Decoder with Nilay Patel
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?
00:38:32 · Mitch Glazier
[00:38:32] S4: Great. So this is why it took three years and it's still and it's still and it's still going on because what you're saying is first of all, you need to learn from the experience with the DMCA. Right? It is the precedent we have and there are there are obviously problems on both sides. You you need to learn from those. The second is you need to create a new intellectual property right. In this case much closer to trademark than to copyright but still an intellectual property right because that is as you said sort of the functional way of balancing that against the first amendment. Like if you have an intellectual property right, you are allowed to remove it despite, you know, somebody's other free speech rights. In this case, there's a weird analysis of like, do you have a free speech right to control how your voice is used. Sure. Right, so it's like free speech versus free speech. So what we did was besides getting together with many first amendment law scholars and trying to sort of hammer this out, which was a fascinating learning process by the way. Like I feel like I got to go back to law school and listen to these brilliant constitutional scholars talk about the tension between the first amendment and intellectual property rights. What you have to do is you if you're going to create a takedown regime, you have to put in hurdles on both sides. You have to put in hurdles on the I'm telling you to take it down side. And there are lots of things we've learned from the past like, are we going to force a, in this case, first amendment review before you can send the notice? What's the punishment if you send a false notice? Is that punishment high enough to deter false notices? Then you've got sort of on the back end, well, you have to have a counter notice. Right? And then how do you make sure that that works well and that it it's it's not too low of a hurdle but a little bit of a hurdle because you want to have balance on both sides. And then finally you have this middle area where if there's going to be a decision about whether or not it's a parody for example, which many are and the first amendment there trumps copyright when it comes to a parody. What if it's news? What if it's... And and what is news anymore? What what is sort of bonafide news versus like some of the stuff I'm getting when I'm scrolling?
00:40:52 · Mitch Glazier
So we then created sort of this middle period where a temporary restraining order, a very quick legal action could take place where a judge could actually decide the constitutional question because nobody wants the platforms deciding constitutional questions. You know, the the people on both sides are like regular people. They're not gonna be sort of making ultimate determinations. And so that's ultimately where we cape down in the no fakes act which is the name of the federal bill that's now being pushed and whether the balance in there is perfect or not yet I don't know but I do know that we learned a lot of lessons from the DMCA and I think everybody is very aware that the first amendment sort of defenses are really paramount in this in any kind of regime like this. And that overprotecting on either side. If you overprotect on the first amendment side, then you know this also applies to a girl who's bullied in high school and some kid takes her face and sticks it on a body that's not hers. Right? You don't want that staying up when it shouldn't. On the other hand, I have the right to use your face for certain things because that's my free speech. Right? And it's it's really funny or I'm making a point about underlying character or something like that. So Yeah. I... Long answer, there's no perfect response. But I think this time we had like OpenAI at the table. We had YouTube at the table. We had people like, you know, public knowledge at the table who bring a different perspective than we would bring and that ultimately get to a place where I don't think folks are thrilled on all sides of it. But I think they think it's progress.
00:42:31 · Nilay Patel, Mitch Glazier, S8
[00:42:31] S3: It it's something. I will grant you that it's something. Right? It's it's better than we have now, but it's fundamentally the creation of a new intellectual property. Right? [00:42:38] S4: Absolutely. It is. [00:42:40] S3: And there's some balance there that almost certainly will track the same balance that copyright law and music has undergone over the past hundred years. Right? [00:42:48] S4: No question. Ad[00:42:58] S8: This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses, setup required, compatibility, and availability varies 18 plus.
00:42:58 · S8, S7
Ad[00:42:58] S8: This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses, setup required, compatibility, and availability varies 18 plus. Ad[00:43:23] S7: Support for this show comes from Outshift by Cisco, which is Cisco's incubation engine for frontier technology. Imagine a company where every department can talk, but none can work together. Decisions stall, people spend all day chasing updates, mistakes slip through the cracks. That's the challenge facing multi agent AI today. The fact is when AI agents work in isolation, more AI doesn't mean better AI. And if agents can't work together, you're just scaling the confusion. Outshift by Cisco is here to help. Outshift by Cisco knows communication doesn't equal collaboration. And in the age of AI, that difference changes everything. Outshift by Cisco is building the Internet of Cognition, an open source foundation for building multi agent systems. Agents share context, memory, and guardrails to get excellent results from design all the way to production. So instead of simply passing messages, agents can build on each other's work and move towards shared goals. Read the paper, experience the demo, and grab the code from outshift.com. That's outshift.com.