah those that's also an xbox apple vision pro also an xbox do you know what i mean like what isn't an xbox but i think like the to the extent that this just screams this is a large screen on which to play games i'm not bothered by it but the thing you're describing is why people are getting tripped up because it's like oh this should now play my xbox games and it isn't that simple and so we're in this position of like nobody many more people know what to make of xbox than know what to make of quest so i can actually see why bringing quest and xbox together makes sense for shipping this headset except it's not fully an xbox i just i get turned in circles but ultimately this thing is like a limited edition and looks very cool and uh not that many people get it so it's like whatever but i do find it sort of fascinating that they're like leaning into this thing is for games and microsoft is like games are for everything and they're like oh i see why you're friends like sure yeah just on the one hand you know microsoft spent last week or i guess two weeks ago talking about the you know the rogue ally and being like the future of xbox's windows games on the go we also support steam and one turn later they're like it's a limited cloud gaming library on the quest it does it just feels like they they've they've lost sight of what they want xbox to be so it's everything and yeah who knows okay uh the meta smart glasses uh they are a success at least according to the metrics meta keeps saying and they've expanded them this week and now they've got oakley smart glasses same basic concept as the ray-bans only they look like oakley's and they shoot 3k video slightly higher resolution video because they're slightly bigger is basically my understanding of the product yeah pretty much the the thing i thought was really interesting uh alex heath talked to one of the folks on the team building this stuff and uh they confirmed what we have always suspected which is that people use these glasses for two things one is audio and one is camera and they call them ai glasses which is very funny because it's like well we're gonna call this thing a thing no one uses them for uh but like this this positioning makes sense.

42:48Doing it with Oakley makes sense. I don't think these glasses are particularly good looking, but I also can't pull off Oakleys in general, so I'm not a great person to judge this one. When you went on the 8th grade trip to DC, did everybody buy fake Oakleys? Oh, 100%. I've owned so many fake Oakleys in my life. Chokeleys, we called them. Would you call them? Chokeleys? Oh, we were Fokeleys. Oh, very good. Yeah, they were good. But yeah, I think this thing Meta is doing continues to make perfect sense to me uh it's it's still not clear how you bridge the gap between this and the orion glasses that we talked about before because they're like the technical breakthroughs required to get from one to the other are vast and unsolved uh but just this thing where like meta has a hit at relative scale doing this basic kind of stuff and they've just decided to lean into this is the thing that everybody wants we will figure out how to stack capabilities on top of it over time feels like the right move to me it also feels really clear that their partnership with luxotica has just continued to pay dividends here right like you need glasses that are naturally chunky enough to fit this hardware and they have managed to find multiple styles here that adapt well to this additional hardware that are already formats that people know and love right These are very popular glasses.

44:11They're very popular brand names. Expanding to Oakley was a really smart next move after Ray-Ban. This is a challenge that every other company getting into the glasses space is going to have. If you put out a knockoff pair of Ray-Bans or Oakleys, people will be able to tell that they are a knockoff pair. Meta's biggest advantage here is it is just selling Oakleys with some headphones in them. That's not a bad product at a bare minimum. Nobody has to use the AI. well i think meta is desperate for well they would like that where their ai assistant is the first party assistant not an app on the iphone and they've said all these glasses i will say they um the transition lenses are available but all the cool photos are the reflective orange lenses and meta's continued attempts to make transitions very cool uh continues to amuse that's all i'm I'm just saying, especially because if you're wearing transition Oakley's, many decisions have been made along the way.

45:09Vindication is coming from my dad who's been wearing transitions for like a decade. The world is coming around to Joey. I don't know if you saw Joanna Stern's video with Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak, but Joswiak was wearing transitions in the video. And about halfway through, they tinted to see if they were in the sun. And I was like, well, this is, I mean, it's fine. Like, do you, whatever you want to do. But the fact that you can't control them actually sometimes causes problems. Maybe it's a defense mechanism where he's like, these questions are too hard. I just black them out. Like, I can't see you.

45:40Just like you can't see Siri. I don't know. Look, the fact that it's camera and headphones, exactly the same problem as Alexa had for years. It's timers and music. And it's great. I think people like having cameras on their face. I got a TikTok ad today for what can only be described as a necklace with a MagSafe mount. Huh. Because people mount their phones here when they drive their cars and do stuff, and they want the first-person view. I get it. I get why people want cameras in their glasses. I don't think Meta has actually – I would love to know the rate at which people who buy these glasses also use the AI stuff.

46:17Is Meta convincing 2 % of those people to be like, I love the Meta AI assistant? how many people are looking at stuff and be like what is that because that's the use case they keep coming up with right again i i think the real thing people want to build is orion the augmented reality glasses and even orion doesn't actually do augmented reality yet like we're we're we're long long away but if you love an oakley and you like glasses i join a certain speaking of joanna loves her meta rebands loves them can't get enough of them i wear mine all the time just as sunglasses that happen to do other things like that's that's great do you have the transition lenses No, mine are just sunglasses.

46:53So I just get to be the cool guy who like wears sunglasses inside the coffee shop for a while. Does the Meta app support multiple glasses? The last time I tried, I could only be paired to one at a time. I mean, these are just like, right, these are problems with the form factor that you're going to have to overcome. Nobody wears the same pair of glasses all the time. Right. Like even people who wear glasses, like prescription glasses, I have two pairs of glasses. Because when you go to the store and my glasses, they're always like, do you want two pairs of glasses? and then people with sunglasses have lots of different kinds of sunglasses like being locked into one pair of one style of sunglasses forever is not great and now they have multiple styles I don't know I'm just saying on the chart of wearable bullshit you still have to put the thing on your face man the utility has to be much higher than it is right now but you love them they're great and they're like they've solved the face problem because they just look like sunglasses like that's the thing that's to Jake's point Like the hardest thing about this is just provided to Meta by another company that is fabulously good at making glasses people like.

47:57And rather than do what Meta tried to do and what Apple is trying to do and what traditionally tech companies have always done, which is like build the hardest, most expensive thing and then try to like trickle the tech down to cheaper prices. Meta was just like, we're going to do the least and then try to build up from there. And I actually think in this particular case, in part because of, you know, the problems that come with Neelai's chart of wearable bullshit, that's the right move. Like, make a thing people like and then figure out how to get it to do more stuff strikes me as way more compelling than I'm going to build a helmet for your face and then figure out how to make you like wearing it.

48:38The Apple Vision Pro, everybody. Yeah. All right. We got to take a break. We'll be back. Speaking of meta, we got to talk about their big AI win. Anthropics' big AI win. but they're also losses. We'll be right back. We'll explain. Amazon has everything for everyone on your list. Like your teenage son, who won't give up the peach fuzz currently posing as a mustache on his upper lip. Get him an electric razor. Amazon has early holiday deals on gifts everyone wants, like the latest kitchen gadgets and toys, and some they don't even know they need, like that razor. Grab him a mirror, too, so he can see how pretty he is without that dirt on his lip.

49:22Morning, Zoe. Jeff Bridges, why are you still living above our garage? I want to be in a T-Mobile commercial like you. Teach me, Sildana. I couldn't possibly. At T-Mobile, get the new iPhone 17 Pro on them. It's designed to be the most powerful iPhone yet and has the ultimate pro camera system. Impressive. Let me try. At T-Mobile, you can save up to 20 % versus the other big guys. You heard them. T-Mobile is the best place to get the new iPhone 17 Pro on us with eligible trade-in in any condition. Check them out to see how much you can save versus the other big guys at T-Mobile.com slash switch.

49:52Support for this show comes from LinkedIn. When you're a small business owner, your business is on your mind 24-7. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share it with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. LinkedIn's new features can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people with deep candidate insights. Either post your job for free or pay to promote.

50:27Promoted jobs get three times more qualified applicants. At the end of the day, the most important thing to your small business is the quality of candidates. And with LinkedIn, you can feel confident that you're getting the best. Based on LinkedIn data, 72 % of SMBs using LinkedIn say that it helps them find high-quality candidates. Find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash track. That's linkedin.com slash track to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

51:05All right, we're back. Addie Robertson's here. Hey, Addie. Hey. I'm excited. Usually when you and I talk, something very dark has happened. Like a lot of times you're on Decoder and we're like, well, Addy's here. And we both have the same reaction. I'm excited to talk to you about AI and copyright because this is just chaos. Like it is delightful chaos in our nation's courts as the AI copyright cases begin to wind their way to some decisions. Oh, yeah. These are fun. Can I back us up here a little bit and just like build from the ground up a little bit Because I confess I have had trouble keeping these two cases this week separate in my head and then also trying to figure out what they have to do with each other because it seems to be a lot.

51:47So, Addy, can you just like walk us through these trials a little bit first? Let's do Anthropic first because that decision hit first this week. Just remind us quickly like what that case was about and what was decided this week. This is David saying, Neelai can immediately get in his feelings. That's just what happened. Yeah, Neelai was so fast to like, let's talk about the fourth factor of copyright law. And I'm like, can I remember what books are first? Yeah, so there are two groups of authors here, and both of them found out their work is almost certainly ingested into the training data set of a chatbot company, in one case Meta, in one case Anthropic.

52:25And they both sued. And there are kind of two arguments. One argument is these things were pirated in the first place. And then in some ways, the bigger argument is, well, even if you get these things legally, you are putting these into a training set that is then using them to power a very lucrative product. And that's unauthorized. That's copyright infringement. You need to get permission from us and pay us. Okay, so this became, Neelai, a fair use thing, kind of all the way down, right? It's very important to separate what specifically is fair use. And the courts here don't agree. There's a lot going on in these, but it's important to just think about AI from the technical perspective.

53:08There's training the model, and then there's inference, where you get outputs from the model. And in these cases, it's all about training the model. is in the Anthropa case, literally buying a bunch of used books, ripping off the covers, scanning them into a database, and then using that database to train a model is all of that fair use. Not if you ask the model to produce some copyrighted book. Is that copyright infringement? And that's a big distinction. The reason people hate lawyers is because lawyers are constantly making extremely pedantic distinctions between things. But in these cases, those distinctions are wildly important because the judges react to those distinctions between training and inference, between inputs and outputs, very, very different.

53:55So both of these cases were fundamentally about training, right? Both of these cases are sort of fundamentally about training with a side, which is actually also very important, of you pirated these books in the first place. It's kind of the difference between, again, in both cases at first, they were like, all right, we're going to download all these books and we're going to train on them. And then Meta kind of kept it there. And Anthropic went, wait, we need to fix this. We're not comfortable with this. So then, as Neil, I mentioned, they got a bunch of books and they destroyed the books after scanning them.

54:28So then there was a copy in the cloud. And this turned out to be a really hugely important distinction for reasons besides the training. If I told you to just go buy a million books, would you know how to do it? I've been thinking about this all week. Anthropic hired one of the people who ran Google Books. Like they found the one person who knew how to do it. So the Anthropic case is really interesting for that reason. They started by saying, we're just going to steal stuff. And they pirated books. And they referred to the problem they had as like legal business slog that's in the opinion. And the legal business slog is like, should we pay money and acquire things legally?

55:05And they're like, no, we'll just steal it. And then they came back around and were like, we're going to scan a bunch of books. And the judge in that case, adding my read was that he cared a lot about acquisition. He was so mad. He's very focused on did you acquire these books legally or not? He makes a distinction between the legally acquired books and the pirated books. And then he spends a lot of time being like, OK, once you have the stuff, what can you do with it that's fair or not? And the first thing, and this is really just, again, pedantic steps down the line. The first thing that Anthropic did was they made a big database of books.

55:42And that is, you don't think about that in the context of you're training a model, but the judge spends a lot of time being like, okay, the first thing you did was make a database of books. And then you use that database. You can use that database to do all kinds of stuff. You can just search the database to see what books you have. And he, you know, there's a lot of like consumer rights history here. A lot of Google history here, ripping the covers off of books and scanning them into a big database. If, if you wanted to do that to all the books you owned, you would be like i can do that right like if the judge here had found that buying a million books ripping the covers off and scanning them into a database was illegal like a lot of things would break i think like i there's some part of this where copyright is such a maximalist control over what you can do with the things you can buy that the only answer you can get to is you're allowed to buy a million books rip the covers off of them and scan them into a database as long as you don't a lot of people access the database.

56:44Yeah, it's pretty notable here that they went from, okay, yeah, obviously it's illegal to acquire these digital books, but there are many legal ways to acquire digital books. And it is notable they didn't do that because you have the most maximalist freedom as a consumer with a physical copy. Yeah. If you wanted to buy a bunch of Kindle books, they come with DRM, they come with license restrictions. You can, as I was saying, you can buy a bunch of eBooks without that, but you still end up with terms of service agreements. If you just go buy a book, you can kind of do a physical book. You can kind of do whatever you want.

57:16So the judge says, okay, you made this database. That was fair use. Ripping the covers off the physical books and scanning the database. That's fair use. You're allowed to do that. Stealing books and making a database. That's not fair use. Stop there. The end. You're in trouble for that. Is that even a fair use thing or is it the stealing the books? Well, he's made the distinction between is it fair use to buy a bunch of physical books, rip the covers off and scan them. Okay, that's fair use. Is it fair use to steal a bunch of books? No. There's sort of a bunch of separate charges here. There are the charges of, all right, is it copyright infringement to do this?

57:53Or is it also separately copyright infringement to pirate all these books? Right. So then Anthropic tried to fix it by saying the database is not important. Training the model is important. And the judge said, okay, training the model from your legal database, that's fair use. That's very transformative, especially because the authors, one, conceded that trading the model was just like reading a book, which is a big thing to concede. Right. Which has been an argument of the AI industry for years, right? That it's like it's the equivalent of reading a web page and talking about it. And this is going to come up over and over again.

58:26And I think this is why Addy and I both think these are fun. The lawyers blew it for the authors like left and right. And the judges are kind of like, you know, you guys are blowing it. Like, try again, but don't blow it. So the lawyers conceded that it was just like reading a book. and then they did not argue the outputs of the model would affect the market for their work right so they stopped and this is why it made the big distinction between inputs and outputs they stopped at training they did not get to if you ask anthropic if you ask claude to make our book it'll just make our book or if you ask claude to summarize our book it'll just like spit out the answer to our book and that will ruin the market for a book they just didn't go there and the judge is like this is where you need to explain the different tenets of of copyright and fair use stuff.

59:09Okay. So David, the four factors of fair use. Here we are. We got here so inevitably. You've told me this so many times and it just goes fully, my eyes glaze over every time you say this to me. So I'm going to try and listen this time. It's 17 United States Code, section 107, the four factors of fair use. So this is when someone accuses you of stealing their work, you say, no, no, it's fair use. And so it's what's called an affirmative defense. You say, yep, I did. I did sample your song. This is fair use. Yep, you're right. I made a copy, but it's fair use. And then the judges are supposed to evaluate this on a case-by-case basis.

59:43They have four factors, the purpose and character of the use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount and substantiality of the portion used, and the effect on the use of the market. And how important each of these factors are just goes up and down over the years. The Supreme Court issues fair use copyright decisions. You get law review articles being like, the third factor is no longer in vogue. Like it's, everyone's always arguing about this. But here, what everyone should be arguing about is the fourth factor, the effect of the use on the market. If you train a chatbot on all the books in the world, and then you can just ask the chatbot about those books, and it will tell you the answer, the market for those books will inevitably dry up.

1:00:25And this, if I'm remembering correctly, is like the New York Times whole argument in its case against OpenAI, right? If you can get OpenAI to regurgitate New York Times articles, why would anyone go to the New York Times? I mean, I would be careful with that because in that case, it is specifically output. They are saying that you could get them to regurgitate exact text. And here it's kind of more, A, you can generate a bunch of stuff that imitates us and that infringes on our ability to sell things, or also that it can summarize and it can give answers. And that can, even if it's not really direct, clear, you're copying our stuff that's still diminishing the market.

1:01:00And then in the anthropic case, the authors didn't allege the outputs, right? They just didn't argue about it at all. They were totally focused on training and they didn't get to outputs. And the judge is even sort of saying throughout the opinion, you didn't talk about the outputs. So your argument is merely training the model will have some effect on the market for your work. But like, what is it? You didn't argue. It's not here. Like we don't have a record for it. So I'm just not going to talk about it. So we're totally focused on training and not on inference, right? We're totally focused on the inputs to train the model and not on the outputs of the model itself.

1:01:33And so the authors lose. He says training is fair use. This is totally transformative. You can legally acquire books. You can put them into a database. You can use that database to train a model, making the database as fair use, making the model from what's in the database as fair use, and then stop. Right? And like, there's a big yawning gap there of, well, now you have a model. What do you think is going to happen? And the answer is like, oh, you're going to make a bunch of stuff that competes with the author's original works. And so that's a real puzzle. Like, who knows what happens next? And he even leaves it open.

1:02:08Like, if you want to allege the next thing, you can allege the next thing. And then on top of it, he says, what you are not allowed to do is pirate a bunch of books and make a database. He doesn't even get to, and then you can train the model. He just says doing that first step where you stole a bunch of books and put them in a database. That's not fair use. You can't do that. And that is a nightmare. Like you might read this as training the model is fair use for your legally acquired physical books that you've ripped the covers off and scanned in your database. What it does not say is it's fair game for anything.

1:02:39And so if you, for example, have opened YouTube and downloaded a bunch of YouTube videos, I'm looking at you open AI. well, you violated YouTube's terms of service. The copyright in all those videos is owned by the YouTubers. You have a database of content that you're training Sora on that you don't have the rights to. And so this Anthropic decision has opened the door to being like, we're not even going to get to training as fair use. We're going to get to your illegal database of YouTube videos. And you're not allowed to clean up that problem by saying training is fair use. So this first decision, very complicated, like very technical, very readable.

1:03:22We've profiled Judge Alcet before. Sarah has profiled him. He writes code. He's in the weeds of the technical details here. But what you have is training is fair use if you have a legally acquired set of content to train from. There's also kind of a backwards looking and a forward looking issue here, which is, say, in the future, if you're kind of just starting from scratch, then the upshot of this is, well, OK, you've got to buy a million books. That costs a lot. It's a finite number. In backwards looking, if you've already done all this stuff, the potential damages for each work are just like ruinous if you add them up to a large enough number.

1:03:58And so anybody who's starting from scratch with a model that is starting acquiring all this stuff legally, like that's one economic model. Any of the big players, that's a whole different one. Yeah. Because they've already done all this. And again, OpenAI has a lot of money. But every YouTuber in the world can read this decision and say, well, you stole our videos. And it wasn't you can't buy physical YouTube videos and rip the covers off of a database. You access them on YouTube, which has terms of service that says you cannot do this. So this is already like puzzle one. This decision, you read it and you're like, okay, there's a way forward if you pay a bunch of authors.

1:04:35And maybe it doesn't even work, right? Used books don't pay the authors. But there's parts of copyright law that say you're allowed to buy used books and do whatever you want with them. And this ruling reaffirms that. It does not say you can just pirate a bunch of stuff and train it and call that fair use. Okay. So here's a bunch of liability for the industry. Then literally the next day, a decision in the meta case comes down, which Addy, I'm reading is basically being like, no, actually Judge Alsup got this wrong. Like, this is all theft left and right. It's basically Judge Alsup got all the fundamentals of this right, but he weighted the transformative factor, overarching factor, and the fourth economic market value factor totally wrong.

1:05:14And that makes him completely wrong on all of it. Yeah. Go through this case. So this case is slightly different, but it's a bunch of authors suing meta. And if I'm correct, Meta got caught using torrented books. Like straightforwardly, they just torrented the books. From Library Genesis, I believe, yeah. The collection of books that was just this very large corpus of pirated books, they torrented them. There's debate about whether that included them uploading things, which one typically does when you torrent things. The classic seeders versus leechers debate hits our nation's copyright law. Yeah, they have to define seeding and leeching in there.

1:05:50there's a whole section about that but they're specifically not dealing with the copyright uh like was this direct copyright infringement right now except to say yeah look it basically was um so there's that and then after that these authors sued in a pretty similar way uh except that they also specifically said the issue here is partly that it is recreating our works so they did focus on output. And then also that there's this market potentially for us licensing our work to you and that that's a market that you're taking from us. The judge called both of these clear losers. He basically thinks everyone here is wrong.

1:06:33So the meta won the case. Metta won the case just handily. And it's because the judge says, look, those are the only things you focused on. And both of those are bad arguments, partly because they couldn't get Lama to actually spit out more than 50 words of the direct text. So they were trying to say, look, you're verbatim producing stuff, and it just didn't work out. And then the second one, because you just can't necessarily say, yeah, if I were allowed to license this, I would make a lot of money. That doesn't necessarily mean you should be able to exploit that. And so then after saying, look, concluding just this argument is terrible.

1:07:16These lawyers are bad. Please don't do this. They said there's this other argument that would have been way stronger. And it's that the fundamental use of these things is to flood the market in a way that destroys the ability of authors to make a living and completely diminishes the thing that copyright is meant to do, which is encourage human creativity. Basically, AIs are creativity killing machines, and that should mean that it outweighs any potential transformative value. So I want to just quote from the opinion because it is brutal. This ruling does not stand for the proposition that meta's use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful.

1:07:57It stands only for the proposition that these plaintiffs made the wrong arguments and failed to develop a record in support of the right one. He's just saying you screwed this up. Yeah, you did it wrong. You did it wrong. And then mentions, by the way, these guys only they only represent 13 artists, 13 authors. So, you know, there are a lot of other authors and maybe meta scan them. It probably did. Just saying that. Yeah. Yeah. Wait. OK, so let's talk about this here because the reaction to this this week has been fascinating because I think it's been sort of a Rorschach test depending on how who you are promoting here.

1:08:32All of the AI folks are like, this is a landmark victory for AI. This puts us on the path to do all the stuff that we needed to do. But then it also sounds like there's an easy read of this, that this is like a small victory for these companies who won this case on a technicality, but have just had the door thrown wide open for everyone else on Earth to sue them better and win. Which of those things is it? Or is it both of those things? It's the second one. It's so by far the second one. um i think you know addy and when sarah's on and i whenever we're talking about the legal system on the show we are constantly reminding people that the courts are not computers they are not deterministic systems that you cannot predict what will happen right and so i i think the ai companies are like this is fair use and then they got an outcome that kind of looks like this is fair use and they're like see we predicted this correctly we were right all along and what you actually have is a court saying these lawyers sucked.

1:09:32And if you had better lawyers and you argued these things differently, we would have reached different outcomes. But we can't reach those outcomes in the absence of your better lawyers. And that is a maddening to people. I know it's maddening to people because I have the Blue Sky app on my phone and I open it from time to time. And it's just people being mad that these lawyers blew it. And they blew it. And the judge is saying flatly they blew it. I don't know why in the Anthropic case, the lawyers happily conceded that training an AI model is like letting school children read books to learn things.

1:10:05I wouldn't have conceded that. I do know that it costs a lot of money to build an expert record about how AI systems work versus the brains of six-year-olds or whatever, and they might not have had that money. You can't know, and that's why it's not deterministic. A lot of decisions got made along the way. And then we have these rulings. But there are more cases to come. As Addy's saying, the court in the meta case is basically inviting other authors to try to make the better argument that they have laid out. You have the New York Times, which is over a million dollars deep into its open AI litigation, that's watching these outcomes and will change its arguments.

1:10:44Then you have Disney, which is a very late entrant into all these copyright lawsuits. They're partnered up with Universal and together they're suing MidJourney about outputs. They're watching these cases develop. They're watching these arguments. And they're like, oh, we need to focus on outputs. By the way, I need to disclose that Universal is owned by Comcast. NBC Universal is a part of Comcast. They're the investor in our parent company. Our parent company has a deal with OpenAI. One of the reasons these companies have deals with OpenAI is because they want to set markets for licensing. They want to set rates.

1:11:14So these lawsuits can proceed on whatever way they're going to proceed. You can see it's not settled. These are just the first little skirmishes. And a lot of times what's happening is that the first plaintiffs are authors, are creatives who don't have the money for the most lawyering, who need to get to outcomes quickly. And they're getting outgunned by the lawyers for the huge technology firms. That's not always going to be the case. Record labels are also in on this. Record labels have sued Tsuno and Udeo. Although they're starting to settle some of those on the side. I'm just saying like the legal system is not deterministic.

1:11:53It is also reactive to what happens before, like necessarily. It's precedential. It's reactive to these cases. And the arguments in the future cases will shift around these decisions to attack their weak points or in the case of the meta decision to take the open invitation to get it right. Right. I would also say we're at the point where basically this is kind of every judge for themselves at the point where you appeal and then you start getting appeals court cases and then circuit courts start saying, all right, here's roughly how we think about it. Then judges have kind of precedents that they are trying to draw from.

1:12:27And of course, if the Supreme Court says something, then that's something that you have to wait pretty heavily. But at this point, they can kind of just stay stuff to each other. So it's also not like this one ruling that, say, all up hands down is a law that everyone else has to follow. Somebody else can come up with their own theory of fair use, which is pretty much exactly what we've seen. Right. And fair use in the law is supposed to be case by case. Right. So one fair use decision is not supposed to affect all the other ones. In reality, because of the money and time and risk involved, they get treated as precedent.

1:13:02But here, everybody has incentives to reopen those doors again and again and again. So I don't know. Addy, what do you think? I think this is a bunch of small, narrow rulings that open the door to much more chaos to come, not definitive reckoning, but maybe you feel differently. I don't know, in part because I feel like sometimes court cases are a little bit just they're reflective of a larger vibe and culture that it's like I think we've seen with Section 230 cases that it's not necessarily that judges all impact each other, but that if you start seeing a bunch of rulings around one kind of particular interpretation of the law or one kind of like weighting of something, that sometimes means you are seeing a pattern that's going to continue.

1:13:44It's correlation, not causation. And also, I don't know, I'm actually wondering what would happen if Alstub had a case that was more specifically output-based. Because on one hand, yeah, it opens up a bunch of whole new cans of worms. On the other, some of his comments did It seemed like they kind of indicated it doesn't matter if somebody is, say, writing a book with an AI system that competes with yours. That doesn't inherently mean that they are that is unfair. Yeah. He's got a line that's like copyright law does not protect you from competition. It's supposed to inspire more people to create.

1:14:18And there's a you know, there's a very deep, meaningful tension in there because the mechanism by which copyright law is supposed to inspire you to create is by letting you sell your stuff. Right. You create stuff, you get rights to it. Other people can't take it for free. They have to pay you money. But at the same time, if they take your stuff for free and then make stuff that competes with you, like that's competition. There's something really weird in there. But there are also a lot of pre-AI cases where I think people would be a lot more sympathetic to the idea that you should be able to say copy things without having to get permission.

1:14:53Like the fact that you can report on facts that somebody says in a news story without getting permission from the original writer of that story. like the fact that you can do a pastiche of an artist and that artist's style is not necessarily a thing that's automatically copyrightable. I think these are all things that when humans are involved, we actually are pretty okay with the idea that creativity is cumulative and people build on each other. I think the thing that's really interesting about the meta ruling is that it specifically makes the argument that scale is different, which is something I see a bunch of people make pragmatically, but I don't think I've seen in the court system as much, that the argument isn't actually, well, these things are fundamentally different and not competitive because the writing is somehow different or because something's not necessarily learning.

1:15:43It's because you can create all of them so quickly that they will flood the market and they will destroy the market for books. Specifically, he thinks romance novels and spy thrillers. Romance novels come up a bunch in this. uh the whole the entire like romance novel like fanfic community right now is like deeply insulted right they're at war with ai every day yeah romance authors are starting to use ai and romance readers are just furious about it well it's funny because you we've talked about this many times like if you go on those forums like now people just say tropes all in a row and request stories and like oh that's what ai is for like i just want this to happen um wild interactions in that community.

1:16:22The scale problem is really interesting because if we just play this game right now on the show, the moral dilemmas of copyright law become plain. So if I say to you, David, can you rip a CD onto your computer without paying extra money to a record label? What would you say? Yes. Can you rip 10 CDs? Yes. Can you, David Pierce, rip 1 ,000 CDs to your computer without paying record labels additional money? I guess in theory, yeah. If you had the hard drive space, could you rip a million CDs to your computer without paying the record labels? You, David Pierce. Yeah, I think so. Can Meta do that? No.

1:16:57Like, this is the problem, right? You write the rule that says it's okay to, like, rip CDs or we got a lot of Plex users on the show. Wait, wait, wait. Fair use can account for this, right? Part of the consideration of fair use is whether something is commercial or not. Part of the consideration is whether it's commercial, but in the Anthropic case, Judge Alsop says you're allowed to just make a database. If what you want to do is make it easier to search, make it easier to run different applications on, it's totally fine for you to buy a million books, rip the covers off, and scan them into a database.

1:17:27It's the next use that gets you into trouble, right? It's, okay, is it training the AI model? Is that fair use if you have the database? He says yes. If you were to say, I've now made this database publicly available for anyone to read all the books or listen to all the music in my database, you would go to jail. That's the Internet Archive is in trouble for their database of books that they acquired. They scanned it and they let everybody have access to. So the questions get really difficult the second you start not just adding scale, but adding different uses of what they're going to do. And some of those uses of commercial change the equation.

1:18:07And this is the problem. This is why everybody hates copyright law. This is why everybody hates lawyers. You start to get incredibly pedantic about what happened when, to whom, who made the copy when, where does the copy live? And everyone's like, it's just the computer, right? I can just like open it up and get whatever I want. And then underneath that, all of those questions determine who gets paid. And I think here, you know, the big problem with the anthropic fair use ruling is, one, if you buy a million used books and train a model that generates billions of dollars in value, the authors who wrote those books get nothing.

1:18:41That's just the way it works in our society. If they pay a one-time fee to buy a million brand new books and then train a model that generates billions of dollars in revenue, the authors essentially on that curve get nothing. They get paid one time. Is that fair? Like, I don't, I truly don't know the answer to those questions. And these rulings kind of don't get you there. I don't know. I think that the meta ruling is interesting because it does actually kind of cut through all this. Because everything in copyright is very angels dancing on a head of a pin. Like, is putting something in RAM a copy?

1:19:14But the overall argument is the whole reason copyright exists is to encourage human creativity. And so the ultimate bar should not be, is this fair or is this hitting this particular place where it starts being uncomfortable? Or is the company that's doing this making it commercial? It is when you look at this thing holistically, does it serve the purpose that the law is meant to serve? And that's not mostly how courts work. But I think if you are considering this from a larger kind of philosophical sense, that is interesting and worth considering. Sarah and I have often crashed out because we both started as like copyright minimalist warriors in our legal careers.

1:19:55And we've now like horseshoe theory around to like copyright law is good, actually, which is crazy. So the argument that you would make from the other side, and it's a good argument, is that human beings do not need copyright law to be creative. this this legal system that we've invented is there to create scarcity and economic value for creativity which certainly incentivizes some people to create but if actually if you look around our instinct is literal human beings every day is to create we will do it for free people wake up every morning and they have access to creative tools on their computers and they cannot help themselves like it is just the our most essential human nature is to make stuff and that's in real tension here right like it it's hard to square the court saying we have to preserve the essential nature of copyright law so that there will be creativity and then literally those judges go home and they open the instagram app on their phone and it's just like the most free creativity that has ever existed in the history of humanity i mean somebody at andreessen horowitz is going to play that clip that you just said for everyone who works there that's the crash that's the i mean that is the argument that these companies make in favor of all of this is that no we're not diminishing anything because everybody would do it for free.

1:21:06Right. And then they make that argument from their yachts. I will make the counter argument to this, which is that while people will create, a lot of the purpose of creativity is to share that thing with other people. And if AI creates a situation in which it is virtually impossible to distribute your work or to get anyone to see your human made work, I think that you can say that is really meaningfully chilling creativity. The problem is that I don't think copyright law as a stance can solve this. There's this really bizarre tension in the meta opinion where, OK, if you take its premise as true, that this will completely destroy the market for books, then the only thing copyright law can do is say, OK, well, some people have to get a few dollars a month as residuals for this to create this entire creativity killing database.

1:21:55really the only way that you can take this argument as true is to assume that also copyright law is going to be powerless to change it it might be i mean we one outcome of all these cases is they hit the supreme court and supreme court says fine training is fair use maybe that's not i think it is much more likely that as these cases careen towards that risk because no one knows how that will go. That actually the incredibly well-moneyed interest here will go get a law, right? That Disney and OpenAI and Google, all of these companies have to deal with each other. They will go, Nashville is a powerful economic force in copyright law.

1:22:39Where does that leave the next generation of artists though? Because the way that I see that gaming out is, yeah, all the record labels that currently have artists sell a bunch of data to companies. And then companies create this database and they train on it and they train a bunch of, I don't know, music apps and apps for writing romance novels and all of that. And then they create training data based on that, that then they sort of cycle into their system over and over, which is what they're trying to do right now. And then at that point, where does the next generation get paid? I don't know that there's actually a way that happens, especially if there is this situation where, say, AI-generated content floods everything.

1:23:20Yeah, I don't know. I think that will be the heart of the negotiation, fundamentally, especially because private equity is in the mix. The creative industry is not clean. It's not pure. It's a lot of, essentially, banks now. And so private equity companies have bought Bruce Springsteen's entire catalog for$500 million. They're not going to take a one-time training payment for that. They bought that because they think they can exploit that music for years to come in various ways. I don't know. I just think that's not actually satisfying because that means Bruce Springsteen has a steady stream of income, but that there is no market for the next person.

1:23:57No, Bruce Springsteen got his one-time payment. I mean, this is why it's particularly gross. Bruce Springsteen has half a billion. Okay, yes, fair. It's the private equity company that made the investment is going to want to return over time. And that return over time is the thing that ideally makes any new work also valuable. And that's tough. I don't know how any of that plays out, especially because I don't think this gets litigated. I don't think it's solved at the level of Supreme Court. I think Congress has to write a law in that you can already see how messy that will be. And the battle lines of that law as these court cases wind ever forward are literally the huge entertainment companies that basically own this kind of lobbying.

1:24:38This is what they do. And they're very, very good at it. Going up against Disney to walk back copyright law is not historically a successful effort. going up against Nashville in the music industry to walk back copyright law. Not historically a successful effort. In fact, some of the only AI related laws we have are like the Elvis Act in Tennessee that prevents people from making AI Elvis impersonators. Well, and things like the Disney one are seem more sort of viscerally straightforward in that you can just go to mid journey and be like, show me Simpsons. And it'll just do the Simpsons for you in a way that I think things like these cases are a little, just feel more abstract because it's like something goes in, black box, something else comes out.

1:25:22In that one, it's just something goes in and then that same something comes out for free and you can do whatever you want with it. And I feel like that, we're just going to look at that differently. Whether we should or not, it feels different. No, the pictures always win. Yeah. Legally different media are also different. Like you can quote a bunch of a book, but if you want to sample three seconds of a song, you're on much shakier territory. I would actually chalk that up to the fact that the record labels in Hollywood are better at this than the book publishing industry. The news media is not great at this historically.

1:25:53And those industries are really, really good at it. And part of it is, to David's point, you have a more visceral emotional reaction to that picture is the same and that song is the same. Yeah. They are good at fighting these fights. So my suspicion here at it might not be satisfying is that you get to some solution where there's still value for the individual song. There's still value for the individual video. It might be less than before and there might be more supply, which will crash that value because there's only so many people and only so many minutes to consume songs and videos in the day.

1:26:26But I don't think you get to a place where this set of artists gets paid once and no future artists get paid because that will kill these businesses and they're not existentially stupid. They can be stupid. They're not existentially stupid. My really dark take is that the reason Disney is suing Mid Journey is because Disney is about to use all of its IP to generate infinite Star Wars forever. So I don't know. I think we're just shifting the people who are going to be making these things and flooding the market. Disney learns wrong lesson from Andor is a real headline. It's right there for you.

1:26:57We need to take a break. We'll be right back. Every great company story is defined by moments when the founders make bold decisions. These are high-stakes moments that risk the business, but can lead to greatness. I'm Rolof Boeta, managing partner of Sequoia Capital and the host of Crucible Moments. We're returning for a brand new season. Join us as leaders from Stripe, Zipline, Palo Alto Networks, Klarna, Supercell and more. Share what it's actually like to navigate the make or break decisions. Crucible Moments is back on October 23rd. Until then, catch up on seasons one and two wherever you find your podcasts.

1:27:45Avoiding your unfinished home projects because you're not sure where to start? Thumbtack knows homes, so you don't have to. Don't know the difference between matte paint finish and satin? Or what that clunking sound from your dryer is? With Thumbtack, you don't have to be a home pro. You just have to hire one. You can hire top-rated pros, see price estimates, and read reviews all on the app. Download today. Morning, Zoe. Jeff Bridges, why are you still living above our garage? I want to be in a T-Mobile commercial like you. Teach me, Sildana. I couldn't possibly. At T-Mobile, get the new iPhone 17 Pro on them.

1:28:21It's designed to be the most powerful iPhone yet and has the ultimate pro camera system. Impressive. Let me try. At T-Mobile, you can save up to 20 % versus the other big guys. You heard them. T-Mobile is the best place to get the new iPhone 17 Pro on us with eligible trade-in in any condition. Check them out to see how much you can save versus the other big guys at eMobile.com slash switch. We're back. The lightning round, which David says has to be two minutes long. Two minute lightning round. Because we just spent an hour crashing out of our copyright law. So let's talk about Brendan Carr for 45 minutes.

1:28:54America's favorite podcast within a podcast. By the way, lightning round unsponsored. If we're in a Tesla and it crashes, we will point out that it crashes. I'm just saying. You can't buy us. I've noticed a lot of people have started posting on various social platforms at me that you can't tell us what to do. That's all I've ever wanted from the lightning round just unsponsored for flavor. Is people reminding everyone that you can't actually tell us what to do and you can't buy us. I think when you die, I'm going to write, you can't tell me what to do on your tombstone. And it's going to feel right.

1:29:23It is the animating thesis of the Verge talk. That and figuring out what's going on with the frame TV. Okay. Brandon Carr is a dummy. America's favorite podcast is a podcast. It's time. Oh, this is a short one because he did something dumb, but it's like predictably done like he did the dumb thing that republican commissioners always do at the fcc so a couple of things happened one everyone left the fcc presumably because brandon is so unpleasant to work for does anna gomez still work there i haven't checked on this in a minute she still works there she is not yet fired by donald trump okay the only democratic commissioner on the fcc and she literally will tell you she does not know why she has not been fired um so and she's on tour saying Brandon is a bad guy who's violating the First Amendment.

1:30:09Wild stuff over there. So there were just the two of them, which is not a quorum for the FCC to do its business. Nathan Symington, who left the FCC, wanted this guy Gavin Wax to be appointed. He didn't get it. This woman named Olivia Trusty is the new Republican commissioner of the FCC. She was confirmed by the Senate. She has a long history with everyone. There were statements about her like we would confirm her in a normal time because she's a Republican commissioner, Republican presidents get Republican commissioners. But Brendan is such a weird threat to free speech that we're opposing her nomination.

1:30:41That's where Brendan has taken this organization. This woman who would have sailed through a normal times was opposed by various Democrats and various free speech groups. And literally, they're saying, she's fine, but Brendan sucks. So we're opposing her nomination. We can't let Brendan do anything. You can't let him have another vote. She got through party on vote. So it goes. Immediately, immediately, Brendan moves to open comment. on letting companies own more broadcast stations. So we have this concept in the United States called media ownership rules that say big companies can't own all the TV stations for a variety of reasons.

1:31:17First, you just want your local media to have a relationship to you, right? That the TV stations and newspapers and radio stations that serve your area should have some skin in the game where you live, right? They should be responsive to their local communities. And this is like deep in the law and the policy. where you want the local media to be local. You don't want national media to ignore your concerns and do all this other stuff. This has waxed and waned over the years, but you can kind of feel it, right? If you go on social media, there are not local media ownership rules. There are not rules that your algorithm has to show what's happening in your community.

1:31:52Everything is just national culture war all the time because that's what plays in social media. Weird, it's a weird outcome. So we have these rules from ages ago. It's a, you know, big companies can't just buy all the TV stations and actually program. than they actually locally owned. And then we have this other rule that says there's a percentage. The same company can't own all the stations in your town. The same company can't own all the stations and all the radio stations, all these vapor. So you have all these media ownership rules.

1:32:21Brendan thinks they're dumb. He thinks we should open it up and let everybody own everything. And his argument is it's not smart that these companies have to compete with the internet, so we should let them own everything so they can get big enough to compete with Google and Facebook. And the problem there, of course, is when you open the social media apps on your phone, you are not subjected to local news. You're subject to national culture war, which is the exact reason the policy exists. Brendan, everybody, he just walked into the literal opposite of the reason for the rule. We should make everything national culture war so that local news can compete with Google is not the right answer at all.

1:32:59Make local news do national culture war is what we're after now. That's our boy, Brendan. So that's Brendan. He's a dummy. As always, Brendan, if you can defend any of this stuff, you're welcome on the show. I'd love to have you. It's been a minute since I've issued this threatening invitation to you and I'm issuing it again. You're welcome. On Decoder, on the Vertichest. We've only got weeks to go. David, I believe this is your last show before baby. This is my last Friday show. I will be on Tuesday's show, which due to the magic of technology, we have already recorded. This cake is already baked.

1:33:33Exactly. But yeah, this is the last one I'll be on for a couple of months. Yeah. And then I'm weeks away here as well. So our children are coming. And Brendan, we will let our children interview you. I think they can take you, buddy. That's a good idea. I mean, Max can take me. So I think she can definitely take Brendan. But you're invited anytime you want. You got a couple weeks to go. I'll come back special just for you, Brendan. I do have, by the way, it's going to be so great when Jake interviews Brendan while we're out. I think Jake can take Brendan too. I'm not worried about it in the slightest.

1:34:10Just a little bonus round. Not the FCC. The Federal Trade Commission did some dumb shit this week. They are allowing Omnicom, which is a big ad agency, to buy another big ad agency. But they're issuing a consent decree that says they're not allowed to keep ads off of X, basically. so they're literally stepping into the free market and saying you have to spend money on platforms where you disagree with political views and then we'll let your merger go what kind of free market is that where the government is like we will let you merge but you are not allowed to choose how you spend your money you are required to advertise on objectionable content is such a funny thing for the government to require yeah the advertisers By the way, the clients are allowed to still make their decisions.

1:34:57But the ad agencies, which fundamentally what the ad agencies do is help people spend their ad dollars. They're not allowed to make those decisions. Perfect. I can't imagine how that will ever get. How will anyone get around this? This incredible rule. So they're like, here's here's the people. Here's the Nazis. And then just another another one just to throw it out there. um paramount is being sued by trump for the cbs interview you know about this where he says the kamala harris interview was deceptively edited blah blah there's some mediator that's proposed some settlement 20 billion dollars and it's held up because paramount executives and their lawyers cannot figure out how to pay this money without being on the hook for bribery charges because it's just bribery.

1:35:46This is a real problem. If you don't believe me, you can read the notoriously leftist Wall Street Journal editorial board saying, don't do this paramount, just fight and win this lawsuit. Yeah. When Rupert Murdoch is like, don't be an idiot, like go win your First Amendment argument and he agrees with you, I'm just letting you know. All right. That's politics for today. Don't do bribery. Brendan's an idiot. I got it all on my system. David, do you have a palate cleanser? Jake, let's do one each before we get out of here. All right. What do you have? I am super excited about this one. Have you guys ever looked at your TV and thought, not enough pixels here?

1:36:31I can tell you for me, like, the answer is constantly. Every day. The answer is always every single time you think, this isn't enough. Guys, we're going to 16K. It's happening. The HDMI 2.2 spec is out. Now, there are some drawbacks, and I know this is going to be a hard one for the gamers out there. It's only 60 hertz. So I know nobody's going to want this just yet, right? How is this going to look on BraviaCore? That's all I want to know. Until we can get 16 ,120, you know, it's not for me. But the HDMI forum is on top of it. They're weirdly ahead of the curve here. I do not know what the current demand is for support for 16K 60 hertz video.

1:37:12I'm not sure how much of that exists. I don't know where I would get it. The YouTubers aren't yelling at us to film in it yet. I love, by the way, that they've only revved it to 2.2. Right? Because we're at HDMI 2.1 right now, right? Yes. 16120 is only worth 0.1. They've only revved it to HDMI 2.2 to get to 16K120. What is it going to take, you guys?

1:37:5032K 360 HDMI 3. This is the goal. We got to go to the HDMI forum headquarters and just yell numbers at them until they concede that it's time to rev the main version number. I love this. This is, I'm all in. I'm really excited to buy a bunch of expensive HDMI cables and connect them to my$300 42-inch TCL Roku TV. This is what is most important. As soon as these cables are available, I don't care if you're still running 1080p, any HDMI cable you buy from here on out has better be a 16K cable because one day you're going to want to change out your Xbox and it's going to be too hard to get to. you're going to need to make sure you have that 16k support just in case my 19 dollar roku express is going to look sick now it's going to rule yeah okay so andrew ossevsky wrote this story for us every paragraph of the story is great uh because andrew is a great gadget writer and he wrote it very dryly and if you just read it on its face this is the work of people who who have no connection to reality so those cables that you're talking about are now officially called hdmi 2.2 ultra 96 cables sick sure there's a new standard they support called the latency indication protocol or lip that's a sick band name by the way latency indication protocol is like a swing band that needs to exist why is it called lip because it matches up the audio in the video so the audio matches the lips oh that's good it's good it's good stuff and some might even say somewhat more important than 16k having your audio synced to your video HDMI 2.2 mostly here on the Vergecast we love a good backronym so I will take it I'm all in I'm just saying it's a new top end Ultra 96 is the new top end you get high speed premium high speed and ultra high speed and now Ultra 96 I'm happy alright what do you got David Microsoft is killing the blue screen of death finally after 40 years when your computer explodes it will no longer show the blue screen of death it will show the black screen of death Microsoft is redesigning it a thing that I learned this week thanks to a story Tom Warren wrote for The Verge in 2014 was that Steve Ballmer wrote the text of the blue screen of death message because he didn't like he got the blue screen of death and he thought the wording didn't seem right for when it was going wrong so he the Windows team challenged him to go do a better job and he did.

1:40:20He wrote the blue screen of death message which is wonderful but now they're changing it to something much less fun and interesting. It just now says your device ran into a problem and needs to restart and then at the bottom it actually shows you the code of what went wrong which is vastly more useful than what the blue screen of death did but is much less fun and the black screen of death just doesn't doesn't roll off the tongue the same way. And I will be very sad to not have my computer just randomly run up this thing. You still have to use the acronym, right? It's still the BSOD. It's still the BSOD, which I assume was intentional.

1:40:59But like, why? Just a little bit of a lie. I agree. There's no other way of looking at this. This is like a canonical thing in technology. Everybody knew what the blue screen of death was. Oh, they're getting rid of the sad face. Yeah, dude. I thought they were just changing from blue to black no this is what i'm saying it's devastating it's very bad i mean your computer used to feel bad for you and now it's like do either of you ever watch the office yeah do you know the scene where where it's kelly's birthday and dwight just puts up a sign that says it is your birthday that's the black screen of death now it just says your device ran into a problem and needs to restart your computer used to feel bad for you it was like i'm sorry i blew i blew it and I'm going to fix it now.

1:41:43And now your computer is just like, well, I'm dead. In other great moments of sort of dead ahead tech writing that read is very funny. Tom wrote this story and he wrote it. It's very, again, it's very dead ahead. It's got some good quotes. The whole thing did great reporting. The last line, dead ahead. The changes to the blue screen of death are part of the broader effort by Microsoft to improve the resiliency of Windows in the wake of last year's CrowdStrike incident, which left millions of Windows machines booting to the blue the screen of death and it's like oh part of that effort was making the screens black do you think it's so that if you see a lot of them all at once it's not as obvious that they've broken that's what i'm saying yeah right you can like look over a room full of them and they don't all it's not it doesn't immediately scream we're all destroyed it's like how tiffany has the trademark on its pantone blue you see the blue screen of death like that windows pc has crashed and now there's just a black screen.

1:42:35You're like, maybe that's Linux. Like it's, it's the wrong thing to have a trademark on. Own your shame, Microsoft. That's the Vergecast, everybody. Own your shame. We'll see you next week. Rock and roll.

1:42:53And that's it for the Vergecast this week. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE-11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Will Poore, Eric Gomez, and Brandon Kiefer. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

1:43:15Rinse takes your laundry and hand delivers it to your door. Expertly cleaned and folded. So you could take the time once spent folding and sorting and waiting to finally pursue a whole new version of you. Like Tea Time U. Mmm. Or this Tea Time U. Or even this Tea Time U. So did you hear about Dave? Or even tea time, tea time, tea time you. Mmm. So update on Dave. It's up to you. We'll take the laundry. Rinse. It's time to be great. Lemo, emu. And Doug. Here we have the Lemo, emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating.

1:43:59It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Uh, Lemu? Is that guy with the binoculars watching us? Cut the camera! They see us! Only pay for what you need at LibertyMutual.com. Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty. Savings vary. Underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.