This Week in Tech Episode 928 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for Tweet this week in Tech. Two people in studio, Harry McCracken, the techno here. Kathy Galles from Tech Dirt is here. Also, Amanda Silver Link joins us for the first time ever from Tech Crunch. We will talk about the three big Supreme Court decisions that came down this week. Turns out Kathy wrote Amicus Briefs for two of them. She says it's one win, one loss <laugh>. We'll find out what that means. We'll also talk about the change in streaming TV and the failure of pay TV services and a whole lot more. It's all coming up next. We might even play a little d and d next on Twitter.

TWiT Intro (00:00:38):
Podcasts

Leo Laporte (00:00:38):
You

TWiT Intro (00:00:39):
Love from people you trust. This is Twitch is Twit.

Leo Laporte (00:00:49):
This is twit this week in Tech. Episode 928 Recorded Sunday, May 21st, 2023. SCOTUS didn't read my briefs. This week. In Tech is brought to you by Grammarly. Go. You'll be amazed at what you can do with Grammarly. Go go to grammarly.com/go to download and learn more about Grammarly. Go and by Noom. Stop chasing health trends and build sustainable, healthy habits with Noom s psychology based approach. Check out Noom s first ever book The Noom Mindset. A deep dive into the psychology of behavior change available to buy now wherever books are sold. And don't forget to sign up for your trial at noom.com/twiz And by Duo. Duo protects against breaches with a leading access management suite, providing strong multi-layered defenses to only allow legitimate users in. For any organization concerned about being breached that needs a solution, fast Duo quickly enables strong security and improves user productivity. Visit signup.duo.com today for a free trial. And by Mint mobile inflation is everywhere. Whether it's gas, utilities, or your favorite streaming services, thankfully Mint Mobile can give you a much needed break. Get your new wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month and get the plan shipped to your door for free when you go to mint mobile.com/twit.

(00:02:26):
It's time for twit this week at Tech, the show. We cover the week's tech news. I'm a little scared. I have people in the studio today. This is scary. Harry McCracken. Hello. Good to see you. Hey, Leon Fast Company. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> The technolog I your name. You might have heard your ears burning earlier this week cuz people are saying, well, no one uses an iPad for day-to-day work. And I said, well, Harry does. Absolutely. I have for like 12 years, 11 inch Pro now. And you're feeling pretty good because now you got final cut and logic on there. So,

Cathy Gellis (00:03:00):
Hey, well soon Final cut at least is exciting.

Leo Laporte (00:03:02):
You're ready. Also in studio with us from Tech Dirt, our favorite intellectual PR person,

Cathy Gellis (00:03:10):
<Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (00:03:13):
She's an attorney. Kathy Gillis.

Cathy Gellis (00:03:15):
Thanks for having me.

Leo Laporte (00:03:16):
Hi, Kathy. Cg council.com. You're on Maskin on that, Kathy Gillis. But more importantly, Kathy wrote not one, but two amicus briefs for big, big Supreme Court decisions that came down this week. And we were gonna talk about both of them. One had a lot to do with fair use. The other turns out didn't have anything to do with section two 30. It could have though,

Cathy Gellis (00:03:37):
It could have, it will reverberate in the same space.

Leo Laporte (00:03:40):
It will reverberate in the same space. Wow. Okay. I'm gonna think about that for a little while while I introduce Amanda Silvering, who I've been wanting again on this show forever and ever. She writes about culture, she's the senior culture writer at Tech Crunch. And it's great to see you. You've been on Tech News Weekly before, but we never got you on this show. So welcome.

Amanda Silberling (00:04:02):
Yeah, it's exciting to be on the show.

Leo Laporte (00:04:04):
I don't wanna say anything, but it looks like somebody stole your guitar.

Amanda Silberling (00:04:08):
Oh. So yeah, it's man, I should have that in the background cause it's like a neon pink bass and it makes me look really cool. But it's in the other room right now cuz I had a bass lesson the other day cause you

Leo Laporte (00:04:20):
Were playing it. That's that's a good reason.

Amanda Silberling (00:04:24):
Yeah. Excellent. So it's, it's in the other room inside of a black case, but, oh,

Leo Laporte (00:04:29):
Hot

Amanda Silberling (00:04:29):
Pink. It shouldn't be there looking cool Pink. I'm pointing the wrong way.

Leo Laporte (00:04:33):
So, before we get to the Supreme Court, cause I, I do want to get to the Supreme Court, but I also, Amanda had a scoop that I thought was really interesting. I kind of want to mention this. It looks like you saw an email or from Instagram that Instagram is gonna launch a Twitter clone.

Amanda Silberling (00:04:54):
See, I love that you think it's a scoop because I think Leah Haberman and Matt Navarra posted this before me, so thank you for giving me the credit. But forget me tell my editors that it was a

Leo Laporte (00:05:05):
Scoop. Yeah. Leah tweeted it, but that doesn't count. You wrote the article. That's what matters.

Amanda Silberling (00:05:10):
Yeah, I mean, also, actually before we got on apparently the incoming c e o of Twitter, Linda Sino or Yao, sorry, I she just retweeted the Tech Crunch tweet of that article. So thank you for the traffic. Linda

Leo Laporte (00:05:28):
<Laugh>. That's interesting. I wonder why the new CEO of Twitter would be promoting a major competitor from Meta.

Amanda Silberling (00:05:36):
Well, she said I think she said like, game On or something. Oh, yeah. Was her comment. It's like

Leo Laporte (00:05:42):
The welcome. Right. Seriously, Instagram

Cathy Gellis (00:05:44):
Is validating the market by entering it. Yeah. I think our belief in rational behavior by anybody running the company that is Twitter these days might be overestimating

Leo Laporte (00:05:55):
<Laugh>. I wonder what will say, so Instagram is, and this is the, the slide I guess that Leah Haberman got. Yeah, Instagram is gonna launch up, it looks a lot like Twitter. It's text based, right? Not photo based. It, it says quickly build your audience in one tap. Anyone can follow the accounts they follow on Instagram. So it's kind of just Instagram comments in a kind of a separate space. Yes. That's what it feels like a little bit.

Amanda Silberling (00:06:26):
Yeah. It's, it seems like it's gonna be very similar to Twitter, but basically if you have an Instagram account, then you can just carry over your handle and your verification status if you're verified. And then it'll give a little notification like Amanda is now on whatever they name the Twitter clone. But yeah, I mean, this is all very speculative. Instagram wouldn't give me a comment on the record about it, but there was another blog. I am, it's in the article, but I'm forgetting the name now. But they did give them a comment and they were like, this is in development essentially. But it is interesting that they're being hush hush. However, I did see an email that they sent to a creator where they're basically trying to get like, big name creators, actors, athletes Sure. To just get on the platform from the get go because that's kind of, that's what drives what drives growth. Yeah. If people are like, oh man LeBron is over here. Sure.

Leo Laporte (00:07:37):
That's totally what's what made blue Sky kind of explode with suddenly some big names like a o c she

Amanda Silberling (00:07:44):
Follows me, which wow. I, it's an honor. She's never engaged with any of my Blue Sky skeets. That's what they're called officially. But she does follow me on there and it's a, it's an honor and a privilege that I am I'm afraid she's gonna unfollow me and that I'm gonna feel bad <laugh>. So

Leo Laporte (00:08:01):
Just say nothing. Say nothing. So the new, the blog you were talking about is Money Sent Money Control Rather. Yes. Yes. And they say it's gonna be called either it's Codename P 92 or Barcelona, neither of which will be the name <laugh>, I'm sure. Yeah. meta said in a statement two, money Control. We're exploring a standalone, decentralized social network for sharing text updates. We believe there's an opportunity for a separate space where creators and public figures can share timely updates about their interests. Yeah. We call it Twitter. We believe there is an opportunity and has been. It's interesting though, they say decentralized cuz you don't think of Instagram as decentralized in any way.

Amanda Silberling (00:08:40):
Nope. <laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:08:41):
Your, your article says it will, well actually this is from the slide. It will be compatible with other apps like Mastodon. That doesn't mean we'll be on the Fed averse necessarily. I don't know what that means.

Amanda Silberling (00:08:58):
Yeah, it's really confusing wording because like we were talking about this before we went live. That it, it is just confusing because you would think that if it's compatible with Mastodon then it would be built on Activity Pub, but maybe it's not. Maybe like, are we gonna have like amanda@instagram.com? Is that how it's gonna be interoperable? It's like the tech behind it feels very vague, but I guess

Cathy Gellis (00:09:28):
There's

Amanda Silberling (00:09:29):
Some, I think it'd be cool if it's decentralized. Yeah. There,

Cathy Gellis (00:09:31):
There's some like little bits of, I I, when I saw this get Tweeted and Social mediad, I saw a lot of cynicism behind it. But as is we're talking about it, I actually think there's some little sparks of a good idea here. But it really feels like not enough meetings have actually happened in the company to work this all out. Because I think it's actually really interesting if Instagram has something that is their own community that they foster and they moderate and somehow monetize, but that they're using a technology that's less proprietary. Like, that's really interesting. But that is a fundamental shift in the way that a Facebook property has operated. So it could be a really big idea, but I, that's gotta kind of happen from sea level suite type things because it fundamentally re architects the company.

Leo Laporte (00:10:19):
Well, we don't know where this slide is from, and it may be that the people who are doing it know more than the people who made this silly slide. But I completely agree with you. Yeah. I think the opportunity is very interesting. If anybody were open to new ideas at this point, it would be meta, right? Because their bet, their bet on the Metaverse has not been oh, oh

Cathy Gellis (00:10:39):
A hit. I think don't know individual employees at Meta, but aren't very bright. No, I'm not. I mean, the, the mind that thought that that was a good idea makes me wonder.

Leo Laporte (00:10:48):
But he's chased now. Is he not? Oh, isn't Mark saying, oh, whoops, I should have done ai.

Amanda Silberling (00:10:56):
I think

Leo Laporte (00:10:57):
A mistake all,

Amanda Silberling (00:10:57):
I don't think they're like walking it back, but I think in the investor calls, like with so many companies right now, it's like everyone just wants to say AI as much as possible, right. When they are reporting their earnings because they're trying to make the investors happy. But yeah, I think I actually, I wrote this at some point, who knows where it is on techcrunch.com somewhere, but like at the last quarterly earnings report, mark was like, we're not backing away from the Metaverse, we're just also focusing on ai. But I don't know, I mean,

Leo Laporte (00:11:34):
It's your sense of that Harry,

Harry McCracken (00:11:36):
Well

Leo Laporte (00:11:37):
I know you've written a lot about this.

Harry McCracken (00:11:39):
They're not abandoning the metaverse, like abandoning the metaverse. We're involve things like, like shutting down meta aquest and so forth, which I, I do not expect to happen. And I it must be less of a priority, particularly when they have fewer people on staff and are, are trying to be efficient. Right. I think it would, they

Leo Laporte (00:11:56):
Fired what, 25,000

Harry McCracken (00:11:57):
Or something. It seems like it be a terrible mistake to downplay AI in order to put all your resources into the metaverse. And in fact, meta actually does have a lot of great AI people who have done, actually always

Leo Laporte (00:12:09):
Have Jan Lacoon.

Harry McCracken (00:12:10):
They have done a lot of great research and the next step is to actually figure out how, how to make that into a better and more successful meta, which has not quite happened yet, but could. So,

Leo Laporte (00:12:18):
And they're not mutually exclusive. No. Right. You could have VR with ai, then you have Rye.

Harry McCracken (00:12:24):
I mean, I think what people kind of feel, what people feel is not French for

Leo Laporte (00:12:27):
True. I might point out, so it's not a bad slogan and not a bad nickname. Like you can use it if you want. Go ahead.

Harry McCracken (00:12:32):
I think what people feel

Cathy Gellis (00:12:33):
Us, that's over for them, <laugh>,

Harry McCracken (00:12:35):
I think what maybe almost everybody a agrees, whether they've acknowledged or not, is that the Metaverse is not like two years away because the hardware we really want for the Metaverse is not two years away. And in fact they're just some, some fundamental things about creating great metaverse hardware that we don't know how to do yet.

Leo Laporte (00:12:52):
I foolishly

Harry McCracken (00:12:53):
We don't know when we will know

Leo Laporte (00:12:54):
1600 bucks on the Oculus Pro, which is now a thousand very shortly thereafter, <laugh>. And it's not 1600 bucks worth anything. It's not much better than the HTC five or even the original Oculus Rift, which I bought through a Kickstarter sale. Apple is now two weeks away, two weeks

Harry McCracken (00:13:12):
Away, $3,000

Leo Laporte (00:13:13):
Less than that a week from no two weeks away. Do we know that though? I mean and my concern with Apple launching a VR headset is that maybe this is a category that's already dead. Is that a possibility?

Cathy Gellis (00:13:27):
Yeah, I never thought it was worth spending any attention on, like, I've just kind of sat out this whole, I mean, I remember verbal, like I've been in the in tech long enough that I've seen this before and I've seen the same level of enthusiasm and I've seen the same detachment of understanding what the technology could possibly solve as an identified problem. By

Leo Laporte (00:13:48):
The way, everything you just said, if you took out VR and put AI in instead.

Cathy Gellis (00:13:52):
Exactly. I'm kind of saying this one out too sentence. I mean, you talk, you talked about is Zuck Chason, but I mean, he might say whoops, but if you don't have any sort of reckoning about what your error was and how you ended up coming to make it, he's just gonna repeat them.

Leo Laporte (00:14:07):
I don't, when you put 25 billion into something, it's hard to say. Whoops.

Cathy Gellis (00:14:12):
Or 44 billion as it is. Is it even more? Well, no, but he's, he's been out wasted Bunny. I mean he, yeah, so Zuck kind of has, he's kind of out of the limelight. He only wasted 25 billion <laugh>. Other people have wasted a lot more.

Leo Laporte (00:14:25):
We don't know cuz Apple's very secretive how much they might have spent on this. Your, your headline last month, Harry was how Apple's headset could be a $3,000 flop and a success.

Harry McCracken (00:14:37):
Yeah, I mean I th I thought way, way back to the early 1980s when Apple released the lease off, which was a, a $10,000 computer,

Leo Laporte (00:14:47):
Which very expensive

Harry McCracken (00:14:48):
Flop, which only lasted for a few years and is remembered as a flop. But it was also a milestone along the way to the Mac. And even the Mac when it came out did not sell anywhere near as well as they expected. But on the other hand, the Mac is still around and is is an enormous business. And I, I feel like we need to give the Lisa A. Little bit of credit for helping to jumpstart that process. That's

Leo Laporte (00:15:08):
A really good point. And therefore this and more recently, you could even say the Apple Watch in his first few iterations was not a compelling product. It took, it

Harry McCracken (00:15:15):
Took a while. I mean, even took a while. Even the iPhone, if you look at the earliest coverage of the iPhone after it came out, people were not entirely sure whether the iPhone as innovative as it was, was gonna be a success. Very interesting. I think it, I think it's quite possible. We'll just take years before we know that this Apple head headset was worth it or

Cathy Gellis (00:15:29):
Not. That be, that may be an important thing. You can have sleeper hits. And the problem is, is in our culture, we don't have good ways of appreciating and measuring sleeper hits. But you can have things like, I'm thinking the movie Clue, which came out in the theaters and failed and it's

Leo Laporte (00:15:43):
Still sleeping as far as I can tell, is if there is people,

Cathy Gellis (00:15:46):
The movie Cluey people love it. Oh really? Yeah. People watch it cuz they glued toge, they split the endings and that just ended up a mess. But they glued the endings together, they

Leo Laporte (00:15:54):
Watch it cuz it's bad.

Cathy Gellis (00:15:56):
No clue is good. Oh, it's good. Okay. Yeah. It's got some fantastic performances in it. Highly recommended it.

Leo Laporte (00:16:01):
I gonna watch it tonight. Had no idea

Harry McCracken (00:16:02):
It turned into a thing.

Cathy Gellis (00:16:04):
Oh, I mean, it, it's has his legs, but it failed at the box office, but it was a quality product. So I think there's certain things where they come and they end up making a difference and sometimes they come, they make a difference, but they die. But something about their legacy lives on like

Leo Laporte (00:16:17):
The Lisa. Yeah.

Cathy Gellis (00:16:18):
Yeah. But sometimes the thing actually comes out and holds on and it doesn't quite hit the, you're not gonna measure it as a success because it's not an astronomical success, but it can hold on just enough that it can live on for years

Leo Laporte (00:16:30):
And decades. And this is critical. Amy Webb said this last week on the show, magic Leap had a vision for something that would take a decade to bring to fruition

Cathy Gellis (00:16:41):
Ahead of their time is a phrase that we use.

Leo Laporte (00:16:43):
Yeah. And, but the venture cap, the model of venture capital that they were using would never give them that much time. So they couldn't make, make it happen. Apple on the other hand, has, you know, is a almost 3 trillion company with billions in the bank. Many billions in the bank probably could, if it took a decade if they were really committed, could make something of this. I guess my next question though is what would, what, what makes this a success? I, I don't want, whatever it is, this, even if it were 1500 bucks, I already have one. What would it, what would it take for Apple's headset to be a success? Amanda, do you ever do VR gaming?

Amanda Silberling (00:17:21):
Yeah. I have a quest too because meadow was just like trying to like get them into journalists' hands at the time. Which is, it is ethical because you need to have one in order to report on it.

Leo Laporte (00:17:36):
Can't view anything without em. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

Amanda Silberling (00:17:38):
Yeah. I don't know, I, so great news for Mark Zuckerberg if Mark is out there, Hey, what's up? Hey. But I play Rex softball and today I overheard people while I was like running onto the field and as I'm like running, I heard someone talking about their Oculus and I was like, what? And then I was like, no, don't talk to them. You are playing softball right now. You are not at work <laugh>. But yeah, I mean I have one. I have and but

Leo Laporte (00:18:09):
What, but so you don't spend a lot of time in it, I'm guessing.

Amanda Silberling (00:18:13):
I No, I mean I did for a little bit. Exactly. Because when I,

Leo Laporte (00:18:18):
It, it's one of those,

Amanda Silberling (00:18:19):
When I initially got it like I like to do physical activity in places that are not my apartment. But in case you forgot, there was a major international event that made doing things outside of your apartment temporarily. Less possible. And the Supernatural app, which the meta acquisition of Within which makes Supernatural, which is like an exercise app that, I mean that was a whole legal situation, but eventually the acquisition got closed. But but yeah, supernatural was like great. And I really enjoyed Why'd

Leo Laporte (00:18:58):
You Stop?

Amanda Silberling (00:18:58):
I thought it was really fun.

Leo Laporte (00:19:00):
Why'd you stop?

Amanda Silberling (00:19:00):
But oh, I stopped because then the yoga studio near me open. Hmm. I was like, cool, I'm gonna go to yoga now and like not be looking at a screen because I think that's like one of my big problems with it is after work I don't wanna be looking at screens and there's a really big difference between like playing your switch or having a thing on your head. Yeah, I agree. But I don't know. I mean my whole take on all this, which this is like not a particularly intellectual take, I think this is incredibly obvious, but the idea of playing a video game in VR is really cool. The idea of taking a work meeting in VR is not <laugh> and all of the marketing around how you use these headsets has been really focused on like going to work and like doing meetings in vr. And I just don't really think we need to be in a VR meeting. Like you

Leo Laporte (00:19:51):
Just told us why when

Amanda Silberling (00:19:53):
It's fine.

Leo Laporte (00:19:53):
You just told us why cuz you don't want to, you've been looking at screens all day, you don't want to use it after work. So Meta probably observed that and said, well, we'll use it for work, but nobody wants to use it for work, work either. So why this better than it's not better. That's the problem

Cathy Gellis (00:20:05):
Else. Like, I mean, to some extent we're talking communi, computer mediated communication, but that could mean anything. Like right now we're having computer mediated communication and this is fine. I don't need to have a headset and some 3D graphic rendering of a physical environment. I mean, if we're not actually in the physical environment, that doesn't help me. It doesn't enhance the experience. I need to be able to hear you maybe be able to see facial recognition and just have a conversation, have the connection. And I don't see why adding this third dimensional immersive thing, even if it was rendered well, helps, like why That's the thing that we're just all desperate for. Cuz we can kind of connect via computers via flatter technology.

Leo Laporte (00:20:47):
And let's not forget that a certain percentage of the population around 11% gets nauseated

Cathy Gellis (00:20:52):
By, I think I would be in the, I haven't tried it, but I,

Leo Laporte (00:20:55):
No, I do's another reason to take it off after, after a little bit. Yeah.

Harry McCracken (00:20:59):
I have a question but I can't get it over my head and over my glasses. Yeah, we

Leo Laporte (00:21:02):
Wear glasses. So Harry assuming that this is the Lisa, when will it, and what will it look like when it becomes a success?

Harry McCracken (00:21:14):
Well, at $3,000, I assume that Apple is not expecting this to be like an enormous, this developer consumer product. It might be something that enough people buy that they learn. At first

Leo Laporte (00:21:25):
They talked about selling a million, which would be a $3 billion mark. Now they're saying half a million, still a big market. So

Harry McCracken (00:21:30):
It seems like the price has to come way, way down. And there's certainly a lot of reporting and they're working on cheaper versions.

Leo Laporte (00:21:36):
I think they couldn't make it cheaper. I think that's the problem.

Harry McCracken (00:21:39):
It also seems like well, smartphones got more economical once the right. The necessary technologies scaled up. Even

Leo Laporte (00:21:47):
In the first year, the iPhones price was cut significantly.

Harry McCracken (00:21:50):
Right. So that could happen. There, I mean probably the one thing we will learn when they have this ww d c keynote is whether they have a, any be more of a better vision than Mark Zuckerberg or anybody else for, for killer apps that do in indeed feel like they could be killer apps. Because other than supernatural that this whole world is very short on those things. And if nothing else, apple is good at kind of figuring out how to not just put technology out in the world, but kind of figure out the stack of, of hardware and software and services that adds up to something compelling. And you know, are are we gonna be blown away by it in the way that people were blown away by the iPhone on day one? It that seems unlikely, but it's at least conceivable that's some of the ideas out there will have more clarity after Apple shows them off. I

Leo Laporte (00:22:38):
Think Apple's getting a pass from a lot of us because they have in the past done that. I'm not convinced that's gonna happen this

Harry McCracken (00:22:45):
Time. It's really tough. I mean, I think the bar is higher than it was for the iPhone or the Apple Watch in a lot of ways.

Cathy Gellis (00:22:49):
I mean, I think Apple's got the money that it, it can spend it including on some things that don't work. And quite frankly, that's the point of if you've got all that cash spend it, that's kind of what you should do. I mean, you don't wanna be completely reckless, but on the other hand, they can afford to take chances and make longer term investments. So more power to them. Right. Although if we're gonna talk money for things and even like I smartphones coming down, I don't understand 1800 for a foldable pixel <laugh>. Like, I mean maybe that's the cost of production, but I don't understand cuz even the Samsung can flip and it, it's expensive at a thousand dollars. Like finally there's a pixel that's foldable and and it folds on the access that doesn't actually fit in your pocket. But that's, that's unreachable. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> And who wants to carry around that much cash value in your pocket

Harry McCracken (00:23:37):
And it has the equivalent of, of three very large screens. Cuz it has a, a normal large screen and then something double the size of a large screen. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:23:44):
The cheap Samsungs or cheaper Samsung is a flip. So it's a regular size phone when you open it up. This is more like the Samsung fold and it's the same price as as Samsung fold I'm sure. Oh, is it? Oh yeah. I think Samsung, I'm sure Google looked at Samsung said, whoa, how much can, how we charge? Oh, 1700 bucks. Okay. But I don't think anybody's gonna buy, I don't know why Google's releasing that. That's, that doesn't make any sense.

Cathy Gellis (00:24:05):
I mean they needed to produce something that flipped. I'm waiting for

Leo Laporte (00:24:08):
Something that's, phones are much better.

Cathy Gellis (00:24:09):
Yeah, like something cuz they got bigger and bigger and bigger and I was waiting for it to shrink and the really good way to shrink it is folded in half. And I'm looking at this, I'm like, oh, they have a fold to full phone. I look at it, I'm like, you're folding it on the wrong access <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:24:23):
You want the galaxy flip, which I think rumor has it, Samsung will announce the flip four. Is it next in a couple of months this summer? I guess it's the five Cause the four is out. This is what you want. It's cute. See it fold in half. It's the size of a pocket square. Yeah. I

Cathy Gellis (00:24:38):
Mean it falls the right way. I I covet it. I would rather have pixel for various reasons and I still don't wanna spend a thousand dollars on my cell phone. Yeah. like I thought a thousand was usurious and the only thing that'll happen is new generations will drive down the price of the old ones. But I also don't want an outdated phone because like some of the other considerations are like the security of the phones. And you kind of want something that's, you know, you

Leo Laporte (00:24:59):
Must be newer. You must be a con head a con. Do you know what I'm talking about? The, the TV show succession?

Cathy Gellis (00:25:05):
Oh, I haven't

Leo Laporte (00:25:06):
Seen him. Conor Roy says running for president.

Amanda Silberling (00:25:09):
I've only seen one season. <Laugh>. Well,

Leo Laporte (00:25:10):
All you need to know is Conor Roy, who had a interest in politics at a very young age, is running for president. His slogan is he's fighting against Youi and Onanism. So he's at least 50% in your, in your pocket in

Cathy Gellis (00:25:22):
Anyway. I'm sorry, I'm bringing up 1980s movies as my cultural

Leo Laporte (00:25:25):
Records. Yeah, you brought a clue. At least I have a more modern show. All right, Mo moving actually, Amanda, what is the timeframe for Instagram's Twitter clung.

Amanda Silberling (00:25:36):
They said that they're aiming for release this summer. So interesting. We'll see. But that'll be really interesting to keep an eye on and I will definitely be writing about it if that actually comes out this summer.

Leo Laporte (00:25:50):
You may think I would be against it. Cause I'm not a fan of centralized networks, but if it does in fact support activity pub or the fe averse I would be, I would, I think that's kind of the kind of thing that would be very helpful for Mastodon and another fe averse applications. If Fi Firefox is doing a Mastodon they haven't yet released it, but they're, they're planter the problem, I think this is good. If

Cathy Gellis (00:26:12):
They did a Microsoft Old School Microsoft of Embrace and Extend, well that would be bad problem. But on the, but you know, given the, you know, little bit of details we have now, I think there's a surprising amount of potential to actually produce something good and useful for the ecosystem. But I will be maybe surprised if they do manage to produce something good and healthy for the ecosystem and not accidentally screw everything up for themselves or anybody else. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:26:39):
Well, there we have it, ladies and gentlemen. VR headsets, AI and Twitter all in one segment. This is a first. We got it all outta the way. The Supreme Court is it's

Cathy Gellis (00:26:51):
Fastest show ever.

Leo Laporte (00:26:52):
<Laugh>. Yeah, we're done. Goodnight everybody. If

Amanda Silberling (00:26:54):
Anyone has a bingo card out there,

Leo Laporte (00:26:56):
We covered it all in one segment. We are gonna talk more about the Supreme Court decision. There's a lot more to talk about in just a bit. I really like having all three of you here though. This is great. Thank you Amanda for being on the show for the first time ever. Wonderful

Amanda Silberling (00:27:09):
To have you. Yeah, thanks for having me on a little screen, which makes me feel like a cyborg, but kind of in a cool way.

Leo Laporte (00:27:15):
Well, to be fair, you have the biggest head on the set right now, so that's okay. Yeah, that's okay. You win

Cathy Gellis (00:27:22):
<Laugh>. Well, so

Leo Laporte (00:27:23):
I might Well, yeah, she does

Cathy Gellis (00:27:24):
Just keep paying her compliments. It'll get bigger. Oh, no way.

Amanda Silberling (00:27:27):
I'm going the other way.

Leo Laporte (00:27:28):
<Laugh> techcrunch.com. She's a culture writer for TechCrunch. Of course. Kathy Gilles is here expert on many things. But we're gonna talk about the Supreme Court decisions, the Andy Warhol decision, and then the, the Tamana, which is the Twitter decision and the Google decision, all of which came down actually there was another Supreme Court decision that came down this week. Nine. Nothing we could talk about that you, this was a good week for you. Busy week. It

Cathy Gellis (00:27:54):
Was a weird week. Were you busy? It was a weird couple of days. Yeah. There was a conference where me and some other people who are in this space were at to even talk about these cases. Like there was a whole panel, what is going on at the Supreme Court. And basically we found out like 15 minutes before the panel began. So how time? It was actually really interesting cuz nobody had to feel, everyone felt bad cuz we really, nobody had had time to read anything, right? So,

Leo Laporte (00:28:18):
Well we thought, I think the general thinking was the Supreme Court's gonna defer this decision to the very end.

Cathy Gellis (00:28:22):
We were expecting this to be a late one, but also with a very different result potentially. But Warhol was a very late decision.

Leo Laporte (00:28:30):
And that must have been a gut punch for you.

Cathy Gellis (00:28:31):
Oh, it was terrible. That's not what you, I will explain why it was terrible. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:28:34):
Bad for fair use. We'll talk about that in just a little bit. Also, Harry McCracken, the Techn. It's great to have you. Number of people in the chat room said Twits over. No, just beginning. Just don't get your hope. Sorry.

Cathy Gellis (00:28:46):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:28:46):
Just beginning our show today, brought to you by Grammarly and something new from Grammarly. Grammarly Go. First of all, props to Grammarly. They're a Ukraine company. They are, it's been a very tough time for them, but they make one of the best product products out there. And I love Grammarly for that. They're from Ukraine. But also I love them because they do their core product in Lisp. I love them for that. And now there's Grammarly go where today we're working in communicating faster than ever. But a lot of times when you're sitting down to that blank page, it's tough, right? You feel a little stuck. Have you ever had that happen? Whether you're writing a thank you note or a business plan, then you're gonna like this new Grammarly go. I've been trying it in beta. This is Grammar Lee's new communication assistant powered by yes, the hot topic generative ai.

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Now it's like, well that was a little confusing. Let's break that into two sentences. Makes it clear. That's really good. That kind of refining what you write. Or if you're looking at that blank page going, eh, I don't know where to start. It's a great way to get started. And then the juices flow and you can write Grammarly, I love it.com/go. Give it a try today. All right. I've been putting it off. Should I put off a little more and talk about Montana? No, no actually I do wanna talk about Montana cuz Montana banned TikTok this week.

Cathy Gellis (00:31:58):
It thinks it did.

Leo Laporte (00:31:59):
Can't. I mean, first of all, there's a, first, there's a thing called the First Amendment right? There's

Cathy Gellis (00:32:03):
Also the practical implementation of this.

Leo Laporte (00:32:05):
How do you even do it? Right? so many states have already said, if you're a state employee, you can't use TikTok on your state provided phone. I don't have a problem with that. Military do it. Do, that's fine. You shouldn't be toing when you're working anyway.

Cathy Gellis (00:32:23):
I think that's harder to say because you get you know, should AOC not be TikTok? She talks as part of her work doing

Leo Laporte (00:32:30):
No, it's communication.

Cathy Gellis (00:32:31):
Yeah. So that's a good point. I think it's, it's less legally fraught to have such a rule, but it may not actually be good internal to have such a rule and possibly also therefore run into some constitutional problems as well. But in theory, state to state, like we're, we're governing our own property makes a little bit more sense legally. Right?

Leo Laporte (00:32:51):
Very hard for one state to say, okay, nobody in Montana can use TikTok. I don't even know how, where would you begin? And by the way, the fine is significance $10,000 per incident. So if a, so the first people would act, I guess would be Apple and Google, who would then say, are you in Montana while you can't get these a, the TikTok app on our phone.

Cathy Gellis (00:33:11):
I mean, one thing that has not happened, although I think there might be some runway before this actually kicks in is

Leo Laporte (00:33:17):
January 1st.

Cathy Gellis (00:33:17):
So you know, like how many people are there actually in Montana, if you, you know, Google has done some geo blocking before with stupid local jurisdictional rules that have tried to govern it in stupid ways. Spain Spain with turning off the news. So they might do that. But in the meantime, there's at least one legal challenge that's been filed so far.

Leo Laporte (00:33:39):
This is interesting cuz TikTok decided not to, to sue on its own behalf, but it's very clear what they probably did is they went to five Montana TikTok creators <laugh>, and said, you know, this is gonna be a problem, isn't it? So they have TikTok users and creators challenging it. That's a little, from a First Amendment point of view, that's probably more sensible. Yeah.

Cathy Gellis (00:34:03):
Well I I don't know if TikTok is officially sitting it out, but it's, it, to steer a corporate ship is hard. Right? and there's a lot of considerations that you have to do. I'd like to see companies be a lot more aggressive and challenge a lot of these state laws, but there's reasons why, and some not completely unreasonable reasons why they're more cautious in what they do. I don't know if they necessarily had any conversation with the, the talkers themselves. Maybe they did, maybe they didn't. But this, I looked at it briefly. I mean, one of the things you're always gonna have is, you know, standing questions of are these people affected in the way that they would even be able to challenge this? Although I think there's certainly a colorable argument, they

Leo Laporte (00:34:44):
Five Montana residents who quote, create published view, interact with and share videos on TikTok. Yeah, I mean that sounds like standing,

Cathy Gellis (00:34:51):
I think it gets in the door. And First Amendment standing is supposed to be more expansive anyway, so that does look like a, an injury that's likely to be accrued. And that's interesting that they're Montana resonance. So I don't know what will happen to it, but it certainly looks colorable.

Leo Laporte (00:35:06):
I, you know, my feeling is TikTok is watching and if they don't have to sue, they won't. It's interesting net choice who has sued in other First Amendment cases, I think in Texas and Florida is saying right now we don't have plans to sue. I think everybody's hoping the creators will step forward

Cathy Gellis (00:35:21):
And well, net choice is doing a California lawsuit. Net choice is has already filed a lawsuit challenging the age appropriate design law that California had. Good cuz

Leo Laporte (00:35:31):
That's a terrible

Cathy Gellis (00:35:31):
One. And I mean I think that's a thing of net choice as an entity is showing up of they're a traded association, but they're showing up and they're actually bringing some of these challenges. And the question is, will the rest of the industry, you know, back them up on this? Cuz I think it's, I think it's absolutely the right move. Like I think companies end up thinking like, well, can I survive this? But that's too short term in their thinking because maybe you can survive this particular piece of crap, but you can't survive the whole onslaught.

Leo Laporte (00:35:59):
So the state of Montana threw a spokesperson for the ag said that they want to use geofencing to <laugh> to prevent the use of TikTok in Montana build, build a wall that sounds like they have to kind build the great firewall of Montana. A quick firewall of Montana.

Cathy Gellis (00:36:20):
I mean, what, what, it's

Amanda Silberling (00:36:20):
So interesting too. I mean like Kathy, I would be interesting what you would have to say about this, but like another like state specific legal issue I've been following is certain states passing legislation that in order to access certain adult websites, you need to verify your age, but you're verifying your age through a government app. And this

Leo Laporte (00:36:46):
Is the California,

Amanda Silberling (00:36:46):
I think there's pretty California

Cathy Gellis (00:36:49):
Started Utah then doubled down on it,

Leo Laporte (00:36:51):
Right? And I, I think Louis, this

Amanda Silberling (00:36:53):
Is something

Leo Laporte (00:36:54):
UK is about to do and mm-hmm <affirmative> it, so

Amanda Silberling (00:36:57):
It seems like there's just a lot of legislation right now that's like very state specific regulating how people are using the internet and it's not gonna, I don't know, I just find that really interesting and kind of scary. But yeah, I feel like

Leo Laporte (00:37:12):
Not a lot of

Amanda Silberling (00:37:13):
This trying to regulate internet legislation. Is it

Leo Laporte (00:37:16):
Trying to regulate interstate commerce or? No,

Cathy Gellis (00:37:18):
There are so many problems with this. I mean there's the pure system amendment problem there. When you start to use the well actually the First Amendment problem also shows up in a couple of ways. One of which is well the imposition on the platforms and who the platforms can associate with and how, who they can speak to and what their user and who they can have their users.

Leo Laporte (00:37:37):
So their first amendment rights, so

Cathy Gellis (00:37:38):
Their first amendments, it's impinging on speakers because it's going to essentially keep them off the internet and it's impinging particularly on anonymous speakers because you don't get to speak anonymously if you have to prove yourself to people. Right. It starts to create privacy problems because now you've collecting all sorts of really private sensitive data. You might be, it's like you have

Leo Laporte (00:37:57):
To go in and get your porn license.

Cathy Gellis (00:37:59):
Yeah. And now you've got some Fourth Amendment problems. You might have some Fifth Amendment problems. I mean this is disastrous in every way you can look at it. And it's also like there's no way to run an inter commerce railroad like this because you can't, this is why we have a preemption clause in section two 30. It also tends to run straight into section two 30, but that was where section two 30 was starting to get weakened by courts who tended to see a lot more things percolating out of the state as being like, oh no, this isn't preempted, this isn't preempted. And I think, I think they're wrong. And I think the effect of that is going to be, you can see the harm of each state doing things cuz how do you deal with what Texas wants of internet platforms to do and what California wants. Although California's busy picking the same things that Utah wants. So it's all very confusing when

Leo Laporte (00:38:45):
Apple and Google have said through a trade group before this was ban was approved, that they did not think it possible to restrict access to an app to a single state. Like they didn't think there was a technical way to do

Harry McCracken (00:38:57):
That. It seems tough, I mean, but would we see less of this stuff on the state level if at the federal le level people have spent less time yapping and more time actually coming up with laws? If, if any laws make sense?

Cathy Gellis (00:39:11):
Well the problem is Congress is busy trying to also wreck the internet, but better that they wreck it at the federal level than they wreck it at the state level.

Leo Laporte (00:39:18):
It's wrecked for all of

Cathy Gellis (00:39:19):
Us. Yeah. I mean it's instead

Leo Laporte (00:39:20):
Of just Montanans.

Cathy Gellis (00:39:21):
Yeah. I mean cuz otherwise there's always gonna be a compliance issue. And what plat, what tech companies can't do, what platforms can't do is respond to one state and also all 50 states because it's even not only just the 50 states, if you start to allow state jurisdiction over the internet, then it's state and local, a municipality. And it's like, you know, you can't, you can't cabin this in because like Texas could have one rule and Austin could have another rule and this is not viable.

Leo Laporte (00:39:47):
Joe, Joe and I are a Discord makes a a a good point. And I don't know historically how long this has been going on, but it seems like lately anyway, a lot more laws are created as theater. Not with any intent of passing any constitutional review or getting past courts, but just because, well, we said it so you know, you you can trust us. We, we did the right thing. It feels like a lot of theatrics. It

Harry McCracken (00:40:11):
Feels very performative in performances.

Leo Laporte (00:40:13):
Yeah. Yeah.

Cathy Gellis (00:40:14):
I am not sure that sounds almost too benign. I mean, I think there's enough. I think

Leo Laporte (00:40:18):
It's worse

Cathy Gellis (00:40:19):
Than that. I think it's worse than that. But what's a little bit confusing is that, so I think from the red states, I mean if they're busy banning books, then they're gonna have to ban the internet too, because you haven't effectively like shut down kids' minds unless you take away all the stuff that they're reading. What it baffle boggles the mind though is what's coming out of Blue States. I don't understand what Governor Newsom is thinking in that. Like he basically produced just a slightly lighter version of what Utah ended up doing, what Texas ended up doing. And no

Leo Laporte (00:40:47):
One said Republicans had a monopoly on foolishness. It'd

Cathy Gellis (00:40:51):
Be nice if there was a political opposition that actually wanted to sort of say, wait, the, the, the attacks on the constitutional order is a problem. So our political platform will be not

Leo Laporte (00:40:59):
To do that. This is why I give money to the EF f you know, there are a lot of organ trade organizations that are, you know trying to do the right thing. Maybe not our members representative democracy,

Cathy Gellis (00:41:13):
But I think also they don't necessarily understand exactly what will

Leo Laporte (00:41:17):
Break. I think that's also

Cathy Gellis (00:41:18):
The case. I I think that's fundamentally true of every regulator that wants to speak to it, including members of Congress who are kind of like, something must be done and just have no idea that no, you're going to just make the problem you think you're fixing worse and they don't know. And what really bothers me is the ones who refuse to learn. Like, I mean, I listened to it's

Leo Laporte (00:41:38):
The but you, you said an interesting phrase, something must be done. That's what's really going on. We don't know how to do it. We don't know if we can do it, but something must be done.

Cathy Gellis (00:41:47):
I understand IAnd feel like we

Amanda Silberling (00:41:48):
See this happening with the Kids Online Safety Act where that was pretty much a direct response to the Facebook whistleblowers and the situation with like all these bombshell articles about Instagram being agent of depression and eating disorders. Young, young women and age girls. Yeah. Yeah. But then like, it's just like this same to the point of like theatricality, it's like yeah, if you say Kids Online safety act, no one's gonna be like, that's bad. But then when you think about it, and what this would do is like, like any situation where people are putting age checks and checking people's actual, like government identification in order to do anything on the internet, there are so many really scary implications of that. And no one's arguing against kids' safety. But the way that these these laws play out in practice, you can really tell that the people that are writing them don't know how the internet works. And, but they don't. To Kathy's point a bigger

Cathy Gellis (00:42:58):
Problem. Yeah.

Amanda Silberling (00:42:59):
There have been so many, like I've watched so many hearings over the last two or so years about how social media is making everyone depressed. And I think that is like something that's worth talking about. But nothing has even come of these hearings yet other than like some proposed legislations that won't really fix much. Each

Cathy Gellis (00:43:20):
Hearings are prepared.

Amanda Silberling (00:43:21):
They have so much time to learn about the internet,

Cathy Gellis (00:43:23):
But they're not learning. I mean, talk about the theatrics. Yeah. And they're not, these hearings are performative where people bring in speakers who can speak to their pre ordained biases

Leo Laporte (00:43:33):
Or worse they bring in somebody and then grandstand and don't let 'em speak. It's just an opportunity for a member of Congress to go on for his full 10 minutes. Yeah.

Cathy Gellis (00:43:41):
There's not a whole lot of rigorous inquiry going on here and there's not a whole lot of interest in rigorous inquiry. And then we get things that I'm, you know, to be political. I listen to like Senator Blumenthal talking about like, I've been trying for years to make changes to two 30 and now will finally be the time. It's like, no, the reason you've not been able to pull that off is cuz smart people have managed to stop you because it was a bad idea. It doesn't mean that the time will come where your good idea will survive. It will, it will still not be a good idea. It's

Leo Laporte (00:44:09):
A post sponsor with Marsha Blackburn. Dick Blumenthal of the kids.

Cathy Gellis (00:44:12):
It's Josh Hallway.

Leo Laporte (00:44:13):
I mean it's a, yeah. When you see Marco Rubio's name and right next to Amy Klobuchar or Hickenloopers, it's like, well, at least there's bipartisan support. I guess

Cathy Gellis (00:44:23):
I I have a teed post from January, 2001, I think, where it's deer section two 30 critics when Josh Hawley and, and Ted Cruz are your allies. And this is time to think again. Yeah. Because they know exactly why they want to get rid of this law and exactly what

Leo Laporte (00:44:38):
Advance. Well that's not, that's why it's bipartisan. They have different agendas, but the agendas happen to meet in the middle.

Cathy Gellis (00:44:43):
And and I listen to that hearing where Josh Hawley is smart and he knows that he's getting political support from Blumenthal for what he wants. Right. And I can listen to him kind of like, oh yes, I'm totally doing it to advance that woman's rights issue that you just were speaking of. And Blumenthal doesn't seem to understand that he's getting played

Leo Laporte (00:45:01):
Soy.

Harry McCracken (00:45:02):
It's all just a series of tubes you always

Leo Laporte (00:45:04):
Has. Yeah. Remember that. This is why we're all playing tears of the kingdom right now. Right Amanda? You're playing tears of the kingdom. I bet.

Amanda Silberling (00:45:12):
Oh my God. So this is you

Leo Laporte (00:45:16):
Have to, for your

Amanda Silberling (00:45:16):
Work. I'm a horrible confession,

Leo Laporte (00:45:17):
But Mom, I have to play Zelda for my work.

Cathy Gellis (00:45:20):
Wait, what's her confession? <Laugh>.

Amanda Silberling (00:45:22):
Tell, tell Matthew Panzano that right now. I'm just kidding. <Laugh>. But no, I mean like, so I have not finished Breath of the Wild. That is my big confession. The

Leo Laporte (00:45:32):
The predecessor.

Amanda Silberling (00:45:33):
I have not started Tears of the Kingdom

Leo Laporte (00:45:34):
Because it's the sequel. It's the same game. Yeah man, I just gonna tell you it's the same game, same place. You're still in high roll, you're still wandering around. You could play a both at the same

Amanda Silberling (00:45:46):
Time. I really should be playing it. I'm

Leo Laporte (00:45:48):
Not done yet. I

Amanda Silberling (00:45:48):
Don't know. Breath of the Wild, just,

Leo Laporte (00:45:51):
I'm not done. I'm not done with Animal Crossing New Horizons Eric Glider. I cannot play anything till I finish my animal Crossings down and then <laugh>.

Amanda Silberling (00:46:00):
Well, you can't ever finish it. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:46:02):
Shocks.

Harry McCracken (00:46:03):
I never finished games so I I didn't finish.

Harry McCracken (00:46:07):
Breath of the Wild and I am playing tears of the Kingdom despite that. Yeah.

Cathy Gellis (00:46:11):
Well I win cuz I'm not even, I you don't even know

Leo Laporte (00:46:13):
What we're talking about. 10 million copies sold in three days. The Switch itself is practically at the end of life.

Harry McCracken (00:46:22):
This. Yeah. And, and it's sales of new switches have, have been disappointing lately, but games for the switches people already have are still doing well.

Leo Laporte (00:46:31):
And many are saying this is the best game ever made. 10 out of 10 in many, in many cases. And

Amanda Silberling (00:46:37):
This was also the, the standard price for switch games that are like Pokemon or Zelda or like big franchises like that is $60. But this was the first time that they sold a game for $70 and it still sent 10, I mean, great financial decision for an Nintendo. They still sold an insane amount of copies. But

Leo Laporte (00:46:58):
To put this in perspective, breath of the Wild for Consumer,

Amanda Silberling (00:47:00):
A little concerning the

Leo Laporte (00:47:01):
Breath of the Wild only sold 30 million copies in its entire lifetime. You know, four year lifetime, three days, 10 million copies on Tears of the Kingdom. I imagine there'll be people going back and playing Breath of the Wild too.

Cathy Gellis (00:47:15):
I'd just like to know for the record, I had an Atari 800. I played video games, then <laugh>, I had Pacman, I did Caverns of Mars. We had breakout. I mean, I've got some cred, but like that what did you know got outta my system? What do I need this for now? <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:47:31):
All right, let's take

Harry McCracken (00:47:32):
A break. I'm playing those games too, by the way, on my Atari 800, which I love.

Leo Laporte (00:47:34):
Yeah. Oh three Atari people. That's great. That was my first computer was a 400.

Amanda Silberling (00:47:38):
My first console was What was your first Nintendo 64

Leo Laporte (00:47:42):
<Laugh>. Yeah. You're a, you're an N 64. You're a Mario kid. I bet you're gonna put I don't Did you go see the Mario movie? I

Amanda Silberling (00:47:49):
Didn't see the Target 800 came out.

Leo Laporte (00:47:51):
Oh, you don't even know. I

Amanda Silberling (00:47:52):
Have not, but I do wanna see it cuz I have heard that. It is good. I also think it's very funny that Mario and Luigi apparently are canonically from Flatbush, Brooklyn, which I'm just very happy to know what neighborhood of Brooklyn they live in. I don't, it just, I really wanted to know what I found out. Well, we

Cathy Gellis (00:48:10):
Played Donkey Kong where it came from. Like, like the whole like

Leo Laporte (00:48:14):
On a You mean in an arcade? In an arcade game with, with Sticks.

Cathy Gellis (00:48:19):
I think we had one for the Aari, but it wasn't as old as Pac that it

Leo Laporte (00:48:22):
Wasn't as good as the arcade version. Amanda, this came out before you were, I'm sorry to share this, this is before you were born, I mean

Amanda Silberling (00:48:28):
Oh yeah. No, I I literally just fact checked this. It was discontinued before I was born.

Leo Laporte (00:48:34):
Discontinued before you were born. That's

Cathy Gellis (00:48:37):
Like a lyric to a song. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:48:39):
<Laugh>.

Amanda Silberling (00:48:42):
The Atari 800 was discontinued before I was born. That's love. It's gonna write a poem right now. Yeah, yeah. Let's go.

Harry McCracken (00:48:47):
The attorney 400 was the first computer I bought with my own money about me. Leo.

Leo Laporte (00:48:50):
Me too. Me too. Cuz I was playing a lot of games in the arcade and I realized all these quarters I've just dropped. If I bought an Atari 400, I could play Battlezone to my heart's content

Harry McCracken (00:48:58):
And I still have my 400 and it's Do you my, my friend Benja Edward who works for ours, technic I recently repaired it for me.

Leo Laporte (00:49:05):
I'm so jealous.

Harry McCracken (00:49:06):
Ooh. The crummy keyboard stopped working and yeah, that's the worst key. He swapped in a replacement's. Got

Cathy Gellis (00:49:10):
Any, I think we have an 800, but it had a sticky select key. So I'm wondering if that can get fixed cuz I think we still have it. I bet

Leo Laporte (00:49:16):
You can. Yeah. Oh, I'm sad. I long ago got rid of all of those. Yeah. I'm sorry, Amanda. You have to be with all these old farts, but that's okay. That's

Amanda Silberling (00:49:25):
Life. No, I mean, I, I just had a birthday and I'm like, I don't know. I I know I'm young, but it's like every year closer I get to 30. I'm like, I know. What am I doing? I know

Leo Laporte (00:49:34):
Like, what am I doing?

Amanda Silberling (00:49:36):
I'm so I someday

Cathy Gellis (00:49:37):
You two can be on a show Waxing poetic about video games you played in your youth

Leo Laporte (00:49:41):
<Laugh>, but I'll be dead by then. I, I just

Amanda Silberling (00:49:44):
Exploit people to make me feel like I haven't aged.

Leo Laporte (00:49:48):
It's good. You feel young and that's all that matters. Yes. Thank you. What

Amanda Silberling (00:49:52):
Position? I'm very happy to be in this

Leo Laporte (00:49:53):
Company. <Laugh>, what position do you play in your softball league?

Amanda Silberling (00:49:57):
I play second base.

Cathy Gellis (00:49:59):
Nice. Oh, that's a good, that's a good position. That's a

Leo Laporte (00:50:01):
Nice, do you range the field? Yep. Do they still allow the shift in the, in softball <laugh>?

Amanda Silberling (00:50:07):
A little bit. I do tend to shift more closer to up the middle when there's a righty batter, which is often good job. Yeah, I You wanna get that? I, no, but then, but then the lefties they get me. But every time, yeah. My team is called the hok, which for those who don't know, is a Jewish cookie. And I am Jewish, but a prune.

Leo Laporte (00:50:28):
There are only three Jewish, Jewish cook people on the poppy seed. Yeah. Well,

Cathy Gellis (00:50:33):
Business now that I don't have section two 30 to work, worry about. I can complain about the new roles in Major League baseball, which just exercises me completely.

Leo Laporte (00:50:40):
When you play in the hamin, do you wear tricorn hats to match your

Amanda Silberling (00:50:45):
Le No, but I <laugh>, yes, sk I did just get a hat that, like a Jewish artist made that's like, it's just a hat that is embroidered and says Chen. Oh, wow. And, but unfortunately, I, I debuted it on the field today and I realized that when I run, it would fall off <laugh>. So I need to do a little bit of like, testing and like hat tightening before our next game. So that's what I'm doing outside of work. The

Cathy Gellis (00:51:13):
Aerodynamics of a regular baseball cap are not great. So I think they're supposed to fall

Leo Laporte (00:51:16):
Off before your time. Both of you probably. But the great Willie Mays used to wear a cap that was one size too big, so that when he made a running catch out in the outfield and his cap flew off, he looked much more dynamic. Ooh. He was quite, he was quite famous for that actually. And then he, maybe

Amanda Silberling (00:51:32):
That's what I'm trying

Leo Laporte (00:51:33):
To do. The bass, the famous basket catch. Let's take a little break. We'll come back with more with his sports adult group. But first <laugh>,

Cathy Gellis (00:51:41):
We're not playing the video games anymore. We're getting out and getting fresh air. First a

Amanda Silberling (00:51:45):
Word I'm doing both <laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:51:47):
Just open the window. That's fresh air. Ver a word from our sponsor, Noom. And I'm a big Noom fan. My wife Lisa, is a big Noom fan. I started it. I, I saw all those TV ads a couple of years ago. I said, you know, that looks like a good thing. Actually it took about 20 of 'em before. I said, that looks like a good thing. I should try it signed up. It's not a diet. I said, I'm gonna be doing Noom Lisa. And she said, you know what? I'm gonna be a good wife. I don't need to lose any weight, but I'm gonna do it with you. She has now lost and kept off about 12 pounds. I lost about 16 and kept it off. Actually I think it was closer to 20. I gained back a few of those, but I'm still 16 pounds down.

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We don't have the phone in front of us. We, we, we, we just ta close. Sometimes we close our eyes and taste the food. It makes such a difference. It's little things. So that's, now that's mine. Everybody's journey is different. Noom will give you daily lessons personalized to your goals, your needs. They use scientific principles like cognitive behavioral therapy, so you understand your relationship with food. Why you have cravings, why, why you can't seem to change what you're doing. But there's not a diet. It's nourishing, not restrictive. It focuses on progress, not perfection. You can have days off you can eat anything you want. I remember early on in Noom, I had a hot dog and I felt so guilty. I had my, I I messaged my coach, my noom coach, and I said, I had a hot dog. I'm sorry. She said, what are you talking about?

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There's no forbidden food. That's okay. That's okay. You choose your level of support. By the way, you can have that coach five minute daily check-ins. You can have personal coaching, you can have group. There's a group. You can, you can get as much or as little of the lessons as you want days off. Totally. Okay. Cuz progress is in a straight line. You just wanna do it day, you know, as you do it consistently. It's been a couple years now for Lisa and me, it's really amazing. Maintenance is even better because I've learned, I've internalized all the lessons. Right? And if you get off track, Noom gets you back on track. First time Nummers lose an average of 15 pounds in 16 weeks. 95% of customers say noom is a good long-term solution. Of course, your mileage may vary, but they are, that's based in science.

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They've published 50 scientific peer reviewed articles describing their methods and their effectiveness. So stop chasing health trends. Start building sustainable, healthy habits with noom s psychology based approach. I can tell you it works. Sign up for your trial today, Noom n o om.com/twit noom.com/twit. Check out noom s first ever book. It's out. Now, the Noom mindset might be a good way to start get the book and read about their psychology of behavior change. It explains how it all works, wherever books are sold. And don't forget to sign up for your trial at noom n o om.com/twit. It, it really, really works. And I love them. Thank you Noom, for supporting the show. All right. We gotta talk about the Supreme Court. I've been putting it off. It's like dessert. I've been like putting it <laugh>. That's dessert. So there were a number does Supreme Court what is it, second Tuesday in October. They, they, they meet in October, right? They do the arguments and then they think, and then the, the opinions start coming out.

Cathy Gellis (00:55:53):
I mean, in theory, they trail at some reasonable amount of time after you hear the oral argument. But this one they heard in October and there had been no opinion until May. And that was an unusual long time delay, I think. Yeah. Although everything about how this particular iteration of the court likes to do things is there's past practice and then there's this court. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:56:12):
We won't talk about the shadow docket. That's a whole that too. No, there matter entirely. Do you wanna start with we should with the Andy Warhol case? Yes. Well,

Cathy Gellis (00:56:21):
Do you wanna do the good news or the bad news first?

Leo Laporte (00:56:23):
Because the, well, let me, let's state the facts of the case. Okay.

Cathy Gellis (00:56:25):
Well, the Warhol is the all bad news case. The the other stuff on the two 30 front was the surprisingly good news case,

Leo Laporte (00:56:32):
Right? Yeah. Well, let's start with the bad news first. All

Cathy Gellis (00:56:34):
Right. Oh gosh.

Leo Laporte (00:56:35):
So photographer Lynn Goldsmith in 1981 took a picture of Prince. Yes. That's what's on the left. If you're watching the video. Andy Warhol on a commission from

Cathy Gellis (00:56:46):
Variety, I think, I

Leo Laporte (00:56:47):
Can't remember. It was a Conde Nast publication.

Cathy Gellis (00:56:50):
So Conde Nast ended up later, and I don't know if there Oh, later.

Cathy Gellis (00:56:53):
Okay. but I don't know if there's any

Leo Laporte (00:56:54):
For Vanity Fair later. Anyway, they commissioned these 16 silkscreen images clearly taken from the original Lynn Goldsmith photograph and the position of Andy Warhol's estate was, and your position too, right? You wrote an amicus brief for this one.

Cathy Gellis (00:57:12):
So they, they, it got light. So Andy Warhol made those silk screen adaptations of the Goldsmith photo while he was alive at some point while he was alive. And I think he died in 1987. It's

Leo Laporte (00:57:23):
Hard to make him when you're not alive. Let's, let's just say that and is, I'll stipulate that, your

Cathy Gellis (00:57:27):
Honor, that is largely overlooked in this decision. And it sort of should matter. And I don't mean sort of it should have mattered. So essentially they describe briefly the successor and interest to him, which was he had a foundation, the Andrew Warhol Foundation I guess basically owns the copyrights in his works. And he was approached by Conde Nas because Prince now had died. And they wanted to do an article about him. And they had a choice of like, well what, well, when

Leo Laporte (00:57:55):
You said he was alive, you didn't mean Andy Warhol, you meant Prince.

Cathy Gellis (00:57:59):
Sorry. No, Andy Warhol. Okay. A lot of

Leo Laporte (00:58:01):
People. I was confused. I thought she said Andy Warhol made these prints while he was alive. You meant while Prince was

Cathy Gellis (00:58:05):
Alive. No, Andy Warhol, when he was alive, made his own works. He did not make them after he died. And that, that's, that makes sense. Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:58:12):
That's how it's usually done. The Prince

Cathy Gellis (00:58:14):
Also was alive <laugh> because he made the print. It's also confusing cuz there's Prince, the Prince Prince, he made the silk screens. We'll go with that. Yes. He made the silk

Leo Laporte (00:58:23):
Screen. The images. Yes,

Cathy Gellis (00:58:24):
He made the images and while he was alive and they got published somewhere, but then,

Leo Laporte (00:58:28):
And everything was okay then

Cathy Gellis (00:58:29):
And everything apparently was okay.

Leo Laporte (00:58:30):
Nobody complained later. Nobody, Goldsmith didn't complain. Nobody complained. Right.

Cathy Gellis (00:58:34):
Then 20 years after, ah, Warhol died prince now died. And so Conde Nast wanted to illustrate the article they had on Prince and they went to the Andy Warhol Foundation, which now was the successor in interest for the rights in Andy Warhol's works. And they said, can we license that? And it, and the, the foundation said, great, give us $10,000, I think. And then Goldsmith found out about this and started to threaten them in some way. And so the foundation sued for declaratory judgment to say, well, this should be fair use, so you shouldn't have a leg to stand on and let's just have the courts rule on this now. And the district court said, you're right, it's fair use nothing to see here. And then the second Circuit undid that in a decision that really abandoned what the Supreme Court had said in the Campbell versus AK Rose Case, which was the one where two live crew had

Leo Laporte (00:59:32):
Had sampled the music,

Cathy Gellis (00:59:34):
Sat satirized the op pretty woman, Roy Orbis. Ah,

Leo Laporte (00:59:39):
By the way, that word satirizes.

Cathy Gellis (00:59:40):
Yeah. I may actually be saying it wrong, whether it's satirize or parody, but I think it's all dummy either way you slice it. So I hate to give it that dignity.

Leo Laporte (00:59:46):
If they just used it in the production, that wouldn't be fair use. But if they were satirizing or parodying it, like weird, Al does, that would be fair use. But only <laugh> because I, the only reason I say this is cuz we are always thinking about fair use here. Only if it paros the original creator of it.

Cathy Gellis (01:00:08):
So it be, you

Leo Laporte (01:00:08):
Can't use you can't use it to make another a separate. It's stupid.

Cathy Gellis (01:00:14):
Well, who, well, no, I mean you're, it's also too hard to figure out what the court just said. But in theory, the idea is in the fair u in the statute, it talks about one of the things that makes things more likely to be fair uses is if it's commentary. And so, right. The interpretation is okay, if you're commenting on the original right, you gotta be able to use the original. So that's more likely. That's yes, it is less clear whether commenting on anything else would be fair use. And this decision seems to drive a stick through the heart of the idea that you could comment on anything else using a previously existing work. But that's going to fall apart in practice and be awfully chilling for anybody who the expression has

Leo Laporte (01:00:51):
Me, let me, let me just, just, we're using this phrase, I want to explain what it is so people understand what the phrase fair use is. It is not a law, but it's a, it's a doctrine, right? It's a, it's a, it's a point of view that says you can, in a limited fashion use somebody else's copyrighted material without permission providing it satisfies one of, what is it? It is

Cathy Gellis (01:01:19):
Part of the law.

Leo Laporte (01:01:20):
It is in the law.

Cathy Gellis (01:01:21):
It is in the law. Oh, so before the 1917

Leo Laporte (01:01:23):
USC 1 0 7 Yeah,

Cathy Gellis (01:01:25):
Before the 1976 act, it was interpreted to be part of the law.

Leo Laporte (01:01:30):
Okay. It's now in 76 of became

Cathy Gellis (01:01:32):
Law. But they codified it. They used a lot of what the judges were, the factors the judges were using to consider whether something was fair use or not. And then they baked them into, they baked them into the statute with the 1976 act, which is the basically what we're using now. And so fair use is there, it is part of the law. And it inherently, so what's in the law is if you have a copyright there's some exclusive rights you get as part of a copyright subject to other limitations, including the ones articulated in in 1 0 7. And 1 0 7 talks about fair use. So fair use and courts go back and forth with good language or bad language. But that tho in there is a take on this that your copyright is inherently limited by as things that the public can still do.

Leo Laporte (01:02:17):
And there's reasons for that. It's in society's interest. There's two interests, conflicting interests. The creator of the original work has an interest in protecting their rights so they can sell it and, and you know, they've made it so they own it, but society also has a right that it may be reused in other fashion. I mean you know, we wouldn't have Cinderella if Grimm's fairytales didn't create that notion. The

Cathy Gellis (01:02:43):
Whole point to have copyright at all is we want more stuff. And so we think we have to protect the protect

Leo Laporte (01:02:51):
Creators a

Cathy Gellis (01:02:51):
Little bit, protect creators a little bit so that they will produce the stuff that we need. But then, but now we've taken the stuff away. Like, what's the point? You're not, so the question is what's the tipping point? What does the law need to do? So we do get more stuff.

Leo Laporte (01:03:02):
Society's interest is that well we use all of this stuff to create new stuff. Well, we want, by the way, this is gonna become important Yeah. In, in ar artificial intelligence. Mm-Hmm. Later. But anyway, this is why it's a big deal. So, so Goldsmith's able to take this photo of Prince and have some rights. In fact, she did license it for 400 bucks to Vanity Fair originally, but then they reused it 20 years later when Prince died. They reused the Andy Warhol things and, and Goldsmith said, you didn't pay for that. I still have the rights to it. So the real question was, is this Andy Warhol creation protected by fair use?

Cathy Gellis (01:03:44):
And the court really botched that. And I think the reason that they botched it, well there were a couple, that's a weird thing why they botched it. But the big fundamental thing that I think they got wrong, and I've not seen this discussed com in many other quarters. So other people may disagree, but they ended up focusing on license, the, the later license to Conde Nast as the use. But it wasn't the use of the original fair use applies to the use of the original, which is what Andy Warhol himself did, I guess in the 1980s when he made the adaptation of the Goldsmith picture. He used it in a way to say something new about Prince. And then he goes and he dies and he's dead for 20 years. And then later the party that ends up owning the copyrights in his new works, the Under

Leo Laporte (01:04:31):
Waroff Foundation,

Cathy Gellis (01:04:32):
Start to use his works. And they judged fair use based on a use of his work and construed it to be a use of the original. And I think that burned down an awful lot. And I think that's a really big deal. And I think it's a really big deal that will blow up on copyright owners because they are a copyright owner in his subsequent work and sleeping on something that they own they think is fine. And lately and later they go on to actually exploit the copyright in something they think they own. And then they're gonna be called on the carpet to say that the thing you thought you owned actually turns out, I guess to be infringing. And now I think it leaves the question of, well then are they liable for infringement to Goldsmith? Does Goldsmith inherently own the work? Because even the court leaves the door open to the fact that Warhol himself, when he made that, that adaptation may have, that may have actually been fair use for whatever was filling his mind about what his motivation was like. This is not a sustainable rubric for under understanding

Leo Laporte (01:05:32):
These things. So I'm

Cathy Gellis (01:05:33):
Confused. So is the court

Leo Laporte (01:05:34):
<Laugh>, so there's a picture mm-hmm. <Affirmative> Goldsmith owns the rights that picture Andy Warhol makes those pic those

Cathy Gellis (01:05:43):
He adapts the picture. Adapts

Leo Laporte (01:05:44):
It. Yeah, that's okay. According to the court,

Cathy Gellis (01:05:47):
It could be according to the court

Leo Laporte (01:05:48):
Because that's transformative

Cathy Gellis (01:05:51):
As they ran their four factor analysis test, which is the, the things that courts used to use that's now in, in the statute, according as the court did it, it said, well, based on facts that are not present here Yeah. He still could be considered fair use.

Leo Laporte (01:06:03):
It's fair use cuz it's transformative.

Cathy Gellis (01:06:05):
It could be. So who

Leo Laporte (01:06:06):
Is it Fall? So when, so Goldsmith sued the Andy Warhol Foundation mm-hmm. <Affirmative> over the publishing of this, these pictures in Vanity Fair,

Cathy Gellis (01:06:16):
The licensing of the Warhol version for Vanity

Leo Laporte (01:06:19):
Fair. So her contention was, well Andy could make these pictures, but the Andy Warhol Foundation may not license them.

Cathy Gellis (01:06:26):
Apparently, somehow that was different.

Leo Laporte (01:06:29):
Okay. And the court agreed.

Cathy Gellis (01:06:31):
And the court agreed.

Leo Laporte (01:06:32):
So the court isn't saying you can't make transformative works of somebody's photograph, but you can't license it.

Cathy Gellis (01:06:39):
I mean, it's very strange what the court is doing. I mean, let's say it, I think there's a huge fundamental problem with the way the court ends up viewing the term use and where the fair use is because it's really about the copier's use. And this idea that the Warhol Foundation was somehow the copier, when they didn't make the work, they just ended up owning the rights of the work that Warhol made. So Warhol is the person who made the use of the original and arguably fairly because he used it to say something else. So I think by breaking it down, you break the sustainability of copyright law, including for copyright holders. But it was also done. And the other really toxic thing about this decision is this idea of, well how dare you make money from it? That, that when they ran the four factor test about commerciality, it really just, it just basically meant that it, it resulted in if you make a fair use for free, you're fine <laugh>, but the thing, but if you wanna make money from it, you're not fine. But that matters

Leo Laporte (01:07:36):
Because what Photo Myer wrote, she said Goldsmith's original photograph of Prince and the Andy Warhol foundation's copying use of that photograph in an image shares substantially the same pur purpose and the use of is of a commercial nature.

Cathy Gellis (01:07:51):
Because it was like, oh, you're, you're just making pictures of Prince to license to a magazine as if these are both two same things.

Leo Laporte (01:07:56):
But Warhol did not make that picture to license to a magazine.

Cathy Gellis (01:07:59):
No. So somehow his intent 20 years later is, was not

Leo Laporte (01:08:02):
Commercial,

Cathy Gellis (01:08:02):
Is construed to now be the Warhol foundations. None of this makes sense temporarily. But the other thing, and actually I need to criticize Kagan who wrote a really scathing and correct Ascend. I, there's 87 of this PDF that got produced by the court. I did a search for First Amendment and I've also read it. I don't think the term shows up at all. And the really important thing about like what is the goals and purpose of copyright? We're trying to stimulate the creative, the creation of more of this stuff. But part of the reason we have fair use is because it is the codification of the First Amendment interest. Because what are we doing with exclusive rights? Taking away what the public can do, but essentially impinging on expression. And that's gotta, the first amendment still exists even in the wake of copyright. And there's other Supreme Court precedent that talks about how fair uses of vindication of the free expression values that the First Amendment is making sure that Congress doesn't get to step on and they're stepping on it. Because now all of a sudden, if you want to make subsequent expression that uses something else that came before you're gonna be in trouble. Especially if you wanna monetize it. And there's nothing in the First Amendment that says you don't get to make money off of your expression because I'm something you have to because it's the only way you're gonna keep the lights on. This is so

Leo Laporte (01:09:10):
Justice Kagan and Chief Justice John Roberts were the two dissenters. Right. She said it will stifle creativity of every sort. It will impede new art and music and literature. It will thwart the expression of new ideas and the attainment of new knowledge. It will make our world poorer. That's

Cathy Gellis (01:09:28):
Accurate. Absolutely. Right. And she, and I don't understand why Justice Sotomayor, who normally is one of my favorite justices, who normally sees things really clearly in all their implications, is so blind to this. And then, and it

Leo Laporte (01:09:43):
Seems to be the difference is this commercial use,

Cathy Gellis (01:09:45):
I mean that seems to be the thing, the the, the photographers. The photographers, like I made a picture and I didn't get to license it the second time around because it was a second picture that used mine. So I lost a market opportunity and that was not fair. And that's basically what the court is like. You're right, that's

Leo Laporte (01:10:01):
One of the four tests, right? Is it doesn't that the derivative work doesn't impinge on your market opportunity.

Cathy Gellis (01:10:07):
It's not the way it's phrased. And so, but it's part of the problem. This case was like what are the four factors say and what do they end up meaning? Because commercial, the effect on the commercial market of the of the original work matters for the inquiry. But the degree it's supposed to matter is as Kagan pointed out. And the foundation would point out it's not supposed to eat the hole. Because the first factor is about did it trans, was it transformative? Did it bring something new to the table? A new message? And what Kagan is, is screaming at so de Moor about is like, of course it brought something new. So when Conde Nast had a choice about what image to run to illustrate they

Leo Laporte (01:10:47):
Wanted the new

Cathy Gellis (01:10:47):
One, they wanted the new one. Not because they didn't want

Leo Laporte (01:10:49):
The photos,

Cathy Gellis (01:10:49):
Because they say different things. They, they illustrate well prince the artist in a very different way. It

Leo Laporte (01:10:56):
Is the case that the first test, and this is from 17 USC 1 0 7, determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is fair use the factors to be considered shall include, doesn't mean limited to right. But shall include the purpose and character of the use, including weather such uses of commercial nature. I mean it does say that.

Cathy Gellis (01:11:18):
It does say that. And what this court has done is interpreted it in a way where it just eats the hole and shuts everything down. It also makes me wonder what happens to the author of an original work who made it with no intention to modify it, is all of a sudden their copyright weaker than somebody who produced a work to modify it. Court doesn't answer that question. Interesting. I mean there's a whole lot of like hand waving over some really significant issues that are not addressed by this court. I don't

Leo Laporte (01:11:44):
Understand how sweeping was this decision.

Cathy Gellis (01:11:45):
So we're not entirely sure. This may be a decision that is so bad, it might end up being enough. It's not precedent. It's not because no, it is a precedent, but it may end up being so weird that basically like everybody just ignores it and we carry on with stuff as we did. So that's one pollyannaish take. I've seen some of my friends who, you know, try to advocate for fair uses and things like that talk about how well it's kind of rested on its facts and it's more narrow that, you know, commerciality is an important thing. And so that will in theory help a lot of the more non-profit uses that don't wanna get obliterated by litigation. That if you take the money out of the equation, in theory this core, this decision doesn't really hurt them. I just think it makes such a mess out of everything doctrinally that we are all in trouble including the copyright holders. So

Leo Laporte (01:12:33):
This is kind of like, okay, let's say, so Michael Jackson did a song called Bad. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> Weird. Al Yankovic did a derivative work of it called Fat. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>, which is fair use actually. He, he got permission from Michael Jackson.

Cathy Gellis (01:12:47):
He tends to get permission,

Leo Laporte (01:12:48):
But that he didn't have to. That's probably fair use

Cathy Gellis (01:12:51):
Probably. He's, he's never litigated it. Okay. He doesn't litigate it. He had one song I think where he didn't get the permission. Then's say they got mad at him so he felt

Leo Laporte (01:12:59):
Bad. Let's say then I played bad on the show to or rather Fat on the show to talk about weight loss. Let's say I played it in the Numad. Now it would make sense if Weird Al sued me cuz that was his song I was using. But if the Michael Jackson estate sued me saying, well that derivative work was based on bad, so we, you screwed us. But I wasn't using it to illustrate bad, I was using to illustrate fat is this kind of analogous to what we just saw. And by the way, I'm doing it commercially cuz I sell ads. I'm, it's for an ad.

Cathy Gellis (01:13:33):
I think the upshot to this decision is that could be a problem. And I don't think that's the way to copyrights. It's

Leo Laporte (01:13:40):
A weird, weird problem.

Cathy Gellis (01:13:41):
It's a weird problem. And I don't think the court addresses it. I think the court creates that problem. And I don't think that's a vector of litigation liability that's necessarily existed before where we've really had to contend with it. I mean, we're always in a problem of did you play the song and did that in French on the copyright based in the song. But I think what they're basically saying is, yeah, I think that's actually a really good analogy of what they've just set up.

Leo Laporte (01:14:03):
Even the original work has, has some

Cathy Gellis (01:14:05):
Rights. The Michael Jackson copyright holder could come after you for doing, for having played a

Leo Laporte (01:14:10):
Derivative work, a derivative

Cathy Gellis (01:14:11):
Work. Because that may have been fair use in that context, but it's not fair use in the context. Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:14:15):
Cause I'm doing it commercially now.

Cathy Gellis (01:14:17):
And and that's going to not help your for factor analysis. But that because you used the derivative that the cop, the copyright holder in the original has some cause of action. I guess

Leo Laporte (01:14:26):
That's, that's the same thing that happened just now.

Cathy Gellis (01:14:28):
I think that's, and I don't think it's supposed to work that way.

Leo Laporte (01:14:31):
That's very interesting. Yeah.

Harry McCracken (01:14:32):
I've heard a theory that with this case there might be have been a factor of kind of like modern art. My kid could have done that. Which kind of, well

Leo Laporte (01:14:43):
That's the

Harry McCracken (01:14:43):
Question.

Leo Laporte (01:14:44):
Did they accept that that was a derivative work that any war did? They didn't accept that Eddie Warhol's work was fair use. Right. That his work itself was fair use.

Cathy Gellis (01:14:54):
They, they, I think they said it could be. I mean, and in theory that wasn't necessarily the facts brought to the case. They weren't talking about what Warhol did to the original cuz that wasn't what the litigation, well it ended up strange somehow the, it should have been maybe what the litigation was about, but somehow it ended up not being what the litigation was out about by the time it ended up at the Supreme Court. I'm wondering how this happened. And it seems like we, the court got so fixated on the four factors and how it wanted to interpret the commerciality aspect of it that they just got so lost in the forest factors that they lost the forest for the trees in terms of what is actually going on here and what is the implication.

Leo Laporte (01:15:30):
So unfortunately what they've done is they've really muddied the whole concept.

Cathy Gellis (01:15:33):
I think they've muddied things in a really disastrous way because somebody owns those weird al copyrights and I don't think they're gonna be happy to know that they might be in trouble based on issues raised by whoever he parodied in the first place. Right. And I think he, I think that's a vector of attack that this, this decision sets up.

Leo Laporte (01:15:50):
That's really it. I

Amanda Silberling (01:15:51):
Also think it's really interesting to think about how this is gonna have implications in tech because I mean, what's gonna happen with all of these like ai, Drake voice situations or I've written about fair use and copyright law a little bit in the context of fan communities. Like there was a Bridger Tin musical and

Leo Laporte (01:16:16):
That's right, they got shut down. That was on TikTok. Yeah.

Amanda Silberling (01:16:19):
Yeah. But that actually, so I had written about the case when Netflix had sued the people that created the Bridgeton musical, which was basically just like these two songwriters on TikTok writing songs like in real time on the app. And then they made an album and then the album. So cool. One a Grammy I believe. Yes. But I think they settled the case because, I mean, I might be wrong, but the last time I looked at it, I think they settled the case. But there are a lot of precedents or there, or there's a lot of like conversation about this in the context of like fan fiction where archive of Our Own, which is like a really big fan fiction website. They literally were like created in tandem with copyright lawyers to figure out like, how can we protect 16 year writing about like whatever book they're interested in when it's like, like you can't even link to a Venmo or like a coffee on a oh three because, so they Netflix are so afraid of getting sued.

Leo Laporte (01:17:23):
Netflix, Netflix settled. Which, so it really, we don't know what happened and the court never decided it got to decide on this. Yeah. Netflix settled, but they were, yeah. And also that's a really ING case.

Amanda Silberling (01:17:36):
And I think similarly with what we were talking about with government officials making legislation about the internet when they don't really know how the internet works. I also feel like that happens with art to an extent where like you could write a dissertation on whether or not this Andy Warhol work is like just copying or if it's an original work. And I mean, think,

Leo Laporte (01:18:07):
But what the court court wasn't really thinking about that, that wasn't really the issue was whether Andy's work was derivative or not.

Cathy Gellis (01:18:14):
They were thinking about it so focused on the photographer that she took a picture to be licensed in a magazine. She was putting her product in the, to be licensed to a magazine market space and a magazine comes along, wants a picture of exactly the same thing that she had taken a picture of. And the court was deeply offended that the subsequent work could somehow take that market opportunity from her because the court just treated them as equivalence and Kagan and the Dissen started screaming at the majority of like, they're not

Leo Laporte (01:18:42):
Equivalent Mr. Driven. And similarly Netflix

Cathy Gellis (01:18:45):
That said different things.

Leo Laporte (01:18:46):
Netflix loved the, the, the Bridgeton parody when it was on TikTok, but it wasn't until they went the Kimmel Center. It wasn't until they went to Yeah. The Kennedy Center and had a paying a ticket price for a paying concert that Netflix said. They said they crossed the line that they had tried to establish with Barlow and bear the, the creators of the the, because Netflix has its own Bridgeton experience. And so in the minds of Bridgeton fans, there was a confusion between the derivative work and the original

Cathy Gellis (01:19:23):
Work. So one other thing that ends up happening in this space is there's other things that can go wrong, like passing off or rights of publicity issues. Like there's other things that sort of offend us as like, wait, maybe that isn't a thing that should happen, but it isn't copyright that solves that problem. It is other legal doctrines and other legal rights that might solve the problem. And we tend to just throw it all under copyright, like don't let copyright fix it, but it ends up contorting copyright. So it stops doing what it's supposed to do. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:19:51):
We need a public space. We need a public domain, a a town square where, where all ideas go and can be reworked because that's how creativity happens. I

Cathy Gellis (01:20:00):
Mean, the Kagan is pointing out in the dissent that we've really impinged on that though. Like everybody, we already had to look over our shoulder where the joke was fair use is the right to hire a lawyer. Like there was already a lot of chilling. There is this decision would appear to produce more chilling.

Leo Laporte (01:20:16):
It kills the commons.

Cathy Gellis (01:20:17):
And I, and I'm thinking about, you know, I haven't seen a whole lot of people make the point that I just made. So stay tuned till next week where, you know, there's, we can see if people take issue with it, but I think it's actually the upshot and that hurts copyright holders. So even if you buy the idea that copyright holders should have more and stronger rights, I think it just weakened them.

Leo Laporte (01:20:34):
That's really an interesting side effect that on I

Cathy Gellis (01:20:37):
I it makes me wonder, I must be wrong because I can't believe nobody noticed <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:20:42):
Well, it was bad enough on the face of it. They didn't even need to dig, dig any deeper. Yeah. you know, there is an absolute chilling effect. Youtube is very much a part of that. We are very, we can't do a lot of the things that I think are, as a news organization are clearly protected by fair use because we'll get, rightly or wrongly we'll get a DMC takedown on YouTube and then we lose those views

Cathy Gellis (01:21:05):
And there's first Amendment implications of it. You're trying to do expression that normally the First Amendment should protect. So why does copyright get to say no to it? Right. And you have to be really careful about what copyright says no to because of the First Amendment. And that's what fair use is supposed to be there to make sure it doesn't say no to too

Leo Laporte (01:21:21):
Much. I guess my point is it maybe we would win in court, we could probably defend it, maybe court. Right?

Cathy Gellis (01:21:26):
The retire a lawyer,

Leo Laporte (01:21:27):
It doesn't matter because the it's too late. Yeah. By then, we've already lost any commercial value to the show. So I, the chilling effect is just taking us down for any length of time. Yeah. So we don't even dare risk that. Not because we're worried about court, we might win in court. Right.

Cathy Gellis (01:21:43):
Well we don't wanna pay those lawyers,

Leo Laporte (01:21:45):
But we can't. Yeah. But well even if, even if I wanted to pay the lawyers the com the value of the show is gone after a few days. So by simply, by virtue, yeah. You have the right to appeal. But by virtue of taking it down, and they do, by the way you know, content ID takes stuff down immediately. Cuz it's automated and yeah, we can appeal. But if it's gone for five days, we've lost the value anyway. So this is the problem we're in right now. And I, you know, I I don't know what the answer is to it except,

Cathy Gellis (01:22:14):
Well not this, but the problem is there's a whole lot of people on team give more to the copyright holders, give more to the copyright holders. That's not good for them people on, I think it's not good for them. I think this case has just created a very real problem for them. Yeah. But you know, the reason that there's people like me and EF f and Public Knowledge that have been pointing out like you have to protect, protect fair use is because ultimately, you know, there's other people expressing stuff and they need to be able to, and that we've accidentally untuned copyright law that it's saying no to expression. But the whole point of copyright law is to incentivize this expression. How are you incentivizing something that you're chilling with the exact same rules that you're doing? You've gotta tune it better or also there's just no point in having it.

Leo Laporte (01:22:54):
So that was the bad news.

Cathy Gellis (01:22:56):
That was the bad news. Also, I feel like nobody on the Supreme Court actually read my amicus brief because I made these points very clearly <laugh>, very capably, and they didn't show up anywhere. And I'm really alarmed that the words First Amendment did not show up in any of the eighties. Seven

Leo Laporte (01:23:09):
Pages. Even just Kagan and Roberts didn't

Cathy Gellis (01:23:11):
Even, they didn't. And I think it would've helped 'em possibly win their argument because ultimately they were kind of talking about the effects, like the First Amendment value in terms of the expression was gonna foster. But I think they really needed to doctrinally say this, and we Ms. Justice Breyer on the court because he actually understood these issues. And he had written really important dissents and some earlier for fair earlier copyright decisions at the court where he talked about the dance that the copyright law needs to do with the First Amendment, which interestingly, justice Alito signed onto one of them and now he signed onto the Sotomayor majority. So I don't know what he's thinking these days.

Leo Laporte (01:23:47):
There were two other cases, kind of interlinked cases that the Supreme Court took. And we talked a lot about it after oral arguments. Gonzal, I think you were on with us after oral arguments mm-hmm. <Affirmative> because you were in the court during oral arguments. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, which must have been an interesting thing. This, there were two, two days in a row. They really were the similar case that for some reason they separated into two different

Cathy Gellis (01:24:08):
Cases, similar fact patterns. Yeah. They were different cases brought by different plaintiffs that had different cases that came out of the Ninth Circuit. So they

Leo Laporte (01:24:14):
Had to separate 'em.

Cathy Gellis (01:24:16):
Well, they were two separate things and the ninth Circuit kind of ruled on them together. And then when the cert petitions were fi filed, Gonzalez I think was the one that had the original cert petition, and then the, and then Twitter said, we're gonna do a conditional one where if you grant Gonzalez, please do our case too. Ah,

Leo Laporte (01:24:34):
So Gonzalez versus Google and Twitter versus Tamana, in both cases a terrorist act the family of a victim sued the social media trying to hold them liable for the attacks because social media allowed terrorist organizations to have accounts on either in the case of YouTube in case of Google was YouTube and in case of Twitter was Twitter. And that, that somehow that meant they were liable for

Cathy Gellis (01:25:02):
Yeah. It was all a little vague than that. And it, it depended also on which case. But the, the general thing is terrorists, u terrorists do bad things and terrorists are also using the internet. So both, so the internet were built on the theories of internet is being used by terrorists. So therefore internet must be liable in some way for what the terrorists are doing. And

Leo Laporte (01:25:19):
Historically, and we've celebrated this many times, the internet is protected by section two 30 of the, of is of the D M C A or the

Cathy Gellis (01:25:29):
Communications thesis. I always get

Leo Laporte (01:25:30):
It wrong, c d a saying that we're not li you know, you just can't be held liable for that. Right. Is this a So now the Supreme Court, by the way took the side of section two 30.

Cathy Gellis (01:25:45):
They avoided it, but they avoided it in a way that may actually be better. So

Leo Laporte (01:25:50):
They punted <laugh>. Well

Cathy Gellis (01:25:52):
They punted, but they did better than punting. Okay. This was actually sort of I don't know if I wanna say this is absolutely, but best case scenario is actually a reasonable term that some observers are talking about. For those of us Interesting. Who wanted to maintain things. So

Leo Laporte (01:26:07):
Taina was nine to nothing in, in favor of Twitter

Cathy Gellis (01:26:11):
And Google versus Gonzal or Gonzalez v Google, I don't remember how it's postured. Basically that one was punted. Okay. So that was the one that when I came on and talked about, cuz this is when I did I, the brief and I was in the courtroom for was not well litigated that the plaintiffs, it's

Leo Laporte (01:26:26):
Funny thought it was the Google versus Gonzalez that would end up being the,

Cathy Gellis (01:26:30):
Well everybody did Gonzalez

Leo Laporte (01:26:31):
Versus were that's the one where the, we listened to the arguments, you were in the room. That was the one where they had some point said, well the problem is thumbnails. You're right. Which was since, which

Cathy Gellis (01:26:39):
Was not the thing that they had argued changed, they merged it. They, they changed it.

Leo Laporte (01:26:43):
So, so the, so, so they did rule on Tamana, the, the second case, the Twitter case,

Cathy Gellis (01:26:47):
The one that was more conditional, that only went along for the ride,

Leo Laporte (01:26:50):
But then said, but based on our ruling in Tamana, there's no underlying cause of action in Gonzalez. So we don't have to think

Cathy Gellis (01:26:55):
About it. So a couple things are happening here leading up to this. Everyone was really alarmed that either of these cases were taken because,

Leo Laporte (01:27:02):
And it looked like the Supreme Court took 'em both

Cathy Gellis (01:27:04):
Well

Leo Laporte (01:27:05):
With an eye towards undermining two 30 probably.

Cathy Gellis (01:27:07):
Right? Because in earlier cases, justice Thomas and eventually joined by probably Alito, I forget it was started to get joined by people who were like, we need to take a look at section two 30. We need to take a look at section two 30. And in these companion concurrences they were writing, they were articulating their understanding of section two 30 that was alarmingly wrong. So it looked like they were, that they plucked these cases out and decided to take them because they really wanted to make a mess of Section two 30. So the internet community was alarmed deeply and did major, major brief work on both these cases as they, as they went to the Supreme Court then. But something weird happened. So we went into the courtroom for Gonzalez v Google noticed that there were some significant issues getting and how it was being argued by the plaintiffs and that the court was noticing and that they kept saying like, let me make sure I understand your argument correctly, which is not a good thing. You wanna hear from any number of justices. And it looked like, and I think I came on the show and said it didn't look like they had the appetite to to undermine section two 30 on these, on

Leo Laporte (01:28:10):
These clans. One, one of the things that the plaintiffs were arguing against Google was they use algorithms,

Cathy Gellis (01:28:18):
Right? The idea was, well, to the extent that they promoted this is what they were litigating

Leo Laporte (01:28:22):
Terrorist content through algorithms and that made them publishers that made them complicit in the appearance of these videos on, so

Cathy Gellis (01:28:29):
Section two 30 texta platform, platform for content created by others to briefly paraphrase it, but it doesn't protect you from the stuff you create yourself.

Leo Laporte (01:28:38):
So if you're a publisher, if I publish you know, if Elon Musk publishes a tweet, that's different than if I publish a tweet cuz he's Twitter,

Cathy Gellis (01:28:46):
Right? He's liable for his own stuff that he publishes, but he's not right for the third party, which makes his platform to publish it. Yeah. So I mean then you can litigate over well, and what this case was, was litigating over, well technically who created it. And so the plaintiff's argument basically, although it was not well-led, was if you algorithmically promote something that somebody else

Leo Laporte (01:29:09):
Created, you're publishing it

Cathy Gellis (01:29:10):
Now you count as the creator in section two 30. It doesn't count if you

Leo Laporte (01:29:12):
Create a thumbnail <laugh>.

Cathy Gellis (01:29:14):
Well, and this was not, this was, if they wanted to gut two 30, this was really not

Leo Laporte (01:29:19):
Listening today I was, I was listening to oral arguments and poor Lisa, I was going, they don't create the thumbnail

Cathy Gellis (01:29:25):
<Laugh>. I, I was sitting next to the press pool and a and a woman was sitting in the press pool who was like new to these issues and I could hear her under her breath being like, but that's the whole argument and stuff like that. Like everybody was screaming at it. So

Leo Laporte (01:29:37):
What's interesting is, and it was Justice Thomas who wrote this opinion, he actually said, no, no, no. Algorithmic algorithm is everywhere. It's not publishing. Well,

Cathy Gellis (01:29:49):
So that was in the Tamma case. So with the Google versus Garcia, it, they basically punted it because they basically looked at it and said, and said,

Leo Laporte (01:29:55):
We did Tam,

Cathy Gellis (01:29:56):
But they, they hung their hat on Tamana. So Tamana wasn't really dealing with section two 30 altogether. Oh

Leo Laporte (01:30:02):
This is interesting. Do you think they did that? So they wouldn't, that this wouldn't apply to two 30.

Cathy Gellis (01:30:07):
We are really baffled because this is why we think it's the best case scenario because it's getting really hard to litigate two 30 s since so many people don't like it or misunderstand it. What he ended up saying was basically like, look, if you had no two 30, would there be a claim anyway? Because essentially it was a, it's a concept of secondary liability. It's

Leo Laporte (01:30:25):
Aiding and abetting. Is it aiding and

Cathy Gellis (01:30:27):
Abetting? Is it aiding and bedding? And the secondary liability is basically like, you know, if you do something, you're responsible for it, but am I somehow responsible for the thing you did as a right. When you're the one

Leo Laporte (01:30:36):
Who did it? I I bet you somehow. Yeah.

Cathy Gellis (01:30:38):
Or this is your show posting. So it would be the other way around. So like, right, right. Are you liable for something I say right now because it's your show.

Leo Laporte (01:30:45):
Mike, Mike Masick says that actually in his opinion, justice Thomas gave the best argument in favor of two 30 without mentioning

Cathy Gellis (01:30:53):
Two 30. Right. Because basically two 30 basically doesn't really change that. But if there's no secondary liability then there'd be no liability anyway. Maybe that didn't come out clear, but basically there would be no cause of action. Right? You you, because you couldn't have been liable in the first place because you weren't the actor. It's not being pled that you were the actor, you, it's being pled that somehow there's a cause of action against you as for secondary liability for something somebody else did. And he said this statute doesn't reach that. Cuz that's not weed aiding embedding could possibly mean in which case you still need section two 30 because it helps dispense with the litigation early. Yeah, yeah. But but actually it kind of looks like with this on a regular motion to dismiss, you could actually get rid of it because there's no cause of action for aiding abetting for something that ices happens to use the platform for. And the language that commas used to talk about the algorithms and the as infrastructure is that, you know, without something a lot more than what a than, but just a platform being a platform is not enough to create second to create secondary.

Leo Laporte (01:31:55):
Exactly. Twitter exists and that these tweets were on Twitter, it does not mean Twitter aided and abetted these terrorists.

Cathy Gellis (01:32:01):
Yeah. He's kind of like, maybe there's some hypothetical things out there, but you gotta plead an awful lot more before you can start construing that the, the way tort liability works, that you could have culpability on somebody who was not the direct actor.

Leo Laporte (01:32:13):
So this was the correct decision. It was a very good decision. We all agree about

Cathy Gellis (01:32:16):
It and nine to nothing. So we don't have to worry about that. It was a Thomas decision.

Leo Laporte (01:32:20):
This is very clear. But because it doesn't really mention two 30, does it help strengthen two 30?

Cathy Gellis (01:32:30):
It does in a way. And I think this is something that ma it doesn't

Leo Laporte (01:32:33):
Weaken. It let's,

Cathy Gellis (01:32:34):
It doesn't weaken it. That one. And what it kind of says is, you know, well, alright, so we talked about Senator Blumenthal before, he's since tweeted of, well since the courts aren't gonna give us a relief, we have to go to Congress. Oh that's right. But basically, so it in some sense it pokes the hive of people who hate Section two 30 because they didn't, the court didn't blow it up for them. But what it basically did is it kind of painted the picture of like why we don't have the liability. Like not as a section two 30 doing the internet as a favor, but just as a matter of law as it's been for hundreds of years. We don't have liability that works like this. And I was reading it today and I almost think that, you know, Mike's piece is where he summarizes.

(01:33:12):
Is it good? I think it's even better than Mike says. Cuz Mike's thinking about in the section two 30 context. I'm thinking about it as American law does not bend like this and it shouldn't bend like this because this whole idea of what we've been developing to, of my brother's Keeper that like third parties are responsible for something somebody else does. We traditionally have allowed it, but only in narrow circumstances cuz it doesn't feel fair to be responsible for something somebody else did. And this was a big pushback on that trend in the law to say, you know, the, the direct actor totally liable, but non-direct actor is, you've gotta be really careful. And that's the way the law has always been.

Leo Laporte (01:33:51):
And this was a somewhat scholarly I I got the impression, somewhat scholarly opinion. It

Cathy Gellis (01:33:55):
Was, it was nice. I

Leo Laporte (01:33:56):
Mean Thomas like looked at what aiding and abetting means in common law and so forth and really said the right things and did the right thing. And

Cathy Gellis (01:34:04):
There might be some credible criticism, but a first blanche reading it was, I I am going to enjoy using that decision in my advocacy's.

Leo Laporte (01:34:12):
Good. So good news.

Cathy Gellis (01:34:12):
Good news. Surprisingly good news.

Leo Laporte (01:34:15):
And it doesn't matter that they punted Google.

Cathy Gellis (01:34:18):
No, I mean I think it had to happen and it was probably just as well for every, everybody

Leo Laporte (01:34:21):
It was, it was badly argued the plaintiff's argu to

Cathy Gellis (01:34:23):
It was a pr the the court couldn't blow up two 30 on that particular case. Yeah. But I think what, what Mike's point is, is that ta the TMNA case basically, cuz then they use the TMNA case to say that that's how what they use to get rid of the, the Google case to say that, you know, even if they had pled correctly, you still wouldn't have had any underlying liability here. Right. So the internet survived and that's why we can have all of our nice social media platforms now.

Leo Laporte (01:34:48):
<Laugh>. All right, thank you. This is Kathy you wrote the brief for Google versus gon Gonzalez versus

Cathy Gellis (01:34:55):
Google. I wrote one there and I also wrote an amicus brief as I said in the Warhol case, which right. I don't they didn't read that one. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:35:03):
<Laugh>. But I imagine you made somewhat of the, the same two 30 arguments in Gonzalez versus

Cathy Gellis (01:35:11):
Yes. Oh my typical ones of it. It's good. And one of the, the signatories on it was an individual who hosts own Mastodon server because if he's gonna do that for his friends, where Oh yeah, you can see the expressive rights and stuff. Yeah, yeah. Two 30 works for him and I really wanted to make sure that people understood that two 30 is not just for big companies, that it's got the boots on the ground to make sure, especially if you don't like the big companies in that you have choices that you need two 30 to make sure other people out there can create those choices.

Leo Laporte (01:35:39):
It was my point. Exactly. Because as somebody else who runs a MA on server and a IRC and a Discord chat you know, it's the little people who could really, I mean, I can't afford to defend myself. Right. Two 30 protects us. Yep. It does. Google can afford to d defend itself. It did all the way to the Supreme Court. Yep. Twitter all the way to the Supreme Court.

Cathy Gellis (01:35:58):
I'm not quite sure they paid those lawyers at the end. I'm really curious to know <laugh>,

Leo Laporte (01:36:01):
But I believe me, I couldn't. And so that is really important. Otherwise we wouldn't have a, a forum, we wouldn't have an irc, we wouldn't have a Mastodon because it would be too risky. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So it's a good thing.

Cathy Gellis (01:36:15):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (01:36:15):
That was close.

Cathy Gellis (01:36:17):
Oh, it totally was <laugh>. I'm having a weird weekend because I'm very happy and very unhappy, but the very happy part is we can breathe a little bit.

Leo Laporte (01:36:26):
Yeah. Fair use lost section 2 31. Yeah, that's the sh just skip the whole last half hour. That's all you need to know. Right. <laugh>, now you know why

Cathy Gellis (01:36:36):
Fair use lost the internet won. Yeah. To the extent that it doesn't rely on fair use. Good luck with that.

Leo Laporte (01:36:41):
Oh God no. Kathy <laugh> we're gonna take a little break. We'll have we have more to talk about our show today. Brought to you by Duo. I know you must know the name Duo. I know the name duo for a long time we've used Duo to protect against breaches with a leading access management suite. Strong multi-layered defenses, innovative capabilities only allow legitimate users in to your network or your site or your app and keep bad actors out. For any organization concerned about being breached, that needs protection Fast Duo quickly enables strong security while also improving user productivity. So many companies use DUO for that very reason. It's kind of a a no-brainer. You just turn it on and you're safe. Duo prevents unauthorized access with multilayered defenses and modern capabilities that thwart sophisticated malicious access attempts. We did a panel with Wendy Naer who was a CISO at Duo.

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(01:38:44):
We're really thrilled to have 'em on Twitter. I've been a duo fan for years. Sign up dot d u o.com duo d u o duo signup.duo.com. Thank you duo for all you do. We really appreciate it and thank you TWIT listeners for using that special address. So they know you saw it here, right? Right. Google did reach a privacy settlement with Washington State. This is, you know, to me this is just the tip of the iceberg. You may remember Google had settings to turn off their location tracking. Oh, but look, it didn't do anything <laugh>. They still track you and the state of Washington sued saying alphabet. Well, Google's division of alphabet misled customers about its location tracking the re the settlement resolves claims that Google deceived people into believing. You see, you foolish person. You believed you were controlling how Google collects and uses your personal data. They even gave you a switch, but it didn't do anything. A consent decree file on Wednesday requires Google to be more transparent about its tracking practices and provide a more detailed location, Technologies's webpage describing them and finds Google 39.9 million, which is like the interest on one day revenue. I mean, it's not, is this enough? Is how important is this? I wonder why it's only Washington state Arizona got an 85 million settlement with Google. Also feels like this should be something the Feds should be

Harry McCracken (01:40:24):
At another place where the states are doing stuff that the hard work better done on the federal level.

Leo Laporte (01:40:29):
Yeah. I'm surprised. I guess Lena Kahn's worried about other stuff, but I'm surprised the FTC didn't weigh in on this one as well. But that's a good, that's a good thing.

Harry McCracken (01:40:38):
Yeah. I'm 39.9 million. Who cares?

Leo Laporte (01:40:41):
It's the cost of doing business for Google. Right. interesting article in tech Crunch. I've heard of them, Amanda. The yeah. Yeah. This is your colleague. I, I think I

Amanda Silberling (01:40:54):
Know them right.

Leo Laporte (01:40:54):
Yeah, I think I know who they are. It's on your check. I think your colleague Adam. Actually,

Amanda Silberling (01:40:59):
Actually all my checks is Yahoo,

Leo Laporte (01:41:01):
But Oh God. That's right. I forgot. Yeah. A Yahoo company Adam Chevi, I hope I'm saying his name right. Veic Adam. K we call 'em the government Can't seize your data, but they can buy it. Similar story. The Biden administration proposed new protections earlier this month to prevent law enforcement from demanding reproductive healthcare data from companies like Twitter and Google, but they don't really need to because data brokers have that information. And the US government has been buying that data from private data brokers for years. In fact, we reported, I think last week about one data broker that won its case. What was the name of it? Kok or something like that. They the, the court held, the appeals court held that it, that the government hadn't really shown harm. Oh, well, there's no harm in selling your, your location data, but the court, I guess implied that. Well, if, if you come back FTC with some with some people who've been harmed by this, well, then we can talk. Certainly a big issue in privacy. I think we need a law regulating data brokers, frankly.

Harry McCracken (01:42:22):
It's such a shadowy business.

Leo Laporte (01:42:23):
Yeah. they're out there, they're collecting that data, and then they just sell it to whoever wants it. That's why unfortunately, a ban against TikTok seems so silly because TikTok isn't the problem. The Chinese government can just go to these data brokers and, and get anything they want about anybody they want. It's,

Cathy Gellis (01:42:41):
It's not defining problems that you're throwing legislation at, which really needs to stop because it's going to break more things, and this isn't gonna fix anything.

Leo Laporte (01:42:48):
Thank you. Good article. You wrote I thought Harry, I don't know if you heard it yet or not about Apple's announced New Voice feature. This will be in, in the fall we're at with iOS 17

Harry McCracken (01:43:06):
Later this year, later this year, presumably when the new OS updates come out, maybe.

Leo Laporte (01:43:10):
But really cool if you have als and as you, as it progresses, it gets harder and harder to talk. People like Stephen Hawking start using machines that talk for them Hawking quite famously. Now, apple is going to allow you to bank your voice. So if you have early stages, als, you could bank your voice for the time when you'd have to use a speech machine. And it would sound like you,

Harry McCracken (01:43:38):
It comes pretty close from, from the samples I heard. Have you heard it? Yes. I've heard a few samples. They don't sound a hundred percent like that person might. They have a little bit of, of the typical stuff you associate with a synthesized, but they, they don't sound like Siri or Alexa or the Google Assistant. They sound like a specific human being, which, which is to a lot of these people who might face this really important, they, they would much rather express themselves with their own voice. And that was the goal here. And there have been, there have been ways to do this for a long time, but historically it could involve like a lot of training, which if you have ALS becomes even more of a challenge. It used to be quite expensive. It, it's gotten cheaper. But what Apple is doing is the next step in terms of making it completely accessible, because it will be available as, as on this device, which a lot of people have. And people will be able to, to do the voice banking on an iPhone, an iPad, or a Mac.

Leo Laporte (01:44:34):
I don't know. I, I presume Apple's doing this internally. There are companies that do this already. I played with something from a company called Acapella. Yes. And I had to read 215 phrases, took me about half an hour, and then it made my voice. And, and now I, I don't have als, but if I ever needed, but it's kind of cool. Anyway, this is, this is an example of my voice. Let's see. Make sure you have, you have my sound right? This is my voice. Oh, it's not coming out of the, coming out of the Do hickey. Lemme play it again. Harry. Can you get me a can of soda? This kind of sounds like me.

Harry McCracken (01:45:13):
The, from what I've heard of Apples,

Leo Laporte (01:45:14):
It's better.

Harry McCracken (01:45:15):
If you did this with Apple's version, it would sound quite a bit more like you and it, apples takes 15 minutes of training, by the way, so

Leo Laporte (01:45:23):
A lot faster. Yeah. I am not surprised.

Cathy Gellis (01:45:26):
So you need to package that up so you can be the voice that people can put on their car

Harry McCracken (01:45:30):
Directions.

Leo Laporte (01:45:31):
Yeah. Actually, I did that back when, back in the day, Tom, was it Tom? Tom? I think Tom Tom allowed you to record your voice. And now actually I have a Waze voice. That's me. In fact, I hadn't used ways in a while.

Cathy Gellis (01:45:44):
I think this needs to be a twit tv subscription benefit

Leo Laporte (01:45:47):
Figure. I could, I could put it in the Club Twit. I hadn't used ways in a while. I recorded this maybe five or six years ago. And we were worried about traffic, so it turned on ways and it said, turn left at the next, and it was me. And I said, that sounds like me, Lisa <laugh>. And she said, that's you, you network <laugh> speaking.

Harry McCracken (01:46:05):
Speaking of that sort of thing, I've, I've heard some people who have been concerned that Apple's technology could be used for nefarious purposes.

Leo Laporte (01:46:12):
Ah, could

Harry McCracken (01:46:13):
It, such as stealing somebody else's voice. And yes, I think they, they have done a lot of thinking about that. And, and there are a bunch of existing services, which even though Apples is not available yet, now people are already using for questionable purposes app with Apples. The person who wants to do this has to do the training using these random

Leo Laporte (01:46:32):
Is it on phone? Does it stay on the phone?

Harry McCracken (01:46:34):
It, and in fact, you can just leave it on the phone if you want. And it never gets uploaded to the cloud at all. I mean, probably the single most interesting thing Apple has done technologically is they've crunched this down into a form where the tra where the crunching of your voice can be done on the device. You can, you can upload it to iCloud, which you probably would want to do, because when you're, when you're doing this, it might be, it would be for later use, possibly using devices you don't own yet. But even on iCloud, it's encrypted. And I think it just, it does seem like it would be tough for somebody to essentially steal your voice using this technology. It really does seem like it's, it's under the control of, of the person who is banking their voice

Leo Laporte (01:47:14):
Using Apple stuff. Because you have to read specific phrases. They're random. So you couldn't take all the recordings of me, for instance, and do this. You couldn't

Harry McCracken (01:47:22):
Do that. It seems like it would be extremely difficult to, impossible to like take rec to record Leo's voice and then train it and create a Leo voice without Leo being aware you were doing that. Right. Which is certainly something, a reasonable thing to be concerned about with some of these technologies. There

Leo Laporte (01:47:38):
Are AI companies, 11 Labs as one that will do this from arbitrary samples. Yes. But in order for us to do this Anthony had to come in and have me read a statement, said, I am Leo LaPorte and I give permission for this to be done. But now he's got my voice and he's doing all sorts of stuff with, I think our promos have my, my synthesized voice. Well,

Anthony (01:47:59):
That was Descripts.

Leo Laporte (01:48:01):
Oh, that was, that wasn't, that was who Descript Descripts did. Does 11 AI ask? No, 11 AI says, just gimme some samples. Yeah. I

Anthony (01:48:09):
Mean, they say like, you, you assume responsibility for like,

Leo Laporte (01:48:13):
It's all on you if something goes wrong. But, but any bad actor could then make my voice, right? Yeah. See, I worry, I, I guess I shouldn't, I've told though, as a result all my family and friends we need a, you know, a secret word when I, if I call you saying, I've been kidnapped, please send a million dollars ransom to this address. I need to have the secret word.

Harry McCracken (01:48:36):
That's al That's stuff like that is already happening. Yeah. Based on, on technology.

Leo Laporte (01:48:41):
Yeah. Larry Maggot got, almost got suckered by somebody pretending to be his wife. He wrote the story on his website. Yeah, I, I feel very nervous. And anybody who's in the public domain where they're, or, and for some reason or other, they're vo Even you guys, just cuz you're on this show, there's enough samples of your voices now. Sorry. Tell your loved ones. Yeah.

Cathy Gellis (01:49:06):
I should have a lot more fame and fortune as a consequence of this for the amount of risk it's

Leo Laporte (01:49:10):
Going. I agree. We're gonna have to start paying people a lot more to come on the show.

Amanda Silberling (01:49:15):
Yeah. You know, the problem with journalism is

Leo Laporte (01:49:18):
You're in the public eye, but there's no money. Yeah. <laugh>. I've said that for a long time. Yeah. It's not good. You're so CNET is unionizing by the way, because of red Ventures using AI to write their articles. Has this been an issue at TechCrunch at all, Amanda?

Amanda Silberling (01:49:42):
No. we're not using generative AI in our, but yeah, I think this was like a really interesting story. I actually think that CNET was starting to unionize before all the AI stuff happened. But I think there's a really clear connection between this and and then like the WGA writer strike in Hollywood. Yeah. Where in that strike, basically, AI wasn't really at the forefront, but they just kind of threw in something being like, Hey, by the way, we don't want you to like replace us with AI or ask us to edit scripts that were written with AI and whatnot, which is also a legal issue. <Laugh>, which you wanna get more into that.

Leo Laporte (01:50:33):
There was concerns, for instance, that the, well, how many years is 30 years of Simpson's episodes that if you fed all of those scripts into an ai, could it write a credible Simpsons episode? Writers were very concerned about, I think it

Amanda Silberling (01:50:45):
Can write, like it can write something that looks like a Simpsons episode, but I don't think it's gonna be good.

Leo Laporte (01:50:52):
Like Yeah, we saw the Seinfeld. That was horrible. I

Amanda Silberling (01:50:54):
Wrote about the Yeah. <Laugh> nothing forever Terrible. That was what it was called. But nothing

Leo Laporte (01:51:01):
Forever.

Amanda Silberling (01:51:01):
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was literally just like Jerry Seinfeld being like, it's random. There's a new restaurant. Right. And then Elaine being like, what kind of restaurant is it? Which it is the show about nothing. But like, this was really the show about nothing. For those who don't know, we're talking about, there was a Twitch phenomenon where it was like a generative AI Seinfeld animated copy that just went on forever, but

Leo Laporte (01:51:26):
It got shut down cuz it eventually Yeah. It's really interesting. As all AI does became racist. Right. That's the, that's kinda what always happens. Twitch ended up taking it down. <Laugh>.

Amanda Silberling (01:51:36):
What happened? Yeah. What happened with them was I think they had, they were using

Leo Laporte (01:51:43):
Oh, it was transphobic. A

Amanda Silberling (01:51:44):
Version of open ai. Yeah. Yeah. Or like, they were using a, a version of like the open AI software that had like Gates to prevent it from saying things that could be offensive. But then I think that broke and their failsafe was to use like a non version of that. And then Jerry and a standup upset just, you know, went and had to say transphobic things. This is nothing. Forever

Leo Laporte (01:52:15):
I decided to order an infinitely generating, I'm sorry, as somebody else talking over it. I wanted to play a little bit of it, but Motherboards got a narration on top of it. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. We can't play it anymore. They're gone. Yeah. Wisely. Wisely. So <laugh>, I'm gonna say something. I think they're

Amanda Silberling (01:52:28):
Actually back on Twitch now. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:52:29):
Are they? Oh boy. Yeah. Cuz they were only banned for two weeks. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But then I thought they got the good common sense to just like, this isn't worth <laugh> fighting over. I don't

Amanda Silberling (01:52:39):
Know. I I, I was subscribed to them when I was writing about them, but I haven't like, looked at it in a while. But I'm still getting the emails like they're live on Twitch and then I just haven't Oh, wow. Checked in. But maybe I need to see what they're up to.

Leo Laporte (01:52:53):
Yeah. Let's see. Do they have any shows scheduled? No. No shows. It's not the right channel. Oh, okay.

Amanda Silberling (01:52:59):
Well it's like, watch Me Forever. Is there you

Leo Laporte (01:53:01):
Are? Watch Me Forever. Not Nothing Forever. Okay. They're called, well

Amanda Silberling (01:53:06):
Nothing forever's the name of the show, but then Watch Me Forever is the channel. It's

Leo Laporte (01:53:09):
Very

Amanda Silberling (01:53:09):
Confusing, inconsistent branding.

Leo Laporte (01:53:11):
That's a problem. Oh yeah. I've been to watch me forever cuz it immediately Oh, looks like it's still doing it. There's an ad on it right now. Yeah. well, very interesting. I am a contrarian on ai by the way. I don't know, I'll let you guys yell at me for this. But I say, my thought is computers are not intelligent. They do not think. They never have and they never will. They're just a box of rocks that calculate so fast. It appears to be thinking we don't have to worry about AI becoming dangerous cuz it's not intelligent. It's just stupid words that it's stringing together. It doesn't even know what it's saying. And it is harmless. It's just a, and people especially the media are playing it up as if it's gonna be the next Oh, goddess Determinator at Skynet. And it's not, it's never gonna be cuz it doesn't think.

Cathy Gellis (01:54:10):
I agree. The problem is the people deploying it are also kind of stupid and they're gonna deploy it in some really dumb ways because they think it does more than it actually does. Well

Leo Laporte (01:54:18):
That is a risk because it's often wrong.

Cathy Gellis (01:54:21):
Right. Well, I think that's, I think you're absolutely right on what it is and what its limitations are. It doesn't mean that there's not some externalities we shouldn't be alarmed at, but I think again, it's like there's the policy panic of people are getting alarmed at the wrong things because they don't understand it. They're gunning after it as if it's this magic that needs to be well boxed up. But that's not the problem.

Leo Laporte (01:54:43):
It's, I'll take an, I'll go another step because of course, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, testified in front of Congress and said, yes, you should regulate us. And it's my opinion that all of these people who are building up the danger, including Sam Alman of ai, yes, we need to be regulated. This is, this is them pretending that what they're doing is somehow intelligent and oh, we better watch out. It's self-serving. They want you to think they're doing something more than they're doing. It's

Cathy Gellis (01:55:13):
Just fancy software.

Leo Laporte (01:55:15):
Alman knows very well. Yeah. It's not dangerous. It's not gonna do anything. And it doesn't need to be regulated any more than Eli needed to be regulated. Bring

Amanda Silberling (01:55:23):
To bring it back to the CNET staff trying to unionize. I think like that's an example of Kathy's point about how it's not necessarily the technology, it's the people using it that are using it in questionable ways. But like CNET was trying to publish news articles written with chat G B T and then of course there were a

Leo Laporte (01:55:45):
Bunch of they

Amanda Silberling (01:55:45):
Were inaccuracies, they were

Leo Laporte (01:55:46):
Crap. They got picked by that. Right.

Amanda Silberling (01:55:49):
Well, yeah. They were bad. They, they weren't true. Yeah. And but, but the fact that CNET even was like, this is a good idea. We're gonna do this is like people are, people are using this stuff in ways that are so, like I'm more afraid of the people that are using.

Leo Laporte (01:56:04):
Well, it's always the people. Ai.

Amanda Silberling (01:56:06):
Yeah. And then I mean, the same thing is also happening with the wga, the WGA strike where like, yes, you could feasibly put in 30 years of Simpsons episodes and make a Simpsons episode, but like, it's just gonna be like Lisa place clarinet. It's

Leo Laporte (01:56:24):
Mark

Amanda Silberling (01:56:25):
Skateboards.

Leo Laporte (01:56:26):
It's gonna be like that Seinfeld. It's not gonna be good. Yeah. so but are the writers,

Amanda Silberling (01:56:31):
But that doesn't mean that like, I mean, but but yet still, like that was the contract that the screenwriter were Right. Trying to like, protect themselves with. And then the studios were like, no, we're not gonna commit to not using generative

Leo Laporte (01:56:47):
Ai. Well, and to make your point, CNET fired a bunch of writers because presumably Red Ventures thought, well why are we paying humans to write this crap? I think

Amanda Silberling (01:56:55):
Buzzfeed did too.

Leo Laporte (01:56:56):
Yeah. Buzzfeed news went outta business. Oh

Amanda Silberling (01:56:58):
My God.

Leo Laporte (01:56:59):
Yeah. And Vice is declared bankruptcy. So I, I understand they might want to use ai, but this isn't a, this isn't a path to success. You need people like Harry to write this stuff.

Harry McCracken (01:57:09):
Well, on the other hand, the Leo, I'm, I'm not gonna tell you you're wrong about this, but I sometimes lately I wondered if I am just a box of rocks That's good attributed to get their words <laugh>. And maybe that's, that's true of all of us. And that's an

Leo Laporte (01:57:20):
Interesting

Harry McCracken (01:57:21):
Question. Certainly this technology gonna get at least so much better in the years to come. Isn't that the fundamental if continues at the same pace it has over the last six months, it may get much better, much more quickly. And as with, I mean

Leo Laporte (01:57:35):
I have a, here's my thing. I have a, maybe this is what I'm really saying. I have a belief that no matter how fast it gets, how much better it gets, it will never equal you. Because I think there is something different about you than a box of rocks doing very fast calculations.

Harry McCracken (01:57:49):
I mean, the best journalism that's certainly true. I, I can do things like, well look,

Leo Laporte (01:57:53):
Look at self-driving cars. They got better and better and better, but they still run over kids be, and they will never not run over kids.

Harry McCracken (01:58:00):
But so do humans. Unfortunately. Yeah. I can score interviews with interesting people. I think humans still have interesting take on takes on things that a computer can can't replicate. But I, I think that it just raises the bar for journalists and there's an enormous amount of, of content out there that's crap generated by humans. It's terrible. Yeah. And that stuff is gonna be in trouble. That's what's in

Leo Laporte (01:58:25):
Trouble. I think the same thing about artists. The very

Harry McCracken (01:58:27):
Best, the very best stuff's generated by humans. I, I think there's still gonna be a market for, but, but it scares me a little bit because if all you're doing is putting up a post about what time the Super Bowl is on, right. A a computer can do that and it should be doing that 15 seconds. Like

Leo Laporte (01:58:41):
Humans should not be

Harry McCracken (01:58:42):
Doing at least as well as a human can or better. So maybe in in odd way it's encouraging that, that the people are actually doing good stuff have of a future. And that that people are completely cynical and just trying to monetize stuff through clicks might be in trouble. I

Cathy Gellis (01:58:54):
Saw a sket I think the other day who said something like, I didn't think that the robots would be doing all the art and the humans doing the low wage terrible work instead, or something like, this was not the future I was hoping for. But

Leo Laporte (01:59:07):
I think it's, that's upside down. I think that robots will be doing all the low wage stupid.

Cathy Gellis (01:59:12):
It makes more more sense ultimately. Cuz I think your point is hopefully correct, which is that human bring humans bring a certain gen quo that really fancy good software is just not gonna be able to replicate. Yeah. And at some point the human beings will come to appreciate that appropriately designate the grunt work to the robots and keep the the cool human stuff for the humans.

Harry McCracken (01:59:32):
I actually found a piece of grunt work, which I am, am gonna happily turn over to chat G P T, which is when we do a post on fest company, there's this SEO field where you have to write like a, a short piece summary That should be great that a short summary and actually the goal of the short summary is to be as boring as possible. Yes. But, but to stop, be stuffed with the relevant keywords. That's the

Leo Laporte (01:59:53):
Machine talking to machine chat

Harry McCracken (01:59:54):
G PT can do that. Yeah. Super quickly. Yeah. if I don't have to, it can do it better than I can. And if I'm not doing it, I can spend more time actually doing stuff that human beings will see and hopefully appreciate. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:00:04):
Machine, it makes sense. Machines should do the writing aimed at machines.

Harry McCracken (02:00:08):
And in fact, probably at, at some point that should just be like, not even, not even a field, but something in which, sorry, matter are publishing system does automatically. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:00:16):
We're looking at that. We wanna use it use

Amanda Silberling (02:00:17):
All the way down.

Leo Laporte (02:00:17):
Yeah. We wanna use AI to do transcripts, do summaries. Do maybe not

Cathy Gellis (02:00:24):
Supreme. Not supreme court analysis. Huh? Not Supreme Court analysis.

Leo Laporte (02:00:28):
What's that mean? Oh,

Harry McCracken (02:00:30):
It'll be like Leo and, and three bots at some point during the show. Well,

Leo Laporte (02:00:33):
That wouldn't be so bad. Oh, nevermind. Sorry. I said that. Bonito <laugh>.

Amanda Silberling (02:00:37):
But even still with, with transcripts, like I often am using auto ai. This is not sponsored. No,

Leo Laporte (02:00:44):
I like auto to like

Amanda Silberling (02:00:45):
Record interviews. Yeah. And it's really, really helpful and it is a lot faster than if I were hand transcribing, but it's still not perfect.

Leo Laporte (02:00:54):
Right. My contention is that you can get 90% of the way. It's that last 10% that is impossible. We've seen this again and again in in technology. And that's what humans can do. And I don't, I don't, I'm not mystical. I don't think that, you know, oh, they don't. They'll never have a soul.

Cathy Gellis (02:01:13):
I think people are alarmed that the acceleration of the technology is happening quickly in terms of improvements. So people are sort of panicking at the upshot, both the potential and the upshots. Yes. And that panic is we have more time to sort of figure out how to deal with this, but we don't necessarily have as much time as we thought like five years ago. And and given that there's a number of people who are like, this cool thing I'm going to deploy in a really sort of socially destructive way is not helping dial down the panic.

Leo Laporte (02:01:44):
I think it's a mistake though to extrapolate, okay, look how fast it's growing. Just guess where it's doesn't mean it's gonna suddenly be Einstein.

Cathy Gellis (02:01:52):
No. But I think we're having a visceral emotional reaction to it as opposed to a clear-headed cogent assessment of risk and balance and rewards and stuff like that. Which, welcome to tech policy. That's the way it always is.

Leo Laporte (02:02:01):
And there is legitimate concern in the area of disinformation because you can create disinformation at speed now. And so, oh yeah, we got an election coming up in 2024 and, and the, and the, the zone's gonna be flooded with crap. It's really good at creating bad crap. You don't need a bunch of Russians in a Russian troll farm to do that anymore. You can just do it with machines

Harry McCracken (02:02:21):
And chat. G P T can write English a lot more clearly Right. Than, than your Russian troll can consent

Leo Laporte (02:02:26):
Probably. Yeah. It'll be grammatical. Grammatical crap.

Amanda Silberling (02:02:30):
Yeah. I feel like this is one of those issues in tech where I feel like the most clear answer I can think of is that I just think I want people to be really conscious consumers and think about where, what their reading is coming from and what the motivation exactly is. Yes. But like, I really wanna say that we should be able to trust humanity, but it's hard to know if that's true.

Cathy Gellis (02:02:54):
Well, let's teach all the kids critical thinking skills. Oh, but not without voice or social media or take away the internet. But we'll totally have the next generation ready to like, think these things through carefully.

Leo Laporte (02:03:04):
Well then it makes you wonder why do they want to take that stuff away? Right.

Cathy Gellis (02:03:08):
Because they might actually have critical thinking skills and have some dubious responses to some of the policy getting rammed down their throats.

Amanda Silberling (02:03:14):
It's, I'm getting very depressed

Leo Laporte (02:03:16):
<Laugh>. Yeah. Well no, I mean I, the good news is we don't have to, we don't have to take it. Yeah. I guess I just, it makes me angry cuz I'll go especially it's really bad on Twitter. There's, so all the, all the bitcoin bros have been replaced now by AI pros. Every, you know, 15 great things you can do with chat g p t 12 ways to make money with chat G P T and I think the only people making money are the people who are selling these great ideas to suckers. I don't, I think maybe we've oversold the potential of ai. Yeah. The risk

Amanda Silberling (02:03:51):
Is, I think what's also fascinating is just in terms of like the cyclical of trends in tech. I do think that there is much, much more to AI than crypto. However, it is really interesting that two years ago, I'm sure that this, like the podcast was all about like what's happening with ETH and then now Yes. In our little document here. Yes. I don't think there's a single no crypto story.

Leo Laporte (02:04:20):
No eth stories <laugh>. Nope. it was, and who was more than will be in

Amanda Silberling (02:04:25):
Yeah. Two years. But also AI has been powering so much tech for so long. It's just that now with generative AI in particular, it's much more obvious and people are using chat. G P T just like to play around with it and then seeing what this tech is capable

Cathy Gellis (02:04:42):
Of. I mean, there's certain topics that I just tune out. So I skipped the metaverse, I skipped smart, the Bitcoin stuff and I'm generally skipping the ai, but I'm gonna get sucked back into it cuz AI is raising a couple of issues, some of which is the application of it, but the other is the inputting and the training. And that keeps ending up hitting the copyright space hard. Partly because there's an intersection between the two. But I'm a little bit more alarmed because the people who say, no, you shouldn't be able to train your AI on a population of words, I think impacts the right to read. And what does get me worried is everybody else who's impacting the right to read that, we're going to take away the books, we're gonna take away the social media. And I think we need to have a bigger reckoning of that is an important first amendment.

(02:05:26):
Right. And it's an important Right. For a reason. And I think we lock things up away from, it's not good to lock the words up from people, but I also think it's a problem if you lock things up so people can't send their assistant to go read the books for them or their robotic assistant to go read the books for them. And I think people need to think through what they're asking for, especially as a solution for, I think we have general pro genuine problems and how we apply it, but that doesn't mean we should forbid the training because the training implicates completely different policy issues.

Harry McCracken (02:05:56):
Once in a while, I will intentionally use these chat bots to try to get them to talk about stuff that I've written about to see if, if I can see what I've written in them. And I'd say most of the time, even if they are kind of reflecting something I did, it's not in a way that I, I find disturbing or think should be illegal. I did see one of them, I think barred the other day, which they did the kind of thing that if it was a human doing it, you would say that they were either a plagiarist or flirting with plagiarism because they really weren't entire blocks of my wording in there with no attribution. Oh, interesting. And so it'll be interesting to see, I mean, if that kind of stuff I'm not crazy about, but it's, it's quite different if me and a dozen other people who wrote about something, I'll get mishmashed together and something gets spat out on the other side that might not exist in exactly the same way if I hadn't written my piece. That's a creative process, but it's not entirely dependent on, on my own personal wording. Yeah. At least one attribution, if you're gonna use whole blocks of what I wrote,

Cathy Gellis (02:06:55):
I'm worried that we were accidentally banning web crawlers.

Harry McCracken (02:06:58):
Yeah, totally. I mean, this is, this is the new web crawling mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and people thought used to think web crawling, it was sketchy.

Amanda Silberling (02:07:07):
I, I think it's also really interesting the difference between how we see generative AI with text versus with images, because I think it's a lot less obvious in generating a text block to see like, where it is drawing very specific phrases and ideas directly from writers. Whereas with art you can say, do this in the style of Van Gogh. And it's very clearly like, yep, those are those very particular kinds of brush strokes and whatnot. Or like, it, it feels a lot more obvious with visual art and I don't know what that really, what are the implications of that, but I find it interesting

Leo Laporte (02:07:52):
There. You see it all the time on Twitter among these new AI bros, the notion that in five years films will be made by ai not filmmakers and not actors and not writers.

Amanda Silberling (02:08:04):
I just don't think people want

Leo Laporte (02:08:05):
That's incredible that though. No, I don't want that <laugh>, that's for sure. I don't want that. Like that's,

Amanda Silberling (02:08:09):
I mean, I'm worried about people, like, for people making illustrations for like book covers or something. It's like, yeah, you can probably ask an AI to make like crappy art. A picture of a bat. Yeah. That's turning into a woman. I don't know what book that is, but there's an idea. <Laugh>. But but like for actual creative works, like I don't wanna see a film that an AI made, and I think there's a gimmicky interest in it, but historically in art, these gimmicky interests are only temporary. And I think right now we are in the moment where people think it's fun. If maybe there was a film made with ai, it would be like, oh, this is interesting. But then when there's a second movie made using ai, no one will think it's interesting anymore.

Cathy Gellis (02:08:56):
I'm not even crazy about movies that are mostly CGI built. Yeah. And I think with one of the Star Wars, I think the, the Last Jedi, they made a point to say, we did our special effects by going back to modeling.

Leo Laporte (02:09:08):
Oh, interesting.

Cathy Gellis (02:09:09):
Yeah, there's something about that where they were like, we didn't want it to be just so computery. We wanted it to actually be the old school things where there was some physical tangibility that still showed through onto the print that people

Leo Laporte (02:09:20):
Were watching. How long have we been trying to fight the Uncanny Valley with computer animation? And yet I don't think we've yet done computer animation that really is like human right. Or have we, maybe I don't, maybe we haven't. I don't know yet. It's shrunk,

Amanda Silberling (02:09:36):
But it does not disappear. I mean, have you used Horizon Worlds? <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:09:38):
<Laugh>, but no Legs is the giveaway. Right? It's, that's the key. All right. So I have asked mid journey, Amanda to give me an image of a bat that is turning into a woman. And actually it's doing a pretty good job here. I which one do you like? 1, 2, 3, or four?

Amanda Silberling (02:09:59):
I think four is interesting, but I'm also seeing it like this big on my screen. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:10:03):
Well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna upscale it. I'm gonna make it look a little bit bigger so you can, you can see it. There it is. Ooh. How do you like that?

Amanda Silberling (02:10:13):
Yeah. See, that's pretty cool.

Leo Laporte (02:10:14):
It ain't bad kind. Elizabeth. Ethan. It's an Elizabeth Ethan bat turning into a award that's

Cathy Gellis (02:10:18):
Victorian. Oh.

Amanda Silberling (02:10:20):
Now we just have to use Chachi T to write a story about a bat turning into a woman. And we're I'll

Cathy Gellis (02:10:26):
Do it. You don't chat gbt? I couldn't make it up. <Laugh>.

Amanda Silberling (02:10:30):
No, exactly.

Leo Laporte (02:10:31):
I mean, why bother when chat gb t could do it? I like this one myself. You, I think this is like a, and if you

Amanda Silberling (02:10:36):
Put it into chat cheek p t it'll just be like, there once was a bat and then suddenly it gained consciousness and now it's a woman and it has to figure out how to be a person instead of

Leo Laporte (02:10:47):
A bat. You I'm gonna, this is your assignment, Harry. You do it with Bard. I'll do it with chat G p t. Okay. All right. <Laugh>, what will the prompt be? Let's see. Tell me a story in what's, in what style should the story be? Do we want it Shakespearean? Do we want it to Kenzie in?

Amanda Silberling (02:11:06):
I'm gonna try to think of one with my brain that isn't the obvious. I'm gonna try to

Leo Laporte (02:11:10):
Think of a brand. Okay. You two do humans. I'm gonna use Chad. Whats the prompt? What's the prompt? Tell

Amanda Silberling (02:11:16):
That. Turning into a woman.

Leo Laporte (02:11:17):
The story in the style of Dickens about a bat turning into a woman. Right. Okay. Now I have to point out that I'm using chat. G p t four. You're using bard and then we have two humans. Here's what chat G p t four said. In the crowded, bustling heart of London, far removed from the genteel squares and manicured parks of its aristocratic corners, they existed a unique feature, a sight unseen in such a urban sprawl. It was an old gnarled oak. Wow. We didn't even mention an oak relic of ancient woods. Long since raised to the ground, within the hollow of this time, ravaged tree nestled an inky creature of the knight, A bat named Myrtle <laugh>. Myrtle was no ordinary bat. Her eyes held a human like lint. Her movements were purposeful and intelligent, and she was inexplicably drawn to the city's glow, especially to its vibrant pulse of humanity. Her fascination for the world of men was so intense that it boarded on obsession. Obsession that would trigger a metamorphosis of a most fantastical sort. One fateful night of storm. A biblical proportion rage. This is actually not bad. Go on. What do you got, Harry? I'll, I'll I feel like maybe you should read it just Sylvia, the same flavor about All right, I'll read, I'll read. Give it to me here. It starts with the,

Amanda Silberling (02:12:44):
It starts with the biggest cliche in the book.

Leo Laporte (02:12:46):
Sure. Here's a story in the style of Dickens about a bat turning into a woman. It was a dark stormy night. <Laugh>. So that's it. Eh, A wind held in the rain beat against the windows of the old house inside a young woman set by the fire reading a book. She was alone and she was scared. Suddenly there was a loud crash. The young woman jumped up and ran to the window. She saw a bat flying through the storm. The bat flew into the house and landed on the mantle piece. The young woman was terrified. She'd never seen a bat before. She didn't know what to do. The bat looked at the young woman with its big, dark eyes. The young woman felt a strange sensation. She felt like she was being drawn to the bat. Oh, it goes on. This is, I'm actually more engaged by this story. Hmm. It's not as well written though. Especially the darken

Harry McCracken (02:13:34):
Skin. And eventually you learned that the spat was also a woman.

Leo Laporte (02:13:36):
Oh,

Harry McCracken (02:13:37):
But they, that's kinda the kicker rather than the,

Leo Laporte (02:13:40):
By the way, my story ends over many months, Myrtle, now known as Miriam <laugh>. <Laugh> listened to Miss Haim's stories, her tales of lost love and long dead dreams. Wow. Even as Miriam, she retained the curious, observant nature of her bat self, but now had the power to engage, to influence, to help. She understood the loneliness of human hearts, the shared plight of all beings. Whether they soared in the sky or watch, I think chat, G b d four wins this, this

Harry McCracken (02:14:08):
Has a similar conclusion. And in general, with these things, they always have happy endings at, they often end by talking about how great something is. And if, yeah, if you ask them about a tech journalist, any tech journalist, they will say, this person is incredible. And well known and beloved. Oh, shoot.

Leo Laporte (02:14:22):
I thought that was only me.

Harry McCracken (02:14:24):
Sorry, Liam

Leo Laporte (02:14:25):
<Laugh>. Oh, I'm so disappointed. It

Amanda Silberling (02:14:27):
Is interesting that you chose Charles Dickens for this experiment because according to my Google search is Dickens public domain. Apparently a lot of the works of Dickens are in the public domain. So yes, it does beg the question of how much of this is coming from the fact that Chachi et t probably is trained on like entire Dickens novels.

Leo Laporte (02:14:51):
Oh, good point. All of that would be in there, wouldn't it? Yeah. By the way, it loves you, Harry, the way think

Amanda Silberling (02:14:59):
Even just like the streets

Harry McCracken (02:15:00):
Probably credits dick for things I didn't write.

Leo Laporte (02:15:04):
Please note, this information may be outdated as my training only includes data after September, 2021. You

Harry McCracken (02:15:09):
Can if you have a chat, GT G PT plus you can turn on the browsing feature, in which case

Leo Laporte (02:15:15):
It adds more to the, it will we'll check the out. That's plugins yet.

Cathy Gellis (02:15:18):
All right. I wrote four paragraphs of fiction while you were,

Leo Laporte (02:15:20):
Let's hear what happens to Myrtle? The bat.

Cathy Gellis (02:15:23):
Oh, it's Myrtle The bat. No, it

Leo Laporte (02:15:24):
Doesn't have to be Myrtle.

Cathy Gellis (02:15:25):
Actually that would make sense, but I didn't name the bat. It had been such a nice castle, abandoned, spooky, and devoid of any humans whatsoever until one day, suddenly a ruckus came from down below, peering down the old stone staircase. The bat saw boxes and suitcases being piled inside the door. It had at last happened. People had moved in. Oh, and the bat quickly realized they had moved into its house. Whoa. What was it to do with its home? So invented. Oh, the bat side and reached its reluctant conclusion. If you can't beat them, he said, join them. And so it flew off to the attic where the old potion jars were kept, knocked off the lid of one holding a bubbling blue solution. And doven head first <laugh> as a gastin pain as the burn it felt like was boring into each of its cells. It knew that this was still the solution. This time tomorrow I shall be a woman.

Leo Laporte (02:16:09):
Dr. Jekyll. Ms. Batt. I like that. <Laugh>. I like that. Amanda, you want to give it a shot or

Amanda Silberling (02:16:16):
Yeah, so I was thinking more about like, conceptually I did not write anything down. I was riveted by your experiments. I think

Leo Laporte (02:16:27):
These all were very good. Yeah.

Amanda Silberling (02:16:29):
Yeah. But my, my idea is turning this into a nonfiction essay project in which we explore tales from around the world, from folklore in which women and animals are connected and women are turning into animals or vice versa. Or for example, in the story of cersi from Greek mythology, she's turning men into animals, but she herself is not being turned into an animal. So yeah. So I'm taking this and doing a nonfiction essay collection about you, you, it's yours, portrayals of women. You can

Leo Laporte (02:17:04):
Sue all these ais cuz you are the one who came up with a me woman and turning into a bat. So, oh,

Cathy Gellis (02:17:10):
I snow

Leo Laporte (02:17:12):
<Laugh>. And this is what Sam Altman thinks about all of this CEO O of chat, or the folks who do chat, G B T open ai. Oh, I don't know why Reuters decided to use this picture of Sam testifying before.

Cathy Gellis (02:17:30):
We don't have enough moral panicking <laugh>. You're so

Leo Laporte (02:17:33):
Scared. I'm scared. He actually, his the poll quote is when they asked him if the artificial intelligence could in interfere with election integrity, he says, I'm nervous about it. <Laugh>. So there's a picture of Sam being nervous about it. Please.

Amanda Silberling (02:17:52):
Me too. Sam

Leo Laporte (02:17:53):
Regulated. It's too good. It's scary. Let's take a little break when we come back. Final thoughts. You guys are gosh, I don't know. I have to give a little credit to both Bard and chat g p t for coming up with some interesting

Cathy Gellis (02:18:07):
Stuff. Well, the human who wrote four paragraphs of original Houston in five minutes

Leo Laporte (02:18:10):
Was amazing. Gosh. I don't know. They were all quite good.

Cathy Gellis (02:18:14):
Oh, good. I mean, compared, oh, compared favorably to chat <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:18:17):
You did a great job, Kathy. But we're gonna go with the computer cuz it's cheaper.

Cathy Gellis (02:18:23):
I, I stand with Wga <laugh>. Right. Step to me.

Amanda Silberling (02:18:28):
But you are you have no chance of plagiarizing Dickens. So

Cathy Gellis (02:18:33):
I, I wonder if I had more time. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:18:35):
Yeah.

Cathy Gellis (02:18:36):
<Laugh> and he's in the public domain, so I could totally do that.

Leo Laporte (02:18:38):
Totally clear.

Cathy Gellis (02:18:39):
It just took a while to physically write the whole paragraph. I

Leo Laporte (02:18:41):
Actually was impressed with what you did. Okay, thank you. You too. It was quite good. I, which we should have a vote chat room. Which, which story would you wanna finish? Kathy Bard or chat G p T. Which one?

Amanda Silberling (02:18:53):
I'm with Kathy.

Cathy Gellis (02:18:54):
Thank you. Gosh, Amanda. Thank

Leo Laporte (02:18:55):
You. The human. The human. Got it.

Amanda Silberling (02:18:58):
Wanna read my non-fiction book?

Leo Laporte (02:19:00):
<Laugh> Our show today brought to you by Mint Mobile. We love Mint Mobile. Been using Mint Mobile for two, three years now. I can't remember. I got from Mint Mobile. I bought an iPhone SE that was 15 bucks a month. And then I got the 15 bucks a month plan, unlimited talk and text plus five gigabytes a month. It's actually been going up. It was three when I got it. It's now five. They keep adding more data on the nation's. Number one 5G network, the largest 5G network in America. This is a great deal. Inflation's everywhere. Prices are going up except at MIT Mobile. The only thing getting inflated at MIT mobile is the number gigabytes you can download $15 a month. What's the secret? They don't have stores. They're the first company to sell premium wireless service online only You save a ton.

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Plans start at $15 a month. You can bring your family too. And by the way, families start at two people. So the family plan is a great deal and they don't even, you know, they don't have to actually just don't tell Ryan Reynolds, but they don't even have to be relatives. You could just, your family could be your friends. Right? By going online only eliminating the traditional cost of retail. Mint Mobile passes significant savings onto you. They don't even charge you for the sim. And now they support eims. So if you have a phone that supports eims, it's even easier to switch to Mint Mobile. You could port your number over happens very quickly. You could bring all your contacts and apps with you or get a phone from them. All plans again come with unlimited talk and text and high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network.

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Switch to Mint Mobile, get premium wireless service starting at just 15 bucks a month. And I know when I say that number, you probably gloss it over cuz you think, oh, there's gonna be added fees and services. It's gonna cost me 50, 60, 70 bucks. No, that's the other guy's. Mint Mobile, 15 bucks a month. That's it. 15 1 5. How much are you paying for your wireless service? Maybe you gotta think about switching. Get your new wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month and get the plan shipped to your door for free. Go to mint mobile.com/twit mint mobile.com/twit. They'll ship it right to your door. Cut your wireless bill of 15 bucks a month. That's for five gigabytes a data. That's all most people need, but you want more. They've got more. They even have an unlimited plan. 30 bucks Mint Mobile. How much are you paying right now? Three times that at least. Right mint mobile.com/twit. We thank them so much for supporting our show and you support it when you go to that address. MIT mobile.com/twi. We've got a little mini movie we made narrated, by the way, by my AI voice on everything that happened this week on TWI watch

Speaker 8 (02:23:48):
Curl up with your metaverse headset.

Leo Laporte (02:23:50):
Yeah. Yeah. I could, I could do that. Everything I'm wearing tracks me. That's not, I, I realize there's no point in worrying about your air tag. Everyone knows where you are at all times. NASA has made good a boo boo. At least a boo boo. According to Jeff Bezos, his space company Blue Origin is now gonna be able to make a second human crude lunar lander. NASA chose SpaceX to make the first one to which Jeff Bezos yelled and screamed and said it was a terrible thing. I think he might have even sued. But now now the agency on Friday announced that there's a 3.4 billion contract coming your way, Jeff, to make a lunar lander for the upcoming Artemis mission to the moon. The Blue Origin Lander will have one un crewed demonstration mission ahead of a human crew demo that's set to take place in.

(02:24:51):
I thought this was gonna be like next year, 2029. John. That's like forever. This is currently the plan is for four astronauts to fly to the, this is a, it is a Rube Goldberg device. They're gonna fly to the Gateway Space Station on NASA's Space Launch System Rocket and the Orion spacecraft. Then they're gonna get out, get into the Blue Origin, and they're gonna go on the Blue Origin for a week long trip to the Moon South Pole. So complicated. Spacex won a sole contract in 2021 Blue Ridge and sued, and lost over the decision in 2021. NASA announced in 2022. Nevermind, we're gonna do a second one. So now they got two.

Harry McCracken (02:25:37):
It's the 60th anniversary in 2029 of the original ending. Wow.

Leo Laporte (02:25:43):
I'm, that means I'm the only person in this room who remembers it.

Harry McCracken (02:25:46):
I thought I remembered it watching it in kindergarten

Leo Laporte (02:25:49):
In 1969

Harry McCracken (02:25:50):
Until, until somebody pointed out it didn't happen during the day and I would not have been in at school in July. But

Leo Laporte (02:25:56):
So is she not old enough to remember it? Are you?

Harry McCracken (02:25:58):
Well, I, the, I theoretically maybe you could maybe.

Leo Laporte (02:26:01):
But you were a little kid. I,

Harry McCracken (02:26:02):
I I appear to have been remembering a later landing Have list. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:26:05):
Yeah. That well, that counts. I remember getting up middle of the night, what wasn't quite the middle of night. It was like 4:00 AM or something in Rhode Island. I

Cathy Gellis (02:26:12):
Had the k the Columbia launch originally in kindergarten. Oh, that, that was mine.

Leo Laporte (02:26:18):
That's the one that well,

Amanda Silberling (02:26:20):
Well

Cathy Gellis (02:26:20):
It fell apart

Amanda Silberling (02:26:20):
Later. I, when I was in kindergarten, I remember nine 11. So <laugh>. Yeah, <laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:26:32):
Let's see. A d and d streaming TV channels coming your way. Excited.

Amanda Silberling (02:26:41):
Hmm. I love d and d and I am so skeptical of what is going on with like Hasboro who owns Wizards of the Coast, which owns d and d trying to make d and d like a Lord of the Rings or a Harry Potter type franchise. Which this is literally like what Hasboro has said in communications with investors that they're trying to make d and d quote unquote a four quadrant streaming or a four quadrant media property or something. But it's just so weird because there's really not IP with D and d like what makes d and d fun is what you're doing with your friends, right? And you're creating stories collaboratively with other people like that aren't property of d and d and I don't know, I mean, I'm curious what's gonna happen with this, but I'm also like, damn, they're just really trying to monetize this right now. Well,

Leo Laporte (02:27:35):
You can't really blame them. Dungeons and Dragons. I think the part of it is cuz of the successive encounter party, right? They are huge. One of the, one of the top channels on YouTube and Twitch.

Amanda Silberling (02:27:50):
Yeah. I mean there's like, there's actual play shows like Critical Role and Dimension 20 that are hugely successful.

Leo Laporte (02:27:59):
Oh, critical role. That's who I was thinking of. They're really big aren't they?

Amanda Silberling (02:28:02):
They're aren't Twitch. Yeah. Yeah. When I think in like fall 2021, there was a tick or a Twitch data breach where someone published the, how

Leo Laporte (02:28:14):
Much money they made, like

Amanda Silberling (02:28:15):
In order the most profitable channels and critical role was making something like $90 million a year from Twitch alone. 90 million Fact, check me on that cuz this is like something I wrote two years ago that I'm remembering. But

Cathy Gellis (02:28:30):
You could lo off a lot of zeros and it would still be an issue. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:28:33):
Well, and I think one of the reasons critical role succeeds is cuz they're people and you Yeah. And you get into the people, right? You care about the people.

Amanda Silberling (02:28:40):
They're professional voice actors and improvisers. Right? And they're funny. What is d and d if not voice acting and improvising? And I don't know, I have, you have activated my trap card, but I don't know. I mean, speaking of like the, the theme of like the legal issues of it all. Like there was a whole controversy with g and D earlier this year where there's like a license that allows fans to make content like critical role or content even. Like, hey, I'm gonna write a, a little module where you can have a, like a pirate class or something instead of the existing fantasy classes.

Leo Laporte (02:29:24):
So what's going on here? This is the Dungeon Master, this guy here. And then I believe So are there teams, like there's two teams or there's no,

Amanda Silberling (02:29:32):
I I think though I think those are just all the players and they have them six players staggered like that for screen sizes

Leo Laporte (02:29:38):
Looks like Hollywood Squares. Yeah.

Amanda Silberling (02:29:40):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:29:42):
<Laugh>, I can see why you'd watch this Looks more

Amanda Silberling (02:29:44):
Like the Match game. No. Yeah. I mean it's, it's,

Leo Laporte (02:29:46):
But you're not watching the game. You're just watching these people talk about it, right? There's no, it's not like a League of Legends where there's something to watch.

Amanda Silberling (02:29:53):
No, I mean like the way that you play is like, you're quite literally just like using the structure of these rules,

Leo Laporte (02:29:59):
Right?

Amanda Silberling (02:29:59):
It's creative rules that Yeah. Are now open source that like you're just using these rules as a way of telling stories with your friends and you're like improvising, like at a table with people. Like when when I go to play d and d like I don't know what story I'm gonna tell that depends on like what the other people around me are doing. Right. And so it's like compelling in the same way that improv is compelling. Right,

Leo Laporte (02:30:26):
Right. Well who knows? Maybe he has, bro has this secret sauce and they're gonna make this something very exciting. I have to say there's real trouble ahead in the in the, in the streaming world. But al more importantly in the cable world, core cutting has hit an all-time high according to variety pay TV subscriptions, their lowest levels since 1992. You look like a cord cutter. Kathy Gillis,

Cathy Gellis (02:30:53):
I got cord cutted when I moved cuz I couldn't have it where I moved to, but now I'm going to move to someplace where I could have it. But the pricing is like insane. Yeah. So at this point I've sort of gotten used to not having the cord, but I mean, I think just retransmission fees are such an error.

Leo Laporte (02:31:11):
The local stations Well,

Cathy Gellis (02:31:13):
Of everything. Yeah. And then don't get me started on the copyright lawsuit that obliterated low cast, where now you can't rent an antenna. Right? I I, there, I ripped that to shreds and a tech post and I'm, I I will start snarling again if I start talking about that case. But copyright law shouldn't do it. And it was bad for everybody because the public has access. These are public airwaves, and the public now doesn't not have a reliable way of getting access to what is put on their own public spectrum. And this is

Leo Laporte (02:31:38):
The problem was when we allowed cable comp or local TV channels to both charge you and run ads they didn't want to give up either revenue stream. So the idea of, of ads supported free over the air tv. Nope, they didn't wanna do that anymore. They, they wanted to make sure that you paid fees to them.

Harry McCracken (02:31:58):
I still miss Low.

Leo Laporte (02:32:00):
I still

Cathy Gellis (02:32:00):
Was brilliant. I miss, I can't participate in cultural events like a Super Bowl. I mean, I can't even watch the ads that advertisers are still paying money to have broadcast to audiences because now the audience has to pay for the privilege of watching the ad

Leo Laporte (02:32:13):
Pay. TV penetration like cable or DirecTV is now down to 58% of US households. Big, big declines for Comcast, for DirecTV, for Dish. Comcast dropped 614,000 customers in the first quarter alone.

Cathy Gellis (02:32:33):
I wouldn't, to your assumption I wouldn't be a cord cutter except circumstances cut it and now it just may be Now you're happy. You can't kick it in. No, I'd like to expensive. I'd like to come back, but it's too prohibitively, well,

Leo Laporte (02:32:44):
Even YouTube TV is like 73 bucks for the base services. And that is because of the locals by the way. I think that's,

Amanda Silberling (02:32:52):
Yeah. I just, I don't know, I guess in my like adult life, I think at first I was like, I'm not paying for cable. I'm like in a like low paid writing job and then now I'm like, I could probably afford it, but I'm just used to not having it and I'm like, do I really wanna pay? Yeah. An extra $70 a month,

Leo Laporte (02:33:12):
Your life is better without it.

Cathy Gellis (02:33:13):
Well, I don't pay a lot of streamers either, so like, I, I miss when I could sort of like have one easy budgetable price and get most of what I wanted. Right. And now that reality doesn't really exist. Right. But I don't really wanna pay, I mean, I think I'd rather pay cable than a whole bunch of streamers, but at, but this point the streaming market is economically nonsensical anyway. So I just pay for like a couple things that like happen to mean more and it's not worth dumping a whole lot of money into.

Leo Laporte (02:33:41):
Have you seen Harry McCracken? Have you seen, speaking of streaming the Blackberry movie?

Harry McCracken (02:33:46):
I've saw it and used that as an excuse to write about how great Blackberry was last week.

Leo Laporte (02:33:52):
We were so addicted to it. This is Harry's article and Fest company, the Triumph. Yes. Triumph of Blackberry. Blackberries no longer doing a phone, but they do do the operating system for many cars.

Harry McCracken (02:34:03):
I mean, yeah, Q and X is actually pretty cool. They just acquired it too late in the game for it to help them make a, a great phone.

Leo Laporte (02:34:08):
Yeah. so the, the, the, the movie, which is based on the book, losing the Signal it's out now or is it about to to It's out. It's

Harry McCracken (02:34:17):
Out. It's been out for a few

Leo Laporte (02:34:18):
Weeks. It's not a documentary, right? It's,

Harry McCracken (02:34:20):
It's, no, it's in fact the, the first thing you see is a card explaining that it's a fictionalized version of what happened. And they really did not try super hard to ah, be all that accurate. And it's in fact, kind of cartoony. The

Leo Laporte (02:34:33):
Trailer's great. I really enjoyed the trailer. Oh, good. So this is one to see.

Harry McCracken (02:34:38):
Well, I had some issues anywhere. I mean,

Leo Laporte (02:34:40):
I don't know where it

Harry McCracken (02:34:41):
Is. I'm a tech journalist who writes about tech history, so I personally wanted something that was a little bit more accurate. Right. That said, I'd say it seems like most of the reviews have been positive and film critics are not gonna judge it on whether they detailed exactly what happened in the 1980s when, when research and motion was getting started. So it's, it seems like gen, generally speaking, it has been a crowd. Please, sir.

Leo Laporte (02:35:04):
I, yeah, I don't think people would want the truly geeky real story as

Harry McCracken (02:35:07):
Much. That would've been tough. And in fact, when I wrote about it, my point was kind of that the things that made Blackberry Great would not make for a great movie. No. Because it was stuff like, like the fact that they created

Amanda Silberling (02:35:16):
Tactile keyboards,

Harry McCracken (02:35:17):
Tactile keyboard, the fact that they had a, a server that prevented the network from coming down the fact they cared about security. And in fact, the movie has a few moments where there were like meetings where they tried to people discussing that. And those are the, the least riveting parts of the movie because they just don't make for a great drama, even though that they do help explain why this thing once upon a time really mattered.

Leo Laporte (02:35:39):
It's been in theaters for two weeks, hit 1.7 million last weekend. We'll see what it does. This weekend. That, so second weekend, this will be its third. Yeah. The, the trailer was great and anybody who lives, I had a, we all had Blackberries, right?

Amanda Silberling (02:35:52):
I had a pump. I did.

Harry McCracken (02:35:53):
Oh, I was more of a trio person for the most part. Personally.

Leo Laporte (02:35:57):
Yeah. I had a trio, but my right before the iPhone came out, my, my last phone before the smartphones were, was it Blackberry Pearl? When did you have a Blackberry? Amanda? You must have been in eighth grade.

Amanda Silberling (02:36:08):
No, like literally, I think I was in eighth grade. I think it was because like my dad had them for work and then when he got a new one, then that was, was the phone that I got. Yeah. So we both were very into Brick Breaker, the Blackberry game. Yep.

Leo Laporte (02:36:23):
I love Game Blackberry. I remember my kids saying, dad, put down the Blackberry. Pay attention to us <laugh>. So that's, that's how I know. Hey, what fun it's been to get together with all of you. Thank you Kathy Gilles for your analysis of the Supreme Court stuff. Very complicated, but I think you cut through it and explain why it was important. It clearly was. I'm glad you wrote those amicus briefs. I'm sorry they didn't read both of them thoroughly, but hey, you know, you're one for two. That's not so bad.

Amanda Silberling (02:36:52):
I'll claim credit for the Google versus Gonzalez one. Sure.

Harry McCracken (02:36:55):
Say

Leo Laporte (02:36:55):
Two for three. Okay, sure. Sure. Two for three. Yeah. Kathy is of course an author at Tech. If you wanna hire her, obviously specializes as an IP law CG council, C o u n sel.com. And on the MAs on cloud at Kathy Gillis. Great to see you. First time in studio. Yes. Thank you for coming up here. Yes. Yes. I hope you don't catch Covid <laugh>. Is it my, my deep fervent wish for you. Oh, thank

Cathy Gellis (02:37:20):
You. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:37:22):
<Laugh>. Amanda, you're safe. I think in your, in your apartment. Oh, she's gotta play softball. Philadelphia. yeah. Softball. Well that could be dangerous. Manuel Silver Lang, senior culture writer, tech wrench. First time on. So great to have you. We, we will have you back again soon. I really appreciate your time. Yeah,

Amanda Silberling (02:37:38):
Thanks for having me and I'll, it's fantastic. I'll continue to just make jokes about being younger than you <laugh> and make everyone feel bad that's watching Won, which is what

Leo Laporte (02:37:46):
You want. The podcast. You won't be the only one. Believe me.

Amanda Silberling (02:37:50):
This will be me in like however many years. I'm gonna be like, oh God. Like your parents weren't alive for nine 11.

Leo Laporte (02:37:58):
That's right. That's exactly right. Get ready. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. It happens sooner than you think. No, it's nice to have somebody. It's already happened sooner on the show. I really, I really think we need that perspective. I appreciate it, Amanda. It's great to see you Harry, my buddy, my friend, the techno, find him on Fast Company every time he writes an article. It's something great, something fantastic. Always, always. No, I'm serious. You, you are a no Chatt. G P t, you <laugh> you really find great topics. You, you know your history. And it's always, I mean, I just, I read every one of them always. I know. Cuz I lived. Dammit. You lived it. You were there <laugh>, you were there. I wanna

Amanda Silberling (02:38:38):
Read this Blackberry article now.

Leo Laporte (02:38:39):
Yeah. I wanna see the movie. I I love me too. I love the

Cathy Gellis (02:38:43):
Trailer you're watching. Clue Tonight though.

Leo Laporte (02:38:45):
Oh yeah, that's right. <Laugh>. Yeah. Clue. Or maybe Succession. The pen. Ultimate episode. You, I envy you because someday you're gonna get a D V D box set of all four seasons and you're gonna say, how did I not know this was the best show on television?

Amanda Silberling (02:39:02):
No, I mean I I've been watch, like, I I've been seeing people talking about it on Twitter relentlessly for years. And what's funny is actually before I worked at TechCrunch, I was like, I don't get it. Like they're just in business meetings and then now that I like

Leo Laporte (02:39:18):
Know now you understand? Yes.

Amanda Silberling (02:39:20):
I'm like the stock price dropped below one 20 <laugh> and then they tried doing a hostile takeover and

Leo Laporte (02:39:26):
He offered 1 92 for sure. What is he thinking?

Amanda Silberling (02:39:31):
No, it's not. No, it's a great show. I'm very

Leo Laporte (02:39:33):
Behind, so, oh well it's getting very exciting. We just, last week it was the presidential election and it was a little too close to whole.

Cathy Gellis (02:39:41):
That always hurts. I think we need more historical distance and certainty in our world before this will be comfortable.

Leo Laporte (02:39:47):
Oh, it was very painful. Harry, Kathy, Amanda, thank you so much for being here. Thanks to all of you for being here. Thanks especially to our Club TWIT members who make this show and all of our shows possible. If you're not yet a member, I wanna invite you to join Seven bucks a month. You get so much. You get ad free versions of all of our shows, shows we don't put out in public like hands on Macintosh, hands on Windows home theater, theater geeks, the Title Lennox Show. You get so much for your seven bucks a month and I can't tell you how much that $7 means to us. Only about 1% of our audience has joined the club. I'd like to get that number up. Would you, would you just check it out please? Tweet.Tv/Club twit. We'd be very, very grateful to have you. And if, and if you can for sure. No problem. It's okay. What

Amanda Silberling (02:40:38):
I'm sure you've made this joke, but it's cheaper than Twitter

Leo Laporte (02:40:41):
Blue. It's a dollar less than Twitter blue and you get so much more. Actually I get an actual product with value. I will send all three of you coupon cuz we'd like to have you in there on us. Cuz that's one of the things that makes Club Twit really fun, that Discord has a lot of our hosts in there talking as well. We do twit every Sunday afternoon right after Ask the Tech guys 2:00 PM Pacific, 5:00 PM Eastern Time, 2100 U T C I say that only because if you want, you can't watch us do it live. If you want the freshest possible version, it's it Live twit tv. There's streaming audio and video. Plus if you are watching live, you can chat with us, live in our open to all irc chatroom, irc.twit.tv. Of course Club Twit is also talking about it during the show after the fact ad supported versions of the show available to our website, twit tv slash this week in Tech.

(02:41:34):
If one, by the way, when you get to that page, you'll see a link to the YouTube channel. There's a dedicated YouTube channel. You'll also see a link to various podcast players and the RSS feed. Best thing to do, subscribe in the podcast player of your choice and that way you'll get it automatically the minute it's available. That's our IRC channel there and this is the webpage for this week in tech. Thank you everybody for being here. I will I'm gonna go home and watch succession and I will see you. Remember we are, our schedules changed a little bit this week, tomorrow Monday, iOS today what time John 9:00 AM 9:00 AM So the same time, but they're gonna move forward today because we are gonna do live coverage of Microsoft's Build Developers conference. We're gonna cover, we think there's gonna be important AI announcements and maybe some hardware announcements for Microsoft. So we are going to take a chance and cover both keynotes 9:00 AM Pacific, 12 noon Eastern on Tuesday and Wednesday. I'll be joined by Richard Campbell on the first Richard Campbell and Paul Thoro on the second. So I'll be back Tuesday bright and early 9:00 AM for the Build keynote. Thanks everybody for being here. We'll see you next time. Another twit is in the can. Bye-Bye.