What Meta and Anthropic really won in court

Summary

The Vergecast: "What Meta and Anthropic Really Won in Court"

Date: June 27, 2025
Hosts: Nilay Patel, David Pierce, Jake Castronakis
Guest: Addie Robertson

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Episode Overview

This Vergecast episode centers on the week’s biggest tech stories, headlined by two major AI copyright court decisions involving Meta and Anthropic. The discussion explores the legal, ethical, and technical dimensions of AI training, copyright, and fair use, with deep dives into what these rulings really mean—for Big Tech, authors, the courts, and the broader creative industry. Other key topics include updates on Tesla’s Robotaxi pilot, the shifting details of the Trump Mobile phone, new modular and nostalgic gadgets, and some classic tech punditry on Microsoft and media ownership.

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Key Segments & Highlights

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1. Tesla Robotaxi in Austin — The Influencer Dilemma

Timestamps: [05:17] – [15:49]

• Tesla began a limited Robotaxi pilot in Austin: Only influencers and pro-Tesla social media figures have access, and their videos show frequent driving mistakes.
• Concerns about safety and objectivity: Videos posted by influencers revealed cars braking unexpectedly, veering into wrong lanes, or behaving erratically with seemingly disengaged safety monitors.
• Media access as a double-edged sword: The hosts dissect how restricted access shapes positive narratives but ultimately deprives companies of meaningful feedback.
  • Nilay Patel [10:57]: “Access is poison. And if you get captured where the companies are covered, you're going to make bad shit over time and you're going to lose your audience.”
• Comparison to Waymo: Waymo, by contrast, is happy to let real journalists test their robotaxis, reflecting a different level of confidence in the tech.

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2. Updates on the Trump Mobile Phone: Vaporware in Real Time

Timestamps: [16:30] – [25:34]

• The Trump Organization’s phone project becomes farcical: The originally boasted “Made in the USA” phone is now just “Designed with American values,” and specs keep changing (RAM spec removed, screen size shrunk).
• The Verge tried to buy the phone: Persistent problems with actually ordering it, including not accepting D.C. addresses. No evidence it exists yet.
  • Jake Castronakis [21:41]: “The Verge has ordered two of them... We will find out for all of you if this phone exists, if it is any good, and if they, as the website promises, randomly start billing you recurring charges at some point.”
• Broader context: Compared to other grand tech failures like Project Gen 5SIS (the Dish Network MVNO), the Trump phone is seen as a likely non-starter—“lives at 90” on the Go90 scale of doom.

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3. Gadget Roundup: Modular, Nostalgic, and Branded Devices

Timestamps: [25:47] – [48:14]

• Fairphone 6 (modular, repairable, privacy-friendly): Now offers both Android and a de-Googled version (EOS—only de-Googled version in US), plus a minimalist launcher switch.
  • David Pierce [26:54]: “It is like vanishingly small number of apps [without Play Store]... The case here for something like Mirena is going to get harder.”
• Titan 2 (Kickstarter phone with BlackBerry-like keyboard): Raises $1 million, showing strong nostalgia for physical keyboards, even if use-cases are questionable.
  • David Pierce [33:15]: “My overwhelming theory... is people have real nostalgia for this stuff, but not actual desire for it.”
• Meta & Microsoft Xbox VR Headset (Quest 3S rebranding crossover): Causes confusion over whether it plays real Xbox games (it only does cloud streaming in VR).
  • Nilay Patel [38:07]: "The state of being an Xbox is probabilistic."
  • David Pierce [40:08]: “Apple Vision Pro — also an Xbox.”
• Meta Oakley Smart Glasses (Ray-Ban expansion): Focused on camera and headphones; AI assistant usage minimal. Working with Luxottica ensures they nail wearable form factors.

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4. Main Story: AI Copyright Court Decisions — What Did Meta and Anthropic Actually Win?

Timestamps: [50:10] – [86:46]

The Court Cases at a Glance

• Anthropic Case (Judge Alsup):

  • Questioned if buying and scanning millions of books for AI training is fair use.
  • Ruled that scanning legally acquired physical books is fair use (for database/training), but pirating digital books is not.
    • Nilay Patel [57:19]: “Is it fair use to buy a bunch of physical books, rip the covers off and scan them? …Is it fair use to steal a bunch of books? No.”
  • The authors’ lawyers failed to argue the crucial “outputs” angle, focusing too narrowly on the training phase.

• Meta Case:

  • Meta was caught using torrented datasets.
  • Plaintiffs' arguments—focused on outputs and potential licensing markets—were poorly executed. The judge criticized their approach but left open the door for future, better-structured lawsuits.
    • Nilay Patel [67:32]: “This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta's use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful. It stands only for the proposition that these plaintiffs made the wrong arguments and failed to develop a record in support of the right one.”

Why the Rulings Matter

• No clean win for AI giants: Both decisions highlight how critical legal tactics, argument structure, and plaintiff resources are, more than setting lasting precedent.
  • David Pierce [68:46]: “All of the AI folks are like, this is a landmark victory... But... this is like a small victory... on a technicality, but have just had the door thrown wide open for everyone else on earth to sue them better and win.”
• Pedantry, scale, and precedent: The panel explains why fair use depends on highly granular distinctions (what’s the purpose? what’s the market effect?), and judges are not computers—outcomes remain unpredictable and subject to appeal.
• Scale problem: Copying and “reading” a million books as an individual is fair use; when a company does it for a commercial, model-training purpose, it’s much more complicated.
• Looking ahead: Creative industry heavyweights (Disney, Universal, record labels) are ramping up legal and legislative actions, and future court battles will hinge on better lawyering around outputs and market effects.

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Notable Quotes

• Nilay Patel [59:06]: “It’s 17 United States Code, Section 107, four factors of fair use… The purpose and character of the use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount and substantiality... and the effect upon the market…”
• Addie Robertson [67:54]: “These plaintiffs made the wrong arguments and failed to develop a record in support of the right one.”
• David Pierce [80:45]: “That is the argument that these companies make in favor of all of this — that, no, we're not diminishing anything because everybody would do it for free, right?”
• Addie Robertson [81:50]: “If AI creates a situation in which it is virtually impossible to distribute your work... that is really meaningfully chilling creativity.”

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5. Lightning Round

Timestamps: [88:20] – [102:15]

• FCC’s Media Ownership Rules & Brendan Carr: Critiqued for proposing to relax local news ownership limits in a potential move that would further nationalize news and culture war dynamics.
• FTC, Ad Agencies & X (Twitter) Bribery farce: The government, in reviewing a major ad agency merger, tries to force companies to advertise on platforms like X regardless of their objections—hosts see it as a market distortion.
• Microsoft’s Black Screen of Death: The infamous Blue Screen of Death is being retired after 40 years; now it’ll be a black screen—sadly, less iconic.
  • David Pierce [101:01]: “Do you know the scene where it's Kelly's birthday and Dwight just puts up a sign that says, it is your birthday? That's the black screen of death now.”
• HDMI 2.2 Ultra 96 Cables & 16K TV: A new cable standard supports up to 16K video (at 60 Hz) — a solution for a demand that’s virtually nonexistent.

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Memorable Moments

• Meta & Oakley’s “transitions” lenses nostalgia: The hosts laugh about their failed attempts to make transition lenses cool in photos, noting how even tech execs get “caught” by automatic lens tinting.
• Physical keyboard nostalgia: The Titan 2 Kickstarter’s improbable $1M haul proves the enduring affection for BlackBerry-esque designs.
• David and Nilay’s “Own your shame, Microsoft” bit: A classic Vergecast sign-off moment, bemoaning the deletion of the blue screen sad face: “Own your shame, Microsoft.”
  • Nilay Patel [102:15]: “That’s The Vergecast, everybody. Own your shame.”

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Key Takeaways

• AI Copyright Law Is Far from Settled: The current court wins for Meta and Anthropic are narrow and technical—not broad precedents. Future, better-built lawsuits (especially by well-funded giants) could change the game entirely.
• The Creative Industry’s Battle Lines Are Only Beginning: Tech, entertainment, and publishing are all positioning, and a true legislative push seems more likely than a clear Supreme Court resolution.
• Tech Media Skepticism Remains Vital: Whether it’s Tesla Robotaxis, vaporware phones, or “AI lawfare,” independent scrutiny and skepticism are essential to counter company-friendly influencer ecosystems.
• Gadget Culture Is a Mix of Progress, Nostalgia, and Branding Confusion: From modular Fairphones, to old-school Titans, to Xboxes that are—and are not—Xboxes, the episode lampoons the wild, sometimes incoherent device landscape.

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For Listeners Who Haven’t Heard the Episode

This episode is a masterclass in how fast-moving, headline-grabbing tech-legal dramas can be, in reality, slow, convoluted, and driven by tiny—sometimes even farcical—details behind the scenes. The panel’s mix of legal nerdery, cultural critique, and running jokes about black screens of death and never-materializing Trump phones keeps it sharp, skeptical, and accessible, all while underscoring why the coming year in AI copyright and tech accountability will matter for everyone.

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[End of Summary]

Transcript

[Nilay Patel]

Hey, it's Sterling K. Brown from the Hulu original series Paradise.

[David Pierce]

The next chapter begins as Xavier's search for his wife takes him above ground. And what he finds will change everything. It was never just about the bunker.

[Nilay Patel]

Tune in and discover the truth lies outside Paradise. The official podcast is now streaming and

[David Pierce]

stream paradise on Hulu and Hulu on Disney.

[Nilay Patel]

We heard you. Nine years of bring back the snack wrap and you've won. But maybe you should have asked for more. Say hello to the hot, hot honey snack wrap. Now you've really won. Go to McDonald's and get it while you can.

[David Pierce]

For a lot of Americans, credit card debt feels like a fact of life.

[Addie Robertson]

I think it's just important for people

[David Pierce]

to understand how credit can work for you or against you, why that little

[Addie Robertson]

piece of plastic has so much power. That's this week on Explain it to Me. Find new episodes Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts.

[Nilay Patel]

Hello and welcome to Grinchcast, the flagship podcast of being the new editor in chief of Vogue. I just put my name in the ring. I don't. I don't think that would be a good idea. And I. I love my current job. But it is true that Anna Wintour is stepping down as editor in chief of Vogue. The most legendary editor in chief of all time. And hey, you know.

[Jake Castronakis]

Hey, Neali. 30 more years of this.

[Nilay Patel]

Hi, I'm your friend, Nilay. That's Jake Castronakis. Hello.

[David Pierce]

Hello.

[Nilay Patel]

David Pierce is here.

[David Pierce]

I like imagining Vogue as just like, everyone is wearing black on every page of every issue of the magazine and there's like, packers logos in the background.

[Nilay Patel]

Yes, that would be great. That's my vogue. And only iPhone4s are allowed the most beautiful phone of all time.

[David Pierce]

You would last two issues, but they would be glorious.

[Nilay Patel]

I've only met Anna once or twice, and both times she was utterly charming, I have to say. But the second time was at the American Society of Magazine Editors Awards, the ASME Awards. And we had a table right next to, like, a Conde Nast table that Anna was at. And they were terrified of her. Like, she was sitting there and all of the Conde nasty people were sitting there just in terror. And then our table was just, like, drunk and cheering, like, we were having the most fun. They kept staring at us, like, don't you know? And I was like, I do know. This is our vibe. This is our time now. You're the legacy media.

[David Pierce]

I. I always like thinking about how she must feel about the Devil Wears Prada in the way that Mark Zuckerberg feels about the Social Network because, like, he's a been very upfront about how he did not like the way he was portrayed in that movie. I would say history has proven that movie more right over time than I expected.

[Nilay Patel]

No, Jesse Eisenberg was vastly cooler than Mark Zuckerber. I mean, yes, like, history. What history has proven is Mark Zuckerberg is a huge nerd who can't outrun his own essential nature.

[David Pierce]

Yes, fair. Which I think was a large part of what that movie was going for. But like, yeah, I think that thing where somebody, like, very famously portrays you and it changes the way everyone thinks about you has got to be such a weird phenomenon that, like, most people think when they close their eyes and think of Anna Wintour, they think of Meryl Streep.

[Nilay Patel]

And that's just weird.

[David Pierce]

That's gotta be so strange.

[Nilay Patel]

And I watched several product when I it's on television. It's like, it's a great movie.

[Jake Castronakis]

You should watch it.

[Nilay Patel]

And Becky is always reminding me that I think I'm Anne Hathaway. But in fact, I am now the Meryl Streep here.

[David Pierce]

Interesting.

[Nilay Patel]

It's over. But anyway, look, if you know anyone over there and you want to see Vogue get super weird, I'm open to a conversation. I'm not, you know, just Vogue was

[David Pierce]

a series of feeds. You know what I mean?

[Nilay Patel]

Like, have you thought about going all in on Activity Pub? World's most important fashion magazine. There's a lot there. You could unpack a lot there. The world's most important fashion magazine in the age of Instagram and TikTok is a weird thing to be. They. They have a monopoly on taste.

[David Pierce]

Right.

[Nilay Patel]

It's the COVID of Vogue that's important. The contents of Vogue almost are not. And so, like, that's the dynamic there. It's super interesting. If you're not Anna Wintour and you don't have that monopoly, whether or not Vogue can be the thing that it is in the age of Instagram, TikTok, in the age of all the celebrities being able to publish their own pictures of themselves. It's a thing. I'm just saying. It's a thing. All right, we can set that aside. But if you know anyone, and if you know anyone at Kanye, NASCAR has or want to have a really weird conversation about the future of Vogue, you know, again, I love this job. There's not another job really for me.

[David Pierce]

But I'm trying to decide if it would be more fun to like, point the Verge's resources at getting you elected president. In 2028 or getting you the job as editor in chief of Vote. It's like, it's. They're very different futures, but I find the project of both of them very fun.

[Nilay Patel]

I do think I can shape the direction of the country in either role, just in very different way. Yeah.

[David Pierce]

Which is more effective.

[Nilay Patel]

All right, There's a lot of news this week, a lot of updates. We got it. There's a big set of AI copyright decisions that Addy's going to join us to talk about and unpack, I would say. Earlier today, Addy and I had a conversation and can only be described as we got into our feelings about copyright law because of these AI decisions. So we got to talk about that. There's updates on the Trump phone. Brendan's got a new commissioner at the fcc, so he just immediately started doing some of the dumbest stuff in the world. There's a side note, like there's some FTC dumbness involving just straightforward bribery, which is pretty good. A lot. Just a lot going on in the world. But we should start with a little update on the robotaxis. The Tesla Robotaxis in Austin, I think. David, on the Tuesday show Andy was on, they were like a day in. Now we're several days in. I would say the obvious has occurred.

[David Pierce]

It was very funny. So we, Andy and I talked about it a bunch and he kept being like, look, we should be cautious. Tesla should be cautious. But it's only been a day. We'll see what happens. You know, hope for the best, expect the worst. And like, boy, did it just kind of go sideways from like minute one.

[Nilay Patel]

So there's a bunch of videos. Now there's like a media component to this where the only people who seem to have access are Tesla influencers and like hardcore Elon Musk X posters. And they're all like, we're the media now. And it's like, are. Are you. But then they're all just doing this like incredible live streaming. Like everything is being posted. And so even through the filter of a bunch of people who hold themselves up as being Tesla boosters, there's just like endless videos of these cars just like making mistakes. And the net result of it, just from my perspective as a person watching these videos, is that it's just full self driving, right? Yes. There are safety monitors in the cars and there's that one picture of one steering wheel and one. The background of one photo. You know, like maybe they're all being remote controlled. You know, there's all these rumors about this Stuff but you kind of watch it and you're like, oh, this is just like watching any other full self driving video. Only like the cars are making mistakes without a driver so that it all feels way more dangerous.

[David Pierce]

Right. They're only there. Sitting in the backseat is like a pretty meaningful change in how we're actually applying this technology.

[Nilay Patel]

When FSD messes up and the person's in the driver's seat, they're like, I'm taking control. And they're like, oh, that was scary. Right now it's like, whoops.

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Jake Castronakis]

What are these safety monitors actually supposed to do? Just like, like comfort you when like you rear end somebody?

[David Pierce]

Like, it's all right.

[Jake Castronakis]

We, we. This, this happens from time to time.

[David Pierce]

There have been a bunch of these and I think when the safety monitor does and doesn't get involved has been sort of fascinating. Like there, there were. There was the one I think that has been kind of all over the place. And Andy and I talked about this on Tuesday where uh, the car just veers into the wrong lane for a second and the, the safety monitor doesn't seem to flinch. That this is just like, it's fine. We're just going to go in the wrong lane because we thought the turn lane started before it did. Uh, but then there are a couple of other ones where like something actually goes wrong and the car just like stops in the middle of the road and then the safety monitor does get involved. So it seems very much like the safety monitor is instructed to basically not do anything no matter what unless it has like officially broken. Which is kind of a wild set of instructions to give to a safety monitor in a car like this in a project as early as this. But I just, I don't know how to read it any other way. Like they, they should have been getting involved more if they were allowed to be getting involved more.

[Nilay Patel]

There's definitely one where the car gets stuck kind of like between two cars. It's a tight. And the safety monitor drives it out.

[Jake Castronakis]

Okay.

[David Pierce]

I didn't see that. That's something.

[Nilay Patel]

I get it. Right. It's a very limited beta slash pilot of this stuff. There's not a lot of these cars. It's a trial. Sure. They're on public roads with other people and other cars.

[David Pierce]

Right.

[Nilay Patel]

It does seem to me like the safety monitor should just be in the driver's seat. Especially if it again as it appears it's just full self driving. Like it's not. More if they were faking it and there was a warehouse full of People remote driving cars, I'd be like, yeah, safety monitor in the rc, you know. But like you watch these videos and it feels anyway, from my perspective, like it's just full self driving. And then you get to the fact that most people can't access the cars, right? It is just this limited group at least posting content that is very apt to supporting Tesla. And you have this like war against the media narrative. And I'm just going to say this as many times as I can. Access is poison. And if you get captured where the companies are covered, you're going to make bad shit over time and you're going to lose your audience. And that's just the way it goes. And all of these folks who are like, the media doesn't just because they have the wrong narrative about Tesla. If Tesla was confident in the product, they would just let reporters into it and let them drive around and say, this is amazing. You can just take Awaymo because Waymo is confident in its product. It thinks the products, expanding the markets it operates in. This, this thing where you think Tesla has rewarded these influencers is actually a sign of deep insecurity, like the most insecurity. And you can see it, I mean, we, this is, this is our world, right? You see it with every company, when they're not proud of their products, they close the distribution, they limit the access. You know, we play these games, but we, our rules are clear. If you're listening to this, you know, our rules is clear. You can't buy us, you can't buy our branded content. We're unsponsored for all this stuff because that's how we manage the access games. We just draw the lines as clear as we can. We say, look, we won't play the games if we don't get the access. We'll go and do the next thing. And I like, there's the video. There's the one video of the woman in the backseat and the car breaks so hard it throws the phone out of her hand. And then she starts apologizing for the car and it's like, oh, this is bad. Like, this is a really bad media ecosystem. If you think that the reward is the. The car breaks so hard while you're not wearing a seatbelt, the phone flies.

[Jake Castronakis]

We have it.

[Nilay Patel]

Do you want to just play it, David?

[David Pierce]

I do.

[Addie Robertson]

Let's find out. You guys know we're not lying because we have that stopwatch going, Whoa. All right, so we just slammed on the brake. I'm not exactly sure what just happened, but the Car thought it saw something. And this happens in full self driving. This is something that does happen. That's something that people have talked about being. One of the limitations of full self driving with Robo Taxi is that occasionally it slams on the brakes out of nowhere. You guys kind of saw me react.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, I mean, you get the idea.

[Nilay Patel]

What are we doing?

[Jake Castronakis]

It happens sometimes, guys. Sometimes your car just slams the brakes on you and you just sit there with no.

[Nilay Patel]

The safety. Presumably a safety monitor just saying nothing while this video is happening.

[David Pierce]

It is sort of fascinating that this is what Tesla has conditioned its fans to believe is just.

[Nilay Patel]

No, I'm saying it's more sinister than that. I'm saying it has conditioned access on that behavior.

[David Pierce]

Oh, sure.

[Nilay Patel]

And that feedback loop is actually bad for the company. It's bad for people. Right? It's bad for people who like great products. It's also bad for the company because they're not actually getting the negative feedback they need. The market is not actually providing information. They have a bunch of influencers who are afraid of their access being taken away and not getting invited to the next cyber rodeo or whatever. And then they're yelling at reporters who are just trying to do their jobs, but they're like, you can literally hear the lack of objectivity there. And look, everyone can yell at us. You. I somehow in my career, I've gone from being reliably called an Apple shill to being called an Apple hater. Great, sure, whatever. You can yell at us about our perceived biases, but we have our rules. Like, you can just read the policy like those, those rules exist to. To at least like, provide a set of guidelines for what can expect from our behavior and how we think about access and all these other things that we, you know, that are part of our job and our careers and the media that we make. But you can hear literally in these videos, the influencers thinking if by access will get taken away. And I need to apologize for this car fucking up. And it's like, no, a real person, a real customer does not stop and say this happens. They just get the fuck out the car. And like, that's your problem.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, that video did make me think about, like, the terrible Uber rides that I've had in the past. And, like, they happen occasionally and you have them, but, like, there's a person in the front seat. You can tell. Like, one year at CES, I had an Uber driver who drove me at 45 miles an hour through parking lots of casinos in Las Vegas to get me to the airport. And we were just, like, launching ourselves over speed bumps. And for the first time ever, I had to be like, you gotta stop, dude. Like, I'm not in a hurry. Please stop driving like this. And he did, and it was fine. I went from being like, I'm going to die in the back of this, like, Dodge Charger.

[Nilay Patel]

Of course it was a Dodge Charger to.

[David Pierce]

It was okay because there was a person I could tell, and it was just like. It's. It's not that these things are uniquely bad drivers, it's that we have a chain of understanding how this stuff works, that we just. None of this has made any sense. Again, it goes back to put the safety monitor in front of the steering

[Nilay Patel]

wheel, but he can't. I know why he should. I know why Elon should put the safety monitor behind the wheel. I know why he can't. Because the future of Tesla's valuation depends on Robo Taxis working, not on selling new or better cars.

[David Pierce]

That's why this whole thing exists.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. And. Yeah, well, more time will pass. Presumably more people will get access to this thing. I'm just. I've been bemused. It feels like a bunch of people are entering a kind of journalism where the compromises of access will be made clear and some people will learn the lesson and some people won't. And it all kind of feels like speedrunning to me. Like, you're about to have a whole bunch of experiences here. But I'm. I'm watching these videos and I'm like, oh, the thing doesn't work as well as it should. Right. And if you actually want to compete with Waymo, if you actually want to build that stuff, it needs to work a lot better than this, a lot faster. And like everything with Tesla, maybe it'll just take a long time, but I don't know. I'm going to continue watching this list of Reddit video updates.

[David Pierce]

They're very good. I really. It's. Reddit has done an admirable job of putting together timestamped versions of hilariously bad things happening to these people.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

I highly recommend it, by the way,

[Nilay Patel]

if you want to be an auto journalist and you think Tesla's most. By all means. I'm just. I will just say it again. Access is poison. It will. It. If you chase access, it will kill you. And I say this to our staff all the time, the less access you need, the more you get. And that's a. That's a dynamic. That's very hard. Again, I think they're just speed Running media in like a very particular way. We'll see how it goes. All right. Speaking of Access Poison and Speedruns, there's an update on the Trump phone.

[David Pierce]

Jake, you helped me investigate this. Do you want to take us through what happened with the Trump phone this week?

[Jake Castronakis]

Yeah. Well, if you guys will recall, about a week ago the Trump Organization announced Trump Mobile. Trump mobile announced the T1 phone 8002 gold edition, I believe the name is. And I think we came on here and we said we don't believe that a lot of this is accurate. One of the biggest things was that they said it was going to be made in the United States. Nilay went on TV and shouted that that was a lie.

[Nilay Patel]

That's true. I will say I was not on the show last week and I listened to it and I had what I believe is the very common experience of yelling at the Vergecast. So I feel a lot of empathy for the audience. But CNBC invited me on, I was like, this is fake.

[Jake Castronakis]

And lo and behold, David earlier this week, scrolling through their website sees that they've changed. The website used to say made in the United States. Now it says what's the exact phrase?

[David Pierce]

David, I'm so excited to read this website to you. First of all, shouts to Simon who saw this before I did and sent it to me. Can I just, can I just read you a bunch of copy from. This is the phone page of the T1 on the Trump Mobile website. Says at the very top, meet the T1 premium performance, proudly American. This is the new tagline of this phone, the T1 trademark. They put trademark everywhere which I really respect isn't just another smartphone. It's a bold step towards wireless independence. That doesn't mean anything. Designed with American values In mind, the T1 trademark delivers top tier performance, sleek design and powerful features all without the inflated price tag. Designed with American values in mind is what is replacing made in the usa. We also have with American hands behind every device we bring care, precision and trusted quality to every detail.

[Nilay Patel]

Are those just don JR's hands? Like he's just, he's just collecting his checks.

[David Pierce]

There's just some, some American has put hands near a phone.

[Jake Castronakis]

An American, that's all we know for sure. An American hand has put their has has clicked the AliExpress order. That is what happened here. I am telling you, you go to AliExpress, you type in big Android phone and you will find what is something that is very close to the T1 phone. And the other thing that David noticed is that They've changed the specs as well. The phone is not going to ship as the exact phone that they announced a week ago, which means that like they clearly were not confident what they announced. I think we all said that would be the case and we were already starting to see it morph in front of our eyes. And as they realized that it was, it was not correct. David, what is the updated spec? I believe they changed the RAM and they changed the screen size.

[David Pierce]

So the RAM is now gone from the website.

[Jake Castronakis]

Okay.

[David Pierce]

It normally there was a, there was, if I remember right, there was a section on the site that said like processor and RAM and it had no processor listed but it said 12 gigs of RAM. Now that whole section is gone. So we still don't know the processor and now there is no ram. Apparently the other one, which I think is maybe the bigger signal that something big has shifted here is it has gone from a 6.78-inch screen to a 6.25-inch screen, which I would just point out is a very different phone. If you lop off a half inch of the screen, you've gone from an iPhone plus to an iPhone. Like that's just a different thing. And like they fixed a couple of things. Like now it says battery as battery instead of camera, which is very exciting.

[Nilay Patel]

It's very good. Although I was always excited for a 5000 milliamp hour camera.

[David Pierce]

Camera. It's going to be, it's going to be a sick camera. That camera will power your house somehow. We don't know yet. It also, instead of saying it's going to ship in September, it just says coming later this year. Even the coming soon is gone, which is very funny. So I like. The only thing I can think of is that they got in some kind of legal hot water over the phrase made in the usa, which is a thing that you have to follow certain rules, be able to say about a device or any product. And also that they went from having one supplier to having another supplier. It's the only thing I can think of is that whatever they bought on or thought they were going to buy on AliExpress, now they're buying something else with a half inch smaller screen. There's just no reason that happens in a week other than that.

[Nilay Patel]

Especially at 499.

[David Pierce]

Right. Yeah. The render is still the same, the price is still the same. I'm still convinced this phone does not exist and will never exist. But even the thing that doesn't exist makes less sense every day.

[Jake Castronakis]

The made in the US thing was Just particularly egregious. Right. Like from the start it was wildly obvious that that could not be true. And I guess after enough people asked about it, they realized maybe we shouldn't lie about this one. Which I guess I don't want to say kudos on that, but you know, good for stopping lying. That is a positive.

[David Pierce]

It's not not lying. You know what I mean?

[Nilay Patel]

The phone doesn't exist. I'll give them credit for, for not lying when they ship us a phone. I believe Jake, you ordered one, right?

[Jake Castronakis]

The Verge has ordered to two of them.

[Nilay Patel]

Thousand dollars. We are Trump.

[Jake Castronakis]

Well, yes, well, so Sarah Smithers are

[Nilay Patel]

who take one day off the show. Jake's like blow a grand on Trump.

[Jake Castronakis]

We listen, somebody needs to find out if these phones are real. Sarah Smithers, our wonderful editorial operations director has spent a week trying to order these things. It turns out for the first week they did not have an option to order them if you lived in Washington D.C. okay. And so we had to keep emailing them saying, hey, this is part of the United States. Could you please accept our order because

[Nilay Patel]

our corporate headquarters is in DC.

[David Pierce]

Yes, I understand.

[Jake Castronakis]

So we will find out for all of you if this phone exists, if it is any good, and if they, as the website promises, randomly start billing you recurring charges at some point.

[Nilay Patel]

So many, many people have asked us to review the phone and I'm confident we will. I just, I want to set some expectations that it's not like the, a review of a mid range Android phone is often a banger. Do you know what I mean? Like it's a mid range Android. You know, you already know what it is. The thing that you want from us is to point out the obvious lies, which is like you almost don't need the phone to do it. But at best, like the best thing this can be is a competently executed mid range Android phone.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. That's literally the 100th percentile outcome for this thing is A, it exists and B, it's fine. That is the best possible outcome for the Trump phone.

[Nilay Patel]

I suspect there will be a yawning chasm between the device shipped to us, the two devices apparently that will be shipped to us and that outcome and that, you know, that's the point of review. But I'm just trying to, I don't think you're going to open it. It's going to like light on fire. I think it's going to be a mid range Android phone with some shit bundled software. All right.

[David Pierce]

Nilay Trump mobile project Gena5SIS, you have to bet on one as a grand success in the future.

[Nilay Patel]

Oh, it's. It's Project Gena 5 SIS.

[David Pierce]

Wow.

[Nilay Patel]

Easily, easily Project Gena 5 SIS. And I'm only saying this because it. To the extent that it exists.

[David Pierce]

You were about to say it exists and they were. There was about to be a party in that office. Yes, you almost said it.

[Nilay Patel]

To just set this up for the audience again, because I'm often reminded that we speak in code and inside jokes like a bunch of high school seniors. Project Genophysis is the result of T Mobile being allowed to merge with Sprint in the first Trump administration. And what they did was they told T Mobile it had to divest a bunch of assets and spectrum to Dish Network, a satellite television operator, which would then create a new, from the ground up, 5G network, so that we would have five national carriers and there would be competition. And look around, does it exist? They. They launched a network. They called it Project NF5 CIS. They're now rolling it into Boost Mobile, whatever. Most of those phones still roam onto AT&T and T Mobile because the network doesn't exist. But in some pockets of America, the network apparently exists. That's what I got for you. And so just because they built some cell towers and put some radios on some poles, someone will try to turn that into money because they've spent the money. Yeah, that's true here. What they've done is they asked ChatGPT to make a mid range Android phone with the word Trump on it and no one has to collect on that investment. And so Project Gen 5 says, just because there's hardware in the world, like a little bit has a, you know, on our go 90 scale, where 0 is alive and 90 is dead, is Quibi. I would put Trump at 90, just lives at 90 and Gena 5 sits at like a 75.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, that seems fair.

[Nilay Patel]

I don't think I've ever applied the Go90 scale of gym streaming services to telecom providers, but it works.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, there's like three of them that are at 10 and everybody else is hovering in the mid-80s at all times. It's just what we do.

[Nilay Patel]

There's more phones. There's a new fairphone that's modular. Is this what this is? It's a modular phone. I love a modular phone.

[David Pierce]

I find fairphone totally fascinating. This company has just been like sort of chugging along in the background, doing great work on making like upgradable, repairable, more well made and thoughtfully designed smartphones than almost anybody. And it's not like a huge hit. And their phones have been not amazing because they're trying to do the right thing more than they're trying to build great phones. And those two things are hard to do together. But this new one's really interesting. It's the Fairphone 6. It is smaller and lighter but has more battery, it's more powerful. They've just made a bunch of the trade offs you want them to make for the first time. But they're also doing the modular accessories thing. Do you guys remember the nothing phone that came out and it had the little loop on the side that you could stick a lanyard or change the case and screw that stuff off. That's coming to the fairphone. They're starting to do stuff like that. But the thing I think is really cool is they're shipping this phone in basically two different ways. One is with Android, like normal Android. And fairphone has a pretty refined take on Android, but they're also shipping it with a button that essentially lets you switch to a minimalist mode of Android, which is kind of like we haven't learned a ton about it, but it seems like basically a power do not disturb feature which I think is super clever. And then the other one is it's shipping with a de Googled version of Android which is called eos, made by this company, I believe it's called Mirena. And essentially they've spent several years now building out a version of Android that is totally bereft of Google services. And that's one you really have to make a moral choice. It's like being a vegan, you know what I mean? It's like you have to do it on purpose and live with the consequences, but you're doing it because you believe it's the right thing to do for the world.

[Jake Castronakis]

It's interesting. I suspect there probably is a lot of overlap between those two markets.

[David Pierce]

Like they're going to be a bunch of vegans who hate that.

[Nilay Patel]

I just made the.

[Jake Castronakis]

I was not. I didn't mean vegans and people who are against Google. I thought I meant people who want to repair their phone endlessly and who want to get away from Google. But it is, I think the bummer about this. You know, I think there's a, a very exciting device, right? Like this is I think the best looking fairphone yet. It looks like a normal phone. It's like an upper mid range Android device. It looks great. The colors are fun. I like that it's opinionated with the, the, you know, the button that does the minimal launcher. But if you want to get it in the US you have to get that de Google fied version.

[David Pierce]

Oh, that's the only one in the U.S. yes. Oh, that sucks.

[Jake Castronakis]

And that is a problem. Right. Because choosing to go without Google Services means missing out on a lot of the phone experience. Right. Just like everything's in the Play Store.

[Nilay Patel]

Just.

[Jake Castronakis]

Good, good luck. Right. Like most people that I know use Gmail.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. Where do you get apps for this thing? I'm like clicking around this website. Where do you get apps for it if you don't have the Play Store sideload them.

[David Pierce]

They have a proprietary app store and they have some stuff, but it is, I mean, it is like vanishingly small number of apps compared to the Play Store.

[Nilay Patel]

Yes. They're sideloading and there's, you know, Android is Android, there's other app stores, but the Play Store and then Play services provide a whole lot of capabilities to Android apps.

[David Pierce]

Yes, well. And I think increasingly so does Gemini. And so I think we're, we're now hitting this place. Like, there was also some news this week about Gemini getting more and more integrated with the system and starting to do some like, cross app stuff like we've been talking about with like the future of Siri. And so the non Google version of Android and the Google version of Android are getting like much further apart over time and not closer together. So I think the case here for something like Mirena is going to get harder, I think, because it's like you're just going to have to make a broader set of sacrifices because I think like, if I don't want to have a Google account, it's not that hard to get like a Proton email account and use DuckDuckGo. And like you, you can relatively successfully replace most Google services with something else without trying all that hard. But if you believe in all this AI stuff, and especially like the way it might change the way that you use your devices, taking that out is going to make all kinds of other stuff just break. Yeah, it's like, it's like, oh, I don't use HTTP on my web browser. It's like, well then you can't use the Internet, like. And it does feel like a lot of the AI stuff is heading that way.

[Nilay Patel]

Oh, David, you explained this in your piece about Marina. They're just downloading the apps through Google. They're just, they're just piping you to the Play Store and then they have a clone of Play Services that runs.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, I mean, I knew they had they had their own clone of Play services that doesn't feed any stuff back to Google. I had forgotten that they just take apps from the Play Store.

[Nilay Patel]

Fair enough. Yeah. I mean, you wrote this three years ago, so you're.

[David Pierce]

I'm.

[Nilay Patel]

You're forgiven for not remembering about open source Android clone.

[David Pierce]

I have thought this company is interesting for a long time.

[Nilay Patel]

I mean, I'm fascinated by this and I'm fascinated by the button that turns it into minimal mode on the phone. Like it's a switch. Love that.

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

But, yeah, I mean, this whole. The fact that you have to commit to an entirely secondary operating system, that's a. It's a rough. It's a rough ask.

[David Pierce]

Totally. But I think there's also, like, something in this combination of, like, more repairable, you can swap out some parts, and this, like, tiny but growing accessory ecosystem that, like, there's something there. If you're a person who wants to sort of muck around with your phone from time to time, that I just think is very cool. And to Jake's point, this is the first one that is, like, on its own, a pretty compelling phone, which is awesome.

[Jake Castronakis]

This is the thing I feel like in the past, the fairphones have always looked a little bit lesser than. And I think this one, obviously, we'll still have to review it, see if it all holds up. This is the first one that you look at, and it looks like a modern phone. It does not look like you're going to dramatically miss out on things with the exception of those living in the United States. So that's a bummer. But I'm really excited to see how this pans out.

[Nilay Patel]

All right, there's one more phone that I'm desperate to talk about this week. It's the Titan 2, which the only way you can describe this is that it's a BlackBerry that runs Android. That's what it is. And it looks exactly like an old BlackBerry. It has a screen and a physical keyboard. And I don't know who this is for.

[David Pierce]

It has already raised a million dollars on Kickstarter. Like, so this is the thing I keep. And it's done. Big traffic on the site. Like, people are into this thing. And I think my overwhelming theory about devices like this for years has been that people have real nostalgia for this stuff, but not actual desire for it. Right. It's the same thing as small iPhones. Right. Everyone on Earth is like, oh, God. Remember when, like, the iPhone5 just, like, fit perfectly in your hand? Wasn't that so great? And then you Present them with a phone that small, and they're like, why is this so small? I don't want this. The battery sucks. What are we doing here? I've always assumed that that is the same thing with physical keyboards. People remember their BlackBerry because it was their first smartphone and it was really exciting and it was like a simpler time in the tech world and that was all very cool. But then things like the clicks keyboard come out and they're like sort of a compelling novelty and they're fun and exciting to have and play with, but it's not a thing that is like a mainstream viable product. But then this thing comes out and raises a million dollars on Kickstarter. And so I'm like, there's clearly some people out there who want a giant ass slab of an Android phone with a big keyboard on it.

[Jake Castronakis]

It looks delightful. There's two things about this that I think are special that we need to talk about. One is that on the backside of it, there's a second screen that shows notifications and a clock. It sort of just looks like an ambient Apple Watch. It's.

[David Pierce]

It's pretty awesome.

[Jake Castronakis]

It's interesting. Like, normally, you know, you're like, I want to have my phone out, but not have it out. So I'd like flip it over. And this way you flip it over, but you still have your phone out. So it's actually. You're just not. Not being rude. You're still being rude, which I think is delightful. And then they also advertise multiple times that they have an infrared port. And they do not explain what that means or what you do with it.

[Nilay Patel]

You obviously you turn off motion smoothing at the bar, Jake.

[Jake Castronakis]

But. But does it. Is it an outward infrared port or is it an accepting infrared port? Can I control my phone with a remote?

[Nilay Patel]

Oh, I see. Is it an eyeglass or an IR window?

[Jake Castronakis]

They do not clarify.

[David Pierce]

They just, can I make phone calls with my TV remote is what you're talking about.

[Jake Castronakis]

That would be pretty innovative. I don't know if it would be

[David Pierce]

useful, but I'm gonna go ahead and

[Nilay Patel]

say it's an IR blaster.

[Jake Castronakis]

I mean, that's why this thing has raised a million dollars.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, people just want to go to the bar.

[David Pierce]

And this is officially the most 2013 phone we've seen since 2013.

[Nilay Patel]

It's the standard was called Erda IRDA. And you could very, very slowly beam contact information between phone like dumb phones back in the day. It's a real thing. Yeah, it wasn't great. And no one used it, but it was called Erda. And there was a time in gadget blogging where if a phone didn't have Erda like the commenters like no Erda.

[David Pierce]

I will say to this thing's credit, I think one very compelling thing about it is that you can buy it right now on Kickstarter for $269. And I think that for like a half novelty of a phone is a perfect price.

[Nilay Patel]

And we're like two Trump phones or four Titans.

[David Pierce]

Oh, four Titans. It's not close. Give me a Titan and a fair phone over the two Trump phones. I'm a happy guy.

[Jake Castronakis]

There is also actual motion footage of this phone existing, which cannot be said. There's not a single frame of the Trump phone existing.

[Nilay Patel]

All right, some more gadgets to round out our first segment, which is very gadget heavy, I point out. We're all over the place gadgets. Microsoft and Meta announced an Xbox VR headset that is just a Quest 3S that's green and comes with a controller.

[David Pierce]

One of my favorite things to do this week has been to troll Reddit. Watching people be confused about what this thing is. It's so funny. So two things are true, right? One, this is the best looking quest there has ever been. The black and green color, like works for the Quest in a way. The white beigey thing kind of doesn't. The combo of Xbox stuff and Quest makes sense. Shipping it with a controller that's already paired makes sense. This thing is a gaming machine. They're treating it like a gaming machine. It's going to stream Xbox games. Makes perfect sense. There are so many people who just think this is an Xbox that will play Xbox games, and it turns out it doesn't. And this is what we've talked about before. Like the list of Xboxes that don't play all Xbox games is vast, and this is one of them. It will stream some games. If you have Xbox Game Pass ultimate, which requires jumping through a series of hoops I cannot even begin to describe to you. And like this thing is, it both is and is not an Xbox in a way that is driving a lot of people on the Internet absolutely up the wall.

[Nilay Patel]

Wait, everything at this point is and is not an Xbox? The state of being an Xbox is probabilistic.

[David Pierce]

This is what I mean. Yes. But this one's called Xbox.

[Nilay Patel]

Like every morning I wake up and think to myself, am I an Xbox? And then I go through the list of what games I support and and many days the answer is yes.

[David Pierce]

It's beautiful. For you is. Is your Samsung Frame TV an Xbox?

[Nilay Patel]

It could be because you can run Game Pass on it, right? So wait, I have not paid a lot of attention to Game Pass. So this is just a VR headset and it's got the one app in it that runs in 2D. Right? So you're in the VR environment and it puts up a big fake TV, a big virtual TV and then it just runs Game Pass on it.

[David Pierce]

That's right.

[Nilay Patel]

It's not even running VR games.

[David Pierce]

No, the quest does that. Anyway, this is just purely like a branding exercise. And again, I think the branding exercise makes a lot of sense, but it is just a branding exercise. This is a like, I don't know, imagine some celebrity picked a color scheme for a quest and it did that. This is that it's just called an Xbox. So people assume it's going to be an Xbox.

[Nilay Patel]

Well, it's an Xbox in the sense that Xbox Game Pass ultimate is Xbox.

[David Pierce]

If that's an Xbox, we're all Xbox.

[Nilay Patel]

This is what I'm saying. Everybody got Xbox. Yeah. All right. It's very confusing. I'm trying to figure out who is making money here.

[Jake Castronakis]

Microsoft seems to have some very long term plan here to redefine what the Xbox is and they are really overshooting for what they can actually deliver on today. That seems to be it. I do not see how Xbox is benefiting from this right now when they're just confusing everybody.

[Nilay Patel]

So my understanding is that Xbox came in second place the last two generations, right?

[Jake Castronakis]

Yes.

[Nilay Patel]

The PS4 and the PS5 blew the Xbox away. And then the Switch, and presumably the Switch 2 is, they're all gonna be great and that's gonna be a total thing over there. And it feels like Microsoft is reacting to coming in second place as though they have failed so completely they need to burn it all down.

[David Pierce]

Right.

[Nilay Patel]

And they're like, we will reconceptualize the very concept of an Xbox and turn it into a PC console gaming situation on handheld cloud streaming service on VR headsets. And then the actual console is like of little value to them.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, I think that's right.

[Nilay Patel]

That's kind of what this all feels like. But I'm just saying the Quest 3S is not a huge hit for Meta. Right. There's been reporting that they've kind of lost interest in Quest because their glasses are the success, which we'll talk about in a second. The Ray Bans and now the Oakley smart glasses feel like their future. And so it's like, okay, an Unsuccessful VR headset is being paired with an unsuccessful gaming brand to accomplish what the

[David Pierce]

thing about it is, I actually think in a certain way calling this thing an Xbox makes it make more sense because it is a gaming machine. Like everybody who works on VR stuff will tell you this is not true. But VR is a gaming platform. It just is.

[Nilay Patel]

But this doesn't play VR games. This is the same as one of those xreal glasses that just puts up a fake tv.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, that's also an Xbox. Apple Vision Pro, also an Xbox. Do you know what I mean? It isn't an Xbox help, but I think to the extent that this just screams this is a large screen on which to play games, I'm not bothered by it. But the thing you're describing is why people are getting tripped up. Because it's like, oh, this should now play my Xbox games. And it isn't that simple. And so we're in this position of like, many more people know what to make of Xbox than know what to make of Quest. So I can actually see why bringing Quest and Xbox together makes sense for shipping this headset, except it's not fully an Xbox. I just, I get turned in circles. But ultimately this thing is like a limited edition and looks very cool and not that many people get it. So it's like, whatever. But I do find it sort of fascinating that they're like leaning into this thing is for games. And Microsoft is like, games are for everything. And they're like, oh, I see why you're friends.

[Nilay Patel]

Like, sure, yeah. Just on the one hand, you know, Microsoft spent last week or I guess two weeks ago talking about the, you know, the Rog ally and being like, the future of Xbox is Windows games on the go. We also support Steam and one turn later they're like, it's a limited cloud gaming library. On the Quest. It does feel, it just feels like they, they've, they've lost sight of what they want Xbox to be. So it's everything. And yeah, who knows?

[David Pierce]

Agreed.

[Nilay Patel]

The Meta smart glasses, they are a success, at least according to the metrics Meta keeps saying. And they've expanded them this week and now they've got Oakley smart glasses. Same basic concept as the Ray Bans, only they look like Oakley's and they shoot 3k video. Slightly higher resolution video because they're slightly bigger is basically my understanding of the product.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, pretty much the thing I thought was really interesting. Alex Heath talked to one of the folks on the team building this stuff and they confirmed what we have always suspected, which is that people use these glasses for two things. One is audio and one is camera. And they call them AI glasses, which is very funny because it's like, well, we're gonna call this thing a thing no one uses them for. But like this, this positioning makes sense. Doing it with Oakley makes sense. I don't think these glasses are particularly good looking, but I also can't pull off Oakley's in general. So I'm not like a great person to judge.

[Nilay Patel]

When you went on the eighth grade trip to DC, did everybody buy fake Oakleys?

[David Pierce]

Oh, 100%.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

I've owned so many fake Oakleys in my life. We called them, what'd you call them?

[Nilay Patel]

Jokelies.

[David Pierce]

Oh, we were folkleys.

[Nilay Patel]

Oh, very good.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, they were good. But yeah, I think like this thing Meta is doing continues to make perfect sense to me. It's still not clear how you bridge the gap between this and the Orion glasses that we talked about before, because they're like the technical breakthroughs required to get from one to the other are vast and unsolved. But just this thing where like Meta has a hit at relative scale doing this basic kind of stuff and they've just decided to lean into this is the thing that everybody wants. We will figure out how to stack capabilities on top of it over time. Feels like the right move to me.

[Jake Castronakis]

It also feels really clear that their partnership with luxottica has just continued to pay dividends here. Right. Like you need glasses that are naturally chunky enough to fit this hardware and they have managed to find multiple styles here that adapt well to this additional hardware that are already formats that people know and love. Right. These are very popular glasses. They're very popular brand names expanding to Oakley was a really smart next move after Ray Ban. And so I. Right. Like this is a challenge that every other company getting into the glass space is going to have. If you put out knockoff pair of Ray Bans or Oakleys, people will be able to tell that they are a knockoff pair. Right. Meta's biggest advantage here is it is just selling Oakleys with some headphones in them. Right. That's not a bad product at a bare minimum. Right. Nobody has to use the AI.

[Nilay Patel]

Well, I think Meta is desperate for a product.

[Jake Castronakis]

Well, they would like that where their

[Nilay Patel]

AI assistant is the first party assistant, not an app on the iPhone. And they've said all these glasses, I will say they transition lenses are available, but all the cool photos are the reflective orange lenses. And Meta's continued attempts to make transitions. Very cool. Continues to amuse that's all. I'm just saying. Especially because if you're wearing transition Oakleys, many decisions have been made along the way.

[David Pierce]

Vindication is coming from my dad, who's been wearing transitions for like a decade. The world is coming around to Joey.

[Nilay Patel]

I don't know if you saw Joanna Stern's video with Craig Federighi and Craig Josiak, but Jawswiak was wearing transitions in the video. Then about halfway through, they tinted because they were in the sun. And I was like, well, this is. I mean, it's fine. Like, do it. Do you. Whatever you want to do. But the fact that you can't control them actually sometimes causes problems.

[David Pierce]

Maybe it's a defense mechanism where he's like, these questions are too hard.

[Nilay Patel]

Just black them out. Like, I can't see you. Just like you can't see Siri. I don't know. Look, the fact that it's camera and headphones, exactly the same problem as Alexa had for years. It's timers and music and it's great. I think people like having cameras on their face. I got a TikTok ad today for what can only be described as a necklace with a MagSafe mount, because people mount their phones here when they drive their cars and do stuff and they want the first person view. I get it. I get why people want cameras in their glasses. I don't think Meta has actually. I would love to know the rate at which people who buy these glasses also use the AI stuff. Is meta convincing 2% of those people to be like, I love the Meta AI assistant? How many people are looking at stuff and being like, what is that? Because that's the use case they keep coming up with, right? Again, I think the real thing people want to build is Orion, the augmented reality glasses. And even Orion doesn't actually do augmented reality yet. Like, we're long, long away. But if you love an Oakley and you like glasses. Joanna Stern, speaking of Joanna loves her Meta. Ray Bans. Loves them. Can't get enough of them.

[David Pierce]

I wear mine all the time, just as sunglasses that happen to do other things. Like, that's great.

[Nilay Patel]

Do you have the transition lenses?

[David Pierce]

No, mine are just sunglasses. So I just get to be the cool guy who wears sunglasses inside the coffee shop for a while.

[Nilay Patel]

Does the Meta app support multiple glasses?

[David Pierce]

The last time I tried, I could only. I could only be paired to one at a time.

[Nilay Patel]

I mean, these are just like. Right? These are. These are problems with the form factor that you're going to have to overcome. Nobody wears the Same pair of glasses all the time, right? Like, even people who wear glasses, like prescription glasses, I have two pairs of glasses. Because when you go to the store, my glasses are always like, do you want two pairs of glasses? And then people with sunglasses have lots of different kinds of sunglasses. Like being locked into one pair of one style sunglasses forever is not great. And now they have multiple styles. I don't. I'm just saying on the chart of wearable bullshit, you still have to put the thing on your face, man. It's utility has to be much higher than it is right now. But you love them, they're great.

[David Pierce]

And they're like, they've solved the face problem because they just look like sunglasses. Like, that's the thing. That's, that's to, to Jake's point, like, the, the hardest thing about this is just provided to Meta by another company that is fabulously good at making glasses. People like. And rather than do what Meta tried to do and what Apple is trying to do and what traditionally tech companies have always done, which is like build the hardest, most expensive thing and then try to like, trickle the tech down to cheaper prices, Meta was just like, we're going to do the least and then try to build up from there. And I actually think in this particular case, in part because of, you know, the problems that come with Nilay's chart of wearable bullshit, that's the right move. Like make a thing people like and then figure out how to get it to do more stuff. Strikes me as way more compelling than I'm going to build a helmet for your face and then figure out how to make you like wearing it.

[Nilay Patel]

The Apple Vision Pro, everybody. Yeah. All right, we gotta take a break. We'll be back. Speaking of Meta, we gotta talk about their big AI win. Anthropic's big AI win, but they're also losses. We'll be right back. We'll explain. Support for the show comes from Shopify. Starting a new business, it can be a lonely endeavor, especially in the beginning. And if you're just starting out, it's more important than ever to make sure you have the right tools at hand. If your business includes e commerce, a great next step is to try Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that millions of businesses around the world rely on to sell their products online. You can get started with your own design studio. With hundreds of ready to use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store that matches your brand's style. If you're asking yourself, what if people haven't heard about my brand? Shopify helps you find your customers with easy to run email and social media campaigns. And if you get stuck, Shopify is always around to share advice with their award winning 24. 7 customer support. It's time to turn those what ifs into with Shopify today. You could sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com vergecast go to shopify.com vergecast that's shopify.com vergecast

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[Addie Robertson]

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[Nilay Patel]

When you look beyond the headlines at the trend lines, what is really going to matter? Even if you're not worried about AI per se, you certainly ought to be concerned. Do we have the cultural, you know, strength and resilience to get it right? Now imagine we had to write a new constitution today, put aside AI. Like, how good a job do you think we would do? I'm John Finer. And I'm Jake Sullivan and we're the hosts of the Long Game, a weekly national security podcast. This week we're joined by economist and author Tyler Cowen. We discuss China, the AI race, and aliens. The episode's out now. Search for and follow the Long Game wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back. Addie Robertson's here. Hey, Addy. Hey. I'm excited. Usually when you and I talk, something very dark has happened. Like, a lot of times you're on decoder and we're like, well, Addy's here. And we both have the same reaction. I'm excited to talk to you about AI and copyright because this is just chaos. Like, it is delightful chaos in our nation's courts is the AI copyright cases begin to wind their way to some decisions.

[Addie Robertson]

Oh yeah, these are fun.

[David Pierce]

Can I back us up here a little bit and just like build from the ground up a little bit? Because I confess I have had trouble keeping these two cases this week separate in my head and then also trying to figure out what they have to do with each other because it seems

[Jake Castronakis]

to be a lot.

[David Pierce]

So Adi, can you just like walk us through These trials a little bit first, let's do Anthropic first, because that, that decision hit first this week. Just remind us quickly, like, what that case was about and what was decided this week.

[Nilay Patel]

This is David saying, neil, I can't immediately get in his feelings. That's just sort of.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, Neil, I. Nilai was so fast to like, let's talk about the, the whatever, the fourth factor of copyright law. And I'm like, can I remember what books are first?

[Addie Robertson]

Yeah. So there are two groups of authors here, and both of them found out their work is almost certainly in. Into the training data set of a chatbot company. In one case, Meta. In one case, Anthropic. And they both sued. And there are kind of two arguments. One argument is these things were pirated in the first place. And then in some ways, the bigger argument is, well, even if you get these things legally, you are putting these into a training set that is then using them to power a very lucrative product. And that's unauthorized. That's copyright infringement. You need to get permission from us and pay us.

[David Pierce]

Okay, so this became Nilay, a fair use thing, kind of all the way down. Right.

[Nilay Patel]

It's very important to separate what specifically is fair use. And the courts here don't agree there's a lot going on in these. But it's important to just think about AI from the technical perspective. There's training the model, and then there's inference where you get outputs from the model. And in these cases, it's all about training. The model is, in the anthropic case, literally buying a bunch of used books, ripping off the covers, scanning them into a database, and then using that database to train a model. Is all of that fair use? Not if you ask the model to produce some copyrighted book. Is that copyright infringement? And that's a big distinction. The reason people hate lawyers is because lawyers are constantly making extremely pedantic distinctions between things. But in these cases, those distinctions are wildly important because the judges react to those distinctions between training and inference, between inputs and outputs. Very, very different.

[David Pierce]

So both of these cases were fundamentally about training.

[Jake Castronakis]

Right.

[Addie Robertson]

Both of these cases are sort of fundamentally about training with a side, which is actually also very important of you pirated these books in the first place. It's kind of the difference between, again, in both cases, at first they were like, all right, we're going to download all these books and we're going to train on them. And then Meta kind of kept it there. And Anthropic went, wait, we need to fix this. We're not comfortable with this. So then, as Nilay mentioned, they got a bunch of books and they destroyed the books after scanning them. So then there was a copy in the cloud. And this turned out to be a really hugely important distinction for reasons besides the training.

[David Pierce]

If I told you to just go buy a million books, would you know how to do it? I've been thinking about this all week.

[Nilay Patel]

Anthropic hired one of the people who ran Google Books. Like, they found the one person who knew how to do it. So the Anthropic case is really interesting for that reason. They started by saying, we're just going to steal stuff. And they pirated books. And they referred to the problem they had as like legal business slogan. That's in the opinion. And the legal business log is like, should we pay money and acquire things legally? And they're like, no, we'll just steal it. And then they came back around and were like, we're scan a bunch of books. And the judge in that case, Addie, my read was that he cared a lot about acquisition.

[Addie Robertson]

He was so mad where he's very

[Nilay Patel]

focused on did you acquire these books legally or not? He makes a distinction between the legally acquired books and the pirated books. And then he spends a lot of time being like, okay, once you have this stuff, what can you do with it that's fair or not? And the first thing, and this is really just again, pedantic steps down the line. The first thing that Anthropic did was they made a big database of books. And that is, you don't think about that in the, in the context of your training, a model. But the judge spends a lot of time being like, okay, the first thing you did was make a database of books. And then you use that database. You can use that database to do all kinds of stuff. You can just search the database to see what books you have. And he, you know, there's a lot of, like, consumer rights history here, a lot of Google history here. Ripping the covers off of books and scanning them into a big database. If, if you wanted to do that to all the books you owned, you would be like, I can do that, right? Like, if the judge here had found that buying a million books, ripping the covers off and scanning them into a database was illegal, like, a lot of things would break. I think, like, there's some part of this where copyright law has such a maximalist control over what you can do with the things you can buy that the only answer you can get to is you're Allowed to buy a million books, rip the covers off of them and scan them into a database, as long as you don't let other people access the database.

[Addie Robertson]

Yeah, it's pretty notable here that they went from, okay, yeah, obviously it's illegal to acquire these digital books, but there are many legal ways to acquire digital books and it is notable they didn't do that because you have the most maximalist freedom as a consumer with a physical copy.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, it gets it. Like you, if you want to buy a bunch of Kindle books, like, they come with drm, they come with license restrictions. You can as Adi saying you can buy a bunch of ebooks without that, but you still end up with like, terms of service agreements. If you just go buy a book, you can kind of do a physical book, you can kind of do whatever you want. So the judge says, okay, you made this database. That was fair use. Ripping the covers off the physical books and scanning the database, that's fair use. You're allowed to do that. Stealing books and making a database, that's not fair use. Stop there. The end. You're in trouble for that.

[David Pierce]

Is that even a fair use thing or is it the stealing the books?

[Nilay Patel]

Well, he's made the distinction between is it fair use to buy a bunch of physical books, rip the covers off and scan them? Okay, that's fair use. Is it fair use to steal a bunch of books?

[Addie Robertson]

No, there's sort of a bunch of separate charges here. They're the charges of. All right, is it copyright infringement to do this, or is it also separately copyright infringement to pirate all these books?

[Nilay Patel]

Right. So. And then Anthropic tried to fix it by saying the database is not important, training the model is important. And the judge said, okay, training the model from your legal database, that's fair use. That's very transformative. Especially because the authors1 conceded that training the model was just like reading a book, which is a big thing to concede.

[David Pierce]

Right. Which has been an argument of the AI industry for years. Right. That it's like it's the equivalent of reading a webpage and talking about it.

[Nilay Patel]

And this is going to come up over and over again. And I think this is why Addy and I both think these are fun. The lawyers blew it for the authors, like, left and right. And the judges are kind of like, you know, you guys are blowing it. Like, try again, but don't blow it. So the lawyers conceded that it was just like reading a book. And then they did not argue the outputs of the model would affect the market. For their work, right? So they stopped. And this is why it made the big distinction between inputs and outputs. They stopped at training. They did not get to. If you ask anthropic. If you ask Claude to make our book, it'll just make our book. Or if you ask Claude to summarize our book, it'll just like spit out the answer to our book. And that will ruin the market for a book. They just didn't go there.

[David Pierce]

And judge is like, this is where you need to explain the different tenets of copyright and fair use stuff.

[Nilay Patel]

Okay, so, David, the four factors of fair use. Here we are. We got here.

[David Pierce]

So inevitably, you've told me this so many times, and it just goes fully. My eyes glaze over every time you say this to me. So I'm going to try and listen this time.

[Nilay Patel]

It's 17 United States Code, Section 107, four factors of fair use. So this is when someone accuses you of stealing their work, you say, no, no, it's fair use. And so it's what's called an affirmative defense. You say, yep, I did. I did sample your song. This is fair use. Yep, you're right, I made a copy. But it's fair use. And then the judges are supposed to evaluate this on a case by case basis. They have four factors. The purpose and character of the use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount and substantiality of the portion used, and the effect on the use of the market. And how important each of these factors are just goes up and down over the years. The Supreme Court issues fair use copyright decisions. You get law review articles being like, the third factor is no longer in vogue. Like it's. Everyone's always arguing this. But here what everyone should be arguing about is the fourth factor. The effect of the use on the market. If you train a chatbot on all the books in the world, and then you can just ask the chatbot about those books and it will tell you the answer. The market for those books will inevitably dry up.

[David Pierce]

And this, if I'm remembering correctly, is like the New York Times whole argument in its case against OpenAI, right? That if you can get OpenAI to regurgitate new York Times articles, you can. Why would anyone go to the New York Times?

[Addie Robertson]

I mean, I would be careful with that because in that case, it is specifically output. They are saying that you could get them to regurgitate exact text. And here it's kind of more a. You can generate a bunch of stuff that imitates us and that infringes on our ability to sell things, or also that it can summarize and it can give answers and that can, even if it's not really direct, clear, you're copying our stuff, that's still diminishing the market.

[Nilay Patel]

And then in the anthropic case, the authors didn't allege the outputs, right?

[David Pierce]

They just didn't argue about it at all.

[Nilay Patel]

They were totally focused on training and they didn't get to outputs. And the judge is even sort of saying throughout the opinion, you didn't talk about the outputs. So your argument is merely, training the model will have some effect on the market for your work. But, like, what is it? You didn't argue? It's not here. But you, like, we don't have a record for it, so I'm just not going to talk about it. So we're totally focused on training and not on inference, right? We're totally focused on the inputs to train the model and not on the outputs of the model itself. And so the authors lose. He says training is fair use. This is totally transformative. You can legally acquire books, you can put them into a database. You can use that database to train a model. Making the database is fair use. Making the model from what's in the database is fair use. And then stop, right? And like, there's a big yawning gap there of, well, now you have a model. What do you think is going to happen? And the answer is like, oh, you're going to make a bunch of stuff that competes with the author's original works. And so that's a real puzzle. Like, who knows what happens next? And he even leaves it open. Like, if you want to lodge the next thing, you can allege the next thing. And then on top of it, he says, what you are not allowed to do is pirate a bunch of books and make a database database. He doesn't even get to. And then you can train the model. He just says, doing that first step where you stole a bunch of books and put them in a database, that's not fair use. You can't do that. And that is a nightmare. Like, you might read this as training the model is fair use for your legally acquired physical books that you've ripped the covers off and scanned in your database. What it does not say is it's fair game for anything. And so if you, for example, have opened YouTube and downloaded a bunch of YouTube videos, I'm looking at you. OpenAI. Well, you violated YouTube's terms of service. The copyright in all those videos is owned by the YouTubers. You have a, you have a database of content that you're training SORA on that you don't have the rights to. And so this anthropic decision has opened the door to being like, we're not even going to get to training as fair use. We're going to get to your illegal database of YouTube videos. And you can't, you're not allowed to clean up that problem by saying training is fair use. So this first decision, very complicated, like very technical, very readable. We've profiled Judge Alsupp before Sarah has profiled him. He writes code, he's in the weeds of the technical details here. But what you have is training is fair use if you have a legally acquired set of content to train from.

[Addie Robertson]

There's also kind of a backwards looking and a forward looking issue here, which is, say in the future, if you're kind of just starting from scratch, then the upshot of this is, well, okay, you gotta buy a million books. That costs a lot. It's a finite number in backwards looking. If you've already done all this stuff, the potential damages for each work are just like ruinous if you add them up to a large enough number. And so anybody who's starting from scratch with a model that is starting acquiring all this stuff legally, like that's one economic model. Any of the big players, that's a whole different one. Yeah, because they've already done all this.

[Nilay Patel]

And again, OpenAI. OpenAI has a lot of money, but every YouTuber in the world can read this decision and say, well, you, you stole our videos and it wasn't, you can't buy physical YouTube videos and rip the covers off of them. And database, you Access them on YouTube which has terms of service that says you cannot do this. So this is a, this is already like puzzle one, this decision. You read it and you're like, okay, there's a way forward if you pay a bunch of authors and maybe it doesn't even work right. Used books don't pay the authors. But there's, there's parts of copyright law that say you're allowed to buy used books and do whatever you want with them. And this ruling reaffirms that. It does not say you can just pirate a bunch of stuff and train it and call that fair use. Okay, so, okay, so here's a bunch of liability for the industry. Then literally the next day a decision in the meta case comes down, which Addie I'm reading is basically being like, no, actually judge also got this wrong. Like this is all theft left and right.

[Addie Robertson]

It's basically Judge Allsup got all the fundamentals of this. Right. But he weighted the transformative factor, overarching factor, and the fourth economic market value factor totally wrong. And that makes him completely wrong on all of it.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, go through this case. So this case is slightly different, but it's a bunch of authors suing Meta. And if I'm correct, META got caught using torrented books. Like, straightforwardly, they just torrented the books

[Addie Robertson]

from Library Genesis, I believe. Yeah, that. A collection of books that was just this very large corpus of pirated books. They torrented them. There's debate about whether that included them uploading things, which one typically does when you torrent things.

[Nilay Patel]

The classic Cedars vs Leechers debate hits our nation's copyright law.

[Addie Robertson]

Yeah, they have to define seating and leeching in there. There's a whole section about that. But they're specifically not dealing with the copyright. Like, was this direct copyright infringement right now? Except to say, yeah, look, it basically was. So there's that. And then after that, these authors sued in a pretty similar way, except that they also specifically said, the issue here is partly that it is recreating our works. So they did focus on output. And then also that there's this market potentially for us licensing our work to you, and that that's a market that you're taking from us. The judge called both of these clear losers. He basically thinks everyone here is wrong. So the meta won the case. Meta won the case just handily. And it's because the judge says, look, those are the only things you focused on. And both of those are bad arguments, partly because they couldn't get Lama to actually spit out more than 50 words of the direct text. So they were trying to say, look, you're verbatim producing stuff and it just didn't work out. And then the second one, because you just can't necessarily say, yeah, if I were allowed to license this, I would make a lot of money. That doesn't necessarily mean you should be able to exploit that. And so then after saying, look, concluding just, this argument is terrible. These lawyers are bad. Please don't do this. They said, there's this other argument that would have been way stronger, and it's that the fundamental use of these things is to flood the market in a way that destroys the ability of authors to make a living and completely diminishes the thing that copyright is meant to do, which is encourage human creativity. Basically, AIs are creativity killing machines, and that should mean that it outweighs any potential transformative value.

[Nilay Patel]

So I want to just quote from the opinion because it is brutal. This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta's use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful. It stands only for the proposition that these plaintiffs made the wrong arguments and failed to develop a record in support of the right one. He's just saying, you screwed this up.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, you did it wrong.

[Nilay Patel]

You did it wrong.

[Addie Robertson]

And then mentions, by the way, these guys only. They only represent 13 artists, 13 authors. So, you know, there are a lot of other authors. And maybe Meta scanned them. It probably did. Just saying that.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. Yeah.

[David Pierce]

Wait. Okay, so let's talk about this here, because the reaction to this this week has been fascinating because I think it's been sort of a Rorschach test, depending on how. Who you are promoting here. All of the AI folks are like, this is a landmark victory for AI. This puts us on the path to do all the stuff that we needed to do. But then it also sounds like there's an easy read of this, that this is like a small victory for these companies who won this case on a technicality, but. But have just had the door thrown wide open for everyone else on earth to sue them better and win. Which of those things is it? Or is it both of those things?

[Nilay Patel]

It's the second one. It's so by far the second one. I think, you know, Addie, and when Sarah's on and I. Whenever we're talking about the legal system on the show, we are constantly reminding people that the courts are not computers. They are not deterministic systems that you cannot predict what will happen. Right. And so I think the AI companies are like, this is fair use. And then they got an outcome that kind of looks like, this is fair use. And they're like, see, we predicted this correctly. We were right all along. And what you actually have is a court saying, these lawyers sucked. And if you had better lawyers and you argued these things differently, we would have reached different outcomes. But we can't reach those outcomes in the absence of your better lawyers. And that is a maddening to people. I know it's maddening to people because I have the Blue sky app on my phone, and I open it from time to time. And it's just people being mad that these lawyers blew it. And it. They blew it. And the judge is saying flatly, they blew it. I don't know why. In the anthropic case, the lawyers happily conceded that training an AI model is like letting school Children read books to learn things. I wouldn't have conceded that. I do know that it costs a lot of money to build an expert record about how AI systems work versus the brains of six year olds or whatever. And they might not have had that money, but you can't know. And that's why it's not deterministic. Like a lot of decisions got made along the way. And then we have these rulings. But there are more cases to come. As Addie's saying, the court in the Meta case is basically inviting other authors to try to make the better argument that they have laid out. You have the New York Times, which is over a million dollars, deep into its OpenAI litigation, that's watching these outcomes and won't change its arguments. Then you have Disney, which is a very late entrant into all these copyright lawsuits. They're partnered up with Universal and together they're suing midjourney about outputs. They're watching these cases develop, they're watching these arguments and they're like, oh, we need to focus on outputs. By the way, I need to disclose that Universal is owned by Comcast. NBCUniversal is a part of Comcast, is an investor in our parent company. Our parent company has a deal with OpenAI. One of the reasons these companies have deals with OpenAI is because they want to set markets for licenses, they want to set rates. So these lawsuits can proceed on whatever way they're going to proceed. You can see it's not settled. These are just the first little skirmishes. And a lot of times what's happening is that the first plaintiffs are authors, are creatives who don't have the money for the most lawyering, who need to get to outcomes quickly. And they're getting outgunned by the lawyers for the huge technology firms. That's not always going to be the case.

[Addie Robertson]

Record labels are also in on this. The record labels have sued Suno and

[Nilay Patel]

Yurio, although they're starting to settle some of those on the side. I'm just saying, like, the legal system is not deterministic. It is also reactive to what happens before. Like necessarily, it's precedential, it's reactive to these cases. And the arguments in the future cases will shift around these decisions to attack their weak points, or in the case of the Meta decision, to take the open invitation to get it right.

[Addie Robertson]

I would also say we're at the point where basically this is kind of every judge for themselves. At the point where you appeal and then you start getting appeals court cases and then circuit courts Start saying, all right, here's roughly how we think about it. Then judges have kind of precedents that they are trying to draw from. And of course if the Supreme Court says something, then that's something that you have to weight pretty heavily. But at this point they can kind of just say stuff to each other. So it's also not like this one ruling that say Allsup, hands down is a law that everyone else has to follow. Somebody else can come up with their own theory of fair use, which is pretty much exactly what we've seen.

[Jake Castronakis]

Right.

[Nilay Patel]

And fair use in the law is supposed to be case by case. Right. So one fair use decision is not supposed to affect all the other ones. In reality, because of the money and time and risk involved, they, they get treated as precedent. But here everybody has incentives to reopen those doors again and again and again. So I, I, I, I don't know. Addy, what do you think? I think this is a bunch of small, narrow rulings that open the door to much more chaos to come. Not definitive reckoning. But maybe you feel differently.

[Addie Robertson]

I don't know, in part because I feel like sometimes court cases are a little bit just, they're reflective of a larger vibe and culture that it like I think we've seen with section 230 cases that it's not necessarily that judges all impact each other, but that if you start seeing a bunch of rulings around one kind of particular interpretation of the law or one kind of like weighting of something, that sometimes means you are seeing a pattern that's going to continue. It's correlation, not causation. And also, I don't know, I'm actually wondering what would happen if Allsup had a case that was more specifically output based. Because on one hand, yeah, it opens up a bunch of whole new cans of worms. On the other, some of his comments did seem like they kind of indicated it doesn't matter if somebody's say, writing a book with an AI system that competes with yours, that doesn't inherently mean that they're, that is unfair.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, he's got a line that's like, copyright law does not protect you from competition. It's supposed to inspire more people to create. And there's a, you know, there's a very deep meaningful tension in there because the, the mechanism by which copyright law is supposed to inspire you to create is by letting you sell your stuff. Right? You create stuff, you get rights to it. Other people can't take it for free. They have to pay you money. But at the same time, if they take your stuff for free and then make stuff that competes with you, like, that's competition, like, there's something really weird in there.

[Addie Robertson]

But there are also a lot of pre AI cases where I think people would be a lot more sympathetic to the idea that you should be able to, say, copy things without having to get permission. Like the fact that you can report on facts that somebody says in a news story without getting permission from the original writer of that story. Like the fact that you can do a pastiche of an artist and that artist's style is not necessarily a thing that's automatically copyrightable. I think these are all things that when humans are involved, we actually are pretty okay with the idea that creativity is cumulative and people build on each other. I think the thing that's really interesting about the Meta ruling is that it specifically makes the argument that scale is different, which is something I see a bunch of people make pragmatically. But I don't think I've seen in the court system as much that the argument isn't actually. Well, these things are fundamentally different and not competitive because the writing is somehow different or because something's not necessarily learning. It's because you can create all of them so quickly that they will flood the market and they will destroy the market for books. Specifically thinks romance novels and spy thrillers. Romance novels come up a bunch in this.

[Nilay Patel]

The whole. The entire, like, romance novel, like, fanfic community right now is, like, deeply insulted.

[David Pierce]

Right.

[Nilay Patel]

They're at war with AI every day.

[Addie Robertson]

Yeah. Romance authors are starting to use AI and romance readers are just furious about it.

[Nilay Patel]

Well, it's funny because you. We've talked about this many times. If you go on those forums, like, now people just say tropes all in a row and request stories and like, oh, that's what AI is for. Like, I just want this to happen. Wild interactions in that community. The scale problem is really interesting because if, you know, we just play this game right now on the show, the moral dilemmas of copyright law become plain. So if I say to you, David, can you rip a CD onto your computer without paying extra money to a record label? What would you say?

[David Pierce]

Yes.

[Nilay Patel]

Can you rip 10 CDs?

[David Pierce]

Yes.

[Nilay Patel]

Can you, David Pierce, rip 1,000 CDs to your computer without paying record labels additional money?

[David Pierce]

I guess in theory, yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

If you had the hard drive space, could you rip a million CDs to your computer without paying a record labels? You, David Pierce?

[David Pierce]

Yeah, I think so.

[Nilay Patel]

Can Meta do that? No. Like, why? This is the problem, right? You write the rule that says it's okay to like RIP CDs or we got a lot of plex users.

[Addie Robertson]

Wait, fair use can account for this, right? Part of the consideration of fair use is whether something is commercial or not.

[Nilay Patel]

Part of the consideration is whether it's commercial. But in the anthropic case, Judge Alsop says you're allowed to just make a database if what you want to do is make it easier to search, make it easier to run different applications on. It's totally fine for you to buy a million books, rip the covers off and scan them into a database. It's the next use that gets you into trouble, right? It's okay. Is it training the AI model? Is that fair use if you have the database? He says yes. If you were to say, I've now made this database publicly available for anyone to read all the books or listen all the music in my database, you would go to jail. The Internet Archive is in trouble for their database of books that they acquired. They scanned it and they let everybody have access to. So the questions get really difficult the second you start not just adding scale, but adding different uses of what they're going to do and some of those uses at commercial change the equation. And this is the problem. This is why everybody hates copyright law. This is why everybody hates lawyers. You start to get incredibly pedantic about what happened, when, to whom, who made the copy, when, where does the copy live. And everyone's like, it's just a computer, right? I can just like open it up and get whatever I want. And then underneath that, all of those questions determine who gets paid. And I think here, you know, the big problem with the anthropic fair use ruling is one, if you buy a million used books and train a model that generates billions of dollars in value, the authors who wrote those books get nothing. That's just the way it works in our society. If they pay a one time fee to buy a million brand new books and then train a model that generates billions of dollars in revenue, the authors essentially on that curve get nothing. They get paid one time. Is that fair? Like, I don't, I truly don't know the answers to those questions. And these really kind of don't get you there there.

[Addie Robertson]

I don't know. I think that the meta ruling is interesting because it does actually kind of cut through all this because everything in copyright is very angels dancing on a head of a pin, like is putting something in RAM a copy. But the overall argument is the whole reason copyright exists is to encourage human creativity. And so the ultimate bar should not be, is this fair, or is this hitting this particular place where it starts being uncomfortable, or is the company that's doing this making it commercial? It is. When you look at this thing holistically, does it serve the purpose that the law is meant to serve? And that's not mostly how courts work. But I think if you are considering this from a larger kind of philosophical sense, that is interesting and worth considering.

[Nilay Patel]

Sarah and I have often crashed out because we both started as like copyright minimalist warriors in our legal careers, and we've now horseshoed, theoried around to like, copyright law is good, actually, which is crazy. So the argument that you would make from the other side, and it's a good argument, is that human beings do not need copyright law to be creative. This, this legal system that we've invented is there to create scarcity and economic value for creativity, which certainly incentivizes some people to create. But if actually, if you look around, our instinct as literal human beings every day is to create, we will do it for free. People wake up every morning and they have access to creative tools on their computers and they cannot help themselves. Like, it is just our most essential human nature is to make stuff. And that's in real tension here, right? Like, it. It's hard to square the court saying we have to preserve the essential nature of copyright law so that there will be creativity. And then literally those judges go home and they open the Instagram app on their phone and it's just like the most free creativity that has ever existed in the history of humanity.

[David Pierce]

I mean, somebody at Andreessen Horowitz is going to play that clip that you just said for everyone who works there.

[Nilay Patel]

That's the crash.

[David Pierce]

That's the. I mean, that is the argument that these companies make in favor of all of this is that, no, we're not diminishing anything because everybody would do it for free, right?

[Nilay Patel]

And then they, they make that argument from their yachts.

[Addie Robertson]

I will make the counterargument to this, which is that while people will create, a lot of the purpose of creativity is to share that thing with other people. And if AI creates a situation in which it is virtually impossible to distribute your work or to get anyone to see your made work, I think that you can say that is really meaningfully chilling creativity. The problem is that I don't think copyright law as it stands can solve this. There's this really bizarre tension in the meta opinion where, okay, if you take its premise as True. That this will completely destroy the market for books. Then the only thing copyright law can do is say, okay, well some people have to get a few dollars a month as residuals for this to create this entire creativity killing database. Really the only way that you can take this argument as true is to assume that also copyright law is going to be powerless to change it.

[Nilay Patel]

It might be. I mean we. Oh, one outcome of all these cases is they hit the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court says fine, training is fair to use. Maybe that's an outcome. I think it is much more likely that as these cases careen towards that risk because no one knows how that will go, that actually the incredibly well moneyed interests here will go get a law. Right. That Disney and OpenAI and Google, all of these companies have to deal with each other. That Nashville is a powerful economic force in copyright law.

[Addie Robertson]

Where does that leave the next generation of artists though? Because the way that I see that gaming out is yeah, all the record labels that currently have artists sell a bunch of data to companies and then companies create this database and they train on it and they train a bunch of, I don't know, music apps and apps for writing romance novels and all of that. And then they create training data based on that. That then they sort of cycle into their system over and over, which is what they're trying to do right now. And then at that point, where does the next generation get paid? I don't know that there's actually a way that happens. Especially if there is this situation where say AI generated content floods everything thing.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, I don't know. I think that will be the heart of the negotiation fundamentally, especially because private equity is in the mix. The creative industry is not clean, it's not pure. It's a lot of essentially banks now. And so private equity companies have bought Bruce Springsteen's entire catalog for $500 million. They're not going to take a one time training payment for that. They bought that because they think they can exploit that music for years to come in various ways.

[Addie Robertson]

I don't know. I just think that's not actually satisfying because that means Bruce Springsteen has a steady string of income, but that there is no market for the next person.

[Nilay Patel]

No, Bruce Springsteen got his one time payment. I mean this is why it's particularly gross. Bruce Springsteen has half a billion.

[Addie Robertson]

Yeah, okay. Yes, fair.

[Nilay Patel]

It's the private equity company that made the investment is going to want a return over time. And that return over time is the thing that ideally makes any new work also valuable. And that's tough. I don't know how any of that plays out, especially because I don't think this gets litigated. I don't think this get solved at the level of Supreme Court. I think Congress has to write a law in that you can already see how messy that will be. And the battle lines of that law, as these court cases wind ever forward, are literally the huge entertainment companies that basically own this kind of lobbying. This is what they do, and they're very, very good at it. Going up against Disney to walk back copyright law is not historically a successful effort. Going up against Nashville in the music industry to walk back copyright law not historically a successful effort. And in fact, some of the only AI related laws we have are like the Elvis act in Tennessee that prevents people from making AI Elvis impersonators.

[David Pierce]

Well, and things like the Disney one seem more sort of viscerally straightforward in that you can just go to mid journey and be like, show me Simpsons and it'll just do the Simpsons for you. In a way that I think things like these cases are a little just feel more abstract because it's like something goes in black box, something else comes out in that one. It's just something goes in and then that same something comes out for free and you can do whatever you want with it. And I feel like that we're just going to look at that differently whether we should or not. It feels different.

[Nilay Patel]

Oh, the pictures always win.

[Addie Robertson]

Yeah, legally different media are also different. Like you can quote a bunch of a book, but if you want to sample three seconds of a song, you're on much shakier territory.

[Nilay Patel]

I would actually chalk that up to the fact that the record labels in Hollywood are better at this than the book publishing industry fair. The news media is not great at this historically and those industries are really, really good at it. And part of it is, to David's point, you have a more visceral emotional reaction to that picture is the same and that song is the same. They are good at fighting these fights. So my suspicion here, Addy, might not be satisfying is that you get to some solution where there's still value for the individual song, there's still value for the individual video. It might be less than before and there might be more supply which will crash that value because there's only so many people and only so many minutes to consume songs and videos in the day. But I don't think you get to a place where this set of artists gets paid once and no future artists get paid because that will kill these businesses. And they're not existentially stupid. They can be stupid. They're not existentially stupid.

[Addie Robertson]

My really dark take is that the reason Disney is suing midjourney is because Disney is about to use all of its IP to generate infinite Star wars forever. So I don't know. I think we're just shifting the people who are going to be making these things and flooding the market.

[Nilay Patel]

Disney learns Wrong Lesson from Andor is a real headline.

[Jake Castronakis]

You can.

[Nilay Patel]

It's right there for you. We need to take a break. We'll be right back.

[David Pierce]

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Unleash White Claw Surge. Please drink responsibly. Hard seltzer with flavors, 8% alcohol by volume. White Claw Seltzer works Chicago, Illinois. We're back. The Lightning round, which David says has to be two minutes long.

[David Pierce]

Two minute lightning round because we just

[Nilay Patel]

spent an hour crashing out about copyright law.

[David Pierce]

So let's talk about Brendan Carr for 45 minutes.

[Nilay Patel]

America's Favorite Podcast within podcast, by the way. Lightning Round unsponsored. If you if we're in a Tesla and it crashes, we will point out that it crashes. I'm just saying you can't buy us. I've noticed a lot of people have started posting on various social platforms at me that you can't tell us what to do. That's All I've ever wanted from the lightning round is unsponsored labor, is people reminding everyone that you can't actually tell us what to do and you can't buy us.

[David Pierce]

I think when you die, I'm going to write you can't tell me what to do on your tombstone. And it's going to feel. It's going to feel right.

[Nilay Patel]

It is the animating thesis of the Verge. Talk that and figuring out what's going on with the frame tv. Okay, Brandon Car is a dummy. America's favorite podcast. In the podcast, it's time this. Oh, this is a short one because he did something dumb. But it's like predictably done. Like he did the dumb thing that Republican commissioners always do at the fcc. So a couple of things happened. One, everyone left the fcc, presumably because Brendan is so unpleasant to work for.

[David Pierce]

Does Anna Gomez still work there? I haven't checked on this in a minute.

[Nilay Patel]

She still works there. She is not yet fired by Donald Trump, the only Democratic commissioner on the fcc. And she literally will tell you she does not know why she has not been fired. And she's on tour saying Brandon is a bad guy who's violating the First Amendment. Wild stuff over there. So there were just the two of them, which is not a quorum for the FCC to do its business. Nathan Symington, who left the fcc, wanted this guy Gavin Wax to be appointed. He didn't get it. This woman named Olivia Trustee is the new Republican commissioner of the sec. She was confirmed by the Senate. She has a long history with everyone. There were statements about her life like we would confirm her in a normal time because that's. She's a Republican commissioner. Republican presidents get Republican commissioners, but Brendan is such a weird threat to free speech that we're opposing her nomination. That's. That's where Brennan has taken this organization. This. This woman who would have sailed through a normal times was opposed by various Democrats and various free groups. And literally they're saying she's fine, but Brendan sucks. So we're.

[David Pierce]

We can't let Brendan do anything.

[Nilay Patel]

You can't. You can't let him have another vote. She got through party on vote. So it goes immediately. Immediately Brendan moves to open comment on letting companies own more broadcast stations. So we have this concept in the United States called media ownership rules that say big companies can't own all the TV stations for a variety of reasons. First, you just want your local media to have a relationship to you. Right? The TV stations and newspapers and radio stations that serve your area should have some skin in the game where you live, right? They should be responsive to their local communities. And this is like deep in the law and the policy where you want the local media to be local. You don't want national media to ignore your concerns and do all this other stuff. This has waxed and waned over the years, but you can kind of feel it, right? If you go on social media, there are not local media ownership rules. They're not rules that your algorithm has to show you what's happening in your community. Everything is just national culture war all the time. Because that's what plays in social media.

[David Pierce]

Weird.

[Nilay Patel]

It's a weird outcome. So we have these rules from ages ago that say, you know, big companies can't just buy all the TV stations and national program. They have to be locally owned. And then we have this other rule that says you can't. There's a percentage, right? The same company can't own all the stations in your town. The same company can't own all the stations and all the radio stations, all these favored. So you have all these media ownership rules. Brendan thinks they're dumb. He thinks we should open it up and let everybody on everything. And his argument is it's not smart that these companies have to compete with the Internet, so we should let them own everything so they can get big enough to compete with Google and Facebook. And the problem there, of course, is when you open the social media apps on your phone, you are not subjected to local news. You're subject to national culture war, which is the exact reason the policy exists. Brendan, everybody, he's just like, just walked into the literal opposite of the reason for the rule we should make. We should make everything. National culture war so that local news can compete with Google is not the right answer at all.

[David Pierce]

Make local news do. National culture war is what we're after now.

[Nilay Patel]

That's our boy, Brendan. So that's Brendan. He's a dummy as always. Brendan, if you can defend any of this, you're welcome on the show. I'd love to have you. It's been a minute since I've issued this threatening invitation to you and I'm issuing it again. You're welcome. I'm decoder on the vergecast. We've only got weeks to go. David, I believe this is your last show before.

[David Pierce]

Baby, this is my last Friday show. I will be on Tuesday's show, which, due to the magic of technology, we have already recorded.

[Nilay Patel]

This cake is already baked.

[David Pierce]

Exactly. But yeah, this is the last one. I'll be on for a couple of months.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. And then I, I'm weeks away here as well. So our children are coming and. Brendan, we will let our children interview you. I think they can take you, buddy.

[David Pierce]

That's a good idea.

[Nilay Patel]

I mean, Max can take me, so. Yeah, I think she can, she can definitely take Brendan. But you're, you're, you're, you're invited anytime you want. You got a couple weeks to go. I'll come back special just for you. Brendan, I do have. By the way, it's going to be

[David Pierce]

so great when Jake interviews Brendan while we're out.

[Nilay Patel]

I think Jake can take Brendon too. I'm not worried about it in the slightest. Just a little bonus round. Not the episode. The fcc, the Federal Trade Commission did some dumb this week. They are allowing Omnicom, which is a big ad agency, to buy another big ad agency. But they're issuing a consent decree that says they're not allowed to, to, like, keep ads off of X, basically. So they, they're literally stepping into the free market and saying you have to spend money on platforms where you disagree with political views and then we'll let your merger go. What kind of free market is that? Where the government is like, we will let you merge, but you are not allowed to choose how you spend your money.

[David Pierce]

You are required to advertise on objectionable content. Is such a funny thing for the government to require.

[Jake Castronakis]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

The advertisers, by the way, the clients are allowed to still make their decisions. But the ad agencies, which fundamentally what the ad agencies do is help people spend their ad dollars, they are not allowed to make those decisions. Decisions. Perfect. I can't imagine how that will ever get. How will anyone get around this, this incredible rule?

[David Pierce]

So they're like, here's, here's the people, here's the Nazis.

[Nilay Patel]

And then just another, another one. Just to throw it out there, Paramount is being sued by Trump for the CBS interview. You know about this, where he says the Kamala Harris interview was deceptively edited. Blah, blah, blah. There's some mediator that's proposed some settlement, $20 billion. And it's held up because Paramount executives and their lawyers cannot figure out how to pay this money without being on the hook for bribery charges because it's just bribery. This is a real problem. If you don't believe me, you can read the notoriously leftist Wall Street Journal editorial board saying, don't do this, Paramount. Just fight and win this lawsuit. Yeah. When Rupert Murdoch is like, don't be an idiot. Like, go win Your First Amendment argument. And he agrees with. I'm just letting you know. All right, that's politics for today. Don't do bribery. Brendan's an idiot. Got it all in my system. David, do you have a palate cleanser?

[Jake Castronakis]

Jake?

[David Pierce]

Let's do. Let's do one each before we get out of here. What do you have?

[Jake Castronakis]

I am super excited about this one. Have you guys ever looked at your TV and thought, not enough pixels here?

[David Pierce]

I can tell you for ne. The answer is constantly, every day.

[Jake Castronakis]

The answer is always, every single time. You think this isn't enough. Guys, we're going to 16k. It's happening. The HDMI 2.2 spec is out. Now, there are some drawbacks and I know this is gonna be a hard one for the gamers out there. It's only 60 hertz, so I know nobody's gonna want this just yet, right?

[David Pierce]

How is this gonna look on Braviacore?

[Jake Castronakis]

That's all I wanna know until we can get 16 120. You know, it's not for me, but the HDMI forum is on top of it. They're weirdly ahead of the curve here. I do not know what the current demand is for support for 16k 60hz video. I'm not sure how much of that exists. I don't know where I would get it. The YouTubers aren't yelling at us to film in it yet.

[Nilay Patel]

I love, by the way, that they've only revved it to 2.2. Right? Because we're at HDMI 2.1 right now, right?

[Jake Castronakis]

Yes.

[Nilay Patel]

16120 is only worth 0.1. They've only revved it to HDMI 2.2 to get to 16 120. 16K 120. Like, what is it going to take you guys?

[David Pierce]

32K, 360, HDMI 3.

[Nilay Patel]

This is. This is the goal. We got to go to the HDMI forum headquarters and just yell numbers at them until they concede that it's time to rev the main version number.

[David Pierce]

I love this. This is. I'm. I'm all in. I'm really excited to buy a bunch of expensive HDMI cables and connect them to my $342 inch TCL Roku DV.

[Jake Castronakis]

This is what is most important. As soon as these cables are available, I don't care if you're still running 1080p, any HDMI cable you buy from here on out has better be a 16k cable. Because one day you're gonna wanna change out your Xbox and it's Gonna be too hard to get to. You're gonna need to make sure you have that 16k support, just in case

[David Pierce]

my $19 Roku Express is gonna look

[Jake Castronakis]

sick now it's gonna rule.

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

Okay. So Andreasewski wrote this story for us. Every paragraph of the story is great. Great, because Andrew is a great gadget writer, and he wrote it very dryly. And if you just read it on its face, this is the work of people who have no connection to reality. So those cables that you're talking about are now officially called HDMI 2.2 ultra 96 cables.

[David Pierce]

Sick.

[Nilay Patel]

Sure. There's a new standard they support called the Latency Indication Protocol, or lip.

[David Pierce]

That's a sick band name, by the way. The Latency Indication Protocol is like a swing band that needs to exist.

[Nilay Patel]

Why is it called lip? Because it matches up the audio and the video. So the audio matches the lips.

[David Pierce]

Oh, that's good.

[Nilay Patel]

It's good stuff.

[Jake Castronakis]

And some might even say somewhat more important than 16k having your audio sync to your video. HDMI 2.2, mostly here on the Vergecast,

[David Pierce]

we love a good backronym, so I will take it. I'm all in.

[Nilay Patel]

I'm just saying. It's a new top end. Ultra 96 is the new top end. You get high speed, premium high speed, and ultra high speed. And now ultra 96. I'm happy. All right, what do you got, David?

[David Pierce]

Microsoft is killing the blue screen of death. Finally, after 40 years, when your computer explodes, it will no longer show the blue screen of death. It will show the black screen of death. Microsoft is redesigning it. A thing that I learned this week, thanks to a story Tom Warren wrote for The Verge in 2014, was that Steve Ballmer wrote the text of the blue screen of Death message. No way. Because he didn't. Like, he got the blue screen of death, and he thought the wording didn't seem right for when it was going wrong. So the Windows team challenged him to go do a better job, and he did. He wrote the blue screen of Death message, which is wonderful, but now they're changing it to something much less fun and interesting. It just now says, your device ran into a problem and needs to restart. And then at the bottom, it actually shows you the code of what went wrong, which is vastly more useful than what the blue screen of death did, but it's much less fun. And the black screen of death just doesn't roll off the tongue the same way. And I will be very sad to not have my computer just randomly run up this thing.

[Nilay Patel]

You still get to use the acronym, right? It's still the bsod.

[David Pierce]

It's still the bsod, which I assume was intentional, but, like, why just.

[Jake Castronakis]

This is a tragedy.

[David Pierce]

I agree.

[Jake Castronakis]

There's no other way of looking at this.

[David Pierce]

This is like a canonical thing in technology. Everybody knew what the blue screen of death was, and now it's, oh, they're

[Nilay Patel]

getting rid of the sad face. Yeah, dude, I thought they were just changing it from blue to black. No, this should have been the whole show. Sad.

[David Pierce]

This is what I'm saying. It's devastating.

[Nilay Patel]

It's very bad. I mean, it was supposed to be a bad.

[David Pierce]

Used to feel bad for you and now it's like. Do either of you ever watch the Office?

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

Do you know the scene where it's Kelly's birthday and Dwight just puts up a sign that says, it is your birthday? That's the black screen of death. Now. It just says, your device ran into a problem and needs to restart. Your computer used to feel bad for you. It was like, I'm sorry, I blew it and I'm going to fix it now. And now your computer's just like, well, I'm dead.

[Nilay Patel]

In other great moments of sort of dead ahead. Tech writing that Reid is very funny. Tom wrote the story and he wrote it. It's very. Again, it's very dead ahead. It's got some good quotes. The whole thing did great reporting. The last line dead ahead. The changes to the blue screen of death are part of the broader effort by Microsoft to improve the resiliency of Windows in the wake of last year's CrowdStrike incident, which left millions of Windows machines booting to the blue screen of death. And it's like, oh, part of that effort was making the screens black.

[David Pierce]

Do you think it's so that if you see a lot of them all at once, it's not as obvious that they've broken.

[Nilay Patel]

That's what I'm saying. Yeah, right.

[David Pierce]

You can, like, look over a room full of them and they don't all. It's not. It doesn't immediately scream, we're all destroyed.

[Nilay Patel]

It's like how Tiffany has the trademark on its Pantone Blue. You see the blue screen of death. You're like, that Windows PC has crashed and now it's just a black screen. You're like, maybe that's Linux. Like, it's the wrong thing to have a trademark on.

[David Pierce]

Own your shame, Microsoft.

[Nilay Patel]

That's the Vergecast, everybody. Own your shame. We'll see you next week.

[Addie Robertson]

Week.

[Nilay Patel]

Rock and roll. And that's it for the Verge cast this week. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-Verge 11 the Verge cast is a production of the Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Will Poore, Eric Gomez and Brandon Kieffer. And that's it. We'll see you. New Year, New Me.

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