This Week in Google 750 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for Twig. This week you Google a little bit of a different show. Jeff Jarvis is on assignment speaking at the Senate testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee. So we brought in Kathy Giles, our internet lawyer, Paris Martino is here. We're going to talk about the IRS. They're finally offering free filing, but it's an unlimited rollout. We'll talk about big trials in ai. The information's breaking story, the one that Paris has been working on for the last couple of months, and of course, plagiarism and ai. It's okay. You have a right to read. Kathy Gillis explains that more. Next on this week in Google
TWiT (00:00:42):
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is T Twig.
Leo Laporte (00:00:52):
This is Twig this week in Google. Episode 750 recorded Wednesday, January 10th, 2024. The right to read
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Fastmail.com/twit. That's fastmail.com/twi. It's time for Twig this week in Google. Jeff Jarvis is in. Mr. Jarvis goes to Washington. He's in Washington DC testifying before a Senate judiciary subcommittee on AI and journalism. And we'll put in the show notes, the links to the video of Jeff's appearance, although you can also go to his blog buzz machine.com and read his opening statement. There were more senators in the room than in this picture. This is an empty room, but we've replaced Jeff temporarily with a wonderful Kathy Galles attorney at law, our expert on IP law. She is at CG counsel, C-O-U-N-S-E l.com. You also read her stuff in Tech Dirt and she's in studio, which is wonderful. Hi, Kathy. Hello. I can't remember. You've been here once before, right? Once before. Yeah. So it's nice to have you back. Most of the time people come once and never return. No, I'm kidding. Also, Paris Smart. No, on the Zoom with us. Hello Paris. From the information I see the big article came out.
Paris Martineau (00:04:00):
It did.
Leo Laporte (00:04:01):
How long have you been working on this?
Paris Martineau (00:04:05):
A couple of months. I'd say like two probably on and off
Leo Laporte (00:04:08):
Blowing the lead off of it.
Paris Martineau (00:04:10):
Yeah, a call came in during an ad break for last week's show about last minute things working on that article. So it was buried to the wire.
Leo Laporte (00:04:21):
A health tech unicorn leaves a trail of clinic complaints and concerns over billing practices. Is this Theranos Act two or what?
Paris Martineau (00:04:32):
I mean, it certainly varies some similarities. I think one of the original tips I'd gotten about this, I got on the phone with the source and they were like, oh, lemme give you some background. This startup called ETIs started in the mid 2010s was co-founded by a Stanford dropout, and the purpose was to create a machine that would use a single drop of blood for diagnostics. Whoops. And I was like, oh, you don't say
Leo Laporte (00:04:56):
I've heard of that.
Paris Martineau (00:04:58):
I have heard of that. Surprisingly, that technology didn't end up taking off for a number of reasons. And it turns out they've had a lot of pivots along the way.
Leo Laporte (00:05:10):
Did they predate Theranos both have been brought with that proposal?
Paris Martineau (00:05:13):
No, Theranos was actually a decade before that. Oh,
Leo Laporte (00:05:17):
Interesting.
Paris Martineau (00:05:17):
But it's very interesting when they kind of started to take off as a company. It was 2016 ish, and this was just, I think the Wall Street Journal articles about Theranos first surfaced in 2015. And so of course the CEO and Co-founder of this got a bunch of questions from the media being like, are you Theranos 2.0? And he was like, Theranos was a great idea, but what we really just need is someone to do that. But legitimate. And it kind of I think is interesting given everything that happened next,
Leo Laporte (00:05:49):
My article. So they never did the blood drop test device.
Paris Martineau (00:05:53):
I mean, they did do the blood drop test device. It ended up not being as successful or scalable as they would hope. Oh, that's interesting. I think one of the pitfalls when you're a startup that's raised a lot of venture capital and they've raised 150 million at a multi-billion dollar valuation at this point, is you have this pressure to grow bigger and bigger. And in this startups case, they ended up doing the blood testing device. It helped you kind of figure out the number of white blood cells in your blood, but it really ended up taking off only among a specific subset of patients who were being treated for schizophrenia with this one drug. So it wasn't
Leo Laporte (00:06:35):
Kind of a limited market.
Paris Martineau (00:06:38):
So they ended up pivoting in 2019 to this hot new market called remote patient monitoring telehealth, essentially where telehealth, Medicare and Medicaid had just put out new billing codes that allowed you to get reimbursed for this. So a lot of companies were diving in. It's essentially if your doctor sees you have hypertension, they'll send a blood pressure cuff to your house and you could test every other day to make sure your blood pressure's all right and then the doctor gets reimbursed for you doing that and then reviewing the results. But as this program scaled up, a lot of employees started raising the alarm internally because a big part of the billing process for what I just described is in order to get reimbursed by agencies like Medicare or most insurers, the patient has to actually kind of use the device consistently. The actual rule is it's got to be 16 times a month, 16 different days in order for you to bill it monthly. And this startup had kind of an interesting interpretation of how that worked. They're like, well, the rule says we have to send 16 days of health data. Technically the blood pressure cuff, it's internet connected, so every day it's sending its battery life,
Leo Laporte (00:07:58):
Even nobody's
Paris Martineau (00:07:59):
Using it and cell phone connectivity, even if no one's using it or just using it once. So a bunch of people had been kind of like, Hey, I'm not sure if that's entirely within the spirit of the law. And it turns out a lot of attorneys that I spoke to agree with this. Wow.
Leo Laporte (00:08:14):
Do you think it was intentionally shady or they just maybe didn't read the rules closely
Paris Martineau (00:08:22):
Enough? I mean, I cannot comment on their intentions or not because obviously I'm not the person. But I think it is interesting that I think that there are certain patterns of behavior you could see where if something's unintentional when it comes to acts that could rise to Medicare fraud. Ideally, if someone raises the alarm about this, the company's or doctor's response would be, oh my gosh, let's fix this. And it does seem curious that there were a number of times over the past couple of years that sources say, current employees or former employees raise concerns about this. And every time they were like, nah, it's
Leo Laporte (00:09:04):
Fine. Their timing was good. They launched this a year before the pandemic, then all of a sudden telehealth is the hot thing.
Paris Martineau (00:09:13):
And it became even more lucrative and easy to bill for, but they had all these kind of concerns come up. And so eventually they were like, let's pivot to a different business. And essentially the business they pivoted to in Act three is won't bore you the details, but it's kind of like the back end for doctors and clinics as far as finances go, we'll help you submit insurance claims and whatnot. And they pitched all these different doctors saying like, Hey, we'll supercharge your business. We've got all this high tech stuff or AI power, it'll be fantastic. But once these doctors switched over their whole billing operations to this startup, a lot of them experienced serious drops in revenue. One who went on the record and the story said the first, I think two or so months they worked with this company, they got $0 back from insurers and they had to take a six figure payday loan in order to make payroll.
Leo Laporte (00:10:14):
The story is on the information you subscribe, of course, the healthcare unicorn leaves a trail of clinic complaints, concerns over billing practices. I really honor the information for doing this kind of deep journalism and giving you the time to do it right, which is great. Paris Martin know. Yeah, very fun. We like your work. We're thrilled. Alex Kantrowitz has said this several times. He's the creator of the big tech podcast and newsletter, and he says the problem really is the financialization of the tech sector, that there's so much money going around with VCs and stuff that it encourages people to kind of scramble to find something to raise money on. And when you start getting billion dollar valuations, there's a lot of pressure to deliver.
Cathy Gellis (00:11:05):
It is sort of like an awful lot of rent seeking. How can we extract money out of it versus how can we build sustainable
Leo Laporte (00:11:12):
Innovation?
Cathy Gellis (00:11:13):
Well, sustainability. And so there is some question about what, I mean people are like, well, this is the end result of capitalism. I think it's just sort of, we may have some rules that guide capitalism or version of it that create incentives that don't lead us to actually get things that we want. We may have rules that encourage essentially looting taking out whatever you can as quickly as you can. I mean, a lot of our laws are built to protect shareholders, protect the financiers because we want them to be able to comfortably contribute capital and feel like they can get it out. But we may be favoring those interests at the expense. But long-term, are the businesses sustainable? And maybe they could have been sustainable businesses, but the businesses are in a position where they're having to make choices that skew the interests and may compromise long-term sustainability versus short-term, protecting certain interests so they can get their money out.
Leo Laporte (00:12:10):
So you mean Adam Smith is wrong and that the free hand of the market just isn't sufficient to make it all work perfectly?
Cathy Gellis (00:12:17):
He might be right, but we don't have a free hand of the market doing. We've already got an awful lot of, it's all messed
Leo Laporte (00:12:23):
Up
Cathy Gellis (00:12:23):
Already. There's a lot of fudging happening, and we're just not cognizant of well tuning the fudging. So you get these collateral
Leo Laporte (00:12:29):
Effects. By the way, as long as I'm mentioning the information, I'll mention it's the 10th anniversary. Congratulations to Jessica and all of you. And they're asking people to send them videos talking about how the information has helped them in their businesses or their lives. So if you're an information, it'll be interesting. Yeah. Should I record one? So thanks to you Jessica and Sam. I know Paris, Martino, Paris has a job. Alright, let's talk about, since we have an attorney in house, let's talk about the topic we've been talking a lot about. There's more news around it. This is the issue of AI and copyright. I bet you have some thoughts about this. Kathy Ellis, and of course the thing that got a lot of attention is the New York Times suing Clear Open AI and Microsoft for, is it plagiarism for stealing its content and using it in this training? And there's been some interesting things. It was a great piece in on Teter actually about exactly this topic. And it was a little controversial. Brian Fry wrote, plagiarism is fine.
Cathy Gellis (00:13:48):
Yes, he wrote that. I think he's also writing it more in response to
Leo Laporte (00:13:53):
The firing of Claudine Gay, I'm sure. Yeah.
Cathy Gellis (00:13:55):
There's a lot of hysteria about plagiarism. There's sort of a conceptual overlap between what is plagiarism and what is copyright infringement, but neither concept is well thought out and they aren't the same things and they don't necessarily redeem the same values. There's an awful lot that might qualify as plagiarism that isn't actually copyright infringement. And then there's the question of, well, even if it does count as plagiarism, is this something where it's actually healthy for us to denigrate it? Is this something that's actually wrong? And if it is wrong, why do we think it's wrong? And there's our reaction, something that vindicates the thing that we care about, we might care about the credit about somebody. Yeah, I
Leo Laporte (00:14:41):
Think it's an emotional thing where, well, it's just wrong to take somebody's writing and palm it off as your own.
Cathy Gellis (00:14:47):
And if to the extent that that's happening, maybe that is something that does need to be recognized. It feels wrong, it feels wrong, and maybe the norms should be built around no to that. But one
Leo Laporte (00:14:57):
Of the try rights plagiarism is fine. Plagiarism rules are stupid, and the plagiarism police should line their own
Cathy Gellis (00:15:04):
Business. I think he's got a fair point, and I had made one sort of 15 years ago or so when I was in law school, there was a plagiarism controversy where I was looking at what were people doing and having a reaction of why is this wrong? That's why you have to tease out what you actually care about. So if we do care about this idea of passing off of somebody's work as your own, that feels kind of fraudulent and deceptive. And so we don't like that, but that's a certain value of what we would care about. But a lot of what the hysteria is over isn't doing that. It isn't pressing that sort of emotional button. It's just reusing words and you have to reuse words or reuse ideas because that's actually how we move in knowledge forward's. Think.
Leo Laporte (00:15:48):
This is why I tie into the AI debate. He said, Frew rights, no one owns ideas and no one should own the words we use to express them either. I mean, that's the intellectual process and we all kind of feel in our gut. Well, it's wrong to say I thought this up on my own. But on the other hand, when you're writing a paper, when you're writing anything, you're basing it on stuff you have absorbed and read and learned. And everything we do here is like that is regenerating. I try to give credit, I gave Brian credit and so forth, but also I may say ideas that turn out to be identical to something somebody said that I read some time ago. The reason I bring it up is not so much to talk about plagiarism, but that human process is also kind of what AI is doing when it's training. Isn't it Paris? It's kind of, I can't remember where you came down on this New York Times controversy last week.
Paris Martineau (00:16:46):
I mean, I think I'm middling on it.
Leo Laporte (00:16:48):
You're a content creator and your stuff is published in the information.
Paris Martineau (00:16:52):
Yeah, I think that certainly there is a case to be made that for-profit entities probably shouldn't be benefiting from scraping content creators work in order to build their large language models and train them. But I think that's a bit more nuanced and different than what the New York Times Open AI controversy is about. I think, I mean this point, I think we talked to death on the other week's episode that obviously the claims around open AI being able to piece together a Guy Fury Restaurant Review based on a third party, based on third party articles is a little bit silly. I'm curious, what did you think of open AI's response, Liam?
Leo Laporte (00:17:37):
Yeah, I was just going to pull that up. Let's see. I probably shouldn't pull up the New York Times article about that. Let me, how about the Hollywood Reporter, TechCrunch VentureBeat, the version, who should I plagiarize for this segment? How about open ai? Let's plagiarize themselves. Let's plagiarize open ai.
Cathy Gellis (00:17:59):
Don't take the New York York Times, I mean, don't amplify. The New York Times is so hypocritical they don't want to be read. Jeff's comments at his testimony today I think are in alignment of the comments that I've been
Leo Laporte (00:18:11):
Submitted. What did you say? I didn't hear it.
Cathy Gellis (00:18:13):
You can't lock this stuff up. This is part of language. And so the comments that I've filed on behalf of the Coppi Institute at the copyright office are making the point that you can have copyright obstruct the training of ai. We can have conversations about what should happen to the output, but using copyright as a basis to obstruct training of AI is offending the right to read. Because one of the points that Jeff also made in his testimony, I like that's a good phrase, is that if the humans can read it, why can't you send your tools to do the reading for you to help you? And why shouldn't those tools be software based?
Leo Laporte (00:18:53):
And I would further make the argument that that is a huge benefit societal benefit to have these tools. So by restricting that capability, we're actually harming society. Yeah. Maybe we're protecting the New York Times or let's put it in something. Maybe we care more about Paris Martino. But there is still also a societal benefit to that.
Cathy Gellis (00:19:14):
Right. It's also worse if you say you have to actually distort copyright law to say no to it. And if you say no to it in this context, you are saying no to it in a whole bunch of other contexts that will really hurt us if we
Leo Laporte (00:19:29):
Have That was my contention in his article on Tech Dirt. Was the New York Times opening a can of worms here because doing it too?
Cathy Gellis (00:19:36):
Oh yeah. Well, and he and I have been advocating, so I've submitted comments at the copyright office on behalf of Mike making the point of Right to read is something that we actually have to value and the right to read conflicts with the idea that copyright could obstruct the ability to read. Because the training of AI is essentially reading the material that exists. And if you're going to say no, you can't read the material that exists, that's not something that copyright law actually does. That's not a power that the copyright owner has to say no to reading. They can say no to making copies, but they can't say no to the reading. So you've
Leo Laporte (00:20:14):
Already, that was one response that OpenAI said to New York Times. That's a bug that it's regurgitating the contents of an article. And it's true, the New York Times had to jump through hoops to get it to do that in the first place. That's not the intent of ai.
Cathy Gellis (00:20:28):
It's not the intent. And somebody has also pointed out that if you're going to have liability for the output of AI spitting out something that is too close of a copy that the liability has to do with who's induced that output. And that is a separate,
Leo Laporte (00:20:43):
Well that even New York
Cathy Gellis (00:20:43):
Times
Leo Laporte (00:20:43):
Or
Cathy Gellis (00:20:44):
The lawyers, that is a separate issue from the learning, the reading because the training. Oh,
Leo Laporte (00:20:49):
That's really
Cathy Gellis (00:20:50):
Interesting. So one of the points that we made in our comments is you really can't conflate these issues like AI is, look, people are doing dumb things with it, and there's a whole bunch of reasons to pull the reins on some of the dumb things that are happening. But you can't use the moral panic for what the dumb things are and just look for anything you can throw to throw a wrench in the works and copyright. Well, we can stop this. If we throw copyright into the works, you will break things. You will break things that are important and that need to exist if you throw copyright into obstruct and you have to break down what it is that's going on. There's different things that are, when you think about ai, there's different things. There's how we use it, there's how we train it, there's outputs, there's inputs. And if you treat them all as kind of one whole ball of wax that we're going to regard in one fell analytical swoop, you're not going to be able to deal with it. Well. You need to deal with the different parts in a much more nuanced fashion.
Leo Laporte (00:21:46):
So maybe instead of just talking about the New York Times suit, let's talk about, there are many, many lawsuits going on. John Grisham has sued open AI along with a bunch of other authors. Getty Images, suits, stability, AI creators of stable diffusion saying they copied 12 million Getty images. In fact, you could see the Greeked Getty watermark on some of these generated images. Stability, midjourney and deviant art hit with a class action lawsuit. I mean GitHub, Microsoft OpenAI proposed class action lawsuit filed last year, which says they scraped license code to train their licensed code to trade their code generators. I mean, the courts are going to be ruling on this for years to come. But so far the handful of rulings we've seen have all been in favor of the AI
Cathy Gellis (00:22:42):
They have. Although some of it is more procedural than anything else a lot of these complaints have. So
Leo Laporte (00:22:48):
They're not precedents, they're just,
Cathy Gellis (00:22:50):
Well, they're not far enough along to be precedents, but they're not really necessarily reaching the merits They are. These cases have procedural problems with them. For a number of cases, the claims were built on copyright claims where the copyrights hadn't been registered or hadn't been registered in time. And so you can't sustain the lawsuit if you don't dot the i's carefully. So a lot of these cases have gone away or gone back to start more on procedural things. There's some rumblings that the courts aren't really going to buy it, and it's kind of nice that they didn't ignore the procedural things because they were so keen to buy the arguments on the merits. But we haven't really, we haven't.
Leo Laporte (00:23:29):
So it's undecided still.
Cathy Gellis (00:23:30):
It's undecided. We haven't really had a fully formed quality lawsuit really pushed the envelope where the courts have reached the merits, but meanwhile the copyright office is doing a study and they might produce a result of their study before the courts get to it. In which case that would have some influence.
Leo Laporte (00:23:47):
Would that trump the courts?
Cathy Gellis (00:23:49):
It wouldn't trump it, but it would be influential.
Leo Laporte (00:23:51):
I think it would influence the courts. Yeah. Interesting. Paris,
Paris Martineau (00:23:53):
I'm curious, are there any cases where you think these sort of plaintiffs might have a legitimate case against any of these AI companies or I think your argument about the right to read is very compelling. Does it change when the content being consumed and generated by these large models is different? Does an image-based generation, I can kind of see the argument of a company like Deviant or Getty if it's like you are scraping all of our images and then generating something similar to that, but legally, does that have any standing?
Cathy Gellis (00:24:28):
Well, Getty gets upset if you even think about one of their images. So they're
Leo Laporte (00:24:34):
Litigious
Cathy Gellis (00:24:35):
Are they may be a tadd. So I mean whether somebody would be able to press a lawsuit where they would be able to get enough leverage to succeed on the lawsuit, that is probably more likely than whether they should, whether we really stopped and took a look at this on the merits and really carefully decided what made sense. No, I think the right to read thing would cover whether it was reading words or looking at images. I mean, some language is image-based and character-based languages are not Latin alphabet languages. And it still counts where it's kind of, I haven't found good language I want to use in all my comments, but I think we use, because I hate this, I use consume content and there's a lot of reasons why you don't want to phrase it that way, but I really did want to come up with something. Read is a great phrase. The right to read is a phrase that exists. It's part of First Amendment doctrine. It's
Leo Laporte (00:25:31):
Not merely the right to speak. It's also the right to
Cathy Gellis (00:25:33):
Read. Yeah, I mean we don't have a ton of cases on it, but it is doctrine. I didn't make that term up. Well,
Leo Laporte (00:25:40):
Bear with me for a moment. I'm going to take you back to 1908. I think you know where I'm going, Kathy. So in late at the turn of the century, the 1890s, a new technology came along called The Player Piano, where they could make rolls of popular songs, John Phillips Suzy's songs. You'd plug it into your piano, you'd pump the pedals. I remember I had one of these, or I played with one of these when I was a kid, and it would play the song on the piano
Paris Martineau (00:26:06):
1908. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:26:07):
Also, and the keys would move in everything. Well, the composers were pissed off. They were worried that that would kill the demand for sheet music, which was a prime way that they made money. And the player piano company said, we're not going to play royalties for putting these songs on paper rolls. It went to the Supreme Court white Smith music publishing company versus Apollo Company in 1908. The Supreme Court ruled that because humans couldn't read player piano roles, they weren't in fact copies. So the composers were not due any royalties. They ruled in favor of the machine. In effect.
Cathy Gellis (00:26:54):
Interesting. But you said 1908 and that is two copyright statutes ago. Oh wow. So sometimes old.
Leo Laporte (00:27:04):
It's so similar to this issue though, isn't it? Right.
Cathy Gellis (00:27:07):
It's interesting. It's very, and sometimes things that happened in earlier statutes can linger our
Leo Laporte (00:27:14):
Well, as a result, by the way, there was a new copyright act the next year that extended the law to cover mechanical repercu. And
Cathy Gellis (00:27:20):
That is one
Leo Laporte (00:27:21):
Thing. So that's one way to address that, by the way, is for Congress to say, oh yeah, there is a loophole, but we're going to extend the copyright to
Cathy Gellis (00:27:28):
Cover it. Right? But that isn't good if they have to distort the balance of the copyright statute in order to plug that hole. And it's really bad if the way they've distorted the copyright statute puts it out of compliance with the First Amendment. The first amendment is the thing that's saying, hi. There's a right to read. Also, there is the language in the Constitution that authorizes Congress to do copyright law says we do copyright law and also patents in the pursuit of the progress of science and the useful arts. The whole point is to have law that is going to make sure that there is progress of knowledge and that the country has something to sink its teeth into intellectually.
Leo Laporte (00:28:13):
In a way, that's what happened in 19 90 0 9 because they created what's called a compulsory license, which is that the copyright holder was compelled to license for a relatively low fee. And we wouldn't have, for instance, cover songs if this compulsory license
Cathy Gellis (00:28:27):
Didn't exist. I have mixed feelings about compulsory license.
Leo Laporte (00:28:30):
I have mixed feelings about cover songs. So we can meet in, we've got it covered.
Cathy Gellis (00:28:35):
Well, irrespective of that, compulsory licenses are conceptually a nice idea because they take away the transaction costs. It's like 2 cents or something. Well, and they cause it to, so compulsory licenses, wait, what exactly is a compulsory license? Compulsory license? Well, first of all, one of the reasons they're not a panacea here is because they would still presume that the copyright holder would have a right to say no. What the compulsory license does
Leo Laporte (00:29:03):
Is, so it's not really compulsory.
Cathy Gellis (00:29:05):
No, it is compulsory. So it's addressing a situation where the copyright owner would have the power via their copyright to say no to somebody who wanted to use the thing that they owned. And what a compulsory license does that is helpful is it means that they can't say no and it pre-negotiate the terms by which they have to say yes. So it's
Leo Laporte (00:29:26):
Kind of like Fran, when we talk about licensing much more
Cathy Gellis (00:29:29):
Recently, I'm not as familiar with that one, but types of things like that where the copyright holder could say no, but it's going to cause a whole bunch of economic problems if they say no. So compulsory license will theory streamline things because it turns it into a yes. And pre-negotiate what the terms of the yes are. And in theory that helps make it that uses can still happen and the copyright owners get paid and everybody's happy. The problem is twofold. First of all, if you've a compulsory license shouldn't be a solution where the copyright owner did not have the right to say no in the first place. So when we're thinking about this AI stuff, if the copyright owners can't say no to software reading their stuff, then a compulsory license is not going to solve the problem because it is just giving them the power to say no. And that is a problem because if they can say no here, they can say no to all sorts of reading that happens.
Leo Laporte (00:30:25):
One of open AI's contentions was is if you say AIS cannot ingest copyright material, you're not going to get very good AI because this podcast is by default copyrighted simply by the fact that it exists. I assert, in fact a creative commons license, but everything you do is copyrighted out of the gate
Cathy Gellis (00:30:47):
Pretty much. And you get, but does AI have a right to have good material? But people do. People do. And I mean functionally to Leo's point, there's huge problems with bias in ai. And one of the reasons that you have problems with bias in AI is because they don't get to train on a wide enough sample. So to you, Paris of do you feel good, bad or otherwise about having your stuff read more power to you, that you get to contribute to the language that is understood by our developing artificial intelligence. Whereas if your words aren't there, you are not there. You are helping enrich the vocabulary as we can try to endow our technology to understand it. And
Leo Laporte (00:31:28):
Again, I argue that you could go back and forth on the merits of this, but AI is potentially a life-changing innovation and technology comparable to the personal computer and the internet maybe even more. And we shouldn't be putting curbs on it at this point. You
Cathy Gellis (00:31:50):
Shouldn't be. I mean, maybe some curbs are appropriate, but that's where the new US comes in. Maybe we need the curbs in terms of how we're applying it, given that it's not a fully cooked technology yet, and everybody's treating it like magic.
Leo Laporte (00:32:04):
I'm not against any regulation, but I think saying you can't read anything that's copyright is really going to be detrimental
Cathy Gellis (00:32:11):
For the purposes of training, then no, I do not think
Leo Laporte (00:32:15):
No curves at
Cathy Gellis (00:32:15):
All. I think no curves and certainly not copyright curves,
Leo Laporte (00:32:18):
The more
Cathy Gellis (00:32:18):
The better. And if you put the copyright curves on, you're changing copyright and you're changing copyright, that's going to have collateral effects in other ways. It's going to affect everyone's right to read as human beings. And it's also going to affect other ways that we use software tools like search engines because
Leo Laporte (00:32:34):
They read too. So let's dig into this. So it's not merely bad for ai actually, it would be changing how copyright works to assert that AI cannot read these copyrighted
Cathy Gellis (00:32:44):
Works. I think it does. I think it distorts it, and I think it gives a copyright owner an exclusive power to exclude that The statute does not give
Leo Laporte (00:32:52):
It abrogates the right to read
Cathy Gellis (00:32:54):
And it interferes with that. And that's not the way that copyright law is structured. And it would have a constitutional problem with being structured that way, given that we have the first amendment, which limits what Congress can do in any domain, even ones where they're allowed to legislate. And it would also break other applications where we currently, nevermind the humans who want to be able to go read all their books, including read digital books, but it would also affect other software that does reading like search engines. They're crawling the web and they're reading
Leo Laporte (00:33:24):
Well, that's a good point, aren't they?
Cathy Gellis (00:33:26):
So if you start changing the law to say, well, screw ai, it's terrible, let's just stop it. Even if you were right that it should be stopped, if you use copyright to do it, you're going to stop a whole lot of other things that we don't actually make are back.
Leo Laporte (00:33:37):
You might break search engines. You
Cathy Gellis (00:33:39):
Break search engines,
Leo Laporte (00:33:39):
You're basically then New York Times, they're already pretty broken. And New York Times, by the way, would love to say, well, hey, this is a problem. They sort of would love to say Google can't look at 'em, but on the other hand, they kind of want Google to index.
Cathy Gellis (00:33:53):
Well, Mike Masnick has also pointed, pointed out that the New York Times would not like the collateral effects of copyright law changing in order if its complaint could be sustained. They already had issues with the freelancers being able to assert copyright and stuff, and it's not going to be good for the New York Times bottom line of copyright law changes in its way.
Leo Laporte (00:34:15):
Yeah. So what's the prognosis? What's going to happen at this
Cathy Gellis (00:34:20):
Point? Other things in the world are going to break before we have copyright break ai,
Leo Laporte (00:34:27):
Mike. Okay. I think that's
Cathy Gellis (00:34:28):
A good prediction.
Leo Laporte (00:34:31):
Okay.
Cathy Gellis (00:34:32):
But it does bring up a second thing that is jumping ahead to elsewhere in our rundown, the appeal of the internet archive.
Leo Laporte (00:34:43):
Okay, well, let's hold that thought. I do want to talk very much about it. We're lucky to have Kathy Les here. She is. This is her area of expertise. She's admitted to the Supreme Court so she can prosecute cases there. She's also filed amicus briefs in a lot of very well-known cases, including a recent copyright case with the estate of Andy Warhol, which didn't work out to your
Cathy Gellis (00:35:06):
No, I'm not happy with the original,
Leo Laporte (00:35:09):
That
Cathy Gellis (00:35:09):
Particular
Leo Laporte (00:35:09):
Case. We can talk about that too. Paris Martin o also here from the Information Superstar reporter, the lowest lane of this week in Google. How about that? And I must be, if you're the lowest lane, I must be the Perry White, right? Great Caesar's
Cathy Gellis (00:35:26):
Ghost.
Leo Laporte (00:35:26):
Yeah, definitely.
Cathy Gellis (00:35:27):
Can I be Superman?
Leo Laporte (00:35:28):
Oh yeah, you can be Superman. Okay. Yeah, you can be Superman,
Cathy Gellis (00:35:32):
Kathy,
Leo Laporte (00:35:33):
And that means Bonino. You're Jimmy Olsson. All right, we're going to take a little break. We'll come back with more in just a little bit. As I mentioned, in case you missed it, Jeff Jarvis out of pocket because he's, I dunno, he's just testifying before the United States Senate. That's all. No big deal.
Paris Martineau (00:35:51):
He's wearing a very snazzy suit. Watch
Leo Laporte (00:35:53):
The video.
Paris Martineau (00:35:54):
Just
Leo Laporte (00:35:54):
A typical looks. Somebody pointed out somehow the Senate got the color balance right. We've never been able to do it in Jeff's house. Can you just show a little
Paris Martineau (00:36:03):
Bit? It seems like Jeff has every yellow light in America, whatever room he He's coming in. I know. I
Leo Laporte (00:36:09):
Know. Show, actually, there's a little clip of him answering a question, I think in the rundown. Let me look. That looked like it might be interesting. Did
Paris Martineau (00:36:22):
You? He does give a casual shout out to the pod. He
Leo Laporte (00:36:25):
Mentions the pod. Is it R Pod? He does other pods.
Paris Martineau (00:36:29):
He gives a quote from our Google our episode with the Notebook. Oh yeah, good. He says on the podcast, I co-host, listen, we haven't gotten Twig in the Congressional record
Leo Laporte (00:36:41):
Yet. One step
Paris Martineau (00:36:42):
Closer. Yeah,
Benito (00:36:42):
We have have Josh Howley said when he introduced Jeff, he said he was a host on he's two podcasts this weekend. Google and AI inside.
Paris Martineau (00:36:51):
Hey, that counts.
Leo Laporte (00:36:54):
Josh Hawley. Hey, wow,
Paris Martineau (00:36:56):
Josh Hawley. Oh my gosh. Thanks, man.
Leo Laporte (00:37:01):
Did he go like this when he mentioned Twig? I don't know. Did he
Cathy Gellis (00:37:05):
Flee the Senate?
Leo Laporte (00:37:07):
Yeah. Wow. Do you have, you know what I'm talking about? There's a clip. Where did I see the rundown of these clips? I think where Jeff answers a specific question. I don't know. Did you give me the clips? I think it posted. It's posted X. Oh, it's on X. I can't hear you. What? I
Cathy Gellis (00:37:30):
Think he put it on a post-it.
Leo Laporte (00:37:31):
Oh, it's that post-it. What did I do with a post-it.
Paris Martineau (00:37:36):
That's the original form of post. Leo was just frantically searching every pocket on his person. Where did he put
Leo Laporte (00:37:45):
That? Oh, here it is. It's on the floor. You know what? It sticks nicely to the carpet though.
Cathy Gellis (00:37:51):
That's what 3M had in mind. Wait
Paris Martineau (00:37:53):
Minute,
Leo Laporte (00:37:53):
I got it. John's going to climb down.
Paris Martineau (00:37:57):
Wow. A hero. This is High tech.
Leo Laporte (00:37:59):
High tech. Thank you, Jeff. Answer example. It's in 1 41 57. Well, it's just the shortest clip we have. That's You
Cathy Gellis (00:38:12):
Realize that if copyright obstructs ai, this is how all information will be shared from here on
Leo Laporte (00:38:17):
Out, which is how manually on post-it notes. Yes.
Paris Martineau (00:38:21):
On a post-it note. Yeah. This is the
Leo Laporte (00:38:22):
Future of ai. I
Benito (00:38:23):
Have it queued
Leo Laporte (00:38:23):
Up here. All right. Here's Jeff testifying. Dick Blumenthal's asking him a question. Senator Blumenthal
Mr. Blumenthal (00:38:35):
Under section two 30. Can
Leo Laporte (00:38:38):
You skip back a little bit just so we get
Cathy Gellis (00:38:39):
The full, oh my gosh.
Mr. Blumenthal (00:38:40):
Given that content to trends or it is not covered. Nonetheless, we have introduced no Section two 30 immunity for AI Act, just to make it explicit and clear.
Benito (00:38:55):
Yeah. So the woman before him asked the question,
Mr. Blumenthal (00:39:00):
Kind of deeply offensive irony here, which is that all of you and your publication or your broadcast station can be sued. You can be sued for in effect falsity. And if it's with respect to a public figure like myself, maybe the standards a little bit higher, but I have a right to go to court not So when it comes to social media, so that the organization,
Leo Laporte (00:39:39):
This is his argument for undermining two 30. I don't even want to hear it. By the way, Blumenthal, Buchar
Cathy Gellis (00:39:47):
Attributions
Leo Laporte (00:39:49):
Tom Tillis, they've got the, and this hearing is all about a number of weird, like the No Fakes Act. Do you know about the No Fakes Act?
Cathy Gellis (00:39:59):
I've lost track of that one.
Paris Martineau (00:40:00):
It's a really good acronym.
Leo Laporte (00:40:02):
Well, it's an acronym.
Paris Martineau (00:40:05):
I mean, yeah, really
Leo Laporte (00:40:05):
Good. It's a retro. Well, you're seeing that in sarcastically, of course. Now I know that you think it's a really good, it's a retron that stands for, lemme see if I can find
Cathy Gellis (00:40:16):
It. It's just a laundry basket for every single tech policy bugaboo that
Leo Laporte (00:40:22):
In every respect. Respect. I
Paris Martineau (00:40:23):
Mean, that's, all of
Cathy Gellis (00:40:24):
These are, I haven't seen one that been this much of a collective basket of it.
Paris Martineau (00:40:30):
I mean,
Cathy Gellis (00:40:31):
I don't mean to take
Paris Martineau (00:40:32):
Compliments to, I haven't watched one of these in a while, but I remember back in the 2016 to 2019 era, I had to watch all of these report on all of them, and they all sucked. They all were just, every time I'd go in and be like, wow, with social media and disinformation, yeah, it'll be great and informative. And it's just every single Congress person standing on their soapbox, giving their weird canned lines, not listening to anything around them, and nothing comes of it. I don't know if what
Leo Laporte (00:41:02):
Happens. Is it informative, do you think? Oh,
Paris Martineau (00:41:05):
A hundred percent. It's wrestling
Leo Laporte (00:41:07):
Because they're trying to get votes. It's not about
Cathy Gellis (00:41:10):
This is just an
Leo Laporte (00:41:11):
Policy.
Cathy Gellis (00:41:12):
This is an extra Voltron of stupid. I don't know. It's not that I want to pay compliments to any hearing that has ever come before for all the reasons that Paris just discussed. But this one, even the whole thing of Jeff was there to talk about ai, but also news and the JCPA and link taxes. So we've got copyright in two 30 and ai, it's way too
Leo Laporte (00:41:36):
So much. Yeah, no, this, there's so many fronts. This is Chris Coons, Marcia Blackburn, Amy Klobuchar, and Tom Tillis's. Bill, by the way, just looking at the sponsors tells you this is going to be a mish Marsha Nut Jery.
Cathy Gellis (00:41:48):
That's too complimentary.
Leo Laporte (00:41:50):
But yes, nurture. This is what no fake stands for. Nurture, originals, foster art, and keep entertainment safe. And really it is to protect, I guess, creators against artificial intelligence. In one high profile example, they write the song Heart On My Sleeve, which was created with the AI generated replicas of the voices of pop stars, Drake, and the Weekend quickly accumulated hundreds of thousands of listens on YouTube, Spotify, and other streaming sites before it was identified as a fake and removed from the platforms. How
Cathy Gellis (00:42:26):
Are Drake and the weekend ever going to finance their lifestyles? Now,
Leo Laporte (00:42:30):
I don't think they can survive, or they've been devastated by this. Even worse, an AI generated version of Tom Hanks was used to endorse a dental plan. Now, admittedly, I don't think they're trying to protect Tom Hanks there, but the poor schmucks who thought, well, Tom Hanks endorses it must be good and bought the dental plan. You
Cathy Gellis (00:42:46):
Don't need to change law. That sounds like outright, it's
Leo Laporte (00:42:49):
Already illegal. This
Cathy Gellis (00:42:50):
Sounds pretty fraudulent. I think we have enough legal tools to solve these problems,
Leo Laporte (00:42:56):
And the risk is by doing well, you kind of said it in a nutshell, if they succeed, if New York Times succeeds in this case against open ai, they're actually undermining copyright and undermining the right to read, which is a, it's more than copyright. It's a First Amendment. I
Cathy Gellis (00:43:15):
Would say distorting the balance of copyright in a way that collapses it even more than it's being internally collapsed already, but with collateral effects that I think are incompatible with the First Amendment and also the whole constitutional mandate that empowers Congress to pass copyright law at all. It's not going to help promote the progress of science and useful arts.
Benito (00:43:36):
Yeah, there's a big question here though about
Leo Laporte (00:43:37):
Bonito. Yes.
Benito (00:43:40):
I don't want open AI and Google to make a billion dollars off of what I've written. That's the big argument really. I agree, comes out the end. I think it's bad. It's these giant billion dollar corporations that are actually going to make the money at the end of the day out of
Cathy Gellis (00:43:53):
All this. I'm not sure that's necessarily true. And one of the things is the more the law forbids the innovation, the more likely that will be the end product. Where this is true for most tech policy regulation. The big companies have the resources to be able to navigate, I don't want to say everything you throw at them, but an awful lot.
Leo Laporte (00:44:11):
This is the regulatory capture we're always
Cathy Gellis (00:44:12):
Talking about. Yeah. And this is why I think some of the big companies don't push back nearly hard, as hard as they should against some of these really terrible bills.
Leo Laporte (00:44:20):
Sometimes they lobby for meta is always lobbying. Oh, please regulate us, please.
Cathy Gellis (00:44:24):
I mean, meta, well, I don't think meta measures its own self-interest very well. Either. They blessed Foster and now are fielding foster lawsuits. So I don't think it was very smart for their own interest. But yes, that sort of thing of like, well, we got ours, so we're fine. And hey, if it takes down our competition, all the better for us. That doesn't help. And it just makes people hate the more, which means that people throw more terrible legislation at the tech sector, but the things that affect small innovation, these changes distort the ability of the not Googles to do the innovation.
Leo Laporte (00:44:57):
I would also say Benito, don't you have the confidence that you could still write a song better than the AI
Benito (00:45:04):
Could? No, it's not about what I have to do in the future. It's about the work I have done in the past that I will not get paid for that work that I have done. Do you
Leo Laporte (00:45:12):
Think that they will take away your ability to earn from that previous work?
Benito (00:45:15):
No. Think about it as remixing, like remixing music, right? People who use samples and things like that in their music, they pay now it's been established that now they pay. Now they have to pay for these samples.
Leo Laporte (00:45:25):
Yeah. That's compulsory licensing. Yeah,
Benito (00:45:27):
Exactly. So I mean, I'm not saying that that's the answer, and I don't have an answer. I'm just saying this is the thing that feels icky.
Leo Laporte (00:45:34):
Well, that's the thing. It's an emotional gut reaction. But from all creators, don't steal my stuff, man. And I really understand that, especially you make the excellent point. But if it's a big tech company making money off of it, that's even ickier, right?
Cathy Gellis (00:45:46):
Well, one of the things that came up in the copyright office comments is Mark and Jason contributed a really dumb comment where he was really, really arrogant about classic, I got mine, I'm fine. And everybody just hates him. And people don't, well, there's the cult of Santa Malman, but for everybody else, they don't like him. It's kind of tech bro stuff. And nobody wants these guys to win. They just may happen to be right along the way. And if you distort law to try to take them down, you're going to have collateral effects on the non-tech Bross and prevent anybody else from doing the innovation and creativity. So I ended up putting in the second reply comment some point of whatever the externalities you don't like about what I didn't point to him specifically, but if you really don't like what Andreessen is cooking, this isn't about him.
(00:46:45):
This is about something more principled and you can deal with him later, including one of the presumptions is, well, they don't like the sense of unjust enrichment of he can input everything for free and then make money on the output. But I don't think it necessarily follows that he should necessarily be able to make money on all the output anyway, because again, there's a question of how much of that output really should be entitled to copyright protection at all. I think that's a separate question. It's not one I've fully dived into, but that is a question and is a separate one. And it doesn't mean that just because he can produce his tool to produce more stuff, that he will get rich from it or should get rich.
Leo Laporte (00:47:24):
Well, this is why I'm an advocate of open source, by the way, ai, I think that might make you feel better. At least somebody's not making money off of what you're doing. We license from the very beginning when we started the podcast, I understood this kind of issue. Larry Lessig, who was a guest on the podcast in the early days, had created the Creative Commons license to respond to this because he said, there's really only two choices right now for creators. You either copyright it or you put it in the public domain, and neither one is necessarily suits. He created Creative Commons, and that's our license to this day, which we license in Creative Commons, no commercial, which is you can remix our stuff. You have to give us attribution. And you can't use it for commercial purposes, so you can't make money off of it. You can't take the podcast and sell it on your television station, for instance. But we want people to remix it and reuse it and use clips and so forth. Maybe there's something in the AI age that we got to take a break.
Paris Martineau (00:48:23):
I do think that there should be one last thought. Sorry,
Leo Laporte (00:48:25):
I don't need to take break. Please. No, I know it's
Paris Martineau (00:48:27):
Possible. Think there should be some sort of middle ground in between. It should be a Wild West. There should be no regulation or restrictions whatsoever on ai, and we should restrict it so heavily. It messes up copyright law for all of us. I think that there's got to be somewhere in between that, and
Leo Laporte (00:48:45):
That's why I like creative comments, for instance. That was kind of that middle ground, which was, it allowed remixing, but it also protected some rights. Anyway, we'll come back. We've got lots more, but I have to take a break. Our show today brought to you by Rocket Money. Man, I want to take this break. This company has saved enough money for me now to buy a Vision Pro. So that is very good. If I ask you how many subscriptions, recurring payments you have, could you list them and could you add up all the money that goes out of your pocket that way? I'll tell you what, if you'd asked me before I started using Rocket Money, I would've thought I knew the answer, but I would've been so wrong. Rocket Money finds subscriptions as a personal finance app that finds and cancels, yeah, cancels your unwanted subscriptions.
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It also monitors your spending, helps lower your bills. It's really got a lot of benefits. But let me just talk about the subscriptions thing I had accidentally. It's a dark pattern on a lot of political contribution websites where you'd want to make a contribution, and then there's a hidden checkbox that says, which you want to do this monthly, right? And I didn't see that checkbox, and I missed the fact that for months I was getting dinged every month for an additional contribution. The election was over and they were still taking money. Rocket Money found it, turned it off for me, and that's happened over and over again. It really works. Rocket Money has more than 5 million users. They've helped save its members an average of $720 a year, more than $500 million in canceled subscriptions with Rocket Money. You can see all your subscriptions in one place.
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If you see something you don't want, you go, oh, I'm still subscribed to that. You can cancel it with a tap. I just got Bill dinged a couple of days ago for something I didn't know about it. Rocket Money said, Hey, that was a recurring payment. I said, I don't even know who this is. Instead of disputing it with a credit card or calling the company, I just had Rocket money, cancel it. You never have to get on the phone with customer service. Stop wasting money on things you don't use. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions and keep track of your spending and lower your bills too by going to rocket money.com/twig. This thing's great. Rocket money.com/twig, rocket money.com/twig. We thank them so much for their support of this week in Google. Do I want to launch back into the copyright or, the thing is, this is never going to really resolve, but I think we, we've hit the highlights. We've hit the important,
Cathy Gellis (00:51:24):
I talk about the internet archive lawsuit.
Leo Laporte (00:51:26):
Internet archive. Now, this is a big one for me. Brewster Kale got a little money out of the sale of his company, I think it was ways to a OL. And instead of buying a yacht, he decided to create something called the internet archive archive.org because he felt like there is a lot of history of us, our culture online that is just going to go away in a year or two because the website's going to go down. I'm going to record everything. And he's done it. And I remember I've interviewed him, he said, and I said, what about copyright? He says, well, we'll worry about that when somebody sues us. But we feel like any library, it's more important that we make copies of all this stuff. And if you've ever used the Wayback machine, it's incredible. I signed up for a monthly, this is one monthly contribution I don't mind making because I really want to support what Brewster and Company are doing. So who sued them?
Cathy Gellis (00:52:21):
Well, there's a number of things that the Internet archive archives, and they have a number of faculties about what they make available. But this is all about the faculty that scanned books and then lent books out primarily using a process called controlled digital lending,
Leo Laporte (00:52:42):
Especially during pandemic. They had an emergency,
Cathy Gellis (00:52:46):
Well that one, there was a small bit of time at the beginning of the lockdown aspects of the pandemic where controlled digital lending basically means that if we physically had the copy of the book, instead of physically handing it to a person, we just let one digital copy out. That's
Leo Laporte (00:53:04):
What libraries do with the physical copies.
Cathy Gellis (00:53:07):
So a library that owns a copy of a book is allowed to lend it. And what they said is, okay, well, people can't physically get access to the book. So controlled digital lending is the idea that, well, they had a digital copy of the book, which was a digital copy. They made themselves, and instead of physically handing a reader the book, they let the reader take a digital copy, but only as many digital copies could be checked out as physical copies of the books existed. Because it would be just the same as the library. Either the library, that book would be out the door, and it's only going to one reader.
Leo Laporte (00:53:44):
Libraries do this. Whether there's apps like Libby where libraries have controlled digital lending of digital archives.
Cathy Gellis (00:53:51):
I'm not as familiar with other libraries.
Leo Laporte (00:53:52):
They do audio books that way as well. These are what? Yeah, it's like e-library.
Cathy Gellis (00:53:57):
It's a pretty simple concept. Some of them may vary because some of them may be libraries based on copy, digital copies of the books that may have been acquired via the publishers. One of the things the publisher doesn't like is that the internet archive made its own digital copies. So these aren't about ones that
Leo Laporte (00:54:15):
Weren't purchased.
Cathy Gellis (00:54:16):
They weren't purchased as e copies. They were purchased as physical copies at
Leo Laporte (00:54:20):
The, which scanned and
Cathy Gellis (00:54:21):
Then scanned. So this is one of the things that is upsetting the publishers, which I don't think is something that should be meaningful, but it's something that upsets them.
Leo Laporte (00:54:28):
As Corey doctor has pointed out many, many times, the publishers like to put libraries out of their misery as well. I mean, the publishers don't like this in any form. The publishers
Cathy Gellis (00:54:36):
Are easy to upset generally. Yeah. I mean, there's arguments that if we were inventing libraries today, they would never be allowed to exist. But one of the things that then happened at the beginning of the lockdown is the National Emergency Library where the internet archive took off the one for one limitations because people were entitled to have access to books if they could have got into the buildings with the books, but they couldn't get to the buildings with the books. So the fair use argument about not having the one for one lending was built around the exigency of people aren't really getting, they need it. The whole point of fair use is to make sure that people can actually interact with the knowledge that copyright is incentivizing the creation of, but functionally, nobody can get access to it. So the fair use argument during that period was built around that exigency of this has to happen or else there's no point of having copyright producing books. Nobody can physically get the books. So
Leo Laporte (00:55:38):
That seems, and this was a limited time thing? It was
Cathy Gellis (00:55:40):
A limited time thing, but it seems to have been the pointiest stick that woke up. The bear really pissed him off. And so the bear sued, but the bear didn't just sue over that time period. But then it's sued over the controlled digital landing altogether. And
Leo Laporte (00:55:55):
Where does that stand? We've talked about this before. It feels like we've been talking about it for a long time.
Cathy Gellis (00:55:59):
So the case was unfortunately lost at the district court. So what's happening now is it's up at the second circuit for appeal.
Leo Laporte (00:56:08):
What were the grounds of the loss? That was earlier this last year, right?
Cathy Gellis (00:56:13):
2023. I'm blanking on some of the specifics, but basically it was a very, the fair use analysis was very curt and tangled on itself, and arguably not a correct way. The internet archive has filed its opening brief, pointing out ways that the fair use analysis was not the way that the fair use analysis is supposed to go. I filed an amicus brief for the Copia Institute. Going back to some of what I was talking about in the AI
Leo Laporte (00:56:44):
Is the Copia Institute, the internet archive?
Cathy Gellis (00:56:47):
No, the Copia Institute is Teer.
Leo Laporte (00:56:50):
Oh, yes.
Cathy Gellis (00:56:50):
That's the Think Tanky arm of Teer. And the brief that we filed made some of the same arguments I was making earlier about the copyright in ai, where what does Congress get to do in the copyright space? It gets to pass copyright law to the extent that it promotes the progress of science and the useful arts and is constrained by the First Amendment, including its right to read. So we are not taking issue with the way that the copyright statute is written, but we're taking issue with the way the district court interpreted the copyright statute, because for them to look at it and say that the fair use decision should have not been in favor of the internet archive, makes the copyright statute constitutionally problematic. Because now you're actually, you're obstructing knowledge. You're standing in the way of readers and the things that they want to read and would've been entitled to read
Leo Laporte (00:57:49):
Well, but I'm sure the book publishers would say, if it comes down to knowledge versus our prophets, we are going to profits win every time. Profits should win every single
Cathy Gellis (00:58:00):
Time. They're very cogently making that argument. I just don't think that's the one that we
Leo Laporte (00:58:04):
As a society would lie as
Cathy Gellis (00:58:06):
We as a society or that the Constitution permits. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:58:08):
Now it is on appeal, but the injunction holds until the appeal is served.
Cathy Gellis (00:58:12):
The injunction ended up a little bit narrow. Is the injunction just about unlimited lending? It's not about single user lending. The internet archive already stopped with the unlimited lending after a very short period. It was like March through June or something like that. I'm not positive of those dates, but it was very, and then it was back to the one-to-one. The injunction applies to the one-to-one, but it is, I think, limited to certain works.
Leo Laporte (00:58:40):
It only covers books that are available in electronic format, not the publisher's full catalog of books and print. Also, the publisher has to notify the archive of their commercially available books, so the archive can remove only those books from lending. If a book is out, a print or not available, the archive is allowed to keep it in their library, which is a very good thing. I was going to say, I've borrowed quite a few. You can still borrow books,
Cathy Gellis (00:59:05):
Internet archive in the last couple of months. It's not completely closed. Fortunately, the injunction is more limited than that, but I think if the ruling isn't overturned, ortho Doms
Leo Laporte (00:59:20):
Will fall. Currently a book is out of print or is not available in an electronic format. You can get it from the internet archive. So it can be in print, but just not in an e format. In which case the, so the power broker, the judge, yeah, the power broker. The judge said actually the power broker is available in
Paris Martineau (00:59:37):
Both. No, it's not very famously not allowed to be an ebook.
Leo Laporte (00:59:41):
Oh. But it is an audiobook, so that's an interesting question. I don't know. I would say an audiobook is an electronic format, but I don't, the
Cathy Gellis (00:59:50):
Judge, I think they were just dealing with the works and suit ebook was the eBooks.
Leo Laporte (00:59:54):
Yeah.
Cathy Gellis (00:59:55):
Okay.
Paris Martineau (00:59:55):
I do think it's particularly interesting. I would argue, I mean, I'm sure this has nothing to do with the actual legal standards here, but traditional eBooks are a very different online reading experience than a scanned copy of a,
Leo Laporte (01:00:09):
That's actually one of the things that you, and sometimes archive points out.
Paris Martineau (01:00:12):
You really need that.
Leo Laporte (01:00:13):
Yeah. The archive points out that their scans have real page numbers, for instance. So if you've got a reference to a page number in a book, it's not going to help you with a Kindle version, but it works with the archive books. They have page numbers. They're scanned.
Paris Martineau (01:00:28):
Yeah. For instance, I mean, this is a specific example. I recently checked that a bunch of books from the internet archive because I was trying to buy, albeit from eBay, a bunch of 1990s web design books, because I'm really interested in the, I dunno, the graphics of mid 1990s web design is very interesting to me, but I wanted to make sure the books, I was construction science. Listen, I love an under construction sign. I love a little Netscape,
Leo Laporte (01:00:57):
Weird graphics opening and closing. I was like,
Paris Martineau (01:00:59):
I want to make sure that the books that I am buying have the sort of full page color graphics that I'm interested in. So I checked out probably dozens of books, not at the same time from the internet archive, so that I could check all of this, and it was super useful in making my purchasing decision.
Leo Laporte (01:01:15):
You did see the Terrence Eden's CSS thing that makes old webpages, like when you get a reference to a BBC news article from 1990, it doesn't look like that. It's reformatted to fit the modern BBC's look. Right. So he's created a CSS file that makes webpages that are old look as old as they are. Perfect.
Paris Martineau (01:01:42):
Sometimes I just want to live in that internet for a bit, just kind of a change,
Cathy Gellis (01:01:46):
Hey, do live in that internet. Strangely, I don't think the new internet is necessarily better. A lot of this dynamic stuff
Leo Laporte (01:01:53):
Is, it's not better.
Cathy Gellis (01:01:54):
Infinite scroll is not my friend.
Paris Martineau (01:01:58):
I want to go to the bar at the bottom of the page as things I want, and it's hard to get to it.
Cathy Gellis (01:02:06):
I mean, I've used the internet archives library to, there's a tech dirt post I wrote about a Danny Dunn book. I remembered reading when I was growing up. It's out of print. The libraries have largely cleared it from their shelves, but I really wanted to reread it and write about it, and thankfully, the internet archive had a scan, so I was able to do that. I've read other books that then I've checked out of libraries. I've read other books that have led to purchasing decisions. Like this is part of how culture works. You give people access to it, and yeah, that's how you're going to end up getting money out of it. But if people live in closets because they can't get access to anything, nobody's making any money.
Leo Laporte (01:02:44):
But Corey doctor is coming on twit, isn't he? In a couple of weeks. Right? 21st. 21st. So we'll definitely get into this with Corey because he's interesting because he's an author. He's got a lot of books in print, but he has very strong opinions that the publishers are wrong on this, and of course, defends the internet archive. We'll talk about it when Corey's on the 21st,
Cathy Gellis (01:03:08):
But just to wrap that around. Oh, yes. I think the issues in the internet archive appeal are, as I was writing that amicus brief, I was rewriting the comment I wrote about the copyright and ai, that right to read and access to knowledge and what is the point and purpose of copyright law. I was making the same arguments in both contexts.
Leo Laporte (01:03:26):
Yeah, going full circle, connecting it all. By the way, there are people who probably think the No Fakes Act is a pretty good idea, including gaming voice actors. You may have heard the story earlier this week that SAG aftra, the Actors Union, had struck a deal with an AI firm called Replica Studios that pre-negotiate the cost and the right of replica studios to take a voice artist and generate AI and use their AI version in games. Voice artists are not happy. They say they weren't told about the deal. They say, this is why we went on strike for months last year to fight for protections from ai. Many voice actors, this is from the BBC, have suggested this New Deal is at odds with the purpose of that strike. Fallout and Mortal Combat voice actor, Sunil Ma Halt Ultra says he sacrificed to strike half of last year to keep my professional alive, not to shop around. My AI replica Sag after says The deal was approved by effective members of the union's voiceover performer community. I dunno if they had a vote, but they say we asked. But many voice actors, including Steve Bloom, a voice actor once credited by Guinness for being the most prolific in video games, said nobody he knew approved the deal. Nobody asked me or anybody I know. So interesting. Do
Paris Martineau (01:05:03):
You have any sense of what the compensation is going to be like, or are they actually talking about replacing a AAA game lead with an AI replica?
Leo Laporte (01:05:14):
Because the compensation can't be equal? SAG says this will allow replica to engage SAG AFT members under Fair Ethical Agreements to safely create and license a digital replica of their voice. I presume. Usually what happens with the unions is they negotiate what they call a scale payment, which is the lowest possible payment, and then you can negotiate with replica to being paid more, but they can't be paid less, I guess.
Paris Martineau (01:05:43):
I mean, this could put so many voice actors out of work. It reminds me of, what was that series that up in recently that had a bourdain, a voiceover of him?
Leo Laporte (01:05:55):
Oh, yeah, possibly. It was a documentary about Anthony Bourdain. They had a text, they had a piece of text that Bourdain had written, but they wanted him to read it, of course, Bourdain's Past. So they got an AI to generate the voice and used that voice in the documentary. It was very controversial.
Cathy Gellis (01:06:13):
So I'm not quite sure what law I want to apply there. I don't like that emotionally that creates a gut punch and it feels icky and potentially fraudulent, although if they weren't trying to sell something,
Leo Laporte (01:06:25):
It does feel icky hold any weight in law.
Cathy Gellis (01:06:28):
It tends to be what inspires law to get created. We take a lot of our sense of ickiness and we build law around it, but there's not a perfect alignment between what feels icky and what law actually says no to, because there's also things holding back law like First Amendment and things like
Leo Laporte (01:06:42):
That, and I would presume a judge or a jury would be instructed to not take into account how they feel about it, but what the law says, right?
Cathy Gellis (01:06:49):
Well, things go off the rails all the time. We're human beings, especially with a jury, and we adjudicate things weirdly, so I'm not quite sure what I want the solution to be. Now, if they were trying to use it to sell something, we may already have law because we already have laws about fraud
Leo Laporte (01:07:07):
And deception to Hanks has recourse to them using his image. He probably has a right of
Cathy Gellis (01:07:12):
Publicity claim that's already recognized, but if
Leo Laporte (01:07:15):
He's dead, does he have
Cathy Gellis (01:07:16):
The claim? Well, so I get squeaked by a couple of things for living people. I do think that the right of publicity makes sense, but there are some conflicts with the First Amendment that give me a lot of pause. But in terms of a dead person, Al
Leo Laporte (01:07:33):
Albert Einstein, for instance,
Cathy Gellis (01:07:35):
So I get emotionally swick by the idea that we're going to resurrect a dead person to do something in the living world, but I really hate that dead people can say no to things that the living want to do. So I would probably rather put my thumb on Reanimated Albert Einstein's than to say that a dead Albert Einstein can say no to things. There's a ton of things where the estates of dead people get to say no. The estate of Dr. Seuss got to say no to a whole really interesting, exciting, different book that he wasn't going to write. I mean, he was never going to write it even if he was alive, but he's definitely not going to write it if he's dead. But now nobody got to write it because the estate of a dead person got to say no to a new creative work, expressive work that a living person wanted to do, and I don't think law or the First Amendment should ever say yes to
Leo Laporte (01:08:32):
That. According to the Guardian, Albert Einstein has earned far more posthumously than he ever did in his lifetime because this lawyer basically argued that there is an estate, and the Einstein estate has been extremely litigious in fighting the F Einstein's image.
Paris Martineau (01:08:55):
How does this work? Does the estate just get control of that
Leo Laporte (01:09:00):
Forever? Okay, so when he died in 1955, his will said that manuscripts, copyrights, publication, rights, royalties, and all of the literary property would go first to his secretary and stepdaughter and upon their death to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He didn't mention his likeness or the use of his name for products or advertisements, publicity rights, but when Hebrew University took control of the estate in 1982, they decided we got those two.
Cathy Gellis (01:09:34):
I mean, there's an awful lot of putative owners of rights helping themselves and just claiming to own rights that may or may not actually exist, and certainly may or may not be owned by them, but if they've got the ability to pay the lawyers, then functionally they got some rights. But it comes at the conflict of other expression that the First Amendment is supposed to protect, that the public be able to engage in, and this is a problem in terms of copyrights that tends to be more tangible. I think it's a mess. I think shortcuts are being taken, especially if the copyrights predate the 1976 Act because the 1909 Act was so picky about, did you register? Did you renew? Things like that, but I think that's a problem. Dead authors are not going to be incentivized by a longer copyright term to create a thing that they're not alive enough to create.
Leo Laporte (01:10:23):
One place that Hebrew University has been thwarted is the state of Illinois where there's a statute protecting everything from a celebrity's likeness to their gestures and mannerisms for 100 years only, and after a hundred years, it becomes public domain. The university suing more than a hundred people in the state of Illinois because people have been said, oh God, we can use Einstein.
Cathy Gellis (01:10:50):
I don't know if I, I'm
Paris Martineau (01:10:51):
Surprised that more states or areas don't have limitations like that.
Cathy Gellis (01:10:56):
Well, I think they're starting to, A lot of states, most states have a right of publicity law. A bunch of states, like particularly where the entertainers live, are contemplating having laws that would give rights in the dead person's image or personality or something like that. The way that Illinois then limits it, so you can't have it forever is better than making it forever. But I think it's a problem that they could have it at all. I mean, it deals with the squi factor, but it doesn't deal with the fact that dead people shouldn't be able to control what the living can express, and ultimately these laws come down to giving, I mean, it's not even the dead person. It's somebody who manages to own the property as a result of intestacy. But quite frankly, a lot of these wills aren't written in a way that really passes those, I don't know, I don't even want to say property rights, but some form of rights to heirs in a way that's necessarily coherent, accurate, or fair. There's a number of instances of trophy wives all of a sudden get controlling the copyrights of their wealthy dead husband just because Woo-hoo. By the time he died, they ended up taking it via the marriage and his kids of 40 years got nothing.
Leo Laporte (01:12:20):
There is a doctor though, who has Einstein's brain. He kept his brain, so
Paris Martineau (01:12:25):
Steven Levy tracking down,
Cathy Gellis (01:12:28):
But at least it's tangible. It doesn't bother me in quite the same way.
Leo Laporte (01:12:33):
It might bother Einstein if he knew about it, but I guess he doesn't. Since he's in a jar, I
Paris Martineau (01:12:38):
Know when I die, some doctor can have my brain.
Cathy Gellis (01:12:40):
They can have my, I mean, you can authorize this as a living person. The questions whether somebody can then take it if you didn't authorize it, that's where the squi factor comes in.
Leo Laporte (01:12:49):
Let's take a little break. What's that? The
Cathy Gellis (01:12:53):
Squibb. Squi factor.
Leo Laporte (01:12:55):
Squi, okay.
Paris Martineau (01:12:56):
It's a legal term.
Cathy Gellis (01:12:58):
It is now.
Leo Laporte (01:12:59):
I like it. It's squeamish and I kind of merge together. I didn't make it up. S quick didn't make it up. S quick as a word. It's a real word. S quick. Yeah, let's check the Urban Dictionary. No, before I do that much, before I do that, let me talk about our advertiser. We're so thrilled, by the way, to have Kathy Ellis in studio. Nice to see you. Kathy, Paris, Martin. No, in, in, let's see. You're not in vivo, so you must be in vitro. Yeah, that's glass right behind the glass in the Zoom. Jeff will be back next week. Our show today brought to you by Melissa, the data quality experts, for a long time, since 1985, Melissa offers free trials, sample codes, flexible pricing, and an RO. I guarantee you Boss will like that, but you'll like the unlimited technical support to all customers all over the world.
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Now that of course is for government agencies, but lets you know you're going to gain this superior level of security. It's validated. Melissa's solutions and services are also G-D-P-R-C-C-P-A compliant that meet SOC two and hipaa, high-trust standards for information security management, so your data is safe with Melissa. You need Melissa and your business gets started today. 1000 records cleaned for free. melissa.com/twit, ME lssa melissa.com/tut. We thank them so much for their support of this week in Google. I always thought it'd be kind of cool telling parenthetically, if somebody took all of these hundreds, tens of thousands of hours of video and audio of me and made an AI out of it, I'd be honored. Yeah,
Cathy Gellis (01:15:37):
You could retire. I could just do your job for you.
Leo Laporte (01:15:39):
Oh, you mean before I die even? Yeah, let's do it now. Yeah, maybe it's already happened.
Paris Martineau (01:15:46):
Think of that. Yeah, maybe we've been got, maybe that's why you've turned so pro AI over the past few.
Leo Laporte (01:15:54):
I like
Paris Martineau (01:15:54):
Ai. The calls coming from inside the house.
Leo Laporte (01:15:56):
Don't you like ai?
Cathy Gellis (01:15:58):
Well, she can't. You should. She can't see you in three dimensions. In theory, I can. That's
Leo Laporte (01:16:02):
True. It could be a hollow, but
Paris Martineau (01:16:04):
I don't know. Kathy, you could be fake too. I'm staring
Cathy Gellis (01:16:07):
To wonder.
Leo Laporte (01:16:07):
Yeah, from your point of view, this could all be just a trick. We're playing on Paris Martin, though.
Paris Martineau (01:16:12):
I just, this podcast may not even exist. I could just be talking to couple Paris. I
Cathy Gellis (01:16:17):
Think you robot of my imagination. I've just decided that you know
Leo Laporte (01:16:20):
Who's not.
Paris Martineau (01:16:21):
That could be fair
Leo Laporte (01:16:22):
Salt. Hank. He's real.
Paris Martineau (01:16:25):
That's true. Salt. Hank is realer than all of us.
Leo Laporte (01:16:27):
This is Ferris's new dating technique. I know. Salt Hank is dad. That's
Paris Martineau (01:16:33):
Good. Listen, I was on a date the other day. They were asking about the podcast. I mentioned the Cheetos duster and happened to mention Salt. Hank Leo's very TikTok famous son. The guy goes, holy crap, you know Salt Hank's dad. Wow. I'm two degrees away from Salt Hank
Leo Laporte (01:16:53):
And I
Paris Martineau (01:16:54):
Cackled.
Leo Laporte (01:16:55):
Yeah. I
Paris Martineau (01:16:56):
Was like, I'm going to be talking about this. This in the podcast immediately.
Leo Laporte (01:16:59):
Funny. Yeah, he just did a, have you ever watched The Bear? It's a great TV show on FX about restaurants cooking. In fact, some people I know who work in the restaurant industry say, I can't watch it. It's too anxiety inducing because it's too
Paris Martineau (01:17:15):
Realistic. That's the thing is I've heard it's very stressful and I don't need any
Leo Laporte (01:17:18):
More context, so the people who do the bear thing just sponsored him to go on a food tour of Chicago. They retracing the steps of one of the episodes in the bear. One of the bear people. Adi goes for a tour around Chicago to get inspired by the flavors of Chicago. Hank got to go to all the same restaurants. Oh my God. It looked amazing.
Paris Martineau (01:17:41):
Did he eat any of this food or was this all just for show?
Leo Laporte (01:17:44):
No, he ate it all and in fact, he keeps complaining. I can't eat anymore. I've actually haven't had
Salt Hank (01:17:49):
My whole life grabbed a quick
Paris Martineau (01:17:50):
Cup. Wow, what a poor life. My
Salt Hank (01:17:52):
Favorite spot of the whole trip. I think public quality meats. That looks inappropriate. A little biased. It was like all sandwiches and meat. Wow. There's Brad getting a tour of the cured meat fridge. It's all PTO down at the bottom.
Leo Laporte (01:18:06):
When he came back for this, he said, oh dad, this is the best day of my life. I got to got some
Salt Hank (01:18:10):
Insane fresh sliced
Leo Laporte (01:18:11):
Meat, got giant charcuterie platters. Fred was, this is his favorite. Obviously we're not
Paris Martineau (01:18:15):
Going to find a cured meat fridge is my dream.
Leo Laporte (01:18:17):
Yeah, his too. He grew up, his favorite Christmas present was a whole salami and it'd usually be gone by the end of the day's. Fantastic. We put it in a stocking. It can't be good for you. God, it's great for you. Hey, you know what we're not going to talk about on this show? CES.
Paris Martineau (01:18:38):
Fantastic. Thank.
Leo Laporte (01:18:39):
Don't care. Don't care. Have you ever had to go Paris for any of your Nope. No,
Paris Martineau (01:18:44):
And I'm so happy about that. The closest I've ever gotten was, I think last year I was on the twit after CES and listened to you and Padre. Oh,
Leo Laporte (01:18:52):
He's going to do it again. Go
Paris Martineau (01:18:53):
Through his bag of treasures and each one, I was like, wow,
Leo Laporte (01:18:58):
He's going to do it again. Not less about this. He is right as we speak. He is on the show floor at the Las Vegas Convention Center in his priest's collar saying, God wants you to give me that and it works. He's going to come back with a giant package of words. What
Paris Martineau (01:19:13):
Do you think the silliest item he could bring back? It
Leo Laporte (01:19:16):
Might be this. This is Lenovo's yoga book, Zen Book Duo. Sorry. This is a's Zen Book Duo. It's a two screen computer with a detachable blueprint. Everybody's doing these. I don't know who wants these.
Paris Martineau (01:19:30):
Notably, the screen in this photo for those listening is on top of the other screen. It's ugly. It's just a really tall, I mean, you've seen the videos or photos of people in coffee, like public coffee shops with a four screen setup up, right.
Leo Laporte (01:19:43):
Setting up this massive setup. That's ridiculous. Yeah.
Paris Martineau (01:19:48):
This is enabling those folks. I
Cathy Gellis (01:19:49):
Mean, I am possibly in the market for better screening than I've got, but I am not entirely sure
Leo Laporte (01:19:55):
That that is
Cathy Gellis (01:19:57):
Going to solve the problem.
Leo Laporte (01:19:58):
I think, honestly, do you need to
Paris Martineau (01:19:59):
Be portable though?
Cathy Gellis (01:20:00):
Yeah. I don't have a stable setup
Leo Laporte (01:20:03):
And you have a ThinkPad. This is a great computer. I'm sure Lenovo, in fact, I know Lenovo has a dual screen, but I don't. Just a bad idea. You could get a second screen. John, you do this. I need a solution. Here's what this, here's John's going to bring you what he does. Okay, so you can get a USB second screen. This is who makes this LG or ACEs? Yeah. Jesus. It's just a USB second screen watch. John's going to take it out. It's got a little stand. You carry it under your arm. It's very pretty actually, and then you could plug it in via the USB port. Put it on the other side so people can see it. You put it on a USB port. Now you have a giant floppy, a giant floppy screen.
Cathy Gellis (01:20:45):
The stand may not be selling name.
Leo Laporte (01:20:47):
It's a good stand. Once you get it set up, it's good, and now it's going to be a second screen so you have more real estate, so you have your pleadings can stretch out onto the other side.
Cathy Gellis (01:20:56):
Oh my gosh. There's such luxury
Leo Laporte (01:20:58):
Smaller ones.
Cathy Gellis (01:20:59):
I have a 13 inch
Leo Laporte (01:21:00):
One of those. Yeah, there's a variety of them. Some of 'em are in very inexpensive.
Cathy Gellis (01:21:03):
Well, that might be good. Then you can also leave it at home. You
Leo Laporte (01:21:05):
Don't have to. Don't have Take it. Take it
Cathy Gellis (01:21:05):
With you. Yeah. Alright.
Leo Laporte (01:21:06):
Okay. There'll be a lot of AI conversations at CES. We'll talk about that. Everybody in their Oh, he wants it back. Go ahead. Take it back. No, you take it back.
Paris Martineau (01:21:17):
I'm sorry. I thought this was a note going to set it up for you.
Cathy Gellis (01:21:20):
USBA, I have the big ones and the little ones.
Leo Laporte (01:21:23):
She's got C and a. That is
Paris Martineau (01:21:24):
The correct way to describe big ones.
Cathy Gellis (01:21:26):
I don't understand why they keep naming these things weird things
Leo Laporte (01:21:29):
So that people like us can Lord it over people like you because we know the names. Oh, you mean a type C?
Cathy Gellis (01:21:35):
I have been a geek. I can play geek and I just refuse to indulge. Gratuitous geeking.
Leo Laporte (01:21:41):
That's a good name for the show. Gratuitous ery this week in gratuitous
Cathy Gellis (01:21:45):
Ery. No, this is useful.
Paris Martineau (01:21:47):
That could work. That's good. This week in gratuitous ery is good, and then we keep the twig. We keep the T. The thing is, I was thinking the other way. If we did this week in ai, how are we going to pronounce that Twi?
Leo Laporte (01:21:58):
No, we don't want to do that. This is Twiggy geek.
Paris Martineau (01:22:00):
We could be Twe
Leo Laporte (01:22:02):
Twiggy. Alright, so now you've got a second screen, which going to light up. Well, it didn't light up. It's going to light up. No, it usually lights up when you plug it in. Yeah, it's
Paris Martineau (01:22:11):
Not happy. Okay. This week in gratuitous geek, so let's not work on it. Twiggy, there we go. Twiggy,
Cathy Gellis (01:22:17):
In theory, this is a solution that exists.
Leo Laporte (01:22:19):
Yeah, I practice. It exists.
Paris Martineau (01:22:21):
The longer you spend on this podcast, the more screens will surround. They
Leo Laporte (01:22:27):
Just grow. They just grow. Let me tell you,
Cathy Gellis (01:22:31):
It's sort of the AI bot replication as we've just postulated. Leo and I don't exist. This is all a rendering and the rendering is we've got too many fingers and also too many screens.
Leo Laporte (01:22:42):
Yeah, exactly. The IRS, which for a long time Congress has really been steamrolled by companies like Intuit and h and r Block who made for money tax preparation software. They've managed to convince Congress never to let the IRS do a free solution. Well, the IRS is finally rolling out a free option filing federal tax returns and don't get excited. It's only going to be available this year to a dozen states. It's an in-house filing system. I mean, in many countries it is interesting that, I don't know if this would ever fly in America, but in many countries you get a postcard in the mail that says, you owe this much agree sign here. You send it back and that's that. The feds know how much you made, right? I
Paris Martineau (01:23:33):
Mean, yeah, especially if you are like a W2 employee. They know. Yeah, it's been reported to that
Leo Laporte (01:23:39):
They can do the math, so 12 states who get to try it out. IRS says, it's a critical step forward for this innovative effort file for free directly with the IRS. What does Intuit say? It's a half-baked solution and a waste of taxpayer money. Intuit says, Intuit, by the way, makes TurboTax just in case you didn't know. The direct file scheme is a solution in search of a problem. Intuit for years has offered. TurboTax
Paris Martineau (01:24:09):
Solutions are paid service. TurboTax
Leo Laporte (01:24:11):
Couldn't give us $86. It's not going to hurt you. For years, they've had a quote free thing. They'd either hide it way behind many, many layers, and they do this to me every time. File for free. Fill it out. Oh, did you want to file this? Oh, that'll be $86. It's when the state comes up. Oh, you want to do your state taxes? You want state too? That's another $12. It's like, and I fall for it every freaking time.
Paris Martineau (01:24:41):
You use TurboTax,
Leo Laporte (01:24:42):
Leo? I do Not. For me, for my mom. I do her taxes and you know what? The only reason I use TurboTax, her taxes are pretty simple, but it imports from her brokerage where her savings are. Her IRA is so I don't have to fill in any forms. I just import it.
Cathy Gellis (01:25:02):
It's probably not a ton of labor that you're saving though. It's like one form with one number. Speak
Leo Laporte (01:25:06):
For yourself, Kathy.
Paris Martineau (01:25:08):
Yeah. I'll say a couple years ago, whenever I did a pandemic error layoff and then got another job at complicated taxes, I switched from TurboTax to an accountant and man, guy's, I use it for a year. It's wonderful. I just send him one email a day later, he gets back with all my stuff. It doesn't make any, it's fantastic mistakes. He doesn't,
Leo Laporte (01:25:27):
I've brilliant. I had a tax preparer who screwed up many years in a row. I had a big bill because he screwed up. I have a friend. Same thing,
Paris Martineau (01:25:37):
But do you trust a group of humans more or TurboTax?
Leo Laporte (01:25:40):
TurboTax. It's a computer. It never makes mistakes.
Paris Martineau (01:25:44):
True.
Cathy Gellis (01:25:45):
We've learned nothing from the
Paris Martineau (01:25:46):
Show. I'll say as Leo is an automated machine, as we've now discovered, this all makes perfect sense.
Leo Laporte (01:25:52):
No how 9,000 computer has ever made an error. The direct file pilot.
Cathy Gellis (01:25:58):
What are you doing, Dave?
Leo Laporte (01:26:00):
We'll be open to low and moderate income taxpayers with simple returns. I feel like this is not new. They've always had the easy right, the 10 40 easy online, but I guess this is new. Well, not always. Obviously. Yeah, they can't have interest income more than 1500 bucks. Gig workers not eligible. Unfortunately, like 90% of people under 25 or 30 are gig workers these days. IRS said in November expects several hundred thousand taxpayers to participate in this limited pilot. The IRS free file program. Oh, wait a minute. Okay, so the IRS has always provided online forms any filers can use regardless of income to file returns at no cost. That's always been there. The nonprofit newsroom, ProPublica has reported, for instance, that Intuit's TurboTax program steered users away from its free version and Intuit no longer participates in free file.
Paris Martineau (01:27:09):
ProPublica has done some phenomenal reporting on Intuit's complicity in a variety of different schemes to make it harder for the average American to taxes
Leo Laporte (01:27:19):
File taxes. This is a few ago, they called it the TurboTax trap. Come along as we try to file our taxes for free on TurboTax. It is rather fun. I go through this every time you see the ads that say free filing. Free filing h and r, block free filing, IRSE file Fast and Easy tax act.com free filing free guaranteed zero Fed, zero state zero to file. So they actually went to all this. It says free guaranteed, right? We started the process, created the profile of a TaskRabbit house cleaner who took in $29,000. They did a fake return. They did a bunch of questions after all of that, only then did we get to the bad news. TurboTax revealed, oh, this isn't going to be free. Turns out you don't qualify because you're a gig worker. It's going to cost you $120. Then they went back to free guaranteed Walgreens cashier without health insurance charge to accurately complete your taxes. You need to upgrade to TurboTax Deluxe 59.99. So who gets to file for free? That's the question. Yeah. TurboTax has been playing the Shell game forever, so have all of them. I mean, that's
Paris Martineau (01:28:47):
Their business.
Leo Laporte (01:28:48):
Yeah. Rent sinking. You may remember the, and let's give him some credit. The Joe Biden Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 order. Somebody's got it ordered. The IRS to study direct filing. In May, the agency reported it to Congress. They found a majority of taxpayers would be interested in using a direct file tool, a majority.
Paris Martineau (01:29:14):
I'm surprised that not every American was like, I love tax
Leo Laporte (01:29:17):
Filing tax. No. I want to pay for tax. More
Paris Martineau (01:29:19):
Complicated and expensive.
Leo Laporte (01:29:20):
Yeah, let's keep this crazy. A separate report from the Treasury department's Inspector General said, the design of the survey's overstated taxpayer's interest. Oh, please. It just goes on and on. Right.
Cathy Gellis (01:29:37):
Taxpayers are renowned for Yes, of course. I'd like to pay more for stuff.
Leo Laporte (01:29:42):
Sure.
Paris Martineau (01:29:44):
I'd like it to be more complicated and expensive specifically
Leo Laporte (01:29:47):
Anyway, and
Cathy Gellis (01:29:48):
Taxpayers in particular. That's the interest that that interest group is most known for. That's
Leo Laporte (01:29:54):
What we want to do. Yes. They don't call us payers for want
Paris Martineau (01:29:57):
To be paying more.
Leo Laporte (01:29:58):
We're not tax takers. We're taxpayers,
Cathy Gellis (01:30:00):
Right? Yes. We are proud of it. Proud of
Leo Laporte (01:30:03):
It. The EFF has released, this is interesting, a street level surveillance hub. Did you see this? Have you tried using it? It will let you know what law enforcement has deployed against you in your area. Automated license plate readers, biometric surveillance, body cameras, electronic monitoring, face recognition, drones. Wow.
Cathy Gellis (01:30:31):
So Marin County just allowed the sheriff's department to spend something like a hundred thousand dollars to roll out license plate reading cameras in unincorporated areas in Marin County, including intersections that happen to keep people from approaching the civic center where they pay taxes, vote,
Leo Laporte (01:30:54):
Things like that, or protest.
Cathy Gellis (01:30:57):
I don't understand entirely why they green lit it, and I also don't understand why these things aren't being challenged, but what I think I really don't understand as why the public is not further outraged, and also why the board of supervisors that in theory should be looking out for the public, did not ask questions. There is certain things that were provided that buzzword level encryption and in theory, possibly access to the data that may require a warrant. This is all better than not, but none of it really solves the whole bit of, every time you leave the house to go to the grocery store, the police get to take a picture and know that's a problem,
Leo Laporte (01:31:41):
And by the way, they kind of know that we don't like this. Look at what they do in Arizona. This isn't Paradise Valley. They hide the license plate cameras in fake metal cactuses, so as you're driving around, you may not notice that that cactus over there, why it has a camera inside. This is going to be a useful hub if you're curious to what kind of surveillance is being done. You can't actually search by zip code to find out if you are being surveilled, but if you go to s sls.ff.org, you could certainly get educated on all the different technologies that law enforcement is using, and I think after a while, you're going to realize we have no privacy. We
Cathy Gellis (01:32:33):
Have Well, and it's encroaching, encroaching, encroaching and hot off the presses. In fact, I forgot to send this for the rundown. I have a tech dirt post of the copy of the letter I sent to the board of supervisors that I don't think they read right before they authorized the sheriff's department to spend this money. This has happened within the last, I think this was a December thing, so your neighborhood county is going to watch your car. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:33:03):
Traditionally it is a privilege, not a right to pass along the drive along the streets. Right. I'm
Cathy Gellis (01:33:11):
Not sure that I would phrase that the right to travel is built into the Constitution and a whole for, we
Leo Laporte (01:33:16):
Require driver's licenses, require insurance. There's lots
Cathy Gellis (01:33:20):
Of restrictions. Doesn't mean access to the roads, and this isn't coming out of anything connected to the license of the driver or the license. I don't know. I
Leo Laporte (01:33:29):
Can't drive a car without a license for
Cathy Gellis (01:33:31):
Back. I think that's a weak argument. The issue. It's all
Benito (01:33:34):
Taxpayer paid though, so you did pay for that.
Cathy Gellis (01:33:35):
I think the issue, yeah, we could have paid for a music teacher instead of the contract with the license plate reading company, but no, I don't think that's the way the constitution works. I think in certain instances, I think basically the default reading of the Bill of Rights is that you're free to go about without being surveilled by the government, and if the government wants to do it, they have to be able to survive strict scrutiny to have a good enough reason, narrowly enough tailored in order to do something, and that can justify licensing the cars. But that doesn't justify taking away all the privacy you would've had with passing down the roads at all the
Benito (01:34:12):
Shoplifting, Kathy, all the shoplifting
Cathy Gellis (01:34:14):
That's happening. Oh, that shoplifting is not happening. That is also
Leo Laporte (01:34:18):
Panic stuff. That's amendments Bill of Rights stuff. This is all hundreds of years old. Technology is advanced. You're not an originalist, are you?
Cathy Gellis (01:34:29):
I'm not even quite sure what an originalist ends up actually thinking, but I think originalist believes that
Leo Laporte (01:34:36):
Photographs will steal your soul.
Cathy Gellis (01:34:40):
I mean, I think one of the things that actually we should spend more time thinking about is people are like, well, the Constitution is outdated now we have technology. We have had technology throughout the 200 plus years
Benito (01:34:53):
Clear.
Leo Laporte (01:34:53):
The Supreme Court does not believe that very clearly nothing is outdated about the Constitution. Right.
Cathy Gellis (01:35:00):
It's
Leo Laporte (01:35:01):
Not The founders knew what they were doing, darn it.
Cathy Gellis (01:35:05):
I'm not entirely sure I would even boil that down to that, but in terms of general attitudes, like when people are like, well, the Constitution needs to bend because now we have all this technology. We didn't even have a full periodic table at the time that we passed the Bill of Rights, and yet we were able to scale our freedoms as we had a whole scientific revolution. We do not need to throw out the Constitution just because we've arrived at this particular state of digital technology.
Leo Laporte (01:35:32):
Well, if you're not outraged enough, you may remember the Federal Communications Commission was funded by Congress a couple of years ago with the Affordable Connectivity Program. This was part of the way of getting broadband to every rural area, every low-income area in the country. Broadband access to the internet is really rapidly becoming a necessity. Not a privilege, not a frill. Well, the FCC is about to start winding down the program. It gives $30 monthly broadband discounts to people with low incomes. Congress says, not provided more funding. They say the Republican members of Congress blasted the affordable connectivity program saying the FCC is wasteful in a letter. GOP lawmakers complained that most of the households receiving the subsidy already had broadband service before the program existed.
(01:36:32):
I'm not sure I understand the logic of that. They threatened to withhold funding and criticized what they called the Biden Administration's reckless spending spree. The FCC has announced that without further funding, we're going to have to end the program. We have less than four months left and we will start winding down this week. The program to give households, providers and other stakeholders sufficient time to prepare. Biden administration has requested it is expensive, 6 billion to fund the program through December, 2024, but the current funding will not last through April. Running out completely in May. FCC Chairwoman, Jessica Rosen Waral has repeatedly asked Congress for more funding 23 million households. That's why it's so expensive. 23 million households enrolled in this.
(01:37:26):
Just dunno what to say. Just there you go. You're not going to be able to get on Twitter anymore. FTC has banned X mode from selling phone location data. This is actually really good news. I've said many times we got to do something about data brokers. There has been very little regulation data brokers either from Congress or the FTC. This is the first, as far as I know, the first time a data broker has been banned from selling phone location information. They also order the firm to delete collected data. This is a data broker called X Mode Social. That's the first,
Paris Martineau (01:38:01):
And they've faced scrutiny in the past for selling access to this commercial location data to government contractors and I guess military contractors as well. Right,
Leo Laporte (01:38:13):
And I'm sure law enforcement, it's now known as Out Logic. We talk a lot about privacy, but really it's the data brokers that are the biggest invaders of our privacy because they buy information from all the various little things that collect the data and then aggregate it, making it really incredibly rich and valuable. X mode now out logic buys and sells the location data from phone apps. It's just one of, I think there are hundreds of companies doing this in the data broker industry. They face particular scrutiny, as you said, Paris, for selling access to the commercial location data of Americans, past movements to the US government and military contractors. Apple and Google told developers to remove. This is by the way, you wouldn't get an xmo app. You get an app that had XMO built into it. That's the thing you wouldn't even know. Apple and Google did tell the developers
Paris Martineau (01:39:10):
It be like five, maybe 10 of your apps. Right? And all of them would be selling the sort of data to, I guess in a positive light, advertisers saying, Paris just started going to the gym. You should probably advertise things related to fitness to her or Paris's. Work has changed. She's moved neighborhoods. These sort of invasive and deeply personal things about your life and movements that you'd expect
Leo Laporte (01:39:40):
Somewhat private, worse than that. States that have criminalized, for instance, abortion can also buy that data to find out if Paris, well, I won't say Paris, but someone has visited a women's health center and then perhaps even prosecute that person. So all of this data is collected, medical, reproductive health clinics, places of religious worship, domestic abuse shelters, and on and on. It's precise location data. I just
Cathy Gellis (01:40:06):
Got a really weird Facebook ad for something that was relevant, but there's no way I can think of how it should have known
Leo Laporte (01:40:16):
Well now,
Cathy Gellis (01:40:17):
But I can't think of where they would've acquired data where they could put two and two together and decide that that was something I would care about and it mattered. But what from your social graft? Maybe it was a medical thing and I'm usually pretty good with not uniting the medical stuff.
Leo Laporte (01:40:36):
Did you take your phone with you?
Cathy Gellis (01:40:38):
Yeah, but it's still very oddly specific and I can't think of, I mean, short of this is why people think their phones are spying on them because it's like, well, yeah, if it listened into a conversation, it would've known, but without what data could it have picked up in order to put two and two together and decide that it was something that mattered to me,
Leo Laporte (01:40:58):
It was Senator Ron Wyden, whose office first revealed that XMO has sold location data to military contractors. Wyden said, I commend the FTC for taking tough action to hold this shady location broker responsible for its sale of Americans location data out logic, responded to this article in TechCrunch by giving them a statement through its public relations firm saying, we disagree with the implications of the FTC press release after a lengthy investigation. The FTC found no instance of misuse of any data and made no such allegation. Since this inception, XMO has imposed strict contractual terms on all data customers prohibiting them from associating its data with sensitive locations such as healthcare facilities. Adherence to the FTCs, newly introduced policy will be insured by implementing additional technical processes and will not require any significant changes to businesses or projects. So they didn't find them as far as I could tell. They just ordered them to stop collecting that data and to delete all the data that they had. And as I said, xmo disputes that. Let's see. Just looking through. We have a bunch of AI stuff. A lot of it we've already done. I, should I buy this?
Cathy Gellis (01:42:28):
Oh God, wait, now we're into the CSS realm.
Leo Laporte (01:42:32):
I'm very tempted. We actually tried yesterday and couldn't. This is the rabbit R one and it is not a smartphone. It has LTE has a camera, and the idea is it was debuted, of course this week at CES, instead of taking out your smartphone, you just push the talk button on the R one and tell it what you want and then the AI will do it.
Paris Martineau (01:43:06):
Okay. What AI though?
Leo Laporte (01:43:08):
Ah, it doesn't say
Cathy Gellis (01:43:10):
It's magic. Stop asking questions. Doesn't look at the man behind the curtain.
Leo Laporte (01:43:15):
It costs a hundred money.
Paris Martineau (01:43:17):
How is this different than pulling out She who must not be named the Amazon Echo? Have you
Leo Laporte (01:43:23):
Ever device you asked her for information. This can do things
Paris Martineau (01:43:26):
Or Siri,
Leo Laporte (01:43:27):
This can call you an Uber. You can say, Hey, get me an Uber to the Empire State Building, and the R one will then interpret your request to display cards in the screen. It has a screen showing your fair and then request the ride. Paris.
Cathy Gellis (01:43:42):
That's Siri. This is ai, therefore that's true. I'm sorry.
Paris Martineau (01:43:47):
I'm so
Leo Laporte (01:43:47):
Sorry. Not realize that. Can she who shall not be named make a reservation at a restaurant? Book an airline ticket, add a song to your Spotify playlist and the idea is you don't have a subscription for this. Well, you do. You have to have a SIM card, but that's up to you. Who
Paris Martineau (01:44:03):
Needs this? What would you use this for, Leo?
Leo Laporte (01:44:06):
I think, well, are you
Paris Martineau (01:44:08):
Jonesing for more voice
Leo Laporte (01:44:11):
Connected anything? I think it's interesting that this could be the next generation of smartphone, right? Instead of having apps on it, it connects with apps in the cloud in effect and gives you like an Uber in the cloud and gives you, can
Paris Martineau (01:44:24):
We roll back the tapes from a month ago when you said something else is going to be the next generation of smartphone? It was that little hand device.
Cathy Gellis (01:44:31):
This needs to be a standard feature on Twig. What does Leo think is the next
Paris Martineau (01:44:36):
Generation of smartphone?
Leo Laporte (01:44:37):
Alright, I won't buy one. Okay. It's only, I mean,
Paris Martineau (01:44:40):
You could buy one if you want. It's,
Leo Laporte (01:44:43):
I wouldn't if it were a thousand bucks, but it's only 200 bucks.
Cathy Gellis (01:44:46):
What else could you spend that's practically
Paris Martineau (01:44:47):
Free?
Leo Laporte (01:44:48):
Practically giving it away. Alright. The good news is I went yesterday to the Rabbit R one website and it wasn't functional. I couldn't order it. I
Cathy Gellis (01:44:59):
Mean, we are ruining the sponsorship opportunities here.
Leo Laporte (01:45:01):
Budget. No, I don't care about that. That's
Cathy Gellis (01:45:04):
Rapid. I feel like we're not just angel and Devil sitting on your shoulders. We're both sort of, what
Leo Laporte (01:45:09):
Are you thinking? It might have fixed the website. This image was missing the last time I was there. Let's see. Clicking the pre-order button. Oh, now I can get it, but I won't. Wow. I'll listen to you. I won't. I'm tempted. Actually. They've sold out according to the Verge just a couple of hours ago. 10,000 units. Now they're opening orders for a second production.
Paris Martineau (01:45:34):
Alright. What do you think the over under is before this goes out of business? No shade to the team behind this. I'm sure they put very hard create product. I hope that they do well
Leo Laporte (01:45:43):
To really bring that home. Remember the humane AI pin? They've already started layoffs.
Paris Martineau (01:45:49):
Yes. That's exactly where I was going for this. I saw it and I was like, oh, Leo needs to know That's another AI device that was going to replace the smartphone, Kathy, that Leo almost bought.
Cathy Gellis (01:46:01):
I think my sense of that would depend what are the deals for the manufacturer of the second round? What are the numbers that they do and are they busy? Basically plotting a pivot immediately off of this. Anyway,
Leo Laporte (01:46:14):
Pivot as soon as you take the money and run, right? We're going to do free tax prep software. Humane laid off 4% of its employees. They haven't even released the pin yet. They don't ship until March
Cathy Gellis (01:46:25):
Soon. The rabbit will diagnose you based on just a drop of blood. Drop of
Paris Martineau (01:46:29):
Blood. Drop of blood. That's all you need.
Leo Laporte (01:46:31):
It's a drop of blood. Yeah. I guess there's a, don't even have every
Cathy Gellis (01:46:35):
Minute have to speak to the rabbit. You just need to bleed on it and just
Paris Martineau (01:46:38):
Bleed on it and then it'll order you an Uber to the Empire staple. Right?
Leo Laporte (01:46:45):
Oh Lord. Well, that's the AI segment. Oh, wait a minute. Walmart. Walmart is debuting AI search and AI replenishment features. They showed this at CES Walmart. President Doug McMillan gave a keynote at CES in Las Vegas offering a glimpse of how Walmart planned to put new technologies, including AR drones, generative AI and other AI tech to work to improve the shopping experience.
Cathy Gellis (01:47:17):
I don't want a drone in Walmart, United in the same thought.
Leo Laporte (01:47:20):
I'll just follow you around with a basket lady and throw what you want in it. They have an AI shopping
Paris Martineau (01:47:27):
Assistant just follow you around display ads.
Leo Laporte (01:47:29):
Would you use this that will let you interact with a chatbot as you shop to ask questions and get personalized product suggestions?
Paris Martineau (01:47:37):
My main goal when I go into any store is to talk to as few people as possible. Well, you don't have to talk to, I want to, to avoid all talk to a machine. I would
Cathy Gellis (01:47:45):
All communication, be it a
Paris Martineau (01:47:46):
Machine or
Cathy Gellis (01:47:47):
Person if I have a question, I really want a human who's actually got a broad knowledge base to tap into. Have you ever
Leo Laporte (01:47:53):
Been in a Walmart?
Cathy Gellis (01:47:54):
I try not to.
Leo Laporte (01:47:56):
There is nobody there.
Cathy Gellis (01:47:57):
There was the emergency sweatpants purchase and other than that
Leo Laporte (01:48:02):
1985,
Cathy Gellis (01:48:03):
It was in law school. You can never forget win a packing disaster as I went to a softball tournament.
Leo Laporte (01:48:08):
The ai, for instance, Walmart said you could ask it for, and I know you'll do this a lot, Kathy, a unicorn themed birthday party, and then it will point you to the unicorn themed balloons, napkins, streamers more.
Cathy Gellis (01:48:22):
I host World Intellectual Property Day themed birthday parties because my birthday is World Intellectual Property
Leo Laporte (01:48:30):
Day. What day
Cathy Gellis (01:48:30):
Is that? April 26th.
Leo Laporte (01:48:31):
That really good, happy birthday. That's nice. We just recently last week had public domain day every year on January 1st, stuff goes out of copyright into the public domain.
Cathy Gellis (01:48:44):
I just think it's very amusing that the World Intellectual Property Association decided that the day to celebrate their doctrine was the day I was born.
Leo Laporte (01:48:52):
I don't think it worked that way. Kathy.
Cathy Gellis (01:48:55):
I think they saw me coming.
Paris Martineau (01:48:57):
Yeah.
Cathy Gellis (01:48:58):
Or they should have.
Leo Laporte (01:48:59):
Lady Chatterley's Lover is now in the public domain three Penny Opera, Virginia Wolfs, Orlando, making sure I'm looking at the right year. Yes. January 1st, 2024. You're
Paris Martineau (01:49:09):
Trying to avoid talking about Steamboat Willie and I think
Leo Laporte (01:49:12):
Steamboat Willies the centerpiece. Now, this is the weird thing. That does not mean you can just use Mickey Mouse as you wish.
Paris Martineau (01:49:21):
No, it's very specific versions of Mickey Mouse. Yeah,
Leo Laporte (01:49:25):
The original 19 mouse, 24 Steamboat, more specific Willy movie. Right.
Cathy Gellis (01:49:31):
There is no reason that copyright should work like this. Normally copyright
Leo Laporte (01:49:36):
Is Bono
Cathy Gellis (01:49:37):
Bakes to different, not even in terms of the term, but normally copyright is the specific fixation in a tangible media, but with character copyright, it is all possible fixations in a tangible meeting, including ones that haven't been fixated yet. This isn't something that doctrinally should exist as something that could be controlled. Each individual print of the film. Sure. Maybe even each individual frame, but Mickey Mouse as a concept is drawn like that, or even as drawn in other ways. This is not how copyright is supposed to work. As a friend of mine put it, it is doctrinally unpure and I think it's a huge problem and that's partly why we're tying ourselves in knots, figuring out what we can do with Mickey Mouse and what we can't do with Mickey Mouse, because none of this makes sense. So it's really difficult to figure out the logic of what you can do when the fact that you can't do stuff is illogical free. The mouse,
Leo Laporte (01:50:31):
Steamboat Willie, it was made in 1928. This is, by the way, US law only. In fact, Steamboat Willie May be in the public domain in some countries, but it's still copyrighted in others. So consult your attorney,
Cathy Gellis (01:50:44):
Which is interesting for Google, figuring out where to block the videos.
Leo Laporte (01:50:48):
Yeah, the public domain, so you have a 95 year term. Actually, that was because Disney would keep extending the copyright law every time it came close. Most recently with the copyright Act of whatever from Sonny Bono who was a member of Congress at the
Cathy Gellis (01:51:09):
Time. I think it was named for him. I
Leo Laporte (01:51:11):
Don't know. He was actually, it's the Sonny Bono Copyright Act,
Cathy Gellis (01:51:13):
But I think he may have
Leo Laporte (01:51:15):
Had he already passed.
Cathy Gellis (01:51:16):
He may have.
Leo Laporte (01:51:17):
I think. I seem to remember he was championing
Cathy Gellis (01:51:20):
It. You may have been championing it, but I think it got named after him because Oh,
Leo Laporte (01:51:23):
After
Cathy Gellis (01:51:23):
He hit the tree. Yeah. I'm not positive this should be Googled, but I think that's the order of
Leo Laporte (01:51:27):
Operations. It was 1998. President Clinton signed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, or as some called it the Mickey Mouse Protection Act, extending copyright for the life of the author. Let's see. Plus it's so complicated.
Cathy Gellis (01:51:48):
Some number of
Leo Laporte (01:51:49):
Years. Some just the right number of years.
Cathy Gellis (01:51:53):
This was corporate, so the term
Leo Laporte (01:51:55):
Is 95 years. Yeah, yeah. The 98 Act extended the renewal from 47 to 67 years. 1998 acts the life of the author plus 70 years for works of corporate authorship to 95 years from publication or 120 years after creation, whichever is earlier. Yeah. Right. I don't think Sonny wrote this. Come to think of it.
Cathy Gellis (01:52:24):
I wonder if some of the emotions attached to his premature passing actually led to some of the momentum that did actually cause,
Leo Laporte (01:52:31):
Or he was a sponsor of it. I shouldn't
Cathy Gellis (01:52:32):
Say he wrote it. Clearer minds might have pushed back harder, but the grossest part about all this emotions negatively impacted the legislative process in our country.
Benito (01:52:45):
What I really hate about the Disney thing is that they made all of their money on open.
Leo Laporte (01:52:50):
Yeah, yeah. They stole it all from others.
Benito (01:52:52):
It was all from
Leo Laporte (01:52:52):
Other stuff. In fact, the year before Steamboat Willie, there was a very strangely similar character that Walt might've borrowed. Forgotten the name of him.
Cathy Gellis (01:53:04):
Pinocchio.
Leo Laporte (01:53:06):
Yeah, Pinocchio. Yeah. Gar wrote that.
Benito (01:53:08):
Oh, little Mermaid, snow White. These are all stories by someone else.
Leo Laporte (01:53:12):
Yes. Yeah, but even Mickey Mouse, which one would think no, there couldn't have possibly been anything before then was inspired by an earlier animated something or other. In 1927, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit was created by Walt Disney. That's a whole, oh, that's a cool looking, oh, here you go. Here's Theo Toy Company, Mickey, which predated Mickey Mouse. This is 1925 before Disney even created Oswald and
Cathy Gellis (01:53:46):
He even has the same name.
Leo Laporte (01:53:48):
Yeah, it's called Mickey. Wow.
Paris Martineau (01:53:50):
A haunting looking mouse object.
Leo Laporte (01:53:52):
M-I-C-K-Y? No, E-M-I-C-K-Y-M-O-U-S-E. It is a little haunting and it doesn't have the white gloves.
Paris Martineau (01:54:04):
Oh, that one looks cursed,
Leo Laporte (01:54:08):
But it does predate Mickey. Okay. I am just saying, in fact, they have a patent on it from 1926.
Benito (01:54:14):
Oh, with the red pants and overalls too.
Leo Laporte (01:54:16):
Yeah, it's got the suspenders.
Cathy Gellis (01:54:18):
Alright. I'm troubled by patent.
Leo Laporte (01:54:20):
It was patented.
Cathy Gellis (01:54:21):
Patented, yeah. What is being patented?
Leo Laporte (01:54:25):
Probably that tail.
Benito (01:54:26):
That's toy probably is. It looks like the arms moving.
Leo Laporte (01:54:28):
Yeah. He applied for the
Cathy Gellis (01:54:29):
Mechanism, but it wouldn't have anything to
Leo Laporte (01:54:31):
Do with the toy. Not for the, yeah. How it looks, huh? The name Mickey came later when he held a contest to find a name among employees of the toy company. Larry Seagrove pitched the name Mickey. They trademarked the name February, 1927.
Paris Martineau (01:54:47):
Wow.
Leo Laporte (01:54:48):
The original Mickey was a hit. They sold the Mickey toys from 27 through 31. It was so popular. They had to cut production of the other toys to keep up with the demand. This is from messy messy chic.com, which is the definitive source for first all information. Yeah.
Cathy Gellis (01:55:09):
My dad had always said he thought it was interesting how a culture that generally has distaste for rodinia, like honors, a mouse in particular
Leo Laporte (01:55:20):
An empire. Well, it's rat. Let's get that straight. Okay.
Cathy Gellis (01:55:22):
Rodinia. Rod, my
Leo Laporte (01:55:24):
Challenge? Yes. Volkswagen says it's putting chat GPT in its cars.
Paris Martineau (01:55:31):
No, no.
Cathy Gellis (01:55:32):
Why?
Leo Laporte (01:55:33):
For enriching conversations and giving you some bad navigation directions. It says Andrew Hawkins in the fridge.
Cathy Gellis (01:55:40):
Okay, so it just keeps rolling downhill. Everyone is like, let's throw a copyright to obstruct AI training because there's so many stupid things that people keep trying to do with AI and everyone just wants to stop the stupid. Let's stop the stupid in other ways.
Leo Laporte (01:55:53):
You can use Chad GBT to control your heating, your air conditioning or answer general knowledge questions. I
Cathy Gellis (01:55:59):
Want my
Benito (01:56:00):
Fingers can do all of that.
Cathy Gellis (01:56:02):
In fact, they're going back
Leo Laporte (01:56:03):
To the general knowledge. No, no. Your fingers have no general
Cathy Gellis (01:56:07):
Knowledge. They're going back to tactile buttons. They realized that people were not paying attention to the road when they had to do everything by context.
Leo Laporte (01:56:15):
Yeah, well, especially
Benito (01:56:20):
If you're using a CarPlay or whatever, the buttons will move sometimes and you're like, what the hell did you move my
Leo Laporte (01:56:25):
Button? They just change stuff for no reason at all. Alright, let's take a little break when we come back, pick of the week and we can all go home Happy in the knowledge that we've saved the Republic one last time from a fate worse and death. Thanks to Kathy Gillis and Paris Martino. Well done. Bravo.
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Leo Laporte (01:57:14):
This I would like to take this brief moment to ask you very kindly to support what we do here at twit. I think we do important, good work, work that helps you keep up with what's happening in the world of technology. Maybe laugh about it a little bit, keep you company, but really our main mission is to help a community of tech enthusiasts understand technology and use it in their lives to have better lives and to make a better world. And I think we have an important job to do, but we're going to need your help. Advertising, which has sustained us for the last 17 years, almost 18 is dwindling. It's not going to continue to sustain us for much longer, so we need you to help. You don't have to carry the whole burden by yourself, but we'd love you to join Club Twit.
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(01:58:51):
If that's of interest to you, please visit us at twit tv slash club twit, join the club. We'd love to have you. You can also help us. There are many ways to help us by going to a Take the Twit survey. They're not mutually exclusive. You can join the club and take the survey. We do this once a year to kind of get to know you a little bit better, helps us design our programming and helps us talk to advertisers about who's listening. We don't have any other way of finding out about you, so visit twit tv slash survey 24 tweet tv slash survey 24. Shouldn't take you more than a few minutes. We've shortened it considerably from previous years, but it is a very valuable tool for us, something we only do once a year, so thanks in advance for that picks of the week. Kathy, did you bring anything? You always have like Huey Lewis memorabilia weird stuff. You
Cathy Gellis (01:59:42):
Can't go wrong with that, but I'm trying to stay diversified. I brought a URL that I found Love URLs. Yeah, I brought A-U-R-L-I. That's it. I brought a URL. Thank you. Thanks. It's about you
Leo Laporte (01:59:56):
Love.
Cathy Gellis (01:59:57):
It's about a game called Chunks, but what was interesting to me is I think the site that it's on is a site that people, I hadn't heard of it before, but people read it and the person was talking about a schoolyard game played not at his elementary school in the town he grew up at, but another elementary school, which happened to have been my elementary school. No. So it had the weird of all the gin joints, years and years and years later I'm out and about in the country and I'm reading about
Leo Laporte (02:00:25):
Have you played Chunk?
Cathy Gellis (02:00:26):
Yes. It was a game we played at lunch, recess every
Leo Laporte (02:00:30):
Day. It looks like Dodge. You played at it looks like dodge ball with really hard balls.
Cathy Gellis (02:00:35):
No, you generally use a tennis ball. You might use a racketball, but then it would became interesting because the racket balls bounce so much further so they'd be harder
Leo Laporte (02:00:43):
Field. Are you trying to throw it at somebody? Don't
Cathy Gellis (02:00:45):
Tennis balls hurt more than Don't throw it at the person. Normally you throw it against the wall and you have to catch it cleanly. I think after one it's like handball, bounce sort of.
Leo Laporte (02:00:54):
This is called
Cathy Gellis (02:00:55):
Butts up in my school. Butts up, yes. And for some reason it wasn't called that at my school. It had this other name called ku and it was so specific that in the town I grew up at, we had seven elementary schools and only my elementary school called it that. The other ones, I mean it's a town of like 30,000 people did not use the same name. And this person is lamenting how at his school, they didn't use that name. He went to a school called Trevell. I went to a school called Willard and he's waxing poetic about a game I played as a child. That was, they called
Leo Laporte (02:01:27):
Wall Wall ball out here in California. It
Cathy Gellis (02:01:29):
May be the same thing. So I mean some of it's interesting
Leo Laporte (02:01:34):
Article, but I want you, Kathy, to get in there and work on it because it says this article has multiple issues, so I think you need to improve this. It's a North American elementary school children's playground game originating in the fifties.
Cathy Gellis (02:01:49):
I don't know where it came from. I don't know why. My school of one of seven elementary schools in a 30,000 person town had its own name for it, but the fact that somebody years and years later is waxing poetic and is envying that
Leo Laporte (02:02:02):
Hood. Can you shout Bear trap and have the other guy freeze in place? That
Cathy Gellis (02:02:05):
Wasn't
Leo Laporte (02:02:05):
One of the rules. Not one of the chunkiest rules. Yeah.
Cathy Gellis (02:02:07):
Okay. I mean basically you would do everything cleanly, but if you threw it to the wall and it didn't and it bounced before it got there, or you miss the wall entirely, or I think possibly if you bobbled and dropped it, then you'd have to go pay the penalty. You had to tap the wall five times really fast and if you didn't, then people could throw it at you. But that was not like the routine part of the game. The routine game was you just threw it at the wall and caught it and threw it at the wall and caught it. This was engaging.
Leo Laporte (02:02:36):
This is actually a great site. Defector is the site and David Roth is the author of We Need To
Paris Martineau (02:02:43):
About That's phenomenal example of local media at work. Yeah, isn't it Defector is the staff of Deadspin of publication. That's right. Gizmoto Media Group. That ended up kind of losing all of its writers because the new private equity owners said Stick to sports and defector arriving Deadspin though it was a sports blog, also had a lot of great political and other commentary on it. So all of the writers quit and they started their own site and it has been an incredible success,
Cathy Gellis (02:03:13):
More power the last couple of years and shout out Hometown Pride for this guy who did not go to my elementary school but did grow up in my town of 30,000 people.
Paris Martineau (02:03:24):
Yeah. Chunk is Pride
Leo Laporte (02:03:26):
And Defector. Pride I knew knew that name. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, that's great. I hope they do well.
Paris Martineau (02:03:35):
They do. They put out an annual report every year with their finances and they're profitable and growing
Cathy Gellis (02:03:41):
Nice. Oh good. That's great. I want to do advocacy for, that's the advocacy I do to create the space so you can have these new people expressing themselves and that there is money in it and that's sustainable and that would be, and
Paris Martineau (02:03:53):
It's a worker, which is really fantastic.
Leo Laporte (02:03:55):
Yeah, these aren't exactly new people. In fact, a lot of 'em are. Well-known sports writers and so forth. I mean, they've been around for a while.
Cathy Gellis (02:04:01):
I just found it. The guy was talking about my elementary school and the game that I played, but this is how information sharing works and culture is built and I'm living not halfway. I'm living entirely across the country and reading something about my childhood,
Leo Laporte (02:04:17):
The right to read. And I love it that there's also a Wikipedia article, although they don't call it Chunk, as they call it, butts up. Okay.
Cathy Gellis (02:04:23):
Clearly there needs to be, you kind
Leo Laporte (02:04:25):
Of get in there and do some editing. I think there's definitely, although whoever wrote this Wikipedia article really shows that the widespread variation of it all the different locales. It's played in New York City, it's played in Santa Clara County, it's played in Huntington Beach, California. It's all over in Australian schools. It's called Fumble with a few differences. So it somehow has spread all over. Yeah.
Benito (02:04:53):
That's one of those weird things. I think every elementary school kid knows this game and I don't know how, there was never written rules, never written. Well, I am talking about
Leo Laporte (02:05:01):
A teacher doesn't from the eighties and nineties. A teacher doesn't say, oh, it's time to play chunk. No, this is something you decide to do. Yeah.
Cathy Gellis (02:05:07):
Recess. I don't think we ever taught. It was one of those things that as a kid you just sort of, no.
Benito (02:05:12):
Yeah, it's like passed down. It's passed down from the older kids
Paris Martineau (02:05:15):
Born with the,
Leo Laporte (02:05:18):
We can get you to start a chunks league. We can have the first.
Cathy Gellis (02:05:20):
Well, I like the fact that I'm using this platform to change the Lexology. I should just go into the Wikipedia article and change the name of it and make the Willard School version of it, which has now been lauded by David Roth.
Benito (02:05:34):
It also helps that they were children, so it doesn't really hurt that bad yet as adults. That might be a little painful.
Leo Laporte (02:05:40):
Paris Martino is now we're going to have to call you the Queen of tunnels.
Paris Martineau (02:05:46):
Yeah. I'm going to have to start a segment here called This Week in Tunnels, because my pick of the week is a story that I've been truly laughing about for the last three days, nonstop from the Mind that brought you the tunnel Girl, TikTok saga, which concluded with her being shut down, a new tunnel news cycle has been sweeping. New York City specifically earlier this week, or perhaps earlier this month, rabbis at a Brooklyn synagogue discovered a 50 foot network of illegal hand dug tunnels by a bunch of young men who basically, I think during the pandemic, had created this network of tunnels underneath Eastern Parkway in a strange digging event that ended up, the reason why they discovered this is because it was causing potentially structural damage to the other buildings that the tunnels were underneath, because Brooklyn's quite densely packed. But it has become a major media story here in New York because of all these videos surfacing, I think I included a link to one of them in the show notes as well of people just looking at a subway grate on New York City streets and suddenly a full man pops up and runs away,
Leo Laporte (02:07:03):
Not just a man Hasidic Jew.
Paris Martineau (02:07:06):
Yes. With his hat. With
Leo Laporte (02:07:08):
His hat and his side burns and everything pops out and what the hell
Paris Martineau (02:07:13):
Man? And sprints sprints away and runs
Leo Laporte (02:07:15):
Away.
Paris Martineau (02:07:15):
And so the rabbis were like, what the heck is happening here? We got to close up these tunnels, but the group of essentially is a large group of young Hasidic men who were here on student visas were like, absolutely not. So they had to bring in the cops to try and hold the throngs of boys back when they came in with the concrete pores and they rioted.
Leo Laporte (02:07:39):
Now what you're leaving out is something the New York Post only kind of glancingly alludes to. It looks like the tunnel was actually built to reach a women's bath, an orthodox young orthodox woman's bathhouse I guess. So it had
Paris Martineau (02:07:57):
Been abandoned largely. I think
Cathy Gellis (02:07:58):
It's because it was a separate piece of property and there's litigation over who owns the property and they wanted,
Leo Laporte (02:08:05):
Oh, you know more about this than anyone.
Cathy Gellis (02:08:07):
I have to kind of monitor. The people are yelling at Jews thread and here's why. So this is not, and it's more complicated, but there's some litigation over the other
Leo Laporte (02:08:17):
Property. So they weren't sneaking over to see what the women were doing.
Cathy Gellis (02:08:20):
No,
Paris Martineau (02:08:20):
No. There weren't any people in there. I believe it was a closed building. Yeah. How
Leo Laporte (02:08:25):
Long had they been digging this tunnel?
Paris Martineau (02:08:29):
My understanding is I think it began at some point during the pandemic, but
Leo Laporte (02:08:33):
The question again is why
Cathy Gellis (02:08:36):
I am not sure, although there's one thing that during the Sabbath that's sometimes how far you can travel and how you can travel is limited. So this is why you sometimes see wires in the street because it kind of extends
Leo Laporte (02:08:50):
The boundary. I know the wires. Yeah.
Cathy Gellis (02:08:51):
I wonder if this was in some way in furtherance of the same idea in order to give access to a separate property, but I think it's also connected to the litigation over who owns that property.
Leo Laporte (02:09:02):
So maybe it wasn't just the students. Maybe the rabbi
Cathy Gellis (02:09:06):
Had a little something going on. It's extremely unfortunate and people not behaving well and in a period of time when it is not going to do this culture any favors of people not behaving well in very public ways. So yeah, I wish I could just laugh it at the absurdity of it because this is ridiculous, but I sort of worry about,
Paris Martineau (02:09:27):
I think that that is the double-edged sword of this is that almost immediately people as they want to do, unfortunately online, it became very concerningly antisemitic in common story.
Leo Laporte (02:09:38):
If you're using this in any way to justify antisemitism, you're cracked, you're nuts. This is just somebody digging a tunnel. This is
Paris Martineau (02:09:47):
Just a lot of boys dug a hole, boys
Leo Laporte (02:09:50):
Dug
Paris Martineau (02:09:50):
A hole you want to closed up, which is incredibly funny. Yeah. This is because they
Leo Laporte (02:09:54):
Could, because I have a feeling this is just high-spirited young men
Cathy Gellis (02:09:59):
And probably not the only example of random tunnels that have, we don't get this.
Leo Laporte (02:10:04):
I bet you that there are others.
Cathy Gellis (02:10:06):
Elon Musk has probably built a few,
Leo Laporte (02:10:09):
It wasn't that long, it was only 50 feet. Come on, Elon's got it going all the way under Las Vegas. Yeah,
Paris Martineau (02:10:16):
That's true.
Cathy Gellis (02:10:16):
Yeah. I mean, they didn't bamboozle the taxpayer money to build a mass transit system that doesn't go anywhere. This
Paris Martineau (02:10:22):
Was a DIY endeavor. Exactly.
Leo Laporte (02:10:25):
Love it. I love though the picture entrepreneurs of a Hasidic boy climbing out of the great
Paris Martineau (02:10:32):
Just wearing full suit and hat coming out of the grate and then Scamper away
Leo Laporte (02:10:37):
Got, yeah. Wow, that's so
Paris Martineau (02:10:38):
Funny. That's hysterical.
Leo Laporte (02:10:39):
Funny. So they filled it with concrete as you probably had to for structural reasons, if nothing else.
Paris Martineau (02:10:45):
Yeah, at the very least. Yeah. I mean imagine realizing the place you live has a random illegal tunnel built underneath it. No
Leo Laporte (02:10:52):
One was hurt. I should.
Cathy Gellis (02:10:54):
Yeah. Although it's interesting if you're saying that the other properties had some subsidence issues right out of law school, I worked on a case involving subsidence of a neighboring property. So I look forward to that litigation too. Kickoff as well.
Leo Laporte (02:11:09):
Alright, stop digging tunnels everybody, but thank you for listening. I bet you there are a few people. I bet you there's more than one person who is listening to this show right now who is in a tunnel digging.
Paris Martineau (02:11:19):
I'm just saying you're out there. Respect. Do they
Cathy Gellis (02:11:22):
Get the reception?
Leo Laporte (02:11:24):
Yeah, you don't have to have receipt. It's a
Paris Martineau (02:11:26):
Podcast. You can download it.
Cathy Gellis (02:11:27):
Okay, fine. Alright, download. That's why
Leo Laporte (02:11:29):
They listen to
Cathy Gellis (02:11:29):
The show, A podcast to dig a tunnel with. This is your new tagline is this,
Paris Martineau (02:11:33):
That's what we're looking
Leo Laporte (02:11:34):
For this week in tunneling Paris Marko. Congratulations. Now, do you immediately go to another story or do you have a little time to catch
Paris Martineau (02:11:42):
Your breath? I a little bit of both. I have a couple things already kicking, so no rest, but that's
Leo Laporte (02:11:49):
Alright. She's doing investigative journalism at the information. There's your signal number on the bottom of the screen if you've got a tip. 2, 6, 7, 7, 9, 7, 8, 6, 5, 5. And there have been tips if you know of a tunnel that
Paris Martineau (02:12:06):
Resulted in story, you know of a really interesting tunnel story piece
Leo Laporte (02:12:10):
Anywhere in the major boroughs. That is
Paris Martineau (02:12:13):
The two genres of signal messages I'll accept are news tips that are legitimate and tunnel related information.
Leo Laporte (02:12:21):
And the beauty of it, that red twine you use to connect the dots on the wall also works very well for mapping tunnels. Just saying
Paris Martineau (02:12:28):
That's true. I can never get lost when I go in the tunnels underneath Crown Heights.
Leo Laporte (02:12:33):
Thank you Kathy Elli for coming all the way up here. We really love having you in studio. CG council.com is her website. C-G-C-O-U-N-S-E-L. She's at Kathy Gillis on Mastodon, C-A-T-H-Y-G-E-L-L-I-S. Anything else you want to plug?
Cathy Gellis (02:12:50):
Lots of writing. Teter. We talked about some of it, but there's more. I had a really busy December, so you can read all the briefs that I wrote.
Leo Laporte (02:12:57):
Nice. Is there some special skill to writing briefs that's different than writing say an article or is it similar?
Cathy Gellis (02:13:04):
I mean, I think you want to write in a way that you have a point to make and you want that point to. You are advocate. You're an advocate and you want your point to come out. Clearly you can and to some degree must use certain styling that the court will recognize and lock into. But I think my brief should be readable by humans and I think they're more likely to be read successfully by courts if they're readable by regular non-judicial people. Right. But it was interesting in our copyright AI conversation and the plagiarism part where I'm not supposed to completely innovate things. I'm supposed to cite my articles and Yes,
Leo Laporte (02:13:42):
That's right. Isn't that what you do in law school is you study cases,
Cathy Gellis (02:13:46):
You want the pieces of ideas that came before because you're going to build, they're the bricks that you build your arguments on. So a lot of the, oh, plagiarism is bad norms really kind of contradicts some important use cases of why you actually want to make sure you've got tangible things that came before 'em as part of what you're expressing. Do you
Leo Laporte (02:14:05):
Think courts might be particularly open to that argument because they all aren't attorneys? Well,
Cathy Gellis (02:14:10):
They're really alarmed by the hallucinated cases that keep getting submitted. They don't like that, so they don't like that at all. And courts and laws as industries go are pretty stodgy, so they're not going to be moved too quickly. And at the moment, the use case for why we should move to more AI stuff is really not that present, at least in the judicial context.
Leo Laporte (02:14:32):
I'm a believer, but then of course I would be because I am an ai. Thank you Kathy Ellis. True. Thank you Paris. Martino, thanks to all of you. You joining us. Thank you. ai. Leah
Cathy Gellis (02:14:43):
Ai.
Leo Laporte (02:14:45):
We do twig every Wednesday, two to 5:00 PM Eastern, sorry, Pacific time, that's five to 8:00 PM Eastern Times 2200 utc. We do stream it live as we're doing it on YouTube. youtube.com/twit. Actually, if you subscribe, you'll get a notification in your browser When we go live, we go live when the shows actually begin. For the most part. Of course, people who subscribe to club to it can also join us in the Discord and watch the live stream there. I forgot to mention, and I don't know if Ant sent me this or a fan event, but Ant Pruitt was a long time on our show. We unfortunately had to lay him off with others at the end of the year last year due to the lack of revenue. Nope, just dropped his beautiful thing.
Cathy Gellis (02:15:34):
This is because you're a bot and so therefore holding things is
Leo Laporte (02:15:38):
Hard. I don't understand solid surfaces. The hands are, the hands don't work. Yeah, this is a jigsaw puzzle based on one of an's beautiful photographs of the big sir coast line. This is going to be a tough one, a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle. So I dunno ant if you sent it to me or if a fan bought it at Ant's site and sent it to me, but ant pruitt.com/prince, you can get this print and I think I'm guessing you'd get a jigsaw puzzle out of it too. So that's really cool. Thank you. And it didn't say who sent it, so if you sent it, thank you. But I'm thinking maybe a fan, maybe a fan sent it and we'll be spending the next 10 years working on this thing. I was going to
Cathy Gellis (02:16:17):
Say, there's a lot of blue going on
Leo Laporte (02:16:18):
There. I got your work cut out for you's. 10,000 pieces of blue. Let's see, what else? If you're not a member of the club, please join us. TWI tv slash club twi. If you haven't taken the survey yet, TWIT tv slash survey 24. We will see you all next week right here on this week in Google. Bye-Bye.
Rod Pyle (02:16:42):
Hey, I'm Rod Pyle, editor in chief VA Astor magazine. And each week I joined with my co-host to bring you this week in space, the latest and greatest news from the Final Frontier. We talk to NASA chiefs, space scientists, engineers, educators and artists, and sometimes we just shoot the breeze over what's hot and what's not in space Books and tv and we do it all for you, our fellow true believers. So whether you're an armchair adventurer or waiting for your turn to grab a slot in Elon's Mars Rocket, join us on this week in space and be part of the greatest adventure of all time.
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