Pod Insights The Vergecast What Meta and Anthropic really won in court About this episode It's already the heat of summer, and the news keeps coming. Nilay, David, and Jake start the show with a bunch of tech news, including the latest on Tesla's robotaxi launch, some updates on the Trump Phone, new devices from Fairphone and Unihertz, and Meta's shifting strategy for face computers. After that, The Verge's Adi Roberston joins the show to talk about two important AI lawsuits that were both decided this week — one involving Anthropic and the other involving Meta — and what this particular battle means for who will win the AI war. Finally, in the lightning round, it's time for another round of Brendan Carr is a Dummy, some huge news in the HDMI world, and the end of the Blue Screen of Death.
Further reading:
Tesla’s robotaxis are operating in a regulatory vacuum
Here’s a running list of all of Tesla’s robotaxi mishaps so far
The Trump Phone no longer promises it’s made in America
The smaller Fairphone 6 introduces swappable accessories
The Titan 2 is a modern BlackBerry with 5G, Android, and two screens
A week in Xbox VR with Microsoft and Meta’s new $399 headset
Meta announces Oakley smart glasses that shoot 3K video
Anthropic wins a major fair use victory for AI — but it’s still in trouble for stealing books
Meta’s AI copyright win comes with a warning about fair use
Senate confirms Trump’s FCC pick, Olivia Trusty
FCC Seeks Public Comments on Changing Broadcast Ownership Rules
Trump’s FTC agrees to Omnicom merger — with a gift to X
Paramount Plus with Showtime is getting a rebrand
Paramount delays $35M settlement with Trump as media giant fears bribery backlash: sources
The Paramount Risk in Settling Trump’s Lawsuit: ‘Bribery’?
The HDMI 2.2 specification supports 16K video at 60Hz
Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript 20,159 words · 13 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:37 Nilay Patel? Hello and welcome to Grouchcast, the flagship podcast of being the new editor in chief of Vogue.
1:44 Nilay Patel? I was put my name in the ring. I don't, I don't think that would be a good idea. And I, I love my current job. But it is true that Anna Wintour is stepping down as editor in chief of Vogue, the most legendary editor in chief of all time. And, uh, hey, you know? Hey, can you like 30 more years of this?
2:06 Nilay Patel? Hi, I'm your friend Neil. That's Jake Kastranakis.
2:08 David Pierce? Hello, hello.
2:09 Nilay Patel? David Pierce is here.
2:10 David Pierce? I like imagining Vogue as just like, everyone is wearing black on every page of every issue of the magazine. And, and there's like Packers logos in the background.
2:20 Nilay Patel? Yeah, that's my Vogue. And, and only iPhone 4s are allowed. The most beautiful phone of all time.
2:28 David Pierce? You would last two issues, but they would be glorious.
2:31 Nilay Patel? I've only met Anna once or twice. And both times she was utterly charming, I have to say. But the second time was at the American Society of Magazine Editors Awards, the ASME Awards. And we had a table right next to like a Conde Nast table that Anna was at, and they were terrified of her. Like, she was sitting there and all of the Conde Nast people were sitting there just in terror. And then our table was just like drunk and cheering. We were having the most fun. And they, they kept staring at us like, don't you know? And I was like, I do know. This is our vibe. It's our time now. You're the legacy media.
3:07 David Pierce? I, I always like thinking about how she must feel about Devil Wears Prada in the way that Mark Zuckerberg feels about the social network. Cause like, he's A, been very upfront about how he did not like the way he was portrayed in that movie. I would say history has proven that movie more right over time than I expected.
3:26 Nilay Patel? No, Jesse Eisenberg was vastly cooler than Mark Zuckerberg in that movie.
3:29 David Pierce? I mean, yes.
3:30 Nilay Patel? Like history, what history has proven is Mark Zuckerberg is a huge nerd who can't outrun his own essential nature.
3:35 David Pierce? Yes, fair. Which I think was a large part of what that movie was going for. But like, yeah, I think that thing where somebody like very famously portrays you and it changes the way everyone thinks about you has got to be such a weird phenomenon. That like, most people think when they close their eyes and think of Anna Wintour, they think of Meryl Streep. And that's just weird. That's gotta be so strange.
3:57 Nilay Patel? Uh, and, and, um, yeah, I watch Devil Wears Prada whenever it's on television. Like, it's like, it's a great movie. You should watch it. And Becky is always reminding me that I think I'm Anne Hathaway, but in fact.
4:10 Nilay Patel? I am now the Meryl Streep character.
4:11 David Pierce? Interesting.
4:13 Nilay Patel? It's over. But anyway, look, if you know anyone over there and you want to see Vogue get super weird, I'm open to a conversation about, you know,
4:25 David Pierce? Vogue was a series of feats.
4:28 Nilay Patel? Like, have you thought about going all in on Activity Pub? Important fashion magazine. There's a lot there. You could unpack a lot there. The world's most important fashion magazine in the age of Instagram and TikTok is a weird thing to be. They they have a monopoly on taste, right? It's the cover of Vogue that's important. The contents of Vogue almost are not. And so like, that's the dynamic there. And it's super interesting. If you're not Anna Wintour and you don't have that monopoly, whether or not Vogue can be the thing that it is in the age of Instagram and TikTok, in the age of all the celebrities being able to publish their own pictures of themselves. It's a thing. I'm just saying it's a thing.
5:07 Nilay Patel? All right, we set that aside. But if you know anyone and if you know anyone in the country that wants to have a really weird conversation on the future of Vogue,
5:16 Nilay Patel? you know, again, I love this job. There's another job really for me, but.
5:21 David Pierce? I'm trying to decide if it would be more fun to like point The Verge's resources at getting you elected president in 2028 or getting you the job as editor in chief of Vogue. It's like, it's, they're very different futures, but I find the project of both of them very fun.
5:37 Nilay Patel? I do think I can shape the the direction of the country in either role. It's just in very different way.
5:42 David Pierce? Yeah, which is more effective?
5:44 Nilay Patel? All right, there's a lot of news this week, a lot of updates. We we got it. There's a big set of AI copyright decisions that Addie is going to join us to talk about and unpack. I would say earlier today, Addie and I had a conversation. It can only be described as we got into our feelings about
6:01 Nilay Patel? because of these AI decisions. So we got to talk about that. There's updates on the Trump phone. Brendan's got a new commissioner at the FCC, so he just immediately started doing some of the dumbest stuff in the world. There's a side note, like there's some FTC dumbness involving just straightforward bribery, which is pretty good. A lot, just a lot going on in the world. But we should start with a little update on the robot taxis, the Tesla robot taxis in Austin. I think David on the Tuesday show, Andy was on, they were like a day in, now we're several days in. I would say the obvious has occurred.
6:36 David Pierce? It was very funny. So we, Andy and I talked about it a bunch and he kept being like, look, we, we should be cautious, Tesla should be cautious, but it's only been a day. Well, we'll see what happens, you know, hope for the best, expect the worst. And like, boy, did it just kind of go sideways from like minute one.
6:51 Nilay Patel? So there's a bunch of videos now. There's like a media component to this where the only people who seem to have access are Tesla influencers and like hardcore Elon Musk X posters. And they're all like, we're the media now. And it's like, are, are you? But then they're all just doing this like incredible live streaming, like everything is being posted. And so even through the filter of a bunch of people who's, who hold themselves up as being Tesla boosters, there's just like endless videos of these, these cars like making mistakes. And the net result of it, just from my perspective as a person watching these videos, is that it's just full self-driving. Right there.
7:34 Nilay Patel? Yes, there are safety monitors in the cars and there's that one picture of one steering wheel and the background of one photo, you know, like maybe they're all being remote controlled, you know, there's all these rumors about this stuff, but you kind of watch it and you're like, oh, this is just like watching any other full self-driving video, only like the cars are making mistakes without a driver so that it all feels way more dangerous.
7:59 David Pierce? Right. They're all only, they're sitting in the backseat is like a pretty meaningful change in how we're actually applying this technology.
8:06 Nilay Patel? When FSD messes up and the person's in the driver's seat, they're like, I'm taking control and they're like, oh, that was scary.
8:10 David Pierce? Right.
8:11 Nilay Patel? Now it's like, whoops.
8:13 David Pierce? Yeah. What are these safety monitors actually supposed to do?
8:17 Nilay Patel? Just like comfort you when like you rear end somebody like it's all right. We, we, this, this happens from time to time.
8:24 David Pierce? There have been a bunch of these, and I think when the safety monitor does and doesn't get involved has been sort of fascinating. Like there, there were, there was the one I think that has been kind of all over the place. And Andy and I talked about this on Tuesday where the car just veers into the wrong lane for a second. And the, the safety monitor doesn't seem to flinch. That this is just like, it's fine. We're just going to go in the wrong lane because we thought the turn lane started before it did. But then there are a couple of other ones where like something actually goes wrong and the car just like stops in the middle of the road and then the safety monitor does get involved. So it seems very much like the safety monitor is instructed to basically not do anything,
9:06 David Pierce? no matter what, unless it has like officially broken, which is kind of a wild set of instructions to give to a safety monitor in a car like this in a project as early as this. But I just, I don't know how to read it any other way. Like they, they should have been getting involved more if they were allowed to be getting involved more.
9:25 Nilay Patel? There's definitely one where the car gets stuck, kind of like between two cars. It's a tight, and the safety monitor drives it out.
9:30 David Pierce? Okay. I didn't see that one. That's something.
9:32 Nilay Patel? I get it, right? It's a very limited beta slash pilot of this stuff. There's not a lot of these cars.
9:40 Nilay Patel? It's a trial. Sure. They're on public roads with other people and other cars.
9:44 David Pierce? Right.
9:44 Nilay Patel? It does seem to me like the safety monitor should just be in the driver's seat. Especially if it, again, as it appears, it's just full self-driving. Like it's not more, if they were faking it and there was a warehouse full of people, remote driving cars, I'd be like, yeah, safety monitor in the other seat, you know? But like you, you watch these videos and it, it feels anyway, from my perspective, like it's just full self-driving. And then you get to the fact that most people can't access the cars, right? It is just this limited group, at least posting content that is very apt to supporting Tesla. And you have this like war against the media narrative.
10:26 David Pierce? Right.
10:26 Nilay Patel? And I'm just going to say this as many times I can. Access is poison. And if you could capture where the companies are covered, you're going to make bad shit over time and you're going to lose your audience. And that's just the way it goes. And All of these folks who are like, the media doesn't just have the wrong narrative about Tesla. If Tesla was confident in the product, they would just let reporters into it and let them drive around and say, this is amazing. You could just take away Mo because Waymo is confident in its product. It thinks the product is expanding in markets it operates in. This, this thing where you think Tesla has rewarded these influencers is actually a sign of deep insecurity, like the most insecurity. And you can see it. I mean, we, this is, this is our world, right?
11:10 Nilay Patel? You see it with every company when they're not proud of their products. They close the distribution, they limit the access. You know, we play these games, but we, our rules are clear. If you're listening to this, you know, our rules is clear. You can't buy us, you can't buy our branded content. We're unsponsored for all this stuff because that's how we manage the access games. We just draw the lines as clear as we can. And we say, look, we won't play the games. If we don't get the access, we'll go and do the next thing. And I, like, there's the video, there's the, there's the one video of the woman in the backseat and the car breaks so hard, it throws the phone out of her hand. And then she starts apologizing for the car. And it's like, oh, this is bad. Like, this is a really bad media ecosystem.
11:52 Nilay Patel? If you think that the reward is the, the car breaks so hard while you're not wearing a seatbelt, the phone flies out. We have it. Do you want to just play it, David? I do.
12:02 Speaker 06 Let's find out. You guys know we're not lying because we have that stopwatch going. Whoa, all right. So we just slammed on the brake. I'm not exactly sure what just happened, but the car thought it saw something. And this happens in full self-driving. This is something that does happen. That's something that people have talked about being one of the limitations of full self-driving with robot taxi is that occasionally it slams on the brakes out of nowhere. You guys kind of saw me react.
12:33 David Pierce? Yeah. I mean, you get the idea.
12:36 Nilay Patel? What are we doing?
12:36 David Pierce? It happens sometimes, guys. Sometimes your car just slams the brakes on you and you just sit there.
12:44 Nilay Patel? With no, the safety, presumably a safety monitor, just saying nothing while this video is happening.
12:49 David Pierce? It is sort of fascinating that this is what Tesla has conditioned its fans to believe is.
12:54 Nilay Patel? No, I'm saying it's more sinister than that. I'm saying it has conditioned access on that behavior.
13:01 David Pierce? Oh, sure.
13:01 Nilay Patel? And that feedback loop is actually bad for the company. It's bad for people, right? It's bad for people that create products. It's also bad for the company. Cause they're not actually getting the negative feedback they need. The market is not actually providing the information. They have a bunch of influencers who are afraid of their access being taken away and not getting invited to the next cyber rodeo or whatever. And then they're yelling at reporters who are just trying to do their jobs. But they're like, you can literally hear the lack of objectivity there. And look, everyone can yell at us. Somehow in my career, I've gone from being reliably called an apple shield to being called an apple hater. Great. Sure. Whatever. You can yell at us about our perceived biases, but we have our rules. Like you can just read the policy, like those, those rules exist.
13:46 Nilay Patel? To, to at least like provide a set of guidelines for what you can expect from our behavior and how we think about access and all these other things that we, you know, that are part of our job and our careers and the media that we make. But you can hear literally in these videos, the influencers thinking, if my access will get taken away. And I need to apologize for this car fucking up. And it's like, no, a real person, a real customer does not stop and say, this happens. They just get the fuck out the car and like, that's your problem.
14:18 David Pierce? Yeah. The video did make me think about like the terrible Uber rides that I've had in the past and like, they happen occasionally and you have them. But like, there's a person in the front seat, you can tell that like one year at CES, I had an Uber driver who drove me at, I'm 45 miles an hour through parking lots of casinos in Las Vegas to get me to the airport. And we were just like launching ourselves over speed bumps. And for the first time ever, I had to be like, guy, you, you gotta stop dude. Like, I'm not in a hurry. Please stop driving like this. And he did, and it was fine. I went from being like, I'm going to die in the back of this like Dodge Charger.
14:58 Nilay Patel? Of course, it was a Dodge Charger.
14:59 David Pierce? To it was okay, because there was a person I could tell. And it was just like, it's it's not that these things are uniquely bad drivers. It's it's that like, we have a chain of understanding how this stuff works. That we just, none of this has made any sense. Again, it goes back to like, put the safety monitor in front of the steering wheel, like.
15:17 Nilay Patel? Yeah, but he can't.
15:19 David Pierce? Right.
15:19 Nilay Patel? I know why he should. And I know why Elon should put the safety monitor behind the wheel. I know why he can't. Because the future of Tesla's valuation depends on robo taxis working, not on selling new or better cars.
15:31 David Pierce? That's why this whole thing exists.
15:33 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Anyhow, well, the more time will pass, presumably more people will get access to this thing. I'm just, I I've been bemused. It feels like a bunch of people are entering a kind of journalism where the compromises of access will be made clear. And some people will learn the lesson and some people won't. And it all kind of feels like speedrunning to me. Like, you're about to have a whole bunch of experiences here. But I'm watching these videos. I'm like, oh, the thing doesn't work as well as it should. Right? And if you actually want to compete with Waymo, if you actually want to build that stuff, it needs to work a lot better than this, a lot faster. And like everything with Tesla, maybe it'll just take a long time. But I don't know. I'm going to continue watching this list of Reddit video updates.
16:16 David Pierce? They're very good. I really, it's Reddit has done an admirable job of putting together timestamp versions of hilariously bad things happening to these people.
16:24 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
16:25 David Pierce? I highly recommend it.
16:26 Nilay Patel? By the way, if you want to be an auto journalist and you think Tesla's much, by all means. I'm just, I will just say it again. Access is poison. It will, if you chase access, it will kill you. And I say this to our staff all the time, the less access you need, the more you get. And that's a, that's a dynamic that's very hard. Again, I think they're just speedrunning media in like a very particular way. We'll see how it goes. All right. Speaking of access, poison and speedruns, there's an update on a Trump phone.
16:57 David Pierce? Jake, you helped me investigate this. Do you want to take us through what happened with the Trump phone this week?
17:01 Speaker 07 Yeah, well, if you guys will recall, about a week ago, the Trump Organization announced Trump Mobile. The Trump Mobile announced the T1 Phone 8002 Gold Edition, I believe the name is. I think we came on here and we said, we don't believe that a lot of this is accurate. One of the biggest things was that they said it was going to be made in the United States. Eli went on TV and shouted that that was a lie.
17:32 David Pierce? That's true. I will say, I was on the show last week and I listened to it and I had to, I had what I believe is the very common experience of yelling at the Vergecast. So I feel a lot of empathy for the audience. But CNBC invited me on. I was like, this is fake.
17:44 Speaker 07 And lo and behold, David, earlier this week, scrolling through their website, sees that they've changed the website. Used to say, "Made in the United States." Now it says, what's the exact phrase, David?
17:59 David Pierce? Oh my god. I'm so excited to read this website to you. First of all, shouts to Simon, who saw this before I did and sent it to me. Can I just, can I just like read you a bunch of copy from, this is the, the phone page of the T1 on the Trump Mobile website. Says at the very top, "Meet the T1. Premium Performance. Proudly American." This is the new tagline of this phone. "The T1, trademark, they put trademark everywhere, which I really respect, isn't just another smartphone. It's a bold step towards wireless independence." That doesn't mean anything. "Designed with American values in mind, the T1, trademark, delivers top-tier performance, sleek design, and powerful features, all without the inflated price
18:39 David Pierce? tag." Designed with American values in mind is what is replacing "Made in the USA." We also have, "With American hands behind every device. We bring care, precision, and trusted quality to every detail."
18:51 Nilay Patel? Are those just Don Jr.'s hands?
18:53 David Pierce? Like he's just, he's just collecting his tracks? There's just some, some American has put hands near a phone.
19:01 Speaker 07 An American?
19:01 David Pierce? That's all we know for sure.
19:02 Speaker 07 An American hand has put their, has, has clicked the AliExpress order button. That is what happened here. I am telling you, you go to AliExpress, you type in big Android phone and you will find what is something that is very close to the T1 phone. And the other thing that David noticed is that they've, they've changed the specs as well. The, the phone is not going to ship as the exact phone that they announced a week ago, which means that like, they clearly were not confident in what they announced. I think we all said that would be the case and we were already starting to see it morph in front of our eyes as they realized that it was, it was not correct. David, what is the updated spec? They, I believe they changed the RAM and they changed the screen size.
19:43 David Pierce? So the RAM is now gone from the website, which is very funny. It normally, there was a, there was, if I remember right, there was a section on the site that said like processor and RAM and it had no processor listed, but it said 12 gigs of RAM. Now that whole section is gone. So we still don't know the processor and now there is no RAM apparently. The other one, which I think is maybe the bigger signal that something big has shifted here is it has gone from a 6.78 inch screen to a 6.25 inch screen, which I would just point out is a very different phone. If you lop off a half inch of the screen, you've gone from an iPhone plus to an iPhone. Like that's just a different thing.
20:24 David Pierce? And like the, they fixed a couple of things, like now it says battery as battery instead of camera, which is very exciting. It's very good. Although I was always excited for a 5,000 milliamp hour camera. Camera, it's gonna be, it's gonna be a sick camera. That camera will power your house somehow, we don't know yet. It also, instead of saying it's gonna ship in September, it just says coming later this year. Even the coming soon is gone, which is very funny. So I, like, the only thing I can think of is that they got in some kind of legal hot water over the phrase made in the USA, which is a thing that you have to follow certain rules to be able to say about a device or any product. And also.
21:07 David Pierce? That they went from having one supplier to having another supplier. It's the only thing I can think of is that whatever they bought on or thought they were going to buy on AliExpress, now they're buying something else with a half inch smaller screen. There's just no reason that happens in a week other than that.
21:22 Nilay Patel? Especially at $499.
21:23 David Pierce? Right. Yeah, the render is still the same. The price is still the same. I'm still convinced this phone does not exist and will never exist. But even the thing that doesn't exist makes less sense every day.
21:36 Speaker 07 The made in the US thing was just particularly egregious, right? Like, from the start, it was wildly obvious that that could not be true. And I guess after enough people asked about it, they realized maybe we shouldn't lie about this one. Which I guess, I don't want to say kudos on that, but you know, good, good for stopping lying. That is a positive.
21:57 David Pierce? It's not not lying. You know what I mean?
22:00 Nilay Patel? The phone doesn't exist. I'll give them credit for not lying when they ship us a phone. I believe Jake, you ordered one, right?
22:08 Speaker 07 The Verge has ordered two of them.
22:10 Nilay Patel? Two? We're $1,000 deep in the Trump phones?
22:14 Speaker 07 Well, yes. Well, so Sarah Smithers are...
22:18 Nilay Patel? I take one day off the show. Jake's like, blow a grand on Trump phones.
22:21 Speaker 07 We, listen, somebody needs to find out if these phones are real.
22:27 Speaker 07 Sarah Smithers, our wonderful editorial operations director, has spent a week trying to order these things. It turns out for the first week, they did not have an option to order them if you lived in Washington DC.
22:41 Nilay Patel? Oh, good.
22:42 Speaker 07 And so we had to keep emailing them saying, hey, this is part of the United States. Could you please accept our order?
22:49 Nilay Patel? Because our corporate headquarters is in DC?
22:51 Speaker 07 Yes.
22:51 Nilay Patel? I understand.
22:52 Speaker 07 So we will find out for all of you if this phone exists, if it is any good. And if they, as the website promises, randomly start billing you recurring charges at some point.
23:04 Nilay Patel? So many, many people have asked us to review the phone. And I'm confident we will. I just, I want to set some expectations that...
23:15 Nilay Patel? It's not like the, a review of a mid-range Android phone is often a banger. Do you know what I mean? Like, it's a mid-range Android. You know, you already know what it is. The thing that you want from us is to point out the obvious lies, which is like, you almost don't need the phone to do it. But at best, like, the best thing this can be is a competently executed mid-range Android phone.
23:38 David Pierce? Yeah, that's literally the, the 100th percentile outcome for this thing is A, it exists, and B, it's fine. That is the best possible outcome for the Trump phone.
23:48 Nilay Patel? I suspect there will be a yawning chasm between the device shipped to us, the two devices apparently that will be shipped to us, and that outcome. And that, you know, that's the point of a review, but I'm just trying to,
24:02 Nilay Patel? I don't think you're gonna open it and say like, light on fire. I think it's gonna be a mid-range Android phone with some shit bundled software.
24:08 David Pierce? All right, Neelai, Trump Mobile, Project Jena 5 says, "You have to bet on one as a grand success in the future."
24:17 Nilay Patel? Oh, it's, it's Project Jena 5 says.
24:19 David Pierce? Wow.
24:20 Nilay Patel? Easily, it's easily Project Jena 5 says. And I'm only saying this because it, to the extent that it exists.
24:29 David Pierce? You were about to say it exists. And they were, there was about to be a party in that office.
24:33 Nilay Patel? Yes.
24:33 David Pierce? You almost said it.
24:35 Nilay Patel? To just set this up for the audience again, because I'm often reminded that I, we speak in code and inside jokes like a bunch of high school seniors.
24:43 Nilay Patel? Project Jena 5 says, "Is the result of T-Mobile being allowed to merge with Sprint in the first Trump administration. And what they did was they told T-Mobile it had to divest a bunch of assets in Spectrum to Dish Network, a satellite television operator, which would then create a new, from the ground up, 5G networks, so that we would have five national carriers and there would be competition. And look around."
25:06 Nilay Patel? Does it exist? They they launched a network. They called it Project N5. They're now rolling it in a Boost Mobile, whatever. Most of those phones still roam on 18 TNT mobile because the network doesn't exist. But in some pockets of America, the network apparently exists. That's what I got for you. And so just because they built some cell towers and put some radios on some poles, someone will try to turn that into money because they've spent the money.
25:31 David Pierce? Yeah.
25:31 Nilay Patel? Here, what they've done is they asked ChatGPT to make a mid-range Android phone to put Trump on it. And no one has to collect on that investment. And so Project N5 says just because there's hardware in the world, like a little bit, has a, you know, on our go 90 scale, where zero is alive and 90 is dead, is quippy. I would put Trump at 90, just lives at 90, and N5 says it like a 75.
26:00 David Pierce? Yeah, that seems fair.
26:02 Nilay Patel? I don't think I've ever applied the go 90 scale of June streaming services to telecom providers, but it works.
26:08 David Pierce? Yeah, there's like three of them that are at 10 and everybody else is hovering in the mid 80s at all times. That's just what we do.
26:14 Nilay Patel? There's more phones. There's a new Fairphone. It's modular. Is this what this is? It's a modular phone? I love a modular phone.
26:22 David Pierce? I find Fairphone totally fascinating. This company has just been like, sort of chugging along in the background, doing great work on making like upgradable, repairable, more well-made and thoughtfully designed smartphones than almost anybody. And it's not like a huge hit and their phones have been not like amazing because they're trying to like do the right thing more than they're trying to build great phones. And those two things are hard to do together. But this new one's really interesting. It's it's the Fairphone 6. It is smaller and lighter, but has more battery. It's more powerful. They've just like made a bunch of the trade offs you want them to make for the first time. But they're also doing the the like modular accessories thing. Like, do you guys remember the the nothing phone that came out and it had the little loop on the side that you could
27:06 David Pierce? like stick a lanyard or like change the case and screw that stuff off? That's coming to the Fairphone. They're starting to do stuff like that. But the thing I think is really cool is they're shipping this phone in. Basically, two different ways. One is with Android, like normal Android and Fairphone has a pretty like refined take on Android, but they're also shipping it with a button that essentially lets you switch to like a minimalist mode of Android, which is kind of like, as we haven't learned a ton about it, but it seems like basically a power do not disturb feature, which I think is super clever. And then the other one is it's shipping with a de-googled version of Android, which is called EOS, made by
27:46 David Pierce? this company. I believe it's called Morena. And essentially, they've spent several years now building out a version of Android that is totally like bereft of Google services. And that's one you like, really have to make a moral choice. It's like, it's like being a vegan. You know what I mean? It's like, you have to do it on purpose and live with the consequences. But you're doing it because you believe it's the right thing to do for the world.
28:12 Speaker 07 It's interesting. I suspect there probably is a lot of overlap between those two markets. Like, there are going to be a bunch of vegans who hate that. I just made the comparison.
28:19 David Pierce? I didn't mean vegans and people who are against Google. I thought I meant people who want to repair their phone endlessly and who want to get away from Google. But it is, I think the bummer about this, you know, I think this is a very exciting device, right? Like, this is, I think, the best looking Fairphone yet. It looks like a normal phone. It's like an upper mid-range Android device. It looks great. The colors are fun. I like that it's opinionated with the, you know, the button that does the minimal launcher. But if you want to get it in the US, you have to get that de-googled version.
28:54 Speaker 07 Oh, that's the only one in the US?
28:55 David Pierce? Yes.
28:56 Speaker 07 That sucks.
28:57 David Pierce? And that is a problem, right? Because choosing to go without Google services means missing out on a lot of the phone experience, right? Just like, everything's in the Play Store. Just good luck. Right? Like, most people that I know use Gmail.
29:14 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Where do you get apps for this thing? I'm like clicking on this website. Where do you get apps for it if you don't have the Play Store?
29:20 David Pierce? Sideload them. They have a proprietary app store, and they have some stuff, but it is, I mean, it is like, vanishingly small number of apps compared to the Play Store.
29:28 Nilay Patel? Yes, they're sideloading and there's, you know, Android is Android. So there's other app stores. But the Play Store and then Play Services provide a whole lot of capabilities to Android apps? Yes.
29:39 David Pierce? Well, and I think increasingly, uh, so does Gemini. And so I think we're now hitting this place. Like, there was also some news this week about, uh, Gemini getting more and more integrated with the system and starting to do some like cross-app stuff like we've been talking about with like the future of Siri. And so, uh, the, the non-Google version of Android and the Google version of Android are getting like much further apart over time and not closer together. So I think the case here for something like Marina is gonna get harder, I think, because it's like, you, you're, you're just gonna have to make a broader set of sacrifices. Cause I think like, if I don't wanna have a Google account, it's not that hard to get like a Proton email account
30:23 David Pierce? and use DuckDuckGo and like, you, you can relatively successfully replace most Google services with something else without trying all that hard. But if you believe in all this AI stuff, and especially like the way it might change the way that you use your devices, taking that out is gonna make all kinds of other stuff just break.
30:40 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
30:40 David Pierce? It's like, it's like, oh, I don't use HTTP on my web browsers. Like, well, then you can't use the internet. Like, and it, it does feel like a lot of the AI stuff is heading that way.
30:49 Nilay Patel? Oh, David, you explain this in your piece about Marina. They're just downloading the apps through Google. They're, they're just piping you to the Play Store and then they have a clone of Play Services that runs.
30:58 David Pierce? Yeah, I mean, I knew they had, they had their own clone of Play Services that doesn't feed any stuff back to Google. I had forgotten that they just take apps from the Play Store.
31:08 David Pierce? Fair enough.
31:09 Nilay Patel? Yeah, uh, I mean, you wrote this, uh, three years ago, so you're, um, you're forgiven for not remembering about the weird open source Android clone.
31:17 David Pierce? I had thought this company is interesting for a long time.
31:20 Nilay Patel? Uh, I mean, I'm fascinated by this and I'm fascinated by the, the button that turns it into minimal mode on the phone. Like, it's a switch. Love that.
31:28 David Pierce? Yeah.
31:30 Nilay Patel? But yeah, I mean, this whole, the fact that you have to commit to an entirely secondary operating system, that's a, it's a rough, it's a rough ask.
31:38 David Pierce? Totally. But I think the, the, there's also like something in this combination of like more repairable, you can swap out some parts and this like,
31:49 David Pierce? Tiny but growing accessory ecosystem that like there's something there if you're a person who wants to sort of muck around with your phone from time to time that I just think is very cool. And to Jake's point, this is the first one that is like on its own, a pretty compelling phone, which is awesome.
32:04 Speaker 07 This is the thing. I feel like in the past, the Farah phones have always looked a little bit lesser than. And I think this one, obviously, we'll still have to review it, see if it all holds up. This is the first one that you look at and it it looks like a modern phone. It does not look like you're going to dramatically miss out on things with the exception of those living in the United States. So that's a bummer, but I'm really excited to see how this pans out.
32:26 Nilay Patel? All right. There's one more phone that I'm desperate to talk about this week. It's the Titan 2, which the only way you can describe this is that it's a it's a BlackBerry that runs Android. That's what it is. And it looks exactly like an old BlackBerry. It has a screen and a physical keyboard. And I don't know who this is for.
32:42 David Pierce? It has already raised a million dollars on Kickstarter. Like, so this is the thing I keep, and it's done big traffic on the site. Like, people are into this thing. And I think my overwhelming theory about devices like this for years has been that people have real nostalgia for this stuff, but not actual desire for it. Right? It's the same thing as small iPhones, right? Everyone on earth is like, oh, God, remember when like the iPhone 5 just like fit perfectly in your hand? Wasn't that so great? And then you present them with a phone that small and they're like, why is this so small? I don't want this. The battery sucks. What are we doing here? I've always assumed that that is the same thing with physical keyboards. People remember their BlackBerry
33:26 David Pierce? because it was their first smartphone and it was really exciting. And it was like a simpler time in the tech world. And that was all very cool. But then things like the the clicks keyboard come out and they're like, sort of a compelling novelty and they're they're fun and exciting to have and play with. But it's not a thing that is like a mainstream viable product. But then this thing comes out and raises a million dollars on Kickstarter. And so I'm like, there's clearly some people out there who want a giant ass slab of an Android phone with a big keyboard on it.
33:55 Speaker 07 It looks delightful. There's two things about this that I think are special that we need to talk about. One is that on the backside of it, there's a second screen that shows notifications and a clock. It sort of just looks like an ambient Apple Watch.
34:09 Nilay Patel? It's, it's pretty cool.
34:10 Speaker 07 It's interesting. Like normally, you know, you're like, I want to have my phone out but not have it out. So I'd like flip it over and this way you flip it over, but you still have your phone out. So it's actually, you're just not not being rude. You're still being rude, which I think is delightful. And then they also advertise multiple times that they have an infrared port. And they do not explain what that means or what you do with it.
34:31 Nilay Patel? You obviously, you turn off motion smoothing at the bar, Jake.
34:35 Speaker 07 But, but does it, is it an outward infrared port or is it an accepting infrared port? Can I control my phone with a remote?
34:42 Nilay Patel? Oh, I see. Is it an IR blaster, an IR window?
34:44 Speaker 07 They do not clarify. They just say infrared.
34:47 Nilay Patel? Phone calls with my TV remote. That's what you're talking about.
34:52 Speaker 07 That would be pretty innovative. Uh, I don't know if it would be useful, but.
34:56 Nilay Patel? I'm gonna go ahead and say it's an IR blaster.
34:59 Speaker 07 I mean, that's why this thing has raised a million dollars.
35:01 Nilay Patel? Yeah, people, people just want to go to the bar and.
35:03 Speaker 07 This is officially the most 2013 phone we've seen since 2013.
35:09 Nilay Patel? It's, uh, the, the standard was called IRDA, I R D A. And you could very, very slowly beam contact information between phones, like dumb phones back in the day. It's a real thing.
35:19 Speaker 07 Yeah.
35:20 Nilay Patel? Uh, it wasn't great and no one used it, but it was, it was called IRDA. And there was a time in gadget blogging where like, if a phone didn't have IRDA, like the commenters were like, no IRDA.
35:32 Speaker 07 I will say, to this thing's credit, I think one very compelling thing about it is that you can buy it right now on Kickstarter for $269. And I think that for like a, a half novelty of a phone is a perfect price.
35:47 Nilay Patel? All right. Two, two Trump phones or four Titans?
35:51 Speaker 07 Oh, four Titans. It's not close. Give me a Titan and a Farphone over the two Trump phones. I'm a happy guy. Uh, there is also actual motion footage of this phone existing.
36:04 David Pierce? Which cannot be said. There's not a single frame of the Trump phone existing.
36:08 Nilay Patel? All right, some more gadgets to round out our first segment, which is very gadget heavy, I point out, as we're all over the place with gadgets. Microsoft and Meta announced an Xbox VR headset that is just a Quest 3S that's green and comes with a controller.
36:24 David Pierce? One of my favorite things to do this week has been to troll Reddit, watching people be confused about what this thing is. It's so funny. So, two things are true, right? One, this is the best looking Quest there has ever been. The black and green color like works for the Quest in a way the like white beige thing kind of doesn't.
36:43 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
36:43 David Pierce? The combo of Xbox stuff and Quest makes sense. Shipping it with a controller that's already paired makes sense. Like this thing is a gaming machine. They're treating it like a gaming machine. It's gonna stream Xbox games. Makes perfect sense. There are so many people who just think this is an Xbox that will play Xbox games. And it turns out, it doesn't. And we, this is what we've talked about before, like the list of Xboxes that don't play all Xbox games is vast. And this is one of them. It will, it will stream some games if you have Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, which requires jumping through a series of hoops I cannot even begin to describe to you.
37:22 David Pierce? And like, this thing is, it both is and is not an Xbox in a way that is driving a lot of people on the internet absolutely up the wall.
37:29 Nilay Patel? Oh wait, everything at this point is and is not an Xbox. The state of being an Xbox is probabilistic.
37:34 David Pierce? This is what I mean. Yes. But this one's called Xbox.
37:38 Nilay Patel? Like every morning I wake up and think to myself, am I an Xbox? And then I go through the list of what games I support and
37:44 David Pierce? Yeah.
37:44 Nilay Patel? And many days the answer is yes.
37:46 David Pierce? That's, it's beautiful for you. Is, is your Samsung Frame TV an Xbox?
37:50 Nilay Patel? It could be, because you can run Game Pass on it, right? So wait, I have not paid a lot of attention to Game Pass. So this is just a VR headset and it's got the one app in it that runs in 2D, right? So you're in the VR environment and it puts up a big fake TV, a big virtual TV, and then it just runs Game Pass on it?
38:06 David Pierce? That's right.
38:06 Nilay Patel? It's not even running VR games?
38:08 David Pierce? No, the Quest does that anyway. This is just purely like a branding exercise. And again, I think the branding exercise makes a lot of sense, but it is just, it is just a branding exercise. This is, this is a like, I don't know, imagine some celebrity picked a color scheme for a Quest and it did that. This is that. It's just called an Xbox, so people assume it's gonna be an Xbox.
38:34 Nilay Patel? Well, it's an Xbox in the sense that Xbox Game Pass Ultimate is Xbox.
38:38 David Pierce? If that's an Xbox, we're all Xbox.
38:41 Nilay Patel? This is what I'm saying. Every morning I wake up.
38:42 David Pierce? Yeah.
38:43 Nilay Patel? All right. It's very confusing. I'm trying to figure out who is making money here.
38:48 David Pierce? Microsoft seems to have some very long-term plan here to redefine what the Xbox is. And they are really overshooting for what they can actually deliver on today. That that seems to be it. I do not see how Xbox is benefiting from this right now when they're just confusing everybody.
39:05 Nilay Patel? So my understanding is that Xbox is it came in second place the last two generations, right?
39:10 David Pierce? Yes.
39:11 Nilay Patel? The PS4 and PS5 blew the Xbox away and then the Switch and presumably Switch 2 is throwing a gray and that's gonna be its whole other thing over there. And it feels like Microsoft is reacting to coming in second place as though they have failed so completely, they need to burn it all down. Right? And they're like, we will reconceptualize the very concept of an Xbox and turn it into like a PC console gaming situation on handheld. A cloud streaming service on on VR headsets. And then the actual console is like of little value to them.
39:41 David Pierce? Yeah, I think that's right.
39:42 Nilay Patel? Right? That's kind of what this all feels like. But I'm just saying the Quest 3S is not a huge hit for Meta. Right? There's been reporting that they've kind of lost interest in Quest. Cause their glasses are the success, which we'll talk about in a second. The Ray-Bans and now the Oakley smart glasses feel like their future. And so it's like, okay, an unsuccessful VR headset is being paired with an unsuccessful gaming brand to accomplish. What?
40:11 David Pierce? The thing about it is I actually think in a certain way, calling this thing an Xbox makes it make more sense. Because it is a gaming machine, like everybody who works on VR stuff will tell you this is not true, but VR is a gaming platform. It just is.
40:26 Nilay Patel? But this doesn't play VR games. This is this is the same as one of those X Real glasses that just picks puts up a fake TV.
40:35 David Pierce? Yeah, those that's also an Xbox. Apple Vision Pro, also an Xbox. Do you know what I mean? Like, what is an Xbox?
40:41 Nilay Patel? Help.
40:44 David Pierce? But I think like the, to the extent that this just screams, this is a large screen on which to play games. I'm not bothered by it. But the thing you're describing is why people are getting tripped up because it's like, oh, this should now play in my Xbox games. And it isn't that simple. And so we're in this position of like, nobody, many more people know what to make of Xbox than know what to make of Quest. So I can actually see why bringing Quest and Xbox together makes sense for shipping this headset. Except it's, it's not fully an Xbox. I just, I get turned in circles, but ultimately this thing is like a limited edition and looks very cool and, uh, not that many people get it. So it's like, whatever.
41:28 David Pierce? But I do find it sort of fascinating that they're like leaning into this thing is for games. And Microsoft is like, games are for everything. And they're like, oh, I see why you're friends. Like, sure.
41:37 Nilay Patel? Yeah, just on the one hand, you know, Microsoft spent last week, or I guess two weeks ago, talking about the, you know, the wrong ally. And being like, the future of Xbox is Windows games on the go. We also support Steam. And one turn later, they're like, it's a limited cloud gaming library on the Quest. It does feel, it just feels like they, they've, they've lost sight of what they want Xbox to be. So it's everything.
42:01 David Pierce? And yeah.
42:02 Nilay Patel? Who knows?
42:03 David Pierce? Agreed.
42:04 Nilay Patel? The Meta smart glasses, uh, they are a success, at least according to the metrics Meta keeps saying. And they've expanded them this week. And now they've got Oakley smart glasses, same basic concept as the Ray-Bans, only they look like Oakley's. And they shoot 3K video, slightly high resolution video, because they're slightly bigger is, is basically my understanding of the product.
42:24 David Pierce? Yeah, pretty much. The, the thing I thought was really interesting, uh, Alex Heath talked to one of the folks on the team building this stuff. And, uh, they confirmed what we have always suspected, which is that people use these glasses for two things. One is audio and one is camera. And they call them AI glasses, which is very funny. It's, it's like, well, we're going to call this thing a thing no one uses them for. But like this, this positioning makes sense. Doing it with Oakley makes sense. I don't think these glasses are particularly good looking, but I also can't pull off Oakley's in general. So I'm not like a great person to judge.
42:59 Nilay Patel? When you went on the eighth grade trip to DC that everybody buy fake Oakley's?
43:02 David Pierce? Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah, I've owned so many fake Oakley's.
43:05 Nilay Patel? Oakley's, we, we call them.
43:07 David Pierce? What'd you call them?
43:07 Nilay Patel? Oakleys.
43:08 David Pierce? Oh, we were we were Oakleys.
43:09 Nilay Patel? Oh, very good.
43:10 David Pierce? Yeah, it was they were good. But yeah, I think like this this thing Meta is doing continues to make perfect sense to me. It's it's still not clear how you bridge the gap between this and the Orion glasses that we talked about before, because they're like the technical breakthroughs required to get from one to the other are vast and unsolved. But just this thing where like Meta has a hit at relative scale doing this basic kind of stuff, and they've just decided to lean into this is the thing that everybody wants. We will figure out how to stack capabilities on top of it over time. Feels like the right move to me.
43:47 Speaker 07 It also feels really clear that their partnership with Luxottica has just continued to pay dividends here. Right? Like, you need glasses that are naturally chunky enough to fit this hardware. And they have managed to find multiple styles here that adapt well to this additional hardware that are already formats that people know and love, right? These are very popular glasses. They're very popular brand names. Expand to Oakley was a really smart next move after Ray-Ban. And so I right like this is a a challenge that every other company getting into the glass space is gonna have. If you put out knockoff pair of Ray-Bans or Oakleys, people will be able to tell that they are a knockoff pair. Right?
44:31 Speaker 07 Meta's biggest advantage here is it is just selling Oakleys with some headphones in them. Right? That's not a bad product at a bare minimum, right? Nobody has to use the AI.
44:40 Nilay Patel? Well, I think Meta is desperate for a platform
44:43 David Pierce? They would like that.
44:43 Nilay Patel? Where their AI assistant is the first party assistant, not an app on the iPhone. And they've said only these glasses. I will say they um they transition lenses are available, but all the cool photos are the reflective orange lenses. And Meta's continued attempts to make transitions very cool continues to amuse. That's all I'm just saying, especially because if you're wearing transition Oakleys, many decisions have been made along the way.
45:10 David Pierce? Vindication is coming for my dad, who's been wearing transitions for like a decade. The world is coming around to Joey.
45:16 Nilay Patel? I don't know if you saw Joanna Stern's video with Craig Federighi and Craig Joswiak, but Joswiak was wearing transitions in the video. Then about halfway through, they tinted to see if they were in the sun. And I was like, well, this is, I mean, it's fine. Like do, do you whatever you want to. But the fact that you can't control them actually sometimes causes problems.
45:35 David Pierce? Maybe it's a defense mechanism where he's like, these questions are too hard.
45:40 Nilay Patel? Like, I can't see you, just like you can't see Siri.
45:45 Nilay Patel? I don't, I, like, the fact that it's camera and, and, and headphones, exactly the same problem as Alexa had for years. It's timers and music. And it's great. I think people like having cameras on their face. I got a TikTok ad today for, uh, like what can only be described as a necklace with a MagSafe mount.
46:01 David Pierce? Huh.
46:02 Nilay Patel? Because people mount their phones here when they like drive their cars and do stuff. And they want the like first person view. I get it. I get why people want cameras in their glasses. I don't think Meta has actually trend. I would love to know the rate at which people who buy these glasses also use the AI stuff. Has, is Meta convincing 2% of those people to be like, I love the Meta AI assistant? How many people are looking at stuff and being like, what is that? Because that's the use case they keep coming up with.
46:30 David Pierce? Right.
46:30 Nilay Patel? Again, I, I think the real thing people want to build is Orion, the augmented reality glasses. And even Orion doesn't actually do augmented reality yet. Like we're, we're, we're, we're long, long away. But if you live in Oakley and you like glasses, I, Joanna Stern, speaking of Joanna, loves her Metaray lens. Loves them. Can't get enough of them.
46:47 David Pierce? I wear mine all the time, just as sunglasses that happen to do other things. Like that's, that's great.
46:52 Nilay Patel? Do you have the transition lenses?
46:54 David Pierce? No, mine are just sunglasses. So I just get to be the cool guy who like wears sunglasses inside the coffee shop for a while.
46:59 Nilay Patel? Does the Meta app support multiple glasses?
47:02 David Pierce? The last time I tried, I could only, I could only be paired to one at a time.
47:06 Nilay Patel? I mean, th- these are just like, right, these are, these are problems with the form factor that you're going to have to overcome. You, nobody wears the same pair of glasses all the time.
47:14 David Pierce? Right.
47:15 Nilay Patel? Like even people who wear glasses, like prescription glasses, I have two pairs of glasses. Because when you go to the store, my glasses are always like, do you want two pairs of glasses? And then people with sunglasses have lots of different kinds of sunglasses. Like being locked into one pair of one style sunglasses forever is not great. And now they have multiple styles. I don't know. I'm just saying the on the chart of wearable bullshit. You still have to put the thing on your face, man. It's utility has to be much higher than it is right now. But you love them.
47:43 David Pierce? They're great. And they're like, they've solved the face problem because they just look like sunglasses. Like, that's the thing. That's, that's to Jake's point, like, the, the hardest thing about this is just provided to Meta by another company that is fabulously good at making glasses people like. And rather than do what Meta tried to do and what Apple is trying to do and what traditionally tech companies have always done, which is like, build the hardest, most expensive thing and then try to like trickle the tech down to cheaper prices. Meta was just like, we're going to do the least and then try to build up from there. And I actually think in this particular case, in part because of, you know, the, the problems that come with Neil's chart of wearable bullshit.
48:27 David Pierce? That's the right move. Like make a thing people like and then figure out how to get it to do more stuff. Strikes me as way more compelling than I'm going to build a helmet for your face and then figure out how to make you like wearing.
48:40 Nilay Patel? The Apple Vision Pro.
48:43 Nilay Patel? All right. We gotta take a break. We'll be back. Speaking of Meta, we gotta talk about their big AI win. Anthropic's big AI win, but they're also losses. We'll, we'll be right back. We'll explain.
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50:26 Nilay Patel? All right, we're back. Addie Robertson's here. Hey, Addie.
50:28 Speaker 09 Hey.
50:29 Nilay Patel? I'm excited. Usually when you and I talk, something very dark has happened. Like, a lot of times you're on Decoder and we're like, well, Addie's here. And we both have the same reaction. I'm excited to talk to you about AI and copyright because this is just chaos. Like, it is delightful chaos in our nation's courts as the AI copyright cases begin to wind their way to some decisions.
50:51 Speaker 09 Oh, yeah, these are fun.
50:52 David Pierce? Can I back us up here a little bit and just like build from the ground up a little bit? Because I confess, I have had trouble keeping these two cases this week separate in my head and then also trying to figure out what they have to do with each other because it seems to be a lot. So, Addie, can you just like walk us through these trials a little bit? First, let's do Anthropic first because that that decision hit first this week. Just remind us quickly like what that case was about and what was decided this week.
51:21 Nilay Patel? This is David saying, Neil, I can't immediately get in this feeling. So that's just what happened.
51:24 David Pierce? Yeah, Neil, Neil was so fast to like, let's talk about the whatever, the fourth factor of copyright law. And I'm like, can I remember what books are first?
51:34 Speaker 09 Yeah, so there are two groups of authors here and both of them found out their work is almost certainly ingested into the training data set of a chatbot company, in one case, Meta, in one case, Anthropic. And they both sued and there are kind of two arguments. One argument is these things were pirated in the first place. And then in some ways, the bigger argument is, well, even if you get these things legally, you are putting these into a training set that is then using them to power a very lucrative product. And that's unauthorized. That's copyright infringement. You need to get permission from us and pay us.
52:09 David Pierce? Okay, so this became, Neil, a fair use thing, kind of all the way down, right?
52:15 Nilay Patel? It's very important to separate what specifically is fair use. And the courts here don't agree. There's a lot going on in these, but it's important to just think about AI from the technical perspective. There's training the model and then there's inference where you get outputs from the model. And in these cases, it's all about training the model. Is in the Anthropic case, literally buying a bunch of used books, ripping off the covers, scanning them into a database, and then using that database to train a model, is all of that fair use? Not if you ask the model to produce some copyrighted book, is that copyright inference?
52:56 David Pierce? Right.
52:57 Nilay Patel? And that's a big distinction. The reason people hate lawyers is because lawyers are constantly making extremely pedantic distinctions between things. But in these cases, those distinctions are wildly important because the judges react to those distinctions between training and inference, between inputs and outputs, very, very different.
53:16 David Pierce? So both of these cases were fundamentally about training, right?
53:19 Speaker 09 Both of these cases are sort of fundamentally about training with a side, which is actually also very important of you pirated these books in the first place. It's kind of the difference between, again, in both cases, at first, they were like, all right, we're going to download all these books and we're going to train on them. And then Meta kind of kept it there and Anthropic went, wait, we need to fix this. We're not comfortable with this. So then, as Neil I mentioned, they got a bunch of books and they destroyed the books after scanning them. So then there was a copy in the clout. And this turned out to be a really hugely important distinction for reasons besides the training.
53:59 David Pierce? If I told you to just go buy a million books, would you know how to do it? I've been thinking about this all week.
54:04 Nilay Patel? Anthropic hired one of the people who ran Google Books. Like, they found the one person who knew how to do it. So the Anthropic case is really interesting for that reason. They started by saying, we're just going to steal stuff. And they pirated books and they referred to the problem they had as like legal business slog that's in the opinion. And the legal business log is like, should we pay money and acquire things legally? And they're like, no, we'll just steal it. And then they came back around and they're like, we're going to scan a bunch of books. And the judge in that case... Addy, my read was that he cared a lot about acquisition.
54:35 Speaker 09 He was so mad.
54:37 Nilay Patel? Where he's very focused on, did you acquire these books legally or not? He makes a distinction between the legally acquired books and the pirated books. And then he spends a lot of time being like, okay, once you have the stuff, what can you do with it that's fair or not? And the first thing, and this is really just, again, pedantic steps down the line. The first thing that Anthropic did was they made a big database of books.
55:03 Nilay Patel? And that is, you don't think about that in the, in the context of you're training a model. But the judge spends a lot of time being like, okay, the first thing you did was make a database of books. And then you use that database, you can use that database to do all kinds of things. You can just search the database to see what books you have. And he, you know, there's a lot of like, consumer rights history here, a lot of Google history here, ripping the covers off of books and scanning them into a big database. If, if you wanted to do that, it's all the books you owned. You would be like, I can do that. Right? Like, if the judge here had found that buying a million books, ripping the covers off and scanning them into a database, was illegal, like, a lot of things would break, I think.
55:48 Nilay Patel? Like, I, I, there's some part of this where copyright has such a maximalist control over what you can do with the things you can buy. That the only answer you can get to is you're allowed to buy a million books, rip the covers off of them and scan them into a database. As long as you don't let other people access the database.
56:04 Speaker 09 Yeah, it's pretty notable here that they went from, okay, yeah, obviously it's illegal to acquire these digital books. But there are many legal ways to acquire digital books. And it is notable, they didn't do that because you have the most maximalist freedom as a consumer with a physical copy.
56:20 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it gets, it like, if you wanted to buy a bunch of Kindle books, like they come with DRM, they come with license restrictions. You can, as I was saying, you can buy a bunch of eBooks without that, but you still end up with like terms of service agreements. You just go buy a book, you can kind of do a physical book, you can kind of do whatever you want. So the judge says, okay, you made this database. That was fair use. Ripping the covers off the physical books and scanning the database, that's fair use. You're allowed to do that. Stealing books and making a database, that's not fair use. We're stopped there. The end. You're in trouble for that.
56:54 David Pierce? Is that even a fair use thing? Or is it the stealing the books?
56:57 Nilay Patel? Well, he's made the distinction between, is it fair use to buy a bunch of physical books, rip the covers off and scan them? Okay, that's fair use. Is it fair use to steal a bunch of books? No.
57:08 Speaker 09 There are sort of a bunch of separate charges here. There are the charges of, all right, is it copyright infringement to do this? Or is it also separately copyright infringement to pirate all these books?
57:17 Nilay Patel? Right. So then Anthropic tried to fix it by saying, the database is not important. Training the model is important. And the judge said, okay, training the model from your legal database, that's fair use. That's very transformative, especially because the authors, one, conceded that trading the model was just like reading a book, which is a big thing to concede.
57:39 David Pierce? Right. Which has been an argument of the AI industry for years, right? That it's like, it's the equivalent of reading a webpage and talking about it.
57:45 Nilay Patel? And this is going to come up over and over again. And I think this is why Addy and I both think these are fun. The lawyers blew it for the authors like left and right. And the judges are kind of like, you know, you guys are blowing it. Like, try again, but don't blow it. So the lawyers conceded that it was just like reading a book. And then they did not argue the outputs of the model would affect the market for their work. Right? So they stopped. And this is why it made the big distinction between inputs and outputs. They stopped at training. They did not get to, if you ask Anthropic, if you ask Claude to make our book, it'll just make our book. Or if you ask Claude to summarize our book, it'll just like spit out the answer to our book and that will ruin the market for a book. They just didn't go there. And the judge is like.
58:25 David Pierce? This is where you need to explain the different tenants of copyright and fair use stuff.
58:29 Nilay Patel? Okay, so David, the four factors of fair use. Here we are. We got here so inevitably.
58:34 David Pierce? You've told me this so many times and it just, it just goes fully, my eyes glaze over every time you say this to me. So I'm going to try and listen this time.
58:40 Nilay Patel? It's 17 United States Code, Section 107, the four factors of fair use. So this is when, when someone accuses you of stealing their work, you say, no, no, it's fair use. And so it's what's called an affirmative defense. You say, yep, I did. I did sample your song. This is fair use. I'm a, I'm, yeah, you're right. I made a copy, but it's fair use. And then the judges are supposed to evaluate this on a case by case basis. They have four factors. The purpose and character of the use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount and substantiality of the portion used and the effect on the use of the market. And how important each of these factors are just goes up and down over the years. The Supreme Court issues fair use copyright decisions.
59:23 Nilay Patel? You get law review articles being like, the third factor is no longer invoked. Like it's, everyone's always arguing this. But here, what everyone should be arguing about is the fourth factor. The effect of the use on the market. If you train a chatbot on all the books in the world and then you can just ask the chatbot about those books and it will tell you the answer, the market for those books will inevitably dry up.
59:46 David Pierce? And this, if I'm remembering correctly, is like the New York Times whole argument in its case against OpenAI, right? That if you can get OpenAI to regurgitate New York Times articles, you can, why would anyone go to the New York Times?
59:57 Speaker 09 I mean, I would be careful with that because in that case it is specifically output. They are saying that you could get them to regurgitate exact text. And here it's kind of more, A, you can generate a bunch of stuff that imitates us and that infringes on our ability to sell things. Or also that it can summarize and it can give answers. And that can, even if it's not really direct, clear, you're copying our stuff, that's still diminishing the market.
1:00:20 Nilay Patel? And then in the anthropic case, the authors didn't allege the outputs. Right? They just didn't argue about it at all. They were totally focused on training and they didn't get to outputs. And the judge is even sort of saying throughout the opinion, you didn't talk about the outputs. So your argument is merely training the model will have some effect on the market for your work. But like, what is it? You didn't argue. It's not here. Like, we don't have a record for it, so I'm just not going to talk about it. So we're totally focused on training and not on inference, right? We're totally focused on the inputs to train the model and not on the outputs of the model itself. And so the authors lose. He says, training is fair use. This is totally transformative. You can take, you can legally acquire books. You can put them into a database. You can use that database to train a model.
1:01:04 Nilay Patel? Making the database is fair use, making the model from what's in the database is fair use, and then stop.
1:01:12 Nilay Patel? Right? And like, there's a big yawning gap there of, well, now you have a model. What's going, what do you think is going to happen? And the answer is like, oh, you're going to make a bunch of stuff that competes with the author's original works. And so that's a real puzzle. Like, who knows what happens next? And he even leaves it open. Like, if you want to allege the next thing, you can allege the next thing. And then on top of it, he says, you, what you are not allowed to do is pirate a bunch of books and make a database.
1:01:39 Nilay Patel? He doesn't even get to, and then you can train the model. He just says, doing that first step, where you stole a bunch of books and put them in a database, that's not fair use. You can't do that. And that is a nightmare. Like, you might read this as training the model as fair use for your legally acquired physical books that you've ripped the covers off and scanned in your database. What it does not say is it's fair game for anything. And so if you, for example, have opened YouTube and downloaded a bunch of YouTube videos, I'm looking at you, OpenAI. Well, you violated YouTube's Terms of Service. The copyright in all those videos is owned by the YouTubers. You have a, you have a database of content that you're training Sora on that you don't have the rights to.
1:02:23 Nilay Patel? And so this anthropic decision has opened the door to being like, we're not even going to get to training as fair use. We're going to get to your illegal database of YouTube videos. And you can't, you're not allowed to clean up that problem by saying training is fair use. So this first decision, very complicated, like very technical, very readable. We've profiled Judge Alseth before. Sarah has profiled him. He writes code. He's, he's in the weeds of the, the technical details here. But what you have is training is fair use if you have a legally acquired set of content to train from.
1:02:56 Speaker 09 There's also kind of a backwards looking and a forward looking issue here, which is, say, in the future, if you're kind of just starting from scratch, then the upshot of this is, well, okay, you got to buy a million books that costs a lot. It's a finite number. And backwards looking, if you've already done all this stuff, the potential damages for each work are just like ruinous. If you add them up to a large enough number. And so anybody who's starting from scratch with a model that is starting acquiring all this stuff legally, like that's one economic model. Any of the big players, that's a whole different one. Because they've already done all this.
1:03:30 Nilay Patel? And again, OpenAI, OpenAI has a lot of money. But every YouTuber in the world can read this decision and say, well, you stole our videos. And it wasn't, you can't buy physical YouTube videos and rip the covers off of them and into a database. You access them on YouTube, which has terms of service that says you cannot do this. So this is, this is already like puzzle one. This decision, you read it and you're like, okay, there's a way forward if you pay a bunch of authors and maybe it doesn't even work, right? Used books don't pay the authors, but there's, there's parts of copyright law. So you're allowed to buy used books and do whatever you want with them. And this ruling reaffirms that. It does not say you can just pirate a bunch of stuff and train it and call that fair use.
1:04:09 Speaker 09 Okay.
1:04:09 Nilay Patel? So, okay, there's a bunch of liability for the industry. Then literally the next day, a decision in the meta case comes down, which Addy, I'm reading is basically being like, no, actually Judge Alsop got this wrong. Like this is all theft.
1:04:24 Speaker 09 It's basically Judge Alsop got all the fundamentals of this right, but he weighted the transformative factor, overarching factor, and the fourth economic market value factor, totally wrong. And that makes him completely wrong on all of it.
1:04:37 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Go through this case. So this case is slightly different, but it's a bunch of authors suing Meta. And if I'm correct, Meta got caught using torrented books, like straightforwardly they just torrented the books.
1:04:49 Speaker 09 From Library Genesis, I believe. Yeah. The collection of books that was just this very large corpus of pirated books. They torrented them. There is debate about whether that included them uploading things, which one typically does when you torrent things.
1:05:03 Nilay Patel? The classic Cedars versus Leechers debate hits our nation's copyright law.
1:05:08 Speaker 09 Yeah, they have to define seeding and leaching in there. There's a whole section about that, but they're specifically not dealing with the copyright. Like was this direct copyright infringement right now, except to say, yeah, look, it basically was. So there's that. And then after that, these authors sued in a pretty similar way, except that they also specifically said,
1:05:33 Speaker 09 The issue here is partly that it is recreating our work. So they did focus on output. And then also that there is this market potentially for us licensing our work to you. And that that's a market that you're taking from us. The judge called both of these clear losers. He basically thinks everyone here is wrong. So Meta won the case. Meta won the case just handily. And it's because the judge says, look, those are the only things you focused on. And both of those are bad arguments, partly because they couldn't get Lama to actually spit out more than 50 words of the direct text. So they were trying to say, look, you're verbatim producing stuff and it just didn't work out.
1:06:16 Speaker 09 And then the second one, because you just can't necessarily say, yeah, if I were allowed to license this, I would make a lot of money. That doesn't necessarily mean you should be able to exploit that. And so then, after saying, look, concluding just this argument is terrible. These lawyers are bad. Please don't do this. They said, there's this other argument that would have been way stronger. And it's that the fundamental use of these things is to flood the market in a way that destroys the ability of authors to make a living and completely diminishes the thing that copyright is meant to do, which is encourage human creativity.
1:06:58 Speaker 09 Basically, AIs are creativity killing machines. And that should mean that it outweighs any potential transformative value.
1:07:06 Nilay Patel? So I want to just quote from the opinion because it is brutal. This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta's use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful. It stands only for the proposition that these plaintiffs made the wrong arguments and failed to develop a record in support of the right one. He's just saying you screwed this up.
1:07:28 David Pierce? Yeah, you did it wrong.
1:07:30 Nilay Patel? You did it wrong.
1:07:31 Speaker 09 And then mentions, by the way, these guys only, they only represent 13 artists, 13 authors. So you know, there are a lot of other authors and maybe Meta scanned them. It probably did, just saying that.
1:07:42 David Pierce? Yeah. Yeah. Wait, okay. So let's talk about this here because the reaction to this this week has been fascinating because I think it's been sort of a Rorschach test, depending on how, who you are promoting here. All of the AI folks are like, this is a landmark victory for AI. This puts us on the path to do all the stuff that we needed to do. But then it also sounds like there's a, there's an easy read of this, that this is like a small victory for these companies who won this case on a technicality, but have just had the door thrown wide open for everyone else on earth to sue them better and win. Which of those things is it? Or is it both of those things?
1:08:20 Nilay Patel? It's the second one. It's so by far the second one. I think, you know, Addy and when Sarah's on and I, whenever we're talking about the legal system on the show, we are constantly reminding people that the courts are not computers. They are not deterministic systems, that you cannot predict what will happen.
1:08:39 David Pierce? Right.
1:08:39 Nilay Patel? And so I, I think the AI companies are like, this is fair use. And then they got an outcome that kind of looks like this is fair use. And I'm like, see, we predicted this correctly. We were right all along. And what you actually have is a court saying, these lawyers sucked. And if you had better lawyers and you argued these things differently, we would have reached different outcomes. But we can't reach those outcomes in the absence of your better lawyers. And that is a maddening to people. I know it's maddening to people because I have the Blue Sky app on my phone and I open it from time to time. And it's just people being mad that these lawyers blew it. And it, they blew it and the judge is saying flatly, they blew it. I don't know why in the anthropic case, the lawyers happily conceded
1:09:21 Nilay Patel? that training an AI model is like letting schoolchildren read books to learn things. I wouldn't have conceded that. I do know that it costs a lot of money to build an expert record about how AI systems work versus the brains of six-year-olds or whatever. And they may not have had that money, but you can't know. And that's why it's not deterministic. Like a lot of decisions got made along the way. And then we have these rulings. But there are more cases to come. As Addy's saying, the court in the meta case is basically inviting other authors to try to make the better argument that they have laid out. You have the New York Times, which is over a million dollars deep into its OpenAI litigation that's watching these outcomes and will change its arguments.
1:10:04 Nilay Patel? Then you have Disney, which is a very late entrant into all of these copyright lawsuits. They're partnered up with Universal and together they're suing Mid Journey about outputs. They, they like, they're, they're watching these cases develop. They're watching these arguments and they're like, oh, we need to focus on outputs. By the way, I need to disclose that Universal is owned by Comcast. NBC Universal is a part of Comcast, is a investor in our parent company. Our parent company has a deal with OpenAI. One of the reasons these companies have deals with OpenAI is because they want to set markets for licensing. They want to set rates so these lawsuits can proceed on whatever way they're going to proceed. You can see it's not settled. These are just the first little skirmishes.
1:10:44 Nilay Patel? And a lot of times what's happening is that the first plaintiffs are authors, are creatives who don't have the money for the most lawyering, who need to get to outcomes quickly. And they're getting outgunned by the lawyers for the huge technology firms. That's not always going to be the case.
1:11:01 Speaker 09 Record labels are also in on this. Oh, the record labels have sued Tsuno and Udeo.
1:11:06 Nilay Patel? Although they're starting to settle with some of those on the side. Um, I'm just saying like the legal system is not deterministic. It is also reactive to what happens before, like necessarily it's precedential. It's reactive to these cases and the arguments in the future cases will shift around these decisions to attack their weak points or in the case of the meta decision, to take the open invitation to get it right.
1:11:30 Speaker 09 I would also say we're at the point where basically this is kind of every judge for themselves. At the point where you appeal and then you start getting appeals court cases and then circuit courts start saying, all right, here's roughly how we think about it. Then judges have kind of precedents that they are trying to draw from. And of course, if the Supreme Court says something, then that's something that you have to wait pretty heavily. But at this point, they can kind of just stay stuff to each other. So it's also not like this one ruling that say all sub hands down is a law that everyone else has to follow. Somebody else can come up with their own theory of fair use, which is pretty much exactly what we've seen.
1:12:07 Nilay Patel? Right. And fair use in the law is supposed to be case by case. Right. So one fairies decision is not supposed to affect all the other ones. In reality, because of the money and time and risk involved, they they get treated as precedent.
1:12:23 Nilay Patel? But here, everybody has incentives to reopen those doors again and again and again. So I I don't know, Addy, what do you think? I think this is a bunch of small, narrow rulings that open the door to much more chaos to come, not definitive reckoning, but maybe you feel differently.
1:12:39 Speaker 09 I don't know, in part because I feel like sometimes court cases are a little bit just, they are reflective of a larger vibe and culture that it like, I think we've seen with section 230 cases, that it's not necessarily that judges all impact each other, but that if you start seeing a bunch of rulings around one kind of particular interpretation of the law or one kind of like weighting of something, that sometimes means you are seeing a pattern that's going to continue. It's it's correlation, not causation. And also, I don't know, I'm actually wondering what would happen if Al Saba had a case that was more specifically output based, because on one hand, yeah, it opens up a bunch of whole new cans of worms. On the other, some of his comments did seem like they kind of indicated it doesn't matter
1:13:22 Speaker 09 if somebody is, say, writing a book with an AI system that competes with yours, that doesn't inherently mean that they are, that is unfair.
1:13:32 Nilay Patel? Yeah, he's got a line that's like copyright law does not protect you from competition. It's supposed to inspire more people to create. And there's a, you know, there's a very deep, meaningful tension in there. Because the the mechanism by which copyright law is supposed to inspire you to create is by letting you sell your stuff. Right? You create stuff, you get rights to it, other people can't take it for free. They have to pay you money. But at the same time, if they take your stuff for free and then make stuff that competes with you, like, that's competition, like, there's something really weird in there.
1:14:03 Speaker 09 But there are also a lot of pre-AI cases where I think people would be a lot more sympathetic to the idea that you should be able to say, copy things without having to get permission. Like, the fact that you can report on facts that somebody says in a news story without getting permission from the original writer of that story. Like, the fact that you can do a pastiche of an artist and that artist's style is not necessarily a thing that's automatically copyrightable. I think these are all things that when humans are involved, we actually are pretty okay with the idea that creativity is cumulative and people build on each other. I think the thing that's really interesting about the meta ruling is that it specifically makes the argument that scale is different, which is something I see a bunch of people
1:14:48 Speaker 09 make pragmatically, but I don't think I've seen in the court system as much. That the argument isn't actually, well, these things are fundamentally different and not competitive because the writing is somehow different or because something's not necessarily learning. It's because you can create all of them so quickly that they will flood the market and they will destroy the market for books. Specifically, he thinks romance novels and spy thrillers. Romance novels come up a bunch in this.
1:15:14 Nilay Patel? The whole, the entire, like, romance novel, like, fanfic community right now is, like, deeply insulted, right? They're at war with AI every day.
1:15:24 Speaker 09 Yeah, romance authors are starting to use AI and romance readers are just furious about it.
1:15:28 Nilay Patel? Well, it's funny, because you, we've talked about this many times, but if you go on those forums, like, now people just say tropes all in a row and request stories and, like, oh, that's what AI is for.
1:15:37 Speaker 09 Uh huh.
1:15:37 Nilay Patel? Like, I just want this to happen. Wild interactions in that community. The scale problem is really interesting, because if, you know, we just play this game right now on the show, the moral dilemmas of copyright law become plain. So if I say to you, David, can you rip a CD under your computer without paying extra money to a record label? What would you say?
1:15:56 Speaker 09 Yes.
1:15:57 Nilay Patel? Can you rip 10 CDs?
1:15:58 Speaker 09 Yes.
1:15:59 Nilay Patel? Can you, David Pierce, rip 1,000 CDs to your computer without paying record labels additional money?
1:16:04 Speaker 09 I guess in theory, yeah.
1:16:05 Nilay Patel? If you had the hard drive space, could you rip a million CDs to your computer without paying the record labels? You, David Pierce?
1:16:10 Speaker 09 Yeah, I think so.
1:16:11 Nilay Patel? Can Meta do that?
1:16:12 Speaker 09 No.
1:16:17 Nilay Patel? Like, why, this is the problem, right? You write the rule that says it's okay to like rip CDs or we got a lot of Plex users on this show.
1:16:27 Speaker 09 Fair use can account for this, right? There, part of the consideration of fair use is whether something is commercial or not.
1:16:32 Nilay Patel? Part of the consideration is whether it's commercial, but in, in the anthropic case, Judge Alsop says you're allowed to just make a database. If what you want to do is make it easier to search, make it easier to run different applications on, it's totally fine for you to buy a million books, rip the covers off and scan them into a database. It's the next use that gets you into trouble, right? It's, okay, is it training the AI model? Is that fair use if you have the database? He says yes. If you were to say, I've now made this database publicly available for anyone to read all the books or listen to all the music in my database, you would go to jail. Like, that's the Internet Archive is in trouble for their database of books that they acquired. They scanned it and they let everybody have access to. So the questions get really difficult.
1:17:18 Nilay Patel? The second you start not just adding scale,
1:17:22 Nilay Patel? but adding different uses of what they're gonna do. And some of those uses are commercial, change the equation. And this is the problem. This is why everybody hates copyright laws. So everybody hates lawyers. You start to get incredibly pedantic about what happened, when, to whom? Who made the copy? When, where does the copy live? And everyone's like, it's just a computer, right? I can just like open it up and get whatever I want.
1:17:43 Nilay Patel? And then underneath that, all of those questions determine who gets paid. And I think here, you know, the big problem with the, the anthropic fair use ruling is, one, if you buy a million used books and train a model that generates billions of dollars in value, the authors who wrote those books get nothing. That's just the way it works in our society. If they pay a one-time fee to buy a million brand-new books and then train a model that generates billions of dollars in revenue, the authors essentially on that curve get nothing. They get paid one time.
1:18:16 Nilay Patel? Is that fair? Like, I don't, I truly don't know the answer to those questions, and these really kind of don't get you there.
1:18:21 Speaker 09 I don't know. I think that the meta ruling is interesting because it does actually kind of cut through all this. Because everything in copyright is very angels dancing on ahead of a pin, like is putting something in RAM a copy?
1:18:34 Speaker 09 But the overall argument is, the whole reason copyright exists is to encourage human creativity. And so the ultimate bar should not be, is this fair? Or is this hitting this particular place where it starts being uncomfortable? Or is the company that's doing this making it commercial? It is, when you look at this thing holistically, does it serve the purpose that the law is meant to serve? And that's not mostly how courts work. But I think if you are considering this from a larger kind of philosophical sense, that is interesting and worth considering.
1:19:07 Nilay Patel? Sarah and I have often crashed out because we both started as like copyright minimalist warriors in our legal careers. And we've now like horseshoed theoried around to like copyright law is good, actually, which is crazy. So the argument that you would make from the other side, and it's a good argument, is that human beings do not need copyright law to be creative. This, this legal system that we've invented is there to create scarcity and economic value for creativity, which certainly incentivizes some people to create. But if, actually, if you look around, our instinct as literal human beings every day is to create. We will do it for free. People wake up every morning and they have access to creative tools on our computers and they cannot help themselves.
1:19:50 Nilay Patel? Like, it is just our most essential human nature is to make stuff. And that's in real tension here, right? Like, it, it's hard to square the court saying we have to preserve the essential nature of copyright law so that there will be creativity. And then literally those judges go home and they open the Instagram app on their phone. It's like the most free creativity that has ever existed in the history of humanity.
1:20:12 David Pierce? I mean, somebody at Andreessen Horowitz is gonna play that clip that you just said for everyone who works there.
1:20:18 Nilay Patel? That's the crash out.
1:20:19 David Pierce? That's the, I mean, that is the argument that these companies make in favor of all of this is that, no, we're not diminishing anything because everybody would do it for free.
1:20:26 Nilay Patel? Right. And then they, they make that argument from their yachts.
1:20:28 Speaker 09 I will make the counter argument to this, which is that While people will create, a lot of the purpose of creativity is to share that thing with other people. And if AI creates a situation in which it is virtually impossible to distribute your work, or to get anyone to see your human-made work, I think that you can say that is really meaningfully chilling creativity. The problem is that I don't think copyright laws at Stans can solve this. There's this really bizarre tension in the meta opinion where, okay, if you take its premise as true, that this will completely destroy the market for books, then the only thing copyright law can do is say, okay, well, some people have
1:21:08 Speaker 09 to get a few dollars a month as residuals for this, to create this entire creativity-killing database. Really, the only way that you can take this argument as true is to assume that also copyright law is going to be powerless to change it.
1:21:24 Nilay Patel? It might be. I mean, one outcome of all these cases is they hit the Supreme Court, and Supreme Court says, fine, training is fair use. Maybe that's not coming. I think it is much more likely that as these cases careen towards that risk, because no one knows how that will go, that actually, the incredibly well-moneyed interests here will go get a law. Right? That Disney and OpenAI and Google, all of these companies have to deal with each other. They will go, that Nashville is a powerful economic force in copyright law.
1:22:00 Speaker 09 Where does that leave the next generation of artists, though? Because the way that I see that gaming out is, yeah, all the record labels that currently have artists sell a bunch of data to companies. And then companies create this database, and they train on it, and they train a bunch of, I don't know, music apps and apps for writing romance novels, and all of that. And then they create training data based on that, that then they sort of cycle into their system over and over, which is what they're trying to do right now. And then at that point, where does the next generation get paid? I don't know that there's actually a way that happens, especially if there is this situation where, say, AI-generated content floods everything.
1:22:40 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I don't know. I, that, I, I think that will be the heart of the negotiation, fundamentally. Especially because private equity is in the mix, like...
1:22:51 Nilay Patel? The creative industry is not clean. It's not pure. It's a lot of essentially banks now. And so like, you know, private equity companies have bought Bruce Springsteen's entire catalog for $500 million. They're not going to take a one-time training payment for that. They bought that because they think they can exploit that music for years to come in various ways.
1:23:09 Speaker 09 I don't know. I just think that's not actually satisfying because that means Bruce Springsteen has a steady string of income, but that there is no market for the next person.
1:23:17 Nilay Patel? No, Bruce Springsteen got his one-time payment. I mean, this is why it's particularly gross. Bruce Springsteen has a half billion.
1:23:22 Speaker 09 Okay, yes, fair.
1:23:23 Nilay Patel? It's the private equity company that made the investment is going to want a return over time. And that return over time is the thing that ideally makes any new work also valuable. And that's tough. I don't know how any of that plays out, especially because I don't think this gets litigued. I don't think it's at solved at the level of Supreme Court. I think Congress has to write a law in that you can already see how messy that will be. That in the battle lines of that law is these court cases wind ever forward are literally the huge entertainment companies that basically own this kind of lobbying. This is what they do. This and they they're very, very good at it. Going up against Disney to walk that copyright law is not historically a successful effort.
1:24:07 Nilay Patel? Going up against Nashville in the music industry to walk that copyright law, not historically a successful effort. And in fact, some of the only AI-related laws we have are like the Elvis Act in Tennessee that prevents people from making AI Elvis impersonators.
1:24:22 David Pierce? Well, and things like the Disney one are seem more sort of viscerally straightforward in that you can just go to mid-journey and be like, show me Simpsons and it'll just do the Simpsons for you. In a way that I think things like these cases are a little, just feel more abstract because it's like something goes in, black box, something else comes out. In that one, it's just something goes in and then that same something comes out for free and you can do whatever you want with it. And I feel like that. We're just gonna look at that differently. Whether we should or not, it feels different.
1:24:52 Nilay Patel? No, the pictures always win.
1:24:54 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:24:54 Speaker 09 Legally, different media are also different. Like, you can quote a bunch of a book, but if you want to sample three seconds of a song, you're on much shakier territory.
1:25:04 Nilay Patel? I would actually chalk that up to the fact that the record labels in Hollywood are better at this than the book publishing industry.
1:25:10 David Pierce? Fair.
1:25:11 Nilay Patel? The news media is not great at this historically, and those industries are really, really good at it. And part of it is, to David's point, that you have a more visceral emotional reaction to that picture is the same and that song is the same.
1:25:23 Speaker 09 Yeah.
1:25:24 Nilay Patel? They are good at fighting these fights. So my suspicion here, Addie, it might not be satisfying, is that you get to some solution where there's still value for the individual song. There's still value for the individual video. It might be less than before, and there might be more supply, which will crash that value, because there's only so many people and only so many minutes to consume songs and videos in the day. But I don't think you get to a place where this set of artists gets paid once and no future artists get paid, because that will kill these businesses and they're not existentially stupid. They can be stupid. They're not existentially stupid.
1:25:58 Speaker 09 My really dark take is that the reason Disney is suing Mid Journey is because Disney is about to use all of its IP to generate infinite Star Wars forever. So I don't know. I think we're just shifting the people who are going to be making these things and flooding the market.
1:26:11 Nilay Patel? Disney learns wrong lesson from Andor is a real headline you can... It's right there for you. We need to take a break. We'll be right back.
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1:27:53 Nilay Patel? We're back. The lightning round, which David says has to be two minutes long.
1:27:57 David Pierce? Two minute lightning round.
1:27:59 Nilay Patel? Because we just spent an hour crashing out about copyright law.
1:28:01 David Pierce? So let's talk about Brendan Carr for 45 minutes.
1:28:04 Nilay Patel? America's favorite podcast within podcasts. By the way, Lightning Round, unsponsored. If we're in a Tesla and it crashes, we will point out that it crashes. I'm just saying. You can't buy us. I've noticed a lot of people have started posting on various social platforms at me that you can't tell us what to do. That's all I've ever wanted from the Lightning Round, just unsponsored for flavor. Is people reminding everyone that you can't actually tell us what to do and you can't buy us.
1:28:27 David Pierce? I think when you die, I'm going to write, "You can't tell me what to do," on your tombstone. And it's going to feel, it's going to feel right.
1:28:32 Nilay Patel? It is the animating thesis of The Verge.
1:28:37 Nilay Patel? That and figuring out what's going on with the Frame TV. Okay. Brendan Carr is a dummy. America's favorite podcast within podcasts, that's fine. This is a short one. Because he did something dumb, but it's like predictably dumb. Like he did the dumb thing that Republican commissioners always do at the FCC. So a couple of things happened. One, everyone left the FCC, presumably because Brendan is so unpleasant to work for.
1:29:02 David Pierce? Does Anna Gomez still work there? I haven't checked on this in a minute.
1:29:05 Nilay Patel? She still works there. She is not yet fired by Donald Trump.
1:29:08 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:29:08 Nilay Patel? The only Democratic commissioner on the FCC. And she literally will tell you she does not know why she has not been fired.
1:29:15 Nilay Patel? And she's on tour saying Brendan is a bad guy who's violating the First Amendment. Wild stuff over there. So there were just the two of them, which is not a quorum for the FCC to do its business.
1:29:25 Nilay Patel? Nathan Simington, who left the FCC, wanted this guy Gavin Wax to be appointed. He didn't get it. This woman named Olivia Trusty is the new Republican Commissioner of the FCC. She was confirmed by the Senate. She's a long history with everyone. There were statements about her like, we would confirm her in a normal time because that's, she's a Republican Commissioner, Republican Presidents get Republican Commissioners. But Brendan is such a weird threat to free speech that we're opposing her nomination. That's, that's where Brendan has taken this organization. This, this woman who would have sailed through a normal times was opposed by various Democrats and various free speech groups. And literally they're saying, she's fine, but Brendan sucks. So we're
1:30:03 David Pierce? We can't let Brendan do anything.
1:30:05 Nilay Patel? You can't, you can't let him have another vote. She got through a party on vote. So it goes immediately, immediately Brendan moves to open comment on letting companies own more broadcast stations. So we have this concept in the United States called media ownership rules that say, big companies can't own all the TV stations for a variety of reasons. First, you just want your local media to have a relationship to you, right? That the TV stations and newspapers and radio stations that serve your area should have some skin in the game where you live, right? They should be responsive to their local communities. And this is like, deep in the law and the policy where you, you want the local media to be local.
1:30:47 Nilay Patel? You don't want national media to ignore your concerns and do all this other stuff. This has waxed and waned over the years, but you can kind of feel it, right? If you go on social media, they, there are not local media ownership rules. There are not rules that your algorithm has to show you what's happening in your community. Everything is just national culture war all the time because that's what plays in social media. Weird. It's a weird outcome. So we have these rules eight from ages ago that say, you know, big companies can't just buy all the TV stations and actually program them. They have to be locally owned. And then we have this other rule that says, you can't, there's a percentage, right? The same company can't own all the stations in your town. The same company can't own all the stations and all the radio stations, all these favorite. So you have all these media ownership rules. Brendan thinks they're dumb.
1:31:32 Nilay Patel? He thinks we should open it up and let everybody own everything. And his argument is,
1:31:37 Nilay Patel? It's not smart that these companies have to compete with the internet. So we should let them own everything so they can get big enough to compete with Google and Facebook. And the problem there, of course, is when you open the social media apps on your phone, you are not subjected to local news, you're subjected to national culture war, which is the exact reason the policy exists.
1:31:55 Nilay Patel? Brendan, everybody, he's just like, just walked into the literal opposite of the reason for the rule. We should make, we should make everything national culture war so that local news can compete with Google is not the right answer at all.
1:32:09 David Pierce? Make local news do national culture war is what we're after now.
1:32:13 Nilay Patel? That's our boy Brendan. So that's Brendan. He's a dummy. As always, Brendan, if you can defend any of this stuff, you're welcome on the show. I'd love to have you. It's been a minute since I've issued this threatening invitation to you and I am wishing it again. You're welcome on Decoder, on the Vergecast. We've only got weeks to go.
1:32:31 Nilay Patel? David, I believe this is your last show before baby.
1:32:33 David Pierce? This is my last Friday show. I, I will be on Tuesday's show, which due to the magic of technology, we have already recorded.
1:32:41 Nilay Patel? This cake is already baked.
1:32:43 David Pierce? Exactly. But yeah, this is, this is the, the, the last one I'll be on for a couple of months.
1:32:49 Nilay Patel? Yeah. And then I'm weeks away here as well. So our children are coming and Brendan, we will let our children interview you. I think they can take you, buddy.
1:32:58 David Pierce? That's a good idea.
1:33:00 Nilay Patel? I mean, Max can take me. So yeah, I think she can, she can definitely take Brendan, but you're, you're, you're invited anytime you want. You got a couple of weeks to go. I'll come back special just for you, Brendan. I do have, by the way, um.
1:33:12 David Pierce? It's gonna be so great when Jake interviews Brendan while we're out.
1:33:16 Nilay Patel? I think Jake can take Brendan too. I'm not worried about it in the slightest. Just a little bonus round. Not the FCC, the Federal Trade Commission did some dumb shit this week. They are allowing Omnicom, which is a big ad agency, to buy another big ad agency. But they're issuing a consent decree that says they're not allowed to, to like, keep ads off of X, basically.
1:33:39 Nilay Patel? So they're literally stepping into the free market and saying you have to spend money on platforms where you disagree with political views and then we'll let your merger go. What kind of free market is that? Where the government is like, we will let you merge, but you are not allowed to choose how you spend your money.
1:33:58 David Pierce? You are required to advertise on objectionable content is such a funny thing for the government to require.
1:34:03 Nilay Patel? Yeah. The advertisers, by the way, the clients are allowed to still make their decisions, but the ad agencies, which fundamentally what the ad agencies do is help people spend their ad dollars, they are not allowed to make those decisions. Perfect. I can't imagine how that will ever get, how will anyone get around this, this incredible rule?
1:34:22 David Pierce? So they're like, here's, here's the people, here's the Nazis.
1:34:25 Nilay Patel? And then just another, another one, just to throw it out there. Paramount is being sued by Trump for the CBS interview. You know about this? Where he says the Kamala Harris interview was deceptively edited, blah, blah. There's some mediator that's proposed some settlement, $20 billion and it's held up because Paramount executives and their lawyers cannot figure out how to pay this money without being on the hook for bribery charges because it's just bribery. This is a real problem. If you don't believe me, you can read the notoriously leftist Wall Street Journal editorial board saying, don't do this Paramount, just fight and win this lawsuit.
1:35:10 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:35:11 Nilay Patel? When Rupert Murdoch is like, don't be an idiot, like go win your first amendment argument and he agrees with you. I'm just letting you know. All right. That's politics for today. Don't do bribery. Brendan's an idiot. Got it all in my system. David, do you have a palate cleanser?
1:35:27 David Pierce? Jake, let's do, let's do one each before we get out of here. What do you have?
1:35:32 Speaker 07 I am super excited about this one. Have you guys ever looked at your TV and thought, not enough pixels here?
1:35:41 David Pierce? I can tell you for Neil, like, the answer is constantly, every day.
1:35:44 Speaker 07 The answer is always every single time you think, this isn't enough. Guys, we're going to 16K. It's happening. The HDMI 2.2 spec is out. Now, there are some drawbacks, and I know this is gonna be a hard one for the gamers out there. It's only 60 Hz. So I know nobody's gonna want this just yet, right?
1:36:04 David Pierce? How is this gonna look on Bravia Core?
1:36:05 Speaker 07 That's all I wanna know. Until we can get 16.120, you know, it's not for me. But the HDMI Forum is on top of it. They're weirdly ahead of the curve here. I do not know what the current demand is for support for 16K 60 Hz video. I'm not sure how much of that exists. I don't know where I would get it. The YouTubers aren't yelling at us to film in it yet.
1:36:32 Nilay Patel? I love, by the way, that they've only revved it to 2.2. Right? Because we're at HDMI 2.1 right now, right?
1:36:43 Speaker 07 Yes.
1:36:43 Nilay Patel? 16.120 is only worth .1.
1:36:48 Nilay Patel? They've only revved it to HDMI 2.2 to get to 16.120, 16K 120. Look, what is it gonna take, you guys?
1:36:58 David Pierce? 32K, 360, HDMI 3.
1:37:03 Nilay Patel? This is, this is the goal. We gotta go to the HDMI Forum headquarters and just yell numbers at them until they concede that it's time to rev the main version.
1:37:13 David Pierce? I love this. This is, I'm all in. I'm really excited to buy a bunch of expensive HDMI cables and connect them to my $300, 42-inch TCL Roku TV.
1:37:22 Speaker 07 This is what is most important. As soon as these cables are available, I don't care if you're still running 1080P, any HDMI cable you buy from here on out has better be a 16K cable, because one day, you're gonna wanna change out your Xbox, and it's gonna be too hard to get to. You're gonna need to make sure you have that 16K support just in case.
1:37:41 David Pierce? My $19 Roku Express is gonna look sick now.
1:37:44 Speaker 07 It's gonna rule.
1:37:45 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Okay, so Andrew Sefsky wrote this story for us. Every paragraph of this story is great, because Andrew's a great gadget writer, and he wrote it very dryly. And if you just read it on its face, this is the work of people who... Who have no connection to reality. So those cables that you're talking about are now officially called HDMI 2.2 Ultra 96 cables.
1:38:06 David Pierce? Sick.
1:38:07 Nilay Patel? Sure. There's a new standard they support called the Latency Indication Protocol, or LIP.
1:38:13 David Pierce? That's a sick band name, by the way. The Latency Indication Protocol is like a swing band that needs to exist.
1:38:18 Nilay Patel? Why is it called LIP? Because it matches up the audio and the video, so the audio matches the lips.
1:38:24 David Pierce? Oh, that's good.
1:38:25 Nilay Patel? It's good. It's good stuff.
1:38:27 David Pierce? And some might even say somewhat more important than 16K. Having your audio synced to your video. HDMI 2.2. Mostly here on The Vergecast, we love a good acronym, so I will take it. I'm all in.
1:38:41 Nilay Patel? I'm just saying. It's a new top end. Ultra 96 is a new top end. You get high speed, premium high speed, and ultra high speed, and now Ultra 96.
1:38:51 Nilay Patel? I'm happy. All right. What do you got, David?
1:38:55 David Pierce? Microsoft is killing the blue screen of death. Finally, after 40 years, when your computer explodes, it will no longer show the blue screen of death. It will show the black screen of death. Microsoft is redesigning it. A thing that I learned this week, thanks to a story Tom Warren wrote for The Verge in 2014, was that Steve Ballmer wrote the text of the blue screen of death message.
1:39:19 Nilay Patel? No way.
1:39:20 David Pierce? Because he didn't, like, he got the blue screen of death and he thought the wording didn't seem right for when it was going wrong. So he, they, the Windows team challenged him to go do a better job, and he did. He wrote the blue screen of death message, which is wonderful. But now they're changing it to something much less fun and interesting. It just now says your device ran into a problem and needs to restart. And then at the bottom, it actually shows you the code of what went wrong, which is vastly more useful than what the blue screen of death did, but is much less fun. And the, the black screen of death just doesn't, doesn't roll off the tongue the same way. And I will be very sad to not have my computer just randomly run up this thing.
1:40:03 Nilay Patel? You still got to use the acronym, right? It's still the BSOD.
1:40:05 David Pierce? It's still the BSOD, which I assume was intentional. But, like, why? Just, just leave it alone. It's a tragedy. That's, there's no other way of looking at this. This is like a canonical thing in technology. Everybody knew what the blue screen of death was. And now it's gone.
1:40:20 Nilay Patel? Oh, they're getting rid of the sad face.
1:40:22 David Pierce? Yeah, dude.
1:40:24 Nilay Patel? I thought they were just changing it from blue to black.
1:40:26 David Pierce? No.
1:40:26 Nilay Patel? This should have been a whole show.
1:40:28 David Pierce? This is what I'm saying. It's devastating.
1:40:32 Nilay Patel? It's very bad.
1:40:32 David Pierce? Your computer used to feel bad for you. And now it's like, do either of you ever watch The Office?
1:40:38 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:40:38 David Pierce? Do you know the scene where it's Kelly's birthday? And Dwight just puts up a sign that says, it is your birthday? That's the black screen of death now. It just says, your device ran into a problem and needs to restart. Your computer used to feel bad for you. It was like, I'm sorry, I blew it. And I'm going to fix it now. And now your computer is just like, well, I'm dead.
1:40:55 Nilay Patel? And other great moments of sort of dead ahead tech writing that read is very funny. Tom wrote this story and he wrote it. It's very, again, it's very dead ahead. It's got some good quotes. The whole thing did great reporting. The last line, dead ahead. The changes to the blue screen of death are part of the broader effort by Microsoft to improve the resiliency of Windows in the wake of last year's CrowdStrike incident, which left millions of Windows machines booting to the blue screen of death. And it's like, oh, part of that effort was making the screens black.
1:41:22 David Pierce? Do you think it's so that if you see a lot of them all at once, it's not as obvious that they've broken?
1:41:27 Nilay Patel? That's what I'm saying.
1:41:28 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:41:29 Nilay Patel? Right?
1:41:30 David Pierce? You can like look over a room full of them and they don't all, it's not, it doesn't immediately scream, we're all destroyed.
1:41:37 Nilay Patel? It's like how Tiffany has the trademark on its Pantone blue. You see the blue screen of death, you're like, that Windows PC has crashed. And now there's just a black screen. You're like, maybe that's Linux. It's the wrong thing to have a trademark on.
1:41:49 David Pierce? Own your shame, Microsoft.
1:41:52 Nilay Patel? That's the Vergecast, everybody. Own your shame. We'll see you next week. Rock and roll.
1:42:03 Nilay Patel? And that's it for the Vergecast this week. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE-11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Will Poor, Eric Gomez, and Brandon Kiefer. And that's it. We'll see you next week.
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