Decoder with Nilay Patel
00:29:53 · Mitch Glazier
[00:29:53] S4: Personally, my my leadership style is I like to have people surround me who are not yes people. I don't want people just sort of... If I come up with an idea, I don't want it to be reinforced immediately. If you agree with that, great. But I like to hear from everybody. I think my team knows that I like to hear the truth and I wanna hear their raw opinion because I wanna check my instincts. I usually will have a gut instinct, but then I will survey people that I trust in our companies and people on my own team. I'm learning to be a better listener. When I hear people I kind of as soon as in my mind I feel like I know what they're saying, I tend to then jump ahead to the next. I'm like deposing them, you know, here's I have a million questions. I'm learning to sort of be a better listener and kind of understand where they're coming from. And then I take all of it and I synthesize it. And I would say about maybe 60% of the time I end up with my original gut reaction. But 40% of the time, I take a different path because of what I've heard and the expertise of those who are around me. So it takes a little longer than maybe it should and you don't always have time. Sometimes you have to make a snap decision. But on something really big, like, what what strategy are going... Are we going to take? If we feel like we need to bring a lawsuit, which is going to be a major publicized precedent setting lawsuit that could determine the rights that creators have. You have to take that as seriously as it is. Make sure that you are getting all the opinions that you need to get. I also have a ton of friends who work so to speak on the other side, people who I trust who I've known for many years. And I will often, without disclosing anything I'm not supposed to disclose, I will often call them and say, what is your perspective on this? Like I live in this world of like creator rights where I'm thinking in one direction, but what would you argue on the other side? What how are you looking at this? And when that informs your decision making, not only are you more prepared, but sometimes you will alter the way you think about something. Mhmm. By putting yourself in their shoes and understanding, you know, there's another side to this that's gonna make sense to a judge or to a policymaker because they're not crazy.
00:32:18 · Mitch Glazier, Nilay Patel
I mean, they they have a different take and it's pretty valid and sometimes I have to be a moderating force even in my own industry of saying we're living in our bubble, they're living in their bubble and so if we're going to be effective finding a solution, if that's what we want. If what we want is a solution, then we may have to think about this in a way that leads to a landing zone. If we don't want a solution and what we're trying to do is sort of like, you know, make good trouble, that's okay. There's nothing wrong with that. That's a good thing. It can lead to good results but if we want some, if we're trying to get to here, we better figure out a path, a realistic path to get there. [00:33:02] S3: Okay. So I'm very sorry for this but it feels to me like the rest of this conversation is just gonna be nightmare law school hypotheticals. Like that's just this is just what we're doing now. Nothing more [00:33:13] S4: like that. [00:33:14] S3: That framework applies to a lot of different problems particularly like on the other side they make some good points too. So I opened Instagram today and I saw 9,000,000 deepfakes of celebrities being put in the video for Popstar by Drake. Have you ever seen this video? [00:33:31] S4: Yes. Yes.
00:33:31 · Mitch Glazier, Nilay Patel
[00:33:31] S4: Yes. Yes. [00:33:31] S3: Drake didn't do it himself just... It's Justin Bieber is acting as Drake in the video. And I saw one with Lewis Hamilton today. I saw one with Donald Trump today. I saw a full Star Wars one where it's a Darth Vader, and he's just been deep faked into the... Into Justin Bieber's mansion singing a Drake song. And I thought to myself, I can't even count the layers of intellectual property issue here. Right? First of all, no one has the license to any of this likeness. Right? Like Lewis Hamilton could probably be like, hey, that's me. I don't know under which law he gets to show up and say, hey, that's me and to whom he says it. Is it the AI company? Is it the person who made the video? Is it Instagram? There are some of the platforms have private policies like YouTube now. But I don't even just that where to begin. That's very connected to you saying the scarcity is in the artist, right? The scarcity is in the relationship the fan has to the artist. But that has nothing to do with the copyrights you routinely enforce which is the recording. You can see I'm just spiraling. Like I watched one video, eight seconds of Darth Vader doing a Drake song and I thought I don't even know where to begin. Is it Disney who gets to be the angriest or is it Drake or is it someone in the middle? Can you help me just organize my thoughts here? [00:34:51] S4: So I'm, first of all, I'm so glad you're bringing this up because we have, we literally over the past three years have been dealing exactly [00:34:58] S3: yeah
00:34:59 · Mitch Glazier
[00:34:59] S4: with this because believe it or not and it's so bizarre to think about like none of us right now has a right to our own voice or likeness yeah under federal law most of us don't even have it under state law. State law, which is called right of publicity, usually only applies to advertising or endorsements. Right? Like, I couldn't take your face and put it on a Wheaties box without asking you because I'm selling it and making money with... And and I'm I'm basically using your popularity to do so. That... Those are very limited rights. Now we're in the world of deepfakes where everybody can do anything and make you say or do something you never said you never did and that you might not approve of. And we don't have a basic right to ourselves under the law. It seems so weird in a country that was founded on individual liberty and individual rights that we wouldn't have an individual right to ourselves. So we had to sort of start from scratch. And what we did was we actually got together with YouTube in the very beginning because these things, even if they're not created by the platforms, the the the avenue to the fan is through the platform. Right? And we're not... Everybody's not gonna bring a lawsuit against everybody in order to get this stuff down when it's proliferating as fast as it is. So the question was, what responsibility does or can the platform have to give a very simple sort of takedown mechanism that anybody could use. Right? Because this is your face, it's your right. It's not like the record company owns the right to your to your face. Right? Or the movie company or you own the right to your face. So if you don't like the fact that somebody used your face or your voice in a way you didn't like, you should be able to very quickly say, that's me. I can prove it's me, and I don't want it up there. Yeah. And the platform should want to do something to protect the integrity of the platform.
00:37:06 · Nilay Patel, Mitch Glazier
[00:37:06] S3: Okay. Can can I just stop you?... Liability. Hold on [00:37:08] S4: a sec.
00:37:08 · Mitch Glazier, Nilay Patel
[00:37:08] S4: a sec. [00:37:09] S3: This is why it's a nightmare hypothetical. Right? A long standing trope at The Verge started by our our former colleague Sarah Zhang is that copyright law is the only functional law on the internet. Because the only thing... The only way you actually really wanna regulate the internet is to take things down. Right? That is the thing that people want to accomplish. The first amendment basically prohibits the government from creating some mechanism to take things down except in the case of copyright law where we have the digital millennium copyright act. There's a huge notice and takedown regime in that law and it is frequently abused on all of these platforms to get things taken down. The purpose of that law has been stretched beyond all recognition. If you issue a YouTube strike to a YouTuber on that platform, all hell breaks loose. That is an act of war because unless you're doing it for the right purpose, they know you're doing it to harass them. This is a lot, right? You're describing a new notice and takedown regime that isn't based in the law. It's based on some private company's understanding of what a likeness is. And there's all kinds of reasons that I might want to publish a video of Donald Trump. There's all kinds of reasons that I might want to publish a video of Drake that have nothing to do with using his likeness for commercial purposes. And granting those people the ability to take things down is the same problem without, I don't know, a federal fair use regime or some other backs. Like how do you balance that?