Off The Hook - 2020-03-11

[00:00.060 --> 00:05.920]  [SPEAKER_00]: And don't miss a chance to win free copies of rare Midnight Ravers shows.
[00:06.260 --> 00:17.180]  [SPEAKER_00]: Again, that's on Friday, March 13th, from 12 midnight to 2 a.m., only on WBAI in New York, 99.5 FM.
[00:17.600 --> 00:21.280]  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's talk music and feel the vibes.
[00:21.720 --> 00:26.340]  [SPEAKER_00]: The Midnight Ravers, where every show is a special.
[00:32.410 --> 00:35.750]  [SPEAKER_07]: And this is radio station WBAI New York.
[00:35.930 --> 00:37.430]  [SPEAKER_07]: The time is 7 o'clock.
[00:37.770 --> 00:39.770]  [SPEAKER_07]: Time once again for Off The Hook.
[00:45.000 --> 00:47.020]  [SPEAKER_11]: The telephone keeps ringing.
[00:47.280 --> 00:49.560]  [SPEAKER_11]: So I ripped it off the wall.
[00:50.460 --> 00:52.560]  [SPEAKER_11]: I cut myself while shaving.
[00:53.140 --> 00:55.040]  [SPEAKER_11]: Now I can't make a call.
[00:55.760 --> 00:57.920]  [SPEAKER_11]: We couldn't get much worse.
[01:00.610 --> 01:03.350]  [SPEAKER_11]: Bum-diddly-bum for the best expect from worst.
[01:03.930 --> 01:05.870]  [SPEAKER_11]: I hope that's understood.
[01:06.070 --> 01:06.850]  [SPEAKER_11]: Bum-diddly-bum!
[02:31.680 --> 02:35.960]  [SPEAKER_07]: And a wonderful good evening to all of you in Radio Land.
[02:35.960 --> 02:37.700]  [SPEAKER_07]: This is Off The Hook.
[02:37.860 --> 02:44.000]  [SPEAKER_07]: Emmanuel Goldstein here with you, joined tonight by a toddler on a piano.
[02:44.760 --> 02:46.480]  [SPEAKER_07]: Non-edition, we have Alex.
[02:46.760 --> 02:47.260]  [SPEAKER_06]: Good evening.
[02:48.020 --> 02:48.740]  [SPEAKER_07]: Rob T.
[02:48.860 --> 02:49.400]  [SPEAKER_07]: Firefly.
[02:49.680 --> 02:50.180]  [SPEAKER_07]: Good evening.
[02:50.340 --> 02:50.660]  [SPEAKER_07]: Gila.
[02:50.980 --> 02:51.200]  [SPEAKER_04]: Hello.
[02:51.420 --> 02:51.680]  [SPEAKER_07]: Kyle.
[02:52.020 --> 02:52.640]  [SPEAKER_07]: I'm over here.
[02:53.180 --> 02:54.560]  [SPEAKER_07]: Yes, I see you over there.
[02:55.260 --> 03:07.120]  [SPEAKER_07]: And what we're actually hearing now is, I guess the best way to describe this is a code listing, a listing of results.
[03:07.840 --> 03:09.700]  [SPEAKER_07]: Let me go into some detail here.
[03:09.820 --> 03:11.960]  [SPEAKER_07]: This is from a story in The Independent.
[03:11.960 --> 03:24.680]  [SPEAKER_07]: A musician and lawyer has used an algorithm to generate every possible melody in an attempt to end music copyright lawsuit claims.
[03:24.920 --> 03:30.740]  [SPEAKER_07]: All those, you know, copyright lawsuits that we see, this is an attempt to put an end to that already.
[03:30.740 --> 03:47.880]  [SPEAKER_07]: Working with programmer Noah Rubin, Damien Reel built software capable of generating 300,000 melodies each second, creating a catalog of 68 billion, count them, 68 billion eight-note melodies.
[03:48.680 --> 03:50.780]  [SPEAKER_07]: And we're playing them for you right now.
[03:54.120 --> 03:55.740]  [SPEAKER_07]: Oh yeah, I remember that one.
[03:56.740 --> 04:04.580]  [SPEAKER_07]: The melodies were then copyrighted and released into the public domain in the hope of stifling litigious musicians.
[04:05.840 --> 04:06.360]  [SPEAKER_07]: Wow.
[04:07.220 --> 04:11.720]  [SPEAKER_07]: Joining us on the phone right now are both Noah Rubin and Damien Reel.
[04:11.960 --> 04:12.900]  [SPEAKER_07]: Guys, you with us?
[04:13.700 --> 04:14.440]  [SPEAKER_02]: I am.
[04:14.660 --> 04:15.020]  [SPEAKER_02]: Good evening.
[04:15.280 --> 04:19.800]  [SPEAKER_07]: Does this bring back memories to you, hearing these melodies as we play them over the radio?
[04:20.200 --> 04:23.320]  [SPEAKER_02]: The one you just played was my favorite of the billions we've made.
[04:23.320 --> 04:24.580]  [SPEAKER_07]: Mine too, yeah.
[04:24.720 --> 04:28.260]  [SPEAKER_07]: It's very melancholy, but also uplifting at the same time.
[04:29.520 --> 04:33.840]  [SPEAKER_07]: So first of all, what kind of a reaction have you gotten so far to this project of yours?
[04:34.680 --> 04:37.000]  [SPEAKER_02]: The project that we anticipated would be a mixed bag.
[04:37.140 --> 04:39.860]  [SPEAKER_02]: People are really excited about it and people are very angry about it.
[04:39.940 --> 04:45.180]  [SPEAKER_02]: But I've been pleasantly surprised that it's been nearly universally positive.
[04:45.320 --> 04:48.280]  [SPEAKER_02]: People have really been supportive of the talk.
[04:48.280 --> 04:52.340]  [SPEAKER_02]: It was an article in the Independent, but I also gave a TEDx talk.
[04:53.120 --> 05:10.760]  [SPEAKER_02]: And after we described what we were trying to do to try to help songwriters not have targets on their back for songs that they may have never heard before and being accused of copying those songs, it really struck a chord, if you'll pardon the pun, with a lot of songwriters who really...
[05:10.760 --> 05:15.700]  [SPEAKER_02]: Many of them are worried, is this song new, or am I subconsciously copying somebody else?
[05:15.880 --> 05:22.460]  [SPEAKER_02]: So our project is a way to maybe give them some solace to be able to maybe not have to worry as much about getting sued.
[05:22.680 --> 05:31.020]  [SPEAKER_07]: So you believe that you have been able to capture every possible melody that's ever been recorded and every possible melody that ever could be recorded?
[05:31.840 --> 05:35.720]  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, so that's... so our point is that melodies are math.
[05:35.940 --> 05:41.680]  [SPEAKER_02]: And so we have created a very huge swap in addition to the 68 billion that you mentioned.
[05:41.840 --> 05:42.740]  [SPEAKER_02]: That's just the major scale.
[05:43.020 --> 05:45.800]  [SPEAKER_02]: We also did another 68 billion with a minor scale.
[05:45.860 --> 05:49.560]  [SPEAKER_02]: And then we did another about 65 billion for the chromatic scale.
[05:49.700 --> 05:51.580]  [SPEAKER_02]: So that's both the white notes and the black notes.
[05:51.740 --> 05:59.040]  [SPEAKER_02]: And we're currently doing another data set that isn't just a single octave, but actually goes a fifth below the tonic and a third above the tonic.
[05:59.040 --> 06:01.220]  [SPEAKER_02]: So it's about 14 different pitches.
[06:01.600 --> 06:11.080]  [SPEAKER_02]: And so to answer your question, we may not have gotten every single melody that had ever existed or ever can exist, but getting there is just math.
[06:11.240 --> 06:15.600]  [SPEAKER_02]: It's just change the permutations, change the parameters, and you get every single one.
[06:15.720 --> 06:20.100]  [SPEAKER_07]: Now, you mentioned that there are people who are very happy, but you also mentioned there are people who are very angry.
[06:20.280 --> 06:21.620]  [SPEAKER_07]: Tell me something about those people.
[06:22.620 --> 06:26.700]  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, some people, I think the anger is a bit misplaced.
[06:26.700 --> 06:32.340]  [SPEAKER_02]: They think that we... and, you know, we haven't talked much about the law side of this, but we are asserting copyright.
[06:32.600 --> 06:33.980]  [SPEAKER_02]: We're asserting two claims.
[06:34.400 --> 06:42.940]  [SPEAKER_02]: Claim number one is we have copyright on every single melody, and we've placed every one of those copyrighted works into the public domain, so anybody can use it.
[06:43.260 --> 06:44.640]  [SPEAKER_02]: So that's claim number one.
[06:44.840 --> 06:51.860]  [SPEAKER_02]: Claim number two is that if we do not get copyright in every single melody, then all of these melodies are public domain anyway.
[06:52.980 --> 07:00.480]  [SPEAKER_02]: So really that either, number one, we get copyright and we place it in the public domain, or thing number two, nobody gets copyright and it's in the public domain.
[07:00.680 --> 07:10.000]  [SPEAKER_02]: So the people who have been critical of our work have largely misunderstood those two components and thinking that we're trying to be copyright trolls taking over the world.
[07:10.140 --> 07:11.780]  [SPEAKER_02]: We're absolutely... actually the opposite is true.
[07:11.920 --> 07:13.940]  [SPEAKER_02]: We want to be able to free these melodies for people to use.
[07:13.940 --> 07:29.780]  [SPEAKER_06]: You know, that's an interesting point that you make too, because having generated all these different permutations, 68 billion or so permutations, and then another 68 billion or so permutations, without putting them into the public domain, if you hadn't done that,
[07:29.980 --> 07:35.240]  [SPEAKER_06]: would it have been possible for you then to have become a plaintiff later on in a subsequent lawsuit?
[07:36.240 --> 07:37.180]  [SPEAKER_02]: It's a good question.
[07:37.300 --> 07:43.980]  [SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, for any copyright infringement to happen, the defendant, the person accused of stealing the melody, has to have access.
[07:44.300 --> 07:46.220]  [SPEAKER_02]: And access is a term of art in the law.
[07:46.320 --> 07:52.660]  [SPEAKER_02]: And that means that the defendant has to have heard, or at least have a likelihood of hearing, the plaintiff's work.
[07:53.000 --> 07:55.480]  [SPEAKER_02]: So in this case, you know, I suppose I could.
[07:55.640 --> 08:08.020]  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, we could put it up on a website, but we would probably lose if we tried to, because the person that made the song would say, there's no way that I've ever heard, you know, I've never gone to archive.org to listen to all the music's data set.
[08:08.140 --> 08:09.440]  [SPEAKER_02]: Therefore, I haven't infringed.
[08:09.640 --> 08:11.200]  [SPEAKER_02]: That case would probably get thrown out.
[08:11.420 --> 08:19.340]  [SPEAKER_02]: But access actually is really important to the points that we're trying to make to defend songwriters.
[08:19.740 --> 08:24.040]  [SPEAKER_02]: And the question of, did I hear that other songwriter's work or not?
[08:24.320 --> 08:30.940]  [SPEAKER_02]: If Adam made a song and Beth is accused of stealing Adam's song, did Beth hear Adam's song or not?
[08:31.240 --> 08:38.140]  [SPEAKER_02]: That's a thing that costs millions of dollars to get to trial to decide, for a jury to decide whether Beth heard Adam or not.
[08:38.140 --> 08:45.260]  [SPEAKER_02]: We're trying to keep Beth from even having to prove that, to just say, you know, hey, Adam's melody is the same as all the music's melody.
[08:45.680 --> 08:49.100]  [SPEAKER_02]: Therefore, Adam doesn't even have copyright in the thing that he's trying to sue me over.
[08:49.500 --> 09:01.280]  [SPEAKER_06]: So with respect to the access issue, is that where you get to, and I think this might have been sort of the bee in your bonnet, and perhaps why you created this, the issue of subconscious plagiarism.
[09:02.340 --> 09:03.200]  [SPEAKER_02]: That's exactly right.
[09:03.320 --> 09:09.220]  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I would encourage your listeners to Google and do my first name, Damien, last name real, and copyright.
[09:09.440 --> 09:14.180]  [SPEAKER_02]: And you'll see a TED Talk where the first five minutes are me talking about the George Harrison case.
[09:14.180 --> 09:23.520]  [SPEAKER_02]: And George Harrison was sued by the Chiffons, where George Harrison had the song, My Sweet Lord, and the Chiffons earlier had, He's So Fine.
[09:23.860 --> 09:35.280]  [SPEAKER_02]: And the judge, in that case, after trial said, George Harrison, I believe you that you don't remember hearing the Chiffons song, but what I think you did was subconsciously infringed the Chiffons.
[09:35.280 --> 09:36.240]  [SPEAKER_02]: Therefore, you lose.
[09:36.660 --> 09:38.280]  [SPEAKER_02]: And that struck me as...
[09:38.280 --> 09:46.760]  [SPEAKER_02]: That did put a bee in my bottom, as you say, because the idea of subconscious infringement goes against everything that you need, that the law requires.
[09:46.940 --> 09:54.480]  [SPEAKER_02]: In every other case, somebody suing somebody else needs to prove that the defendant had intent, or that the defendant meant to do something.
[09:54.720 --> 09:58.840]  [SPEAKER_07]: I remember that very case, too, with George Harrison.
[09:58.840 --> 10:05.720]  [SPEAKER_07]: At the end of the case, the judge said that he liked both songs, and George Harrison said, but don't you mean he liked the one song?
[10:07.380 --> 10:08.320]  [SPEAKER_02]: Right, it's true.
[10:08.500 --> 10:21.920]  [SPEAKER_02]: And as a result of that case, we now have 30, 40, 50 years of history, a case law that essentially puts the burden on the defendant, George Harrison, to prove the negative, to prove that they have never heard that other song.
[10:22.080 --> 10:23.500]  [SPEAKER_02]: And how do you ever prove a negative?
[10:23.740 --> 10:25.040]  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, in philosophy, that's impossible.
[10:25.260 --> 10:32.920]  [SPEAKER_02]: And particularly, how can I, as a songwriter, say, I've never heard this other song playing over the loudspeaker in the grocery store?
[10:33.300 --> 10:34.740]  [SPEAKER_02]: It's impossible to prove that.
[10:35.060 --> 10:36.220]  [SPEAKER_02]: Therefore, every defendant loses.
[10:36.480 --> 10:42.800]  [SPEAKER_02]: So what we're trying to do with our work is to try to keep that innocent infringer from losing in a lawsuit.
[10:43.660 --> 10:52.840]  [SPEAKER_06]: But, you know, wouldn't it be the case, though, that, you know, simply because something could be unintentionally copied doesn't mean the fact that it is, in fact, unintentionally copied.
[10:52.840 --> 11:09.300]  [SPEAKER_06]: So, in any subsequent lawsuit, we're still going to have to deal with, you know, the thorny issue of discovery, fact witnesses, and sort of, you know, figuring out, you know, what was the motivation behind the development of that particular melody that is the subject of the suit?
[11:10.280 --> 11:11.180]  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, perhaps.
[11:11.420 --> 11:13.280]  [SPEAKER_02]: And so it depends on what you're suing over.
[11:13.440 --> 11:15.220]  [SPEAKER_02]: So Adam's song and Beth's song.
[11:15.380 --> 11:19.220]  [SPEAKER_02]: What's being alleged to have taken between Adam's song and Beth's song?
[11:19.220 --> 11:23.460]  [SPEAKER_02]: And so if, what we're saying is that a song is a bunch of components.
[11:23.740 --> 11:24.840]  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, melody is one.
[11:25.140 --> 11:26.240]  [SPEAKER_02]: But it's also lyrics.
[11:26.440 --> 11:28.280]  [SPEAKER_02]: It's also the orchestration.
[11:28.600 --> 11:35.920]  [SPEAKER_02]: It's also, you know, many 10 or so different factors of which the pitch change that we're focused on is only one of those.
[11:36.420 --> 11:51.500]  [SPEAKER_02]: So really what we're trying to say is that maybe at an early stage, say the motion to dismiss stage, before people spend a lot of money on discovery, maybe there's an early evidentiary hearing where the court says the thing that Adam's alleging to have been stolen is just the change in pitch.
[11:51.720 --> 11:53.160]  [SPEAKER_02]: And that's just factual.
[11:53.620 --> 11:54.700]  [SPEAKER_02]: Therefore, the case goes away.
[11:54.960 --> 11:55.980]  [SPEAKER_02]: The case is dismissed.
[11:56.420 --> 11:56.920]  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, that's...
[11:56.920 --> 11:58.060]  [SPEAKER_02]: Then you avoid...
[11:58.060 --> 11:59.880]  [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, I find that very interesting.
[12:00.100 --> 12:01.620]  [SPEAKER_06]: And, you know, and correct me if I'm wrong.
[12:01.740 --> 12:10.600]  [SPEAKER_06]: And so, you know, this is sort of the, I guess, the syllogism, if you will, of what I've tried to figure out with respect to your project.
[12:11.040 --> 12:23.320]  [SPEAKER_06]: So if you can demonstrate that melodies are essentially numbers and math, and numbers and math have very few copyright protections, if at all, any copyright protection afforded to them.
[12:24.240 --> 12:24.640]  [SPEAKER_06]: Therefore...
[12:24.640 --> 12:27.940]  [SPEAKER_07]: I've never heard of a number being copyrighted, but I'm sure I could be proven wrong.
[12:28.040 --> 12:29.200]  [SPEAKER_06]: You probably could, yeah.
[12:29.780 --> 12:30.300]  [SPEAKER_06]: No, no, no.
[12:30.540 --> 12:34.240]  [SPEAKER_02]: Actually, yeah, there's actually, yeah, numbers are facts and are not copyrightable.
[12:34.540 --> 12:34.960]  [SPEAKER_06]: That's right.
[12:35.100 --> 12:36.040]  [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, even 2,600.
[12:36.440 --> 12:36.800]  [SPEAKER_06]: That's right.
[12:37.120 --> 12:38.040]  [SPEAKER_06]: Wait a minute.
[12:38.340 --> 12:38.660]  [SPEAKER_06]: That one...
[12:38.660 --> 12:39.080]  [SPEAKER_06]: Okay, never mind.
[12:39.080 --> 12:39.800]  [SPEAKER_06]: Well, yeah, yeah.
[12:40.000 --> 12:40.140]  [SPEAKER_06]: Go ahead.
[12:41.300 --> 12:43.040]  [SPEAKER_06]: Equal application of the law, Emmanuel.
[12:43.260 --> 12:44.820]  [SPEAKER_06]: That's what we strive towards, right?
[12:45.720 --> 12:55.980]  [SPEAKER_06]: So therefore, so again, if we start off with the fact that melodies are numbers and math, and numbers and math cannot be copyrighted, therefore music itself should not be copyrighted.
[12:56.100 --> 13:02.920]  [SPEAKER_06]: Or, you know, a weaker version of that same conclusion would be that music itself should have very few copyright protections.
[13:03.340 --> 13:04.040]  [SPEAKER_06]: Would that be correct?
[13:04.240 --> 13:10.840]  [SPEAKER_02]: I would draw a distinction and you use the word music and I use melody, which is one of the components of music.
[13:11.160 --> 13:11.340]  [SPEAKER_02]: Gotcha.
[13:11.340 --> 13:21.080]  [SPEAKER_02]: So if you think about what is music, music is melody, but it's also harmony and it's also lyrics and it's also which instruments you choose and it's also the ache of the voice when you make the song, right?
[13:21.220 --> 13:27.460]  [SPEAKER_02]: So there's all sorts of things that in combination of all those things, I think you have a copy, you know, the song is copyrightable.
[13:27.640 --> 13:31.280]  [SPEAKER_02]: The element that is not copyrightable, we're arguing, is the melody alone.
[13:31.500 --> 13:36.860]  [SPEAKER_02]: If somebody's alleged, if Adam says, hey Beth, you stole my melody, those cases should go away.
[13:36.860 --> 13:40.220]  [SPEAKER_02]: But if Adam says, hey Beth, you stole my entire song, yeah, go after Beth.
[13:40.720 --> 13:49.060]  [SPEAKER_08]: Yeah, and it's akin to like the structure of a sentence versus a particular string of recognizable or distinct words.
[13:50.620 --> 13:51.100]  [SPEAKER_02]: Exactly.
[13:51.460 --> 13:55.300]  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, everybody needs to use syntax in the way that the English language works.
[13:55.460 --> 14:02.920]  [SPEAKER_02]: And we're arguing in the same way, everybody needs, you know, everybody in the major diatonic scale needs to use the same eight notes.
[14:03.460 --> 14:06.680]  [SPEAKER_02]: There's really, there's only so many ways you could rearrange those notes.
[14:07.380 --> 14:09.580]  [SPEAKER_02]: Especially in a particular genre, say blues.
[14:10.380 --> 14:14.160]  [SPEAKER_02]: There's only so many blues chords and only so many blues melodies you can use.
[14:14.620 --> 14:17.260]  [SPEAKER_02]: And so, of course, we're going to be stepping on each other all the time.
[14:17.540 --> 14:23.780]  [SPEAKER_06]: Well, see, this raises, I think, a fascinating segue into hacker culture as well.
[14:23.880 --> 14:27.280]  [SPEAKER_06]: As you're talking about these eight note melodies, everybody is reliant on these eight note melodies.
[14:27.420 --> 14:33.160]  [SPEAKER_06]: And Emmanuel at the outset here mentioned that, you know, what you had developed were permutations of these eight note melodies.
[14:33.740 --> 14:44.640]  [SPEAKER_06]: So, it sounds to me, essentially, like what you've done is akin to something like brute forcing a password, generating every single permutation of a particular string.
[14:44.640 --> 14:47.480]  [SPEAKER_06]: In this case, they're eight note melodies and not necessarily passwords.
[14:47.680 --> 14:58.360]  [SPEAKER_06]: But there's got to be some similarities between what you did with melodies and these eight note melodies and sort of hacker culture with respect to brute forcing passwords.
[14:58.760 --> 15:00.320]  [SPEAKER_02]: I love that you said that.
[15:00.620 --> 15:06.280]  [SPEAKER_02]: And I'm going to say that that's actually the impetus of my idea is that we worked in cybersecurity, Noah and I.
[15:06.780 --> 15:09.240]  [SPEAKER_02]: And I was also a musician.
[15:09.800 --> 15:11.500]  [SPEAKER_02]: I was a music major in college.
[15:11.500 --> 15:12.480]  [SPEAKER_02]: I have a degree in music.
[15:12.520 --> 15:15.420]  [SPEAKER_02]: And I also have been coding since 1985.
[15:16.200 --> 15:23.220]  [SPEAKER_02]: So, while I was on the cybersecurity engagement, I thought, yeah, you could brute force a password saying A-A-A-B-A-C I wonder if you could do that with music.
[15:25.320 --> 15:26.920]  [SPEAKER_02]: And so that's what I did.
[15:27.020 --> 15:27.680]  [SPEAKER_02]: I went to Noah.
[15:27.680 --> 15:31.860]  [SPEAKER_02]: We were actually on a cybersecurity engagement on-site at a client's location.
[15:32.020 --> 15:34.160]  [SPEAKER_02]: And I said, Noah, do you think we could be able to do that?
[15:34.460 --> 15:39.560]  [SPEAKER_02]: And as I recall it, Noah said, yeah, I think that's an interesting problem.
[15:39.840 --> 15:48.000]  [SPEAKER_02]: And with that, it's now I'm now leaving Washington, D.C., because the mayor has declared a state of emergency, so I need to jump on a plane right now.
[15:48.280 --> 15:54.780]  [SPEAKER_02]: But Noah, you're going to have a great conversation with Noah about the way that he programmed this, and the implications.
[15:55.120 --> 16:04.340]  [SPEAKER_02]: He has great stories to tell, and for your listeners, he's probably the best programmer I've ever worked with, so you're going to love hearing about how he did this.
[16:04.740 --> 16:09.640]  [SPEAKER_07]: All right, well, Damien, thank you so much for talking with us, and have a safe flight, and try not to breathe too deeply.
[16:10.900 --> 16:11.780]  [SPEAKER_02]: Thank you very much.
[16:11.980 --> 16:12.500]  [SPEAKER_02]: Take care, everyone.
[16:12.740 --> 16:15.260]  [SPEAKER_07]: All right, and that's Damien Reel.
[16:15.380 --> 16:19.080]  [SPEAKER_07]: He is the musician and lawyer who helped put all this together.
[16:19.080 --> 16:23.040]  [SPEAKER_07]: We still have Noah Rubin with us, who programmed this whole thing.
[16:23.300 --> 16:24.120]  [SPEAKER_07]: Noah, are you still there?
[16:25.340 --> 16:25.520]  [SPEAKER_09]: Yep.
[16:25.940 --> 16:26.200]  [SPEAKER_07]: Great.
[16:27.180 --> 16:34.940]  [SPEAKER_07]: So, what was involved in actually having a computer or computers do all this?
[16:36.460 --> 16:37.440]  [SPEAKER_03]: That's a good question.
[16:37.600 --> 16:39.760]  [SPEAKER_03]: So, we went through a number of different iterations.
[16:40.100 --> 16:48.040]  [SPEAKER_03]: The first proof of concept we put together in about a couple hours, but we quickly realized there are a number of hurdles.
[16:48.700 --> 16:56.820]  [SPEAKER_03]: So, MIDI has 129 pitches, and for those that don't know, MIDI is the format for soaring music.
[16:57.860 --> 17:02.300]  [SPEAKER_03]: And so, the piano has 88, but MIDI has 129.
[17:02.740 --> 17:11.420]  [SPEAKER_03]: And we quickly realized that if we wanted to exhaust all 129 pitches, it was going to take too long for the compute infrastructure that we had.
[17:11.420 --> 17:21.200]  [SPEAKER_03]: So, we went through a process of deciding which melodies were common and were a good representation of the types of melodies that you would hear in music today.
[17:21.480 --> 17:27.160]  [SPEAKER_03]: And that's how we arrived at the 68.719 billion that we actually generated at first.
[17:28.380 --> 17:39.180]  [SPEAKER_03]: There's also sort of an interesting problem for trying to store billions of individual files, not something that I think anyone encounters on any given day.
[17:40.040 --> 17:45.760]  [SPEAKER_03]: But it turns out that most computers don't like storing a whole bunch of individual files like that.
[17:45.760 --> 17:49.640]  [SPEAKER_03]: So, we had to come up with a storage mechanism that could handle that as well.
[17:50.880 --> 17:57.480]  [SPEAKER_03]: But once we got over those initial hurdles, it was released a matter of hitting go and watching it run for a little over five days, I think.
[17:58.140 --> 18:05.260]  [SPEAKER_04]: So, that massive 600-gigabyte file, there are two of them right now that you can access off of your website.
[18:05.260 --> 18:08.760]  [SPEAKER_04]: And I'm assuming one is the major and one is the minor?
[18:10.140 --> 18:11.040]  [SPEAKER_03]: That's a good question.
[18:11.180 --> 18:13.180]  [SPEAKER_04]: Because it was going to take 12 days to download, so I couldn't get there.
[18:14.180 --> 18:14.620]  [SPEAKER_03]: Right.
[18:14.780 --> 18:19.420]  [SPEAKER_03]: You have Comcast to thank for the fact that we haven't uploaded all of them to archive.org yet.
[18:20.780 --> 18:31.240]  [SPEAKER_03]: In short, I cannot transfer more than a terabyte of data from my house in any given month without Comcast yelling at me and charging me more money.
[18:31.240 --> 18:33.040]  [SPEAKER_03]: So, it is a work in progress.
[18:33.500 --> 18:34.900]  [SPEAKER_03]: We are uploading more when we can.
[18:36.180 --> 18:36.740]  [SPEAKER_07]: Wow.
[18:36.740 --> 18:42.200]  [SPEAKER_07]: How long did it take from the beginning of the project to actually announcing it?
[18:44.020 --> 18:45.000]  [SPEAKER_03]: That's a good question.
[18:45.340 --> 18:49.720]  [SPEAKER_03]: So, Damien's TED Talk was on August 10th of last year.
[18:50.000 --> 18:52.880]  [SPEAKER_03]: I think we started talking about this in June.
[18:54.040 --> 19:04.260]  [SPEAKER_03]: But from start to finish, the final code that we used was about a month or a month and a half from start to finish.
[19:05.660 --> 19:11.540]  [SPEAKER_07]: That's not too long, but it's a good project.
[19:11.720 --> 19:13.080]  [SPEAKER_07]: It's an amazing accomplishment.
[19:13.080 --> 19:14.020]  [SPEAKER_08]: I have a question.
[19:14.320 --> 19:19.000]  [SPEAKER_08]: What was the solution to being able to handle the volume of MIDI files?
[19:19.120 --> 19:21.340]  [SPEAKER_08]: I believe it was MIDI files that were created.
[19:21.680 --> 19:22.740]  [SPEAKER_08]: How did you get around that?
[19:22.840 --> 19:25.480]  [SPEAKER_08]: Or what kind of file structure or system did you choose?
[19:26.620 --> 19:27.680]  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, that's a good question.
[19:27.940 --> 19:32.960]  [SPEAKER_03]: So, our initial attempt was to use a file system called XFS.
[19:33.720 --> 19:40.440]  [SPEAKER_03]: Which, you know, if you use a Windows computer today, the file system that Windows computers use is NTFS.
[19:40.980 --> 19:49.960]  [SPEAKER_03]: And because of the way that NTFS stores data on the file system, we can only have at most 4 billion files or directories.
[19:50.320 --> 19:51.400]  [SPEAKER_07]: Wow, that's good to know.
[19:52.380 --> 19:52.940]  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[19:53.400 --> 19:55.540]  [SPEAKER_03]: So, it's just 2 to the 32.
[19:55.780 --> 19:56.480]  [SPEAKER_03]: That's how we get there.
[19:57.160 --> 20:03.920]  [SPEAKER_03]: So, with XFS, you can have 2 to 64, theoretically, which is orders of magnitude larger.
[20:04.520 --> 20:12.860]  [SPEAKER_03]: And we tried that, but it turns out that most computers don't like to store more than around 4,000 files for each directory.
[20:13.440 --> 20:22.770]  [SPEAKER_03]: And so, after a number of iterations, what we came up with was we separate a MIDI file into batches.
[20:22.770 --> 20:27.270]  [SPEAKER_03]: So, a batch could be, let's say, 22 to 25 MIDI files.
[20:27.650 --> 20:29.890]  [SPEAKER_03]: And we compress each batch.
[20:30.950 --> 20:36.370]  [SPEAKER_03]: And then we store all batches inside of a single file, like an archive.
[20:36.690 --> 20:38.150]  [SPEAKER_03]: It's called a TAR file.
[20:38.590 --> 20:44.070]  [SPEAKER_03]: So, all of the output is actually in a single file on the file system.
[20:45.550 --> 20:46.510]  [SPEAKER_08]: That's incredible.
[20:46.650 --> 20:50.650]  [SPEAKER_08]: That's a great description of what exactly is being shared.
[20:51.610 --> 20:59.550]  [SPEAKER_06]: And so, Noah, one question about, you know, how you went about this is, you know, in what language did you wind up writing the code to generate all of these permutations?
[21:01.110 --> 21:02.170]  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I'm glad you asked.
[21:02.290 --> 21:05.930]  [SPEAKER_03]: Most people don't want to know all the technical nuance, but I'm glad someone's interested.
[21:07.390 --> 21:09.690]  [SPEAKER_03]: So, our prototype was in Python.
[21:10.290 --> 21:14.210]  [SPEAKER_03]: For those of you who are familiar with that, probably one of the more popular programming languages.
[21:15.230 --> 21:21.350]  [SPEAKER_03]: But we encountered a few issues, mostly because Python doesn't allow you to run...
[21:22.330 --> 21:25.670]  [SPEAKER_03]: Excuse me for getting a bit technical here, but...
[21:25.670 --> 21:29.870]  [SPEAKER_03]: Python doesn't allow you to run multiple threads within the same process.
[21:30.710 --> 21:32.710]  [SPEAKER_03]: If you've heard of, like, multi-threading before.
[21:33.070 --> 21:35.370]  [SPEAKER_03]: You actually have to run multiple processes.
[21:35.370 --> 21:44.370]  [SPEAKER_03]: And we were encountering bottlenecks just because Python is slower than some other languages, but also some memory leaks.
[21:44.590 --> 21:54.430]  [SPEAKER_03]: And so, it got to the point where the first time we really tried to do this, the server memory filled up in about three hours and it crashed the server.
[21:54.830 --> 21:55.270]  [SPEAKER_02]: Wow.
[21:55.270 --> 21:58.510]  [SPEAKER_03]: So, we switched to a language called Rust.
[21:59.130 --> 22:05.050]  [SPEAKER_03]: Those that are familiar, it's a newer language, kind of like C, a little bit, or C++.
[22:06.450 --> 22:12.850]  [SPEAKER_03]: And so, Rust allowed us to have better memory management, and it was also much faster.
[22:13.130 --> 22:17.710]  [SPEAKER_03]: So, the solution we have now and are continuously improving is written in Rust.
[22:18.930 --> 22:20.590]  [SPEAKER_06]: I mean, that's fascinating.
[22:20.730 --> 22:23.450]  [SPEAKER_06]: It's interesting to hear that Python had these limitations.
[22:23.450 --> 22:28.750]  [SPEAKER_06]: You know, could that have been solved by just adding more RAM to the machine, you know, with respect to the memory leaks?
[22:28.910 --> 22:33.030]  [SPEAKER_06]: Or, you know, this was something that we were going to encounter over and over and over again with Python?
[22:34.570 --> 22:37.190]  [SPEAKER_03]: It is not necessarily a Python issue.
[22:37.370 --> 22:40.650]  [SPEAKER_03]: I don't want to blame Python, and I personally have a deep love for Python.
[22:40.810 --> 22:42.710]  [SPEAKER_03]: So, I don't want to put it on blast.
[22:45.090 --> 22:49.210]  [SPEAKER_03]: Our quickest solution was to use a different program.
[22:49.210 --> 22:55.130]  [SPEAKER_03]: I find debugging memory errors in Python a bit difficult, which is a Python issue.
[22:56.130 --> 23:05.810]  [SPEAKER_03]: A lot of the, like, scientific computing that people do in Python that is very fast is actually running C under the hood.
[23:06.530 --> 23:13.130]  [SPEAKER_03]: And so, our thought was, let's just use a systems programming language that we know is fast, and then we can manage memory.
[23:14.150 --> 23:15.490]  [SPEAKER_06]: I mean, that's fascinating.
[23:15.670 --> 23:20.310]  [SPEAKER_06]: And, you know, you sound like somebody who's been programming for a while, so you had a lot of familiarity with C.
[23:20.430 --> 23:22.310]  [SPEAKER_06]: It sounded like it wasn't a difficult transition.
[23:23.170 --> 23:26.730]  [SPEAKER_06]: One of the other questions I had, and I guess this might have been, you know, for Damien as well.
[23:26.750 --> 23:29.130]  [SPEAKER_06]: I know I had to catch a plane, but you were probably privy to this as well.
[23:29.130 --> 23:40.490]  [SPEAKER_06]: I'm wondering if any defendants have reached out to you guys yet, and asked for your assistance in defense of a copyright claim, copyright infringement claim.
[23:40.530 --> 23:40.670]  [SPEAKER_06]: Yes.
[23:41.350 --> 23:42.830]  [SPEAKER_03]: That's a really great question.
[23:43.150 --> 23:49.030]  [SPEAKER_03]: The short answer is, I'm not privy to anyone reaching out, but that's something that we're actively working on.
[23:50.030 --> 23:59.830]  [SPEAKER_03]: We had an interview, I think, last week or a couple of weeks ago, where someone asked, you know, are you posing as, are you giving expert testimony?
[24:00.350 --> 24:04.710]  [SPEAKER_03]: And the answer was, well, no, but that's actually a really great idea, and we should definitely do that.
[24:05.270 --> 24:09.130]  [SPEAKER_03]: So my hope is that someone in the near future does reach out and we can try to help them.
[24:09.670 --> 24:11.370]  [SPEAKER_06]: Well, I think that's great.
[24:11.370 --> 24:13.950]  [SPEAKER_06]: It sounds like you guys would be wonderful expert witnesses.
[24:13.950 --> 24:20.710]  [SPEAKER_06]: And, you know, on the defense side, when it comes to a copyright infringement claim for a melody or a piece of music or something like that.
[24:20.830 --> 24:25.010]  [SPEAKER_06]: And, you know, we are definitely going to do what we can to get the word out.
[24:25.270 --> 24:27.170]  [SPEAKER_06]: And, you know, nobody's perfect.
[24:27.290 --> 24:28.110]  [SPEAKER_06]: I'm a lawyer as well.
[24:28.310 --> 24:30.350]  [SPEAKER_06]: So, obviously, stay in touch with me.
[24:30.370 --> 24:33.850]  [SPEAKER_06]: And if there's ever a matter that comes up, we'll be in touch with you.
[24:34.250 --> 24:44.150]  [SPEAKER_04]: I was actually curious, Noah, have you guys gotten, do you have a sense if you're getting more traction from, like, musicians or from people who are just, like, interested in the programming side of it, from both?
[24:44.930 --> 24:46.830]  [SPEAKER_04]: Is there... do you have a sense of that kind of traction?
[24:48.230 --> 24:48.670]  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[24:48.870 --> 25:05.170]  [SPEAKER_03]: So, it may be a bit biased because, you know, Damien is doing a lot of the outreach, but I can tell you that we have had less of an interest from people who are interested in the programming than the larger implications for music copyright, which, you know,
[25:05.170 --> 25:05.530]  [SPEAKER_03]: I'm biased.
[25:05.650 --> 25:12.670]  [SPEAKER_03]: I like the technical side of this, but the larger societal implications or implications for music copyright are honestly more important.
[25:13.050 --> 25:16.850]  [SPEAKER_03]: And so, I'm glad that we've had more interest in that side of it.
[25:17.130 --> 25:33.670]  [SPEAKER_03]: That being said, we've had a number of people reach out that are either working on, let's say, like, a master's thesis or are working on this in their free time and either have computing resources that they want to offer or need help writing the code for whatever they're trying to accomplish.
[25:33.670 --> 25:37.230]  [SPEAKER_03]: And so, I'm personally very excited about those opportunities.
[25:38.150 --> 25:47.310]  [SPEAKER_03]: Somebody actually reached out recently that they're having a hackathon, which, for those unfamiliar, it's just like an event where people get together and write software in a short period of time.
[25:48.070 --> 25:53.830]  [SPEAKER_03]: Someone wants to work on a project related to generating melodies during the hackathon.
[25:54.130 --> 25:56.970]  [SPEAKER_03]: And so, that's something that, again, I'm really excited about.
[25:59.450 --> 26:04.930]  [SPEAKER_03]: But something that Damien likes to say at the end of every interview is that we really like talking with smart people.
[26:05.150 --> 26:11.090]  [SPEAKER_03]: And the entire point of embarking on this journey was to get smart people talking about this topic.
[26:11.690 --> 26:14.230]  [SPEAKER_03]: And you guys are some of those people.
[26:14.250 --> 26:17.810]  [SPEAKER_03]: And we really, really appreciate the time and getting the word out.
[26:17.810 --> 26:22.330]  [SPEAKER_06]: Hey, well, Noah, you know we have a hacker conference coming up this summer.
[26:22.750 --> 26:31.270]  [SPEAKER_06]: And you and Damien sound like you could put together a pretty awesome pitch for a spot at the conference.
[26:31.270 --> 26:33.610]  [SPEAKER_06]: So, we would love to hear from you on that note.
[26:34.170 --> 26:36.070]  [SPEAKER_06]: No pun intended, of course.
[26:36.710 --> 26:40.510]  [SPEAKER_06]: And, you know, but I think this is a super interesting topic.
[26:40.510 --> 26:48.910]  [SPEAKER_06]: And you definitely exemplify the hacker spirit in doing what you did, in sharing your knowledge, in sharing the code, in helping others.
[26:49.170 --> 26:54.230]  [SPEAKER_06]: And we would definitely love to see both of you over at Hope this summer in Manhattan.
[26:54.590 --> 26:56.710]  [SPEAKER_06]: I'm sorry, in Queens this year.
[26:57.310 --> 26:58.990]  [SPEAKER_06]: The Hackers on Planet Earth Conference.
[26:59.250 --> 27:00.850]  [SPEAKER_06]: So, you know, think about that.
[27:00.990 --> 27:05.710]  [SPEAKER_06]: And thank you so much for your time and for sharing your knowledge with us.
[27:05.810 --> 27:07.950]  [SPEAKER_06]: We love talking with smart people as well.
[27:08.430 --> 27:11.210]  [SPEAKER_05]: And thank you for your delightful compositions also.
[27:11.410 --> 27:15.250]  [SPEAKER_05]: As a music lover, I think I'm a fan of your work, or will be at some point.
[27:16.930 --> 27:17.610]  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, thank you.
[27:17.670 --> 27:18.410]  [SPEAKER_03]: I really appreciate it.
[27:18.470 --> 27:20.030]  [SPEAKER_03]: And the conference sounds great.
[27:21.010 --> 27:22.070]  [SPEAKER_03]: I would love to come.
[27:22.910 --> 27:25.950]  [SPEAKER_07]: All right, we're going to listen to the rest of...
[27:25.950 --> 27:28.230]  [SPEAKER_07]: How long will it take us to listen to all of this, by the way?
[27:29.750 --> 27:30.690]  [SPEAKER_03]: Don't hold your breath.
[27:32.690 --> 27:41.850]  [SPEAKER_03]: I would say, if you just wanted to listen to the melodies that contain dark horse in them, there are 8,192.
[27:42.870 --> 27:45.310]  [SPEAKER_07]: For that one piece?
[27:46.610 --> 27:48.870]  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so all the melodies are length 12.
[27:49.050 --> 27:50.490]  [SPEAKER_03]: Dark horse melody is length 8.
[27:50.710 --> 27:53.570]  [SPEAKER_03]: So there are 8,192 that contain that melody.
[27:54.810 --> 27:55.130]  [SPEAKER_07]: Amazing.
[27:55.390 --> 27:57.590]  [SPEAKER_07]: Okay, well, we're going to listen to as much as we can.
[27:59.230 --> 28:00.850]  [SPEAKER_07]: And double back later, perhaps.
[28:01.110 --> 28:03.730]  [SPEAKER_07]: But we should get this onto Shazam as well.
[28:03.830 --> 28:06.650]  [SPEAKER_07]: Make sure that it recognizes all these melodies.
[28:08.070 --> 28:10.310]  [SPEAKER_07]: But Noah, I want to thank you so much for joining us.
[28:10.310 --> 28:12.290]  [SPEAKER_07]: Noah Rubin, I programmed this whole thing.
[28:12.410 --> 28:17.550]  [SPEAKER_07]: And of course, we had Damien Reel before, the musician and lawyer, also part of this project.
[28:18.130 --> 28:21.290]  [SPEAKER_07]: Their website is allthemusic.info.
[28:21.290 --> 28:25.010]  [SPEAKER_07]: And people can find out all kinds of additional information there.
[28:25.630 --> 28:26.610]  [SPEAKER_07]: Noah, final question.
[28:26.610 --> 28:29.070]  [SPEAKER_07]: Is there anything people can do to help you guys out?
[28:31.470 --> 28:41.190]  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I think, again, I think the most important thing is reaching out if you have questions, or just getting the word out to people that genuinely care about the topic.
[28:42.730 --> 28:44.110]  [SPEAKER_07]: Okay, well, consider that done.
[28:44.250 --> 28:47.370]  [SPEAKER_07]: We will definitely spread the word around and spread the tunes as well.
[28:47.830 --> 28:48.550]  [SPEAKER_07]: Thanks again.
[28:48.750 --> 28:49.030]  [SPEAKER_07]: Awesome.
[28:49.710 --> 28:50.710]  [SPEAKER_03]: Thanks, appreciate it.
[28:50.790 --> 28:51.270]  [SPEAKER_07]: Have a good night.
[29:06.690 --> 29:15.810]  [SPEAKER_07]: You know, I think if I ran some kind of institution, like a school or a motel or something, I would just have this playing constantly.
[29:15.970 --> 29:19.270]  [SPEAKER_07]: Instead of elevator music, you just have this going because it won't repeat.
[29:20.070 --> 29:24.170]  [SPEAKER_07]: In quite a long time, and it'll be somewhat unique and different.
[29:24.610 --> 29:25.170]  [SPEAKER_07]: What do you guys think?
[29:25.590 --> 29:27.070]  [SPEAKER_05]: I think that's neat.
[29:27.250 --> 29:31.130]  [SPEAKER_05]: Also, I know we have a lot of musicians and creative people among our listenership.
[29:31.270 --> 29:39.210]  [SPEAKER_05]: So if any of this you're hearing inspires you to, you know, maybe base some of music of your own around it, apparently it's in the public domain and go right ahead.
[29:39.210 --> 29:40.850]  [SPEAKER_04]: So it's in the public domain.
[29:41.050 --> 29:51.550]  [SPEAKER_04]: And what we're listening to right now, because like I said, the full tar file was going to take days and days to download, because again, 600 gigabytes.
[29:51.850 --> 29:59.830]  [SPEAKER_04]: So what this is, is a slightly more manageable chunk of music that's available in the FAQ section of allthemusic.info.
[29:59.830 --> 30:04.510]  [SPEAKER_04]: This is about an hour, 62 minutes worth of music that we're dealing with right now.
[30:07.010 --> 30:10.470]  [SPEAKER_04]: And yeah, I'm definitely going to be humming this later.
[30:11.370 --> 30:17.030]  [SPEAKER_07]: Because I was hoping to hear something a little bit more, you know, like Deep Purple type of riff, you know, that kind of melody.
[30:17.030 --> 30:18.470]  [SPEAKER_07]: And I haven't gotten to that yet.
[30:18.810 --> 30:19.030]  [SPEAKER_07]: Give it time.
[30:19.210 --> 30:19.530]  [SPEAKER_04]: Give it time.
[30:19.590 --> 30:20.530]  [SPEAKER_07]: I will give it time.
[30:22.250 --> 30:23.390]  [SPEAKER_07]: Got nothing but time.
[30:23.530 --> 30:26.830]  [SPEAKER_07]: We're just going to be spending a lot of time indoors listening to music.
[30:27.030 --> 30:29.390]  [SPEAKER_07]: So, folks, this is how you get through this crisis.
[30:29.470 --> 30:33.390]  [SPEAKER_07]: You listen to lengthy periods of melodies.
[30:33.410 --> 30:35.650]  [SPEAKER_07]: And this is our secret.
[30:35.770 --> 30:48.310]  [SPEAKER_04]: Well, the other thing that it was making me think of, and I apologize, I didn't get to bring this up to Noah, is that when we were talking about the George Harrison and the Shirelles thing, the lawsuit situation that I was thinking of was a few years ago,
[30:48.770 --> 30:51.750]  [SPEAKER_04]: when Sam Smith and Tom Petty worked out...
[30:51.750 --> 30:53.150]  [SPEAKER_04]: They didn't even get to court.
[30:53.410 --> 30:59.470]  [SPEAKER_04]: They worked it out out of court that Sam Smith said, Oh, I guess I inadvertently...
[30:59.470 --> 31:05.370]  [SPEAKER_04]: He claimed never to have heard the Tom Petty song, which...
[31:05.830 --> 31:06.670]  [SPEAKER_04]: Somebody help me out.
[31:06.770 --> 31:07.550]  [SPEAKER_06]: I won't back down.
[31:07.610 --> 31:09.270]  [SPEAKER_04]: Thank you very much, which I don't believe.
[31:09.270 --> 31:12.250]  [SPEAKER_04]: But Sam Smith said, Oh, whoops.
[31:12.450 --> 31:20.550]  [SPEAKER_04]: And now Tom Petty and Jeff Lyn have 12.5% of the songwriting for Sam Smith's song, Stay With Me.
[31:20.690 --> 31:31.510]  [SPEAKER_04]: So, if while you are listening to thousands and thousands and thousands of MIDI files, and you hear any of this, you could probably get Noah and Damien cut in on the songwriting of a lot of stuff.
[31:31.510 --> 31:31.750]  [SPEAKER_07]: Wow.
[31:31.910 --> 31:33.550]  [SPEAKER_07]: You know, what always annoyed me...
[31:33.550 --> 31:35.150]  [SPEAKER_07]: I don't know if you guys remember the Ruttles.
[31:35.590 --> 31:39.130]  [SPEAKER_07]: This incredible mockumentary about the whole Beatlemania.
[31:39.910 --> 31:44.910]  [SPEAKER_07]: And it was created by this musical genius named Neil Ennis, who we lost last year.
[31:45.470 --> 31:51.050]  [SPEAKER_07]: And he was forced for the songs, the amazing songs that he wrote that were parodies of Beatles songs.
[31:51.050 --> 31:56.190]  [SPEAKER_07]: He was forced to give songwriting credit to Lennon McCartney.
[31:56.770 --> 31:57.970]  [SPEAKER_07]: They had nothing to do with it.
[31:58.030 --> 31:59.350]  [SPEAKER_07]: They appreciated the humor of it.
[31:59.450 --> 32:06.990]  [SPEAKER_07]: But it was because of the publishing rights and all this legal mumbo jumbo that if you look at the songs, you'll see their names on them.
[32:07.170 --> 32:12.430]  [SPEAKER_07]: It makes absolutely no sense, but it shows you just how the legal world clashes with the artistic world.
[32:12.950 --> 32:13.530]  [SPEAKER_06]: That's right.
[32:13.730 --> 32:25.010]  [SPEAKER_06]: And when you are credited as being, you know, an author or a co-author or have some kind of credit with respect to the creation of a piece, that entitles you, as Gila mentioned, to royalties of a certain percentage.
[32:25.350 --> 32:28.150]  [SPEAKER_06]: And, yeah, I mean, look, it's a crazy system.
[32:28.230 --> 32:32.630]  [SPEAKER_06]: But look, on the flip side of it as well, you know, to play devil's advocate for a second...
[32:32.630 --> 32:33.350]  [SPEAKER_07]: You're a lawyer.
[32:33.510 --> 32:34.170]  [SPEAKER_07]: You're already the devil.
[32:34.410 --> 32:35.450]  [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, well...
[32:35.450 --> 32:36.110]  [SPEAKER_06]: I'm sorry.
[32:36.630 --> 32:37.790]  [SPEAKER_06]: It depends on the day.
[32:37.990 --> 32:38.730]  [SPEAKER_06]: It depends on the day.
[32:38.850 --> 32:40.010]  [SPEAKER_06]: It depends on the client, I guess.
[32:40.010 --> 32:47.150]  [SPEAKER_06]: But, I mean, there is an argument to be made that doing something like this could perhaps be considered to be anti-creative, right?
[32:47.290 --> 32:55.770]  [SPEAKER_06]: That music needs copyright to ensure that an artist is, in fact, credited both morally and financially for their creative endeavors.
[32:56.030 --> 32:59.270]  [SPEAKER_07]: Right, but how far down do you define that?
[32:59.490 --> 33:02.870]  [SPEAKER_07]: You know, just a number of... was this eight notes we're talking about here?
[33:02.970 --> 33:03.310]  [SPEAKER_07]: That's right.
[33:03.470 --> 33:05.630]  [SPEAKER_07]: Can you really define it down to eight notes?
[33:05.630 --> 33:12.630]  [SPEAKER_07]: I mean, you know, if you take a sentence, a quote, is every word copyrightable?
[33:12.890 --> 33:16.910]  [SPEAKER_07]: You know, can you say that you own the word the because you said it in a famous quote?
[33:17.070 --> 33:26.670]  [SPEAKER_07]: At some point, it just gets to be so tiny, so minuscule, that copywriting it just cripples everybody who's trying to create anything.
[33:26.670 --> 33:27.450]  [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, look, I agree.
[33:27.570 --> 33:36.790]  [SPEAKER_06]: And I think Damien addressed this really well in that the legal system puts this ridiculous burden on the defendant to prove the negative that they did not hear something, that they were not aware of something.
[33:37.410 --> 33:51.650]  [SPEAKER_06]: And I think that, you know, there could be some criticism that perhaps this project, if it does work out and could be used as evidence in court, could be considered to be anti-creative if they hadn't taken everything that they created and put it into the public domain.
[33:51.650 --> 33:52.070]  [SPEAKER_06]: Exactly.
[33:52.310 --> 33:52.650]  [SPEAKER_06]: For others.
[33:52.830 --> 34:02.790]  [SPEAKER_06]: And so, you know, that's the distinction, I think, that makes a difference here and makes this a super fascinating project that involves hacker culture, music, math, programming.
[34:03.110 --> 34:05.110]  [SPEAKER_06]: It's incredibly fascinating.
[34:05.350 --> 34:06.270]  [SPEAKER_07]: A little rebellion, too.
[34:06.430 --> 34:07.830]  [SPEAKER_06]: And certainly a lot of rebellion.
[34:07.830 --> 34:10.810]  [SPEAKER_06]: And I really hope that they put in a proposal to speak at Hope.
[34:10.810 --> 34:11.790]  [SPEAKER_04]: I agree.
[34:11.950 --> 34:29.010]  [SPEAKER_04]: I think it's also very interesting for me to see where this place is at the nexus of hacking music and what the music industry is now, when you have 14 credited songwriters, because somebody wrote this tiny piece of the hook, and somebody wrote this tiny piece of the hook,
[34:29.090 --> 34:30.450]  [SPEAKER_04]: and somebody wrote these four words.
[34:30.450 --> 34:39.030]  [SPEAKER_04]: And then, you know, my brother likes to talk about this one song that's popular, that had 14 credited songwriters, and three of them wrote the harmonica solo.
[34:40.490 --> 34:40.970]  [SPEAKER_07]: Wow.
[34:41.250 --> 34:41.410]  [SPEAKER_04]: Right.
[34:41.710 --> 34:45.730]  [SPEAKER_04]: So I'm very curious to see how this is going to change the face of that going forward.
[34:45.730 --> 34:47.490]  [SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, I just love this.
[34:47.610 --> 35:04.490]  [SPEAKER_05]: As a working creative myself, the creative copyright system in this country is horribly broken and should probably be slashed and burned from the ground up because, especially nowadays when we have like insanely extended copyright terms for works dating back to people whose descendants have died off.
[35:05.030 --> 35:14.430]  [SPEAKER_05]: And at this point, like, I think if you take a piano, like hit any eight keys in a row, that'll probably be somewhere in a copyrighted song that you're technically not allowed to use.
[35:14.670 --> 35:20.910]  [SPEAKER_05]: And, you know, this project, I think, really, really challenges that in a fun and interesting way.
[35:21.410 --> 35:25.910]  [SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, I just, I can't wrap my head around it, because what is it that you're protecting?
[35:26.130 --> 35:32.770]  [SPEAKER_07]: I think we need to ask ourselves, what is the worst thing that can happen to somebody if their work is, quote unquote, not protected?
[35:32.770 --> 35:37.210]  [SPEAKER_07]: What, someone else sings your song and doesn't give you the credit for it?
[35:37.270 --> 35:37.530]  [SPEAKER_07]: Okay.
[35:38.050 --> 35:40.110]  [SPEAKER_07]: But you know you have the credit for it.
[35:40.810 --> 35:45.450]  [SPEAKER_07]: And people who do studies of music will know that you wrote that song.
[35:45.870 --> 35:50.150]  [SPEAKER_07]: It's archived someplace in that manner.
[35:50.990 --> 36:03.670]  [SPEAKER_07]: If, though, you control it to the degree where every single note is owned by somebody, or every single melody is owned by somebody, it just makes it impossible to do anything.
[36:03.670 --> 36:05.710]  [SPEAKER_07]: Because everything you do has been done before.
[36:05.890 --> 36:07.970]  [SPEAKER_07]: I mean, try saying something clever on Twitter.
[36:08.130 --> 36:09.670]  [SPEAKER_07]: Someone already has done it.
[36:09.770 --> 36:14.870]  [SPEAKER_07]: But imagine if it was all trademarked and you got sued every time you said something that someone else had the same idea.
[36:16.310 --> 36:18.590]  [SPEAKER_07]: It's really... they're incompatible worlds.
[36:18.790 --> 36:20.070]  [SPEAKER_07]: The legal world and the creative world.
[36:20.130 --> 36:21.770]  [SPEAKER_07]: I just... I don't think they get along.
[36:22.010 --> 36:34.230]  [SPEAKER_05]: It's like if you write a novel and then, like, sometime later it becomes successful and then somebody sues you because you used a three-word piece of a sentence that somebody else had used in another book before you.
[36:34.230 --> 36:37.770]  [SPEAKER_05]: The basic building blocks have to be available at some point.
[36:37.930 --> 36:39.830]  [SPEAKER_05]: You know, you can't copyright the English language.
[36:39.910 --> 36:43.130]  [SPEAKER_05]: You can't copyright the, you know, quick brown fox.
[36:43.390 --> 36:48.810]  [SPEAKER_05]: Like, you know, you've got to leave some tools available for other people to be able to build anything out of it.
[36:49.030 --> 36:49.210]  [SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.
[36:49.370 --> 36:51.890]  [SPEAKER_07]: I mean, I understand counterfeiting.
[36:52.070 --> 36:58.050]  [SPEAKER_07]: You know, if you sell something that someone else did and say it's you, that's obviously wrong.
[36:58.050 --> 37:01.830]  [SPEAKER_07]: That's easy to understand and I think easy to prosecute.
[37:02.510 --> 37:05.210]  [SPEAKER_07]: I imagine, Alex, you might know more about that, but...
[37:05.210 --> 37:05.490]  [SPEAKER_07]: Certainly.
[37:05.790 --> 37:13.630]  [SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, but it's just simply the creative part of it to say that I said this first or, you know, I hum this melody first.
[37:14.090 --> 37:21.010]  [SPEAKER_07]: To turn that into a controlling method is just... it goes against everything that I think artists stand for.
[37:21.010 --> 37:28.090]  [SPEAKER_06]: And to think that the legal system can reasonably resolve these types of disputes, too, I think is sort of ridiculous as well.
[37:28.190 --> 37:39.010]  [SPEAKER_06]: Because, you know, to go back to Gillis' point earlier about whether or not somebody was aware of or heard a particular song becomes a fact issue for either a judge or a jury to determine.
[37:39.430 --> 37:43.970]  [SPEAKER_06]: You know, and it's based on credibility or based on the famousness of a particular song.
[37:43.970 --> 37:47.130]  [SPEAKER_06]: And, you know, maybe somebody heard a song, maybe they didn't.
[37:47.190 --> 37:54.650]  [SPEAKER_06]: But the simple fact of the matter is that the original song that is allegedly being infringed, those royalties aren't being disturbed.
[37:54.850 --> 38:00.590]  [SPEAKER_06]: Those... that author of that song still owns all right and title to that particular work.
[38:00.890 --> 38:05.790]  [SPEAKER_06]: This subsequent work that came after it, you know, maybe has an homage to it.
[38:05.790 --> 38:09.470]  [SPEAKER_06]: And maybe they acknowledged that they stood on the shoulders of that particular song.
[38:09.570 --> 38:11.550]  [SPEAKER_06]: And that's not necessarily wrong.
[38:11.770 --> 38:19.490]  [SPEAKER_06]: To claim that that is wrong would be to stifle innovation and to stifle creativity, which should not be the business of the legal system.
[38:19.650 --> 38:22.450]  [SPEAKER_07]: What if I say to be or not to be?
[38:22.630 --> 38:25.230]  [SPEAKER_07]: Now, is Shakespeare going to come after me for using that?
[38:25.350 --> 38:27.650]  [SPEAKER_07]: I mean, I've said it a million times and it comes up a lot.
[38:27.810 --> 38:30.010]  [SPEAKER_06]: Copyright on that is long expired, I would presume.
[38:30.010 --> 38:31.750]  [SPEAKER_07]: But is the copyright on that sentence?
[38:32.150 --> 38:33.390]  [SPEAKER_07]: Is it on the play?
[38:33.670 --> 38:35.750]  [SPEAKER_07]: Is it on a couple of the words in the sentence?
[38:35.990 --> 38:45.870]  [SPEAKER_07]: At what point do you say, okay, this is ridiculous and you can't possibly say that you're the only person allowed to claim ownership or if anyone's allowed to claim ownership over a phrase?
[38:46.050 --> 38:46.710]  [SPEAKER_06]: Well, same thing.
[38:46.830 --> 38:50.230]  [SPEAKER_06]: You have that issue come up mostly in trademark law, right?
[38:50.250 --> 38:53.150]  [SPEAKER_06]: I mean, what are the things that can be trademarked and what are the things that cannot be trademarked?
[38:53.170 --> 38:54.590]  [SPEAKER_07]: Well, a slogan I can understand.
[38:54.590 --> 38:59.110]  [SPEAKER_07]: And, you know, if Koch decides that, you know, I have a dream is their slogan.
[38:59.430 --> 39:04.110]  [SPEAKER_07]: Well, who's anyone else to stand up and say that they don't have the right, the exclusive right to that phrase?
[39:04.510 --> 39:05.850]  [SPEAKER_07]: That's the craziness we live in.
[39:05.950 --> 39:08.130]  [SPEAKER_06]: You know, you think about, you know, geographic terms, right?
[39:08.310 --> 39:12.450]  [SPEAKER_06]: You know, cities, you know, to have certain emotions associated with them.
[39:12.870 --> 39:16.770]  [SPEAKER_06]: NYC, New York, Trenton, of all places, you know, something like that, right?
[39:16.770 --> 39:24.270]  [SPEAKER_06]: But, you know, so, I'm sorry, trademarking terms that are used by the public, geographic terms, isn't necessarily allowed.
[39:24.270 --> 39:28.150]  [SPEAKER_06]: But if you combine that with something else, then you can have it become a trademark.
[39:28.470 --> 39:29.450]  [SPEAKER_07]: If you see something, say something.
[39:29.570 --> 39:37.030]  [SPEAKER_07]: I think New York actually got angry at someone for using that phrase when they didn't have the right to say, if you see something, say something.
[39:37.270 --> 39:38.230]  [SPEAKER_07]: That's the absurdity.
[39:38.390 --> 39:40.710]  [SPEAKER_05]: Well, New York, I think, also owns, I love New York.
[39:41.470 --> 39:43.450]  [SPEAKER_05]: Why would anybody else want to own that, though?
[39:43.950 --> 39:49.670]  [SPEAKER_05]: I don't, but if you express love for New York in that exact way, I think, technically, you should put a little TM after it.
[39:50.250 --> 39:54.510]  [SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, I mean, it gets absurd because, what, you're going to sue somebody because they say they love New York?
[39:54.590 --> 39:57.690]  [SPEAKER_07]: They're not going to love New York anymore, so you're going to fix that problem.
[39:58.450 --> 40:07.610]  [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, I mean, and, like, there's a slew of rules that go along with trademarks, and you can have trademarks that are the same term, but in different classes of goods and services as well.
[40:07.610 --> 40:14.350]  [SPEAKER_06]: So there is an assumption that you're not going to clash with the other trademark holder of a similar term or the exact mark.
[40:14.970 --> 40:17.270]  [SPEAKER_06]: So, look, you know, it's a complicated system.
[40:17.470 --> 40:21.150]  [SPEAKER_06]: I mean, intellectual property law is certainly fascinating.
[40:21.150 --> 40:27.950]  [SPEAKER_06]: It was one of my favorite topics when I was in law school, but it can really, you know, be quite dry, frankly, in practice.
[40:27.950 --> 40:49.690]  [SPEAKER_07]: I mean, the way I look at it, I think art should always get the priority, so that you should never have a situation where a film or an album or a TV show or a painting or a book is sitting moldering someplace because lawyers disagree on who has the rights to distribute it or display it.
[40:50.990 --> 40:56.810]  [SPEAKER_07]: But it always should be that if something is created, a work of art, that work of art should be shared by definition.
[40:56.810 --> 40:58.190]  [SPEAKER_07]: It should be available.
[40:58.350 --> 40:59.610]  [SPEAKER_07]: It should never be hidden.
[41:00.110 --> 41:00.250]  [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
[41:00.430 --> 41:04.090]  [SPEAKER_06]: I mean, and copyright reform is, you know, a hot topic these days as well.
[41:04.150 --> 41:17.750]  [SPEAKER_06]: If you think about, you know, the length of a copyright, you know, perhaps one way of leveling the playing field would be to shorten the length of any particular copyright so that these things can happen more freely and more fundamentally without fear of litigation.
[41:18.430 --> 41:18.990]  [SPEAKER_07]: All right.
[41:19.210 --> 41:24.390]  [SPEAKER_07]: And with that, let's, uh, shift gears, talk about a couple of other issues that have been going on this week.
[41:24.390 --> 41:32.390]  [SPEAKER_07]: Of course, uh, the, the big, uh, elephant in the room is, uh, the coronavirus and how it's affecting everybody, everybody in the world.
[41:33.290 --> 41:37.190]  [SPEAKER_07]: And, uh, yeah, things like this do, um, do tend to unify.
[41:37.190 --> 41:38.790]  [SPEAKER_07]: They can also terrify.
[41:39.430 --> 41:41.650]  [SPEAKER_07]: Um, what have you guys noticed in the last week?
[41:41.730 --> 41:45.730]  [SPEAKER_07]: I noticed all the, uh, the schools are starting to shut down online only classes.
[41:46.470 --> 41:52.550]  [SPEAKER_06]: I mean, you know, my son is in public school here in, in Manhattan and, uh, you know, it's kind of scary.
[41:52.730 --> 41:55.390]  [SPEAKER_06]: They're testing the emergency tech system.
[41:55.390 --> 42:08.690]  [SPEAKER_06]: We're getting messages almost daily from the principal, uh, letting us know that, you know, you need to answer your cell phone, you know, pick up these unexpected calls because, you know, if your son or daughter is sick, you need to come and get them immediately.
[42:09.130 --> 42:13.250]  [SPEAKER_06]: Um, and these things are, you know, very scary for a, a parent to hear.
[42:13.470 --> 42:17.870]  [SPEAKER_06]: Um, you know, there's lots of telecommuting plans being put into place as well.
[42:17.870 --> 42:25.390]  [SPEAKER_08]: I think, I think telecommunicate telecommunication and telecommuting are holding together the economy at this point.
[42:25.550 --> 42:28.670]  [SPEAKER_08]: I mean, there's a lot of people that can't do that.
[42:28.830 --> 42:30.110]  [SPEAKER_08]: So I don't want to, exactly.
[42:30.310 --> 42:35.290]  [SPEAKER_08]: I don't want to, um, you know, say it's, it's somehow, um, you know, what everyone's doing.
[42:35.310 --> 42:44.810]  [SPEAKER_08]: I know that's not the case at all, but a lot of, uh, businesses, small and large are really emphasizing distancing if they can help it.
[42:44.810 --> 42:53.450]  [SPEAKER_08]: And a lot of, a lot of businesses are remote and, and don't require a physical presence and a lot of meetings and gatherings anyway.
[42:53.470 --> 43:03.710]  [SPEAKER_08]: So if it's already part of how people do business, I think people are just going really hard into that, just doing everything as much as they can, as though they were normally conducting business.
[43:03.710 --> 43:21.290]  [SPEAKER_08]: But the fact that we have that, I think from our perspective and, um, talking about phones and, and, uh, computers all the time, it's kind of amazing to actually see this, this, um, form of work become, um, a necessity in, under the circumstance.
[43:21.290 --> 43:31.810]  [SPEAKER_07]: Well, you know, my main concern is when you tell students going to college that, um, they need to go home now, they need to, um, um, um, just conduct their, their education online.
[43:32.350 --> 43:35.610]  [SPEAKER_07]: First of all, um, broadband isn't a right in this country.
[43:35.850 --> 43:37.650]  [SPEAKER_07]: A lot of people don't have broadband.
[43:37.830 --> 43:41.430]  [SPEAKER_07]: A lot of people don't have, uh, necessary, um, um, speeds.
[43:41.710 --> 43:47.570]  [SPEAKER_07]: Gil, you just demonstrated that, this, this multi-billion melody file you couldn't download in time for the show.
[43:47.570 --> 43:49.350]  [SPEAKER_07]: So, it takes days.
[43:49.650 --> 43:54.950]  [SPEAKER_07]: But the, the thing is, with, with, um, with college classes, is everybody going to have the right software?
[43:55.110 --> 43:56.110]  [SPEAKER_07]: Does everybody have a computer?
[43:56.250 --> 43:57.190]  [SPEAKER_07]: Do they all have a connection?
[43:57.430 --> 43:59.270]  [SPEAKER_07]: A lot of assumptions being made there.
[43:59.430 --> 44:03.270]  [SPEAKER_07]: So, it's, it's not necessarily going to, uh, to work out advantageously.
[44:03.430 --> 44:10.630]  [SPEAKER_04]: I mean, we are, at my place of work, we are making preparations for, in case we all need to work from home, how that will work.
[44:10.750 --> 44:17.470]  [SPEAKER_04]: And I said to our IT director, who had sent out instructions on connecting remotely, I said, this is great.
[44:17.570 --> 44:19.610]  [SPEAKER_04]: The computers in my home run Linux.
[44:19.790 --> 44:20.490]  [SPEAKER_04]: Can I use this?
[44:21.110 --> 44:22.870]  [SPEAKER_04]: And he said, oh, no.
[44:24.750 --> 44:25.570]  [SPEAKER_04]: Oh, no.
[44:26.410 --> 44:28.830]  [SPEAKER_04]: Let me do some consulting and find out what to do.
[44:29.670 --> 44:29.870]  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[44:30.450 --> 44:31.970]  [SPEAKER_07]: So, we're back at that again.
[44:32.190 --> 44:34.090]  [SPEAKER_07]: The old, the old anti-Linux battle.
[44:34.530 --> 44:37.130]  [SPEAKER_05]: And, uh, what you say about broadband is especially interesting.
[44:37.510 --> 44:43.490]  [SPEAKER_05]: Um, there was a period of my life where I was working from home, but, um, I, I didn't have, I didn't have, uh, home Internet access.
[44:43.490 --> 44:50.850]  [SPEAKER_05]: And so I got that access in places of gathering, coffee shops, libraries, cafes, um, you know, things of that sort.
[44:51.030 --> 45:02.010]  [SPEAKER_05]: And, you know, if, if somebody, if somebody is, uh, sent home from school because there's too much disease going around the school and you shouldn't be among crowds, and then they have to go to the local Starbucks or whatever, um, this is not solving the problem.
[45:02.010 --> 45:09.610]  [SPEAKER_04]: But wait, isn't there something you can do where you can, like, set up some kind of a tin can and you can direct the LinkNYC Wi-Fi into your apartment?
[45:09.850 --> 45:10.190]  [SPEAKER_07]: Wow.
[45:10.350 --> 45:10.610]  [SPEAKER_07]: Okay.
[45:10.970 --> 45:14.570]  [SPEAKER_07]: Uh, we have some news about LinkNYC, but, uh, go ahead, Alex, first.
[45:14.810 --> 45:17.050]  [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, I mean, back to the broadband point.
[45:17.230 --> 45:19.870]  [SPEAKER_06]: I mean, this, Emmanuel's absolutely right.
[45:19.950 --> 45:21.110]  [SPEAKER_06]: Not everybody has broadband.
[45:21.110 --> 45:28.210]  [SPEAKER_06]: And even those that do have broadband, I mean, now this raises, again, the thorny issue that, not my favorite issue either, of net neutrality.
[45:28.210 --> 45:38.150]  [SPEAKER_06]: I mean, the implications of net neutrality now, when everybody's going to be telecommuting, conferencing, and quite frankly, the goddamn economy depends on people telecommuting.
[45:38.510 --> 45:53.550]  [SPEAKER_06]: Maybe net neutrality isn't such a great idea because Zoom teleconferences and WebEx teleconferences are not going to be necessarily considered to be in the fast lane that can be purchased from these particular ISPs.
[45:53.550 --> 46:00.010]  [SPEAKER_06]: So, um, yeah, maybe the FCC should reconsider those particular rules and roll them back.
[46:00.930 --> 46:02.850]  [SPEAKER_07]: A lot to think about, a lot to consider.
[46:02.850 --> 46:07.710]  [SPEAKER_07]: Uh, but speaking of LinkNYC, uh, turns out, yeah, who guessed?
[46:07.910 --> 46:10.230]  [SPEAKER_07]: Uh, New York's high-tech solution to the payphone.
[46:10.370 --> 46:11.790]  [SPEAKER_07]: We talked about this last week.
[46:12.090 --> 46:14.870]  [SPEAKER_07]: The LinkNYC is basically kicking out payphones everywhere.
[46:15.070 --> 46:16.190]  [SPEAKER_07]: You're seeing them all over the city.
[46:16.190 --> 46:21.210]  [SPEAKER_07]: But, New York's high-tech solution has run into a low-tech problem.
[46:21.710 --> 46:23.010]  [SPEAKER_07]: The lack of money.
[46:23.530 --> 46:31.870]  [SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, the Google-backed LinkNYC program that was supposed to replace New York City's payphones with nine-foot-tall links on city sidewalks has ground to a halt.
[46:32.270 --> 46:37.790]  [SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, the CityBridge Consortium stopped installing links in the fall of 2018.
[46:37.790 --> 46:38.730]  [SPEAKER_07]: You guys know this?
[46:38.830 --> 46:39.270]  [SPEAKER_07]: They stopped?
[46:40.090 --> 46:42.350]  [SPEAKER_07]: Over a year ago, they stopped installing them?
[46:42.850 --> 46:46.790]  [SPEAKER_07]: And, um, that leaves New York City with just 1,800 of them.
[46:47.010 --> 46:51.130]  [SPEAKER_07]: They're supposed to have 4,500 of them by, uh, the middle of last year.
[46:51.550 --> 46:51.930]  [SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.
[46:52.110 --> 46:56.490]  [SPEAKER_07]: And many of the links that haven't been installed were meant to service, guess what?
[46:56.630 --> 47:02.130]  [SPEAKER_07]: Low-income neighborhoods where residents are in greater need of free Internet access and phones.
[47:02.590 --> 47:02.810]  [SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.
[47:03.510 --> 47:11.610]  [SPEAKER_07]: New Yorkers who benefit most from this service are not getting it, including thousands of people who live in districts that many of you represent because CityBridge is delinquent.
[47:11.610 --> 47:23.590]  [SPEAKER_07]: That's according to, uh, the, um, uh, New York City's, um, um, commissioner of, hang on, uh, Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications.
[47:23.810 --> 47:27.290]  [SPEAKER_07]: Their commissioner, Jessica Tisch, uh, said this to the city council.
[47:27.390 --> 47:42.550]  [SPEAKER_07]: And in addition to providing free Wi-Fi, uh, free domestic phone calls, free Internet-connected tablets, and free USB charging ports, the links were supposed to generate revenue through on-screen advertising and throw off half a billion dollars for New York City.
[47:42.870 --> 47:44.650]  [SPEAKER_07]: So that hasn't happened either.
[47:45.430 --> 47:51.230]  [SPEAKER_07]: CityBridge owes the city tens of millions of dollars going back to 20, fiscal year 2019.
[47:52.050 --> 47:59.050]  [SPEAKER_07]: All of this is against the backdrop of millions of dollars in advertising revenue that CityBridge has reported they received over the same time period.
[48:00.010 --> 48:08.610]  [SPEAKER_07]: So, yeah, now we're in a situation where we're pulling out all the payphones and replacing them with, with, uh, link kiosks and the bills aren't being paid.
[48:08.730 --> 48:10.930]  [SPEAKER_07]: And what does the city do now?
[48:11.670 --> 48:15.510]  [SPEAKER_04]: Well, I'm fascinated, I guess, by the LinkNYC kiosks in general.
[48:15.510 --> 48:22.750]  [SPEAKER_04]: As we were saying last week from the payphone, standing in front of that payphone, we could see three different LinkNYC kiosks.
[48:22.930 --> 48:28.590]  [SPEAKER_04]: And what I've found interesting is that most of what I see on the various LinkNYC kiosks is not advertising.
[48:28.990 --> 48:31.070]  [SPEAKER_04]: I see a lot of fun facts about New York.
[48:31.070 --> 48:33.470]  [SPEAKER_04]: I see how you can get places.
[48:33.470 --> 48:34.550]  [SPEAKER_04]: I see the weather.
[48:34.890 --> 48:38.330]  [SPEAKER_04]: I have not seen ads per se.
[48:38.470 --> 48:39.130]  [SPEAKER_07]: Are you complaining?
[48:39.390 --> 48:40.050]  [SPEAKER_04]: Not at all.
[48:40.090 --> 48:40.450]  [SPEAKER_04]: Oh, okay.
[48:40.510 --> 48:44.910]  [SPEAKER_04]: But I'm asking where they think the money is going to come from if they're just like, fun facts about New York.
[48:45.010 --> 48:46.290]  [SPEAKER_04]: And here's a drawing we found.
[48:46.430 --> 48:51.010]  [SPEAKER_07]: Well, I think the idea was they were going to have advertising and somehow that didn't work out either.
[48:51.130 --> 48:54.830]  [SPEAKER_07]: Or maybe since they stopped paying rent or whatever, nobody is advertising with them.
[48:54.830 --> 48:59.630]  [SPEAKER_05]: Maybe it depends on where they are, because I definitely have seen paid advertising on LinkNYC kiosks.
[49:00.370 --> 49:03.390]  [SPEAKER_05]: I think it's not constant.
[49:03.590 --> 49:06.490]  [SPEAKER_05]: I think it's interspersed with the here's fun facts about New York.
[49:06.750 --> 49:09.210]  [SPEAKER_05]: And hey, the subway exists and things like that.
[49:09.390 --> 49:13.650]  [SPEAKER_05]: But yeah, I think it is pulling in some manner of advertising money.
[49:13.790 --> 49:20.850]  [SPEAKER_05]: But if the concern that owns these things is reporting advertising income, obviously that's coming from somewhere.
[49:20.850 --> 49:24.050]  [SPEAKER_05]: And that isn't being spent on paying their obligation to the city.
[49:24.350 --> 49:26.650]  [SPEAKER_07]: Just to be clear, though, I'm not against these things.
[49:26.650 --> 49:27.250]  [SPEAKER_07]: They're fun.
[49:27.430 --> 49:28.530]  [SPEAKER_07]: I had a lot of fun with it last week.
[49:28.650 --> 49:34.190]  [SPEAKER_07]: Remember, I held my cell phone up to it and it made it made reverb that the whole city block was able to hear for a while.
[49:35.170 --> 49:35.770]  [SPEAKER_07]: Good times.
[49:36.710 --> 49:38.850]  [SPEAKER_07]: But I want to have the old technology as well.
[49:39.030 --> 49:41.250]  [SPEAKER_07]: I want to have the payphones and the LinkNYC.
[49:41.350 --> 49:42.210]  [SPEAKER_07]: Is that so much to ask?
[49:42.450 --> 49:51.070]  [SPEAKER_07]: Is that so much to ask for having something that we know works under certain circumstances and then having something else, which is cool and can do all kinds of other fun things?
[49:51.290 --> 49:53.210]  [SPEAKER_07]: And maybe even a third thing.
[49:53.470 --> 49:55.390]  [SPEAKER_05]: And I was saying so last week.
[49:55.510 --> 50:06.730]  [SPEAKER_05]: Like, it's really interesting to see where the idea of public infrastructure is and where the implementation of it is and exactly how much of an infrastructure we actually have compared to the days when there were payphones on every corner.
[50:07.490 --> 50:08.330]  [SPEAKER_07]: Yes, absolutely.
[50:08.330 --> 50:12.150]  [SPEAKER_07]: So that's the deal with LinkNYC.
[50:12.150 --> 50:15.990]  [SPEAKER_07]: Not quite as nice as people thought it was.
[50:16.170 --> 50:22.470]  [SPEAKER_08]: I just imagine that buying ad space on one of those things is probably not a cheap endeavor.
[50:22.810 --> 50:27.990]  [SPEAKER_08]: And perhaps they'd sell more if it was a matter that...
[50:27.990 --> 50:30.150]  [SPEAKER_08]: Well, there was less of a barrier to entry.
[50:30.310 --> 50:33.830]  [SPEAKER_08]: Because I find any ads I have ever seen, it's always something huge.
[50:33.830 --> 50:35.770]  [SPEAKER_08]: It's not like a community thing.
[50:35.770 --> 50:44.070]  [SPEAKER_08]: There's no local sense to it, which at most you get with the sort of fun New York facts thing that kind of is good for the city.
[50:44.090 --> 50:49.970]  [SPEAKER_08]: But how many like businesses in the neighborhood or like a bodega or any place really has access to that?
[50:50.110 --> 50:54.910]  [SPEAKER_08]: No, you have to be a massive fashion campaign or some entertainment thing.
[50:55.070 --> 50:56.370]  [SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, bring the price down a little bit.
[50:56.430 --> 50:59.130]  [SPEAKER_07]: Let's have some local businesses advertising these things.
[50:59.270 --> 51:01.550]  [SPEAKER_07]: Hey, there's a drugstore down the block or something or...
[51:01.550 --> 51:03.330]  [SPEAKER_07]: Or there's a conference this July.
[51:03.330 --> 51:06.670]  [SPEAKER_07]: Or that, or that, or hey, where can I find the nearest payphone?
[51:06.770 --> 51:07.550]  [SPEAKER_07]: Just around the block.
[51:08.190 --> 51:09.150]  [SPEAKER_07]: There's only one left.
[51:09.250 --> 51:09.630]  [SPEAKER_07]: I don't know.
[51:09.770 --> 51:10.410]  [SPEAKER_07]: Something like that.
[51:10.550 --> 51:11.550]  [SPEAKER_07]: But local info.
[51:11.910 --> 51:14.830]  [SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, make it so that the people can help run these things.
[51:14.870 --> 51:15.550]  [SPEAKER_07]: I like that idea.
[51:15.630 --> 51:17.190]  [SPEAKER_08]: And that they benefit in the area.
[51:17.410 --> 51:17.530]  [SPEAKER_08]: Yeah.
[51:17.870 --> 51:18.030]  [SPEAKER_07]: Uh-huh.
[51:18.670 --> 51:18.910]  [SPEAKER_07]: Gila?
[51:19.250 --> 51:20.850]  [SPEAKER_04]: Oh, no, I was just clicking my pen.
[51:21.110 --> 51:21.790]  [SPEAKER_04]: But I did...
[51:21.790 --> 51:22.630]  [SPEAKER_04]: Sorry about that.
[51:22.690 --> 51:26.030]  [SPEAKER_04]: But I did get a note passed to me about...
[51:26.030 --> 51:27.550]  [SPEAKER_07]: You want to share it with the rest of us?
[51:27.550 --> 51:28.690]  [SPEAKER_07]: That's what I was going to say, yes.
[51:28.790 --> 51:35.250]  [SPEAKER_04]: I will read it to the class about an effect that the coronavirus is having on New York City specifically.
[51:35.670 --> 51:35.790]  [SPEAKER_07]: Okay.
[51:36.110 --> 51:38.590]  [SPEAKER_04]: The St. Patrick's Day Parade has been canceled.
[51:39.430 --> 51:40.070]  [SPEAKER_04]: Well, okay.
[51:40.150 --> 51:43.530]  [SPEAKER_04]: After 200 and what, 54 years?
[51:43.730 --> 51:45.050]  [SPEAKER_04]: If I can math it correctly.
[51:45.270 --> 51:45.610]  [SPEAKER_07]: Uh-huh.
[51:45.890 --> 51:46.030]  [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[51:46.370 --> 51:51.210]  [SPEAKER_07]: So we won't have a lot of drunken people smashing windows and causing terror throughout...
[51:51.210 --> 51:53.630]  [SPEAKER_07]: I mean, you know, I'm playing both sides here.
[51:53.630 --> 51:56.190]  [SPEAKER_04]: The St. Patrick's Day Parade walks right past my workplace.
[51:56.270 --> 51:59.150]  [SPEAKER_04]: Yes, I am thrilled that it's not happening this year.
[51:59.350 --> 52:00.850]  [SPEAKER_07]: How do we cancel SantaCon?
[52:01.570 --> 52:02.310]  [SPEAKER_04]: Give it time.
[52:02.470 --> 52:02.790]  [SPEAKER_07]: All right.
[52:02.970 --> 52:03.470]  [SPEAKER_04]: Give it time.
[52:04.250 --> 52:05.290]  [SPEAKER_07]: But that is something.
[52:05.410 --> 52:10.510]  [SPEAKER_07]: That tells you something about how serious this is and how crowds should be avoided.
[52:10.870 --> 52:12.070]  [SPEAKER_07]: It's not the end of the world.
[52:12.310 --> 52:13.790]  [SPEAKER_07]: It doesn't mean that we have to panic.
[52:13.830 --> 52:16.610]  [SPEAKER_07]: And I haven't seen many signs of panic, I have to say, in New York.
[52:16.630 --> 52:17.670]  [SPEAKER_07]: I don't know about the rest of the country.
[52:18.350 --> 52:21.750]  [SPEAKER_07]: Maybe people can write to us, oth@2600.com and tell us.
[52:21.850 --> 52:23.010]  [SPEAKER_04]: You went in a drugstore recently?
[52:23.010 --> 52:24.170]  [SPEAKER_07]: Well, no, you know what?
[52:24.270 --> 52:27.250]  [SPEAKER_07]: I'm staying away from drugstores because where are the sick people going to go?
[52:27.390 --> 52:30.470]  [SPEAKER_07]: They're going to go to drugstores and not going to go to Chinese restaurants, folks.
[52:30.610 --> 52:31.330]  [SPEAKER_07]: So go there.
[52:31.410 --> 52:33.470]  [SPEAKER_07]: They will be so happy to see you.
[52:33.650 --> 52:35.550]  [SPEAKER_07]: They are so thrilled when they get customers.
[52:35.770 --> 52:37.250]  [SPEAKER_07]: And any restaurant, actually.
[52:37.450 --> 52:39.870]  [SPEAKER_07]: We've been to some places recently that were empty.
[52:40.890 --> 52:42.910]  [SPEAKER_07]: And that's not where the real threat is.
[52:43.010 --> 52:47.170]  [SPEAKER_07]: The threat is in crowds, people coughing, people not being considerate.
[52:47.170 --> 52:49.250]  [SPEAKER_08]: Yeah, I just wanted to put an appeal.
[52:49.450 --> 53:07.170]  [SPEAKER_08]: Like, if anybody notices or sees good stories about interesting uses of technology in approaching either vaccinations and stuff in the future or just testing in your area or around the country, we'd be really fascinated to hear about that.
[53:07.170 --> 53:21.830]  [SPEAKER_08]: I saw a great story about the differences between industrial infrared thermometers because some of the ones with a lot more percentage of error were being used and weren't really going to be able to catch what they needed to.
[53:22.010 --> 53:22.950]  [SPEAKER_08]: All of that kind of stuff.
[53:23.050 --> 53:33.490]  [SPEAKER_08]: It's kind of interesting how begrudgingly a fair amount of cooperation and coordination is happening either at the state or federal but also international level.
[53:33.490 --> 53:37.330]  [SPEAKER_08]: So, any cool technological things, we'd love to hear some interesting stories.
[53:37.470 --> 53:45.650]  [SPEAKER_08]: And also about using technology to study this disease, this virus, a lot more, as well as regular flu.
[53:45.750 --> 53:49.010]  [SPEAKER_08]: I mean, it just kind of puts hygiene into the fore.
[53:49.190 --> 53:50.110]  [SPEAKER_08]: So, we're really interested.
[53:50.210 --> 54:00.150]  [SPEAKER_07]: It's a real opportunity to actually reach out and learn from scientists, to cooperate with people all over the world, and to combat ignorance.
[54:00.150 --> 54:02.330]  [SPEAKER_07]: Speaking of which, Trump is speaking in about an hour.
[54:02.330 --> 54:03.210]  [SPEAKER_07]: We'll see what he has to say.
[54:03.350 --> 54:06.950]  [SPEAKER_07]: Hopefully, he's getting the message finally that this is nothing to be trifled with.
[54:07.090 --> 54:13.330]  [SPEAKER_07]: I would like to see that because it's literally costing lives when bad policies are enacted.
[54:13.790 --> 54:15.870]  [SPEAKER_07]: Now, Alex, I know you are...
[54:15.870 --> 54:17.150]  [SPEAKER_07]: I'm sorry we don't have a theme for this.
[54:17.190 --> 54:18.570]  [SPEAKER_07]: It should be a regular part of the program now.
[54:18.650 --> 54:20.050]  [SPEAKER_07]: But let's just use this melody.
[54:22.430 --> 54:27.330]  [SPEAKER_07]: It's time, once again, for Coronavirus of the Week domain registration.
[54:27.630 --> 54:29.010]  [SPEAKER_07]: And we'll come up with a better name for that, too.
[54:29.010 --> 54:36.350]  [SPEAKER_07]: What Alex is doing is he's scanning the Internet every day to see what domains people are registering.
[54:36.550 --> 54:44.830]  [SPEAKER_07]: So, if you really want to throw him for a loop, register something like Coronavirus, HeyThereAlexHowYouDoing.com, and he'll see that.
[54:45.810 --> 54:50.630]  [SPEAKER_07]: It'll put a smile to his face and otherwise a boring day, I imagine.
[54:50.790 --> 54:51.570]  [SPEAKER_07]: What have you found this week?
[54:51.650 --> 54:52.790]  [SPEAKER_07]: What kinds of domains are being registered?
[54:52.790 --> 54:57.810]  [SPEAKER_06]: Well, I'll tell you, again, more and more of an uptick every single day in the amount of registrations.
[54:58.050 --> 55:05.210]  [SPEAKER_06]: Just today, for the String Corona, we have seen 784 domain name registrations, which is incredible.
[55:05.370 --> 55:05.470]  [SPEAKER_06]: Wow.
[55:05.470 --> 55:06.850]  [SPEAKER_06]: Just within the last 24 hours.
[55:06.950 --> 55:07.630]  [SPEAKER_07]: That's got some highlights?
[55:08.170 --> 55:15.930]  [SPEAKER_06]: Yeah, some highlights would be, you know, on a somber note, CoronavirusFuneral.com, CoronavirusFuneral.com.
[55:16.050 --> 55:16.870]  [SPEAKER_01]: Ooh, what registrations?
[55:16.870 --> 55:21.390]  [SPEAKER_06]: I mean, really craziness, CoronacaosApp.com.
[55:21.730 --> 55:27.990]  [SPEAKER_06]: We've got Coronadoc, Coronamask-store, Coronavaccine.online.
[55:27.990 --> 55:30.430]  [SPEAKER_06]: And again, you know, we're not endorsing any of these sites.
[55:30.550 --> 55:37.690]  [SPEAKER_06]: A lot of these sites are going to present you with misinformation, erroneous information, try to sell you masks that are not manufactured properly.
[55:39.170 --> 55:40.050]  [SPEAKER_06]: Coronavaccine.store.
[55:40.250 --> 55:43.290]  [SPEAKER_06]: There's, of course, a couple of lawyers that are getting in on the game here.
[55:43.290 --> 55:47.090]  [SPEAKER_06]: We've got coronavirus-attorneys.com, of course.
[55:47.310 --> 55:48.750]  [SPEAKER_06]: Then we've got...
[55:48.750 --> 55:50.250]  [SPEAKER_06]: Who do you sue, exactly?
[55:51.210 --> 55:52.010]  [SPEAKER_06]: I don't know.
[55:52.390 --> 55:56.210]  [SPEAKER_06]: There's got to be a defendant somewhere in Wuhan that's got some deep pockets, I'm sure.
[55:56.350 --> 55:58.550]  [SPEAKER_06]: You know, look, some lawyer will figure it out, right?
[55:58.790 --> 56:07.910]  [SPEAKER_06]: Or let's say if the emergency management of this has been completely mishandled, then maybe, you know, there's a city municipality with some deep pockets.
[56:07.910 --> 56:12.750]  [SPEAKER_06]: But then you have a whole bunch of really interesting ones that seem to have incorporated area codes.
[56:13.810 --> 56:21.070]  [SPEAKER_06]: Coronavirus210.com, 213.com, 214-215-305-512, which I recall is Austin, Texas.
[56:21.350 --> 56:23.390]  [SPEAKER_06]: 602-615-617.
[56:24.650 --> 56:25.190]  [SPEAKER_06]: Coronavirus619.
[56:26.610 --> 56:27.690]  [SPEAKER_06]: Coronavirus713.com.
[56:27.790 --> 56:30.070]  [SPEAKER_06]: So a whole bunch of area codes being registered.
[56:30.070 --> 56:40.950]  [SPEAKER_06]: Also really fascinating, and this wasn't within the last 24 hours, but Coronawarriors.com appears to actually be an application that is under development.
[56:40.950 --> 56:45.710]  [SPEAKER_06]: It's going to be an app that will be soon available, perhaps in the Apple and Google Play Store.
[56:45.770 --> 56:52.050]  [SPEAKER_06]: And it's made by the guys who were behind Eczema Tracker as well.
[56:52.610 --> 56:52.870]  [SPEAKER_06]: Wow.
[56:52.910 --> 56:53.870]  [SPEAKER_06]: And eCare platform.
[56:54.030 --> 57:06.910]  [SPEAKER_06]: But essentially what Coronawarriors.com is showcasing right now, and they may not want you to see this, is an app that is going to act just like the Citizen app and give you alerts about outbreaks in your area, where you can buy supplies.
[57:07.290 --> 57:10.990]  [SPEAKER_06]: So people are getting in in the app development business side of this as well.
[57:11.170 --> 57:12.470]  [SPEAKER_06]: So check that out.
[57:12.650 --> 57:14.350]  [SPEAKER_06]: We'll report back with more next week.
[57:14.430 --> 57:16.630]  [SPEAKER_07]: And our melody seems to have gotten a little bit more sophisticated.
[57:17.230 --> 57:20.110]  [SPEAKER_07]: We're being pushed out of here right now, but we'll be back again next week.
[57:20.750 --> 57:23.470]  [SPEAKER_07]: Please write to us, oth@2600.com.
[57:23.470 --> 57:28.670]  [SPEAKER_07]: Stay tuned to WBAI New York, because we have all kinds of updates constantly being broadcast.
[57:28.950 --> 57:33.210]  [SPEAKER_07]: We're local radio, and at times like this, local radio has never been more important.
[57:33.790 --> 57:35.530]  [SPEAKER_07]: And we're very happy this place is here.
[57:35.690 --> 57:36.930]  [SPEAKER_07]: We will see you next week.
[57:37.970 --> 57:38.770]  [SPEAKER_07]: Stay healthy.
[57:38.990 --> 57:39.250]  [SPEAKER_07]: Good night.
[58:27.840 --> 58:30.800]  [SPEAKER_10]: We'll be right back.
[59:56.930 --> 59:58.110]  [SPEAKER_01]: WBAI.org.
[59:58.290 --> 01:00:01.830]  [SPEAKER_01]: Coming up next is Exploration with Michio Kaku.
[01:00:02.050 --> 01:00:06.370]  [SPEAKER_01]: So stay tuned and tell everybody you know to put on WBAI New York.