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The Midnight Ravers where every show is a special. 
And this is radio station WBAI New York the time is 7 o'clock time once again for Off The Hook.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall
I cut myself while shaving, now I can't make a call
Though it couldn't get much worse
But if they could, they would
But the best expect the worst
I hope that's understood
And a wonderful good evening to all of you in Radio Land. This is Off The Hook.
Emanuel Goldstein here with you joined tonight by a toddler on a piano.
In addition to that we have Alex. Good evening. 
Rob T. Firefly. Good evening. 
Gila. Hello.
Kyle. I'm over here. 
Yes I see you over there. 
And what we're actually hearing now is I guess the best way to describe this is a code listing a listing of results. 
Let me go into some detail here. This is from a story in The Independent. A musician and lawyer has used an algorithm to generate every possible melody in an attempt to end music copyright lawsuit claims. 
All those you know copyright lawsuits that we see? 
This is an attempt to put an end to that already. 
Working with programmer Noah Rubin, Damien Real built software capable of generating 300,000 melodies each second creating a catalog of 68 billion count them 68 billion eight-note melodies and we're playing them for you right now. 
Oh yeah I remember that one. 
The melodies were then copyrighted and released into the public domain in the hope of stifling litigious musicians. 
Wow. 
Joining us on the phone right now are both Noah Rubin and Damien Real. 
Guys you with us? 
I am. Good evening. 
Does this bring back memories to you hearing these these melodies as we play them over the radio? 
The one you one you just played was my favorite of the billions we've made. 
Mine too. Yes very melancholy but but also uplifting at the same time. 
Well so what first of all what kind of a reaction have you gotten so far to this this project of yours? 
The project that we anticipated would be a mixed bag of people really excited about it and people very angry about it but I've been pleasantly surprised that it's been nearly universally positive. 
People have really been supportive of the talk and then this is a you know it was an article in the Independent but I also gave a TEDx talk 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 many of them are worried is this song new or am I subconsciously copying somebody else?
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. 
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? 
Well so that's so our point is that melodies are math and so we have created a very huge swath in addition to the 68 billion that you mentioned that's just the major scale we also did another 68 billion with a minor scale and then we did another about 65 billion for the chromatic scale so that's both the white notes and the black notes 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 so it's about 14 different pitches 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 it's just change the permutations change the parameters and you get every single one. 
Now you mentioned that there are people who are very happy but you also mentioned there are people who are very angry tell me something about those people. 
Well some people I think the anger is a bit misplaced they think that we and you know we haven't talked much about the law side of this but we are asserting copyright we're asserting two claims number claim number one is we have copyright on every single melody and we placed every one of those copyrighted works into the public domain so anybody can use it so that's the claim number one. 
Claim number two is that if we do not get copyright in every single melody then all of these melodies are public domain anyway so 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 so the people who have been critical of our work have largely been misunderstood those two components and thinking that we're trying to be copyright trolls taking over the world we're absolutely actually the opposite is true we want to be able to free these melodies for people to use. 
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 would it have been possible for you then to have become a plaintiff later on in a subsequent lawsuit? 
It's a good question and you know for any copyright infringement to happen you have the defendants, the person accused of stealing the melody, has to have access and access is a term of art in the law that means that the defendant has to have heard or at least have a likelihood of hearing the plaintiff's work. 
So in this case you know I suppose I could you know we could put it up on a website but we would probably lose if we try 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 therefore I haven't infringed that case would probably get thrown out. 
But access actually is really important to the points that we're trying to make to defend songwriters and the question of did I hear that other songwriters work or not.
If Adam made a song and Beth is accused of stealing Adam's song did Beth hear Adam's song or not?
That's the thing that costs millions of dollars to get to trial to decide for a jury to decide whether Beth heard Adam or not. 
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 therefore Adam doesn't even have copyright in the thing that he's trying to sue me over. 
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?
That's exactly right yeah I encourage your listeners to Google and do my my first name Damien last name real and copyright and you'll see a TED talk where the first first five minutes are me talking about the George Harrison case.
George Harrison was sued by the Chiffons where George Harrison had the song he said my sweet Lord and the Chiffons earlier had He's So Fine 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 therefore you lose and that struck me as that did put a bee in my bonnet as you say because the idea of subconscious infringement goes against everything that you need that the law requires in every other case somebody suing somebody else needs to prove that the defendant had intent or that the intent the defendant meant to do something.
I remember that that very case too with George Harrison at the end of the case the judge said that he liked both songs and George Harrison said don't you mean he liked the one song.
It's true, 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 and how do you ever prove a negative. 
You know in philosophy, that's impossible.
And particularly, how can I as a songwriter say I've never heard this other song playing over the loudspeaker in the grocery store?
It's impossible to prove that therefore every defendant loses.
So what we're trying to do with our work is to try to keep that innocence infringer from losing in a lawsuit.
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, so in any subsequent lawsuit we're still gonna 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 of the suit.
Well perhaps. 
And so it depends on what you're suing over so Adam's song and Beth's song what's being alleged to have taken between Adam's song and Beth's song and so if what we're saying is that a song is a bunch of components, yet melody is one but it's also lyrics it's also the orchestration it's also you know um you know many ten or so different factors of which the pitch change that we're focused on is only one of those.
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 Adams alleging to have been stolen is just the change in pitch and that's just factual therefore the case goes away the case is dismissed
Well then you avoid yeah I think I find that very interesting and you know and correct me if I'm wrong 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 to your project if 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 therefore..
I've never heard of a number being copyrighted, but I'm sure I could be proven wrong.
You probably could, that's right yeah even 2600 that's right.
Wait wait wait a minute that one okay no yeah yeah go ahead.
Equal application of the law Emmanuel, that's that's what we strive towards right.
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 or you know a weaker version of that same conclusion would be that music itself should have very few copyright protections would that be correct?
I would I would I would draw a distinction you use the word music and I use melody which is one of the components of music you know so if you think about what is what is music and music is a 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 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 the element that is not copyrightable we're arguing is the melody alone.
If somebody if somebody's alleged if Adam says hey Beth you stole my melody those cases should go away but if Adam says hey Beth you stole my entire song yeah go after Beth yeah.
And it's akin to like the structure of a sentence versus a particular string of recognizable or distinct words exactly yeah everybody needs to use syntax in the way that the English language works
and we're arguing in the same way everybody needs to you know everybody in the major diatonic scale needs to use the same eight notes.
There's really there's only so many ways you could rearrange those notes, especially in a particular genre a blues, right there's only so many blues chords and only so many blues melodies you can use and so of course we're going to be stepping on each other all the time.
Well see this raises I think a fascinating segue into hacker culture as well as you're talking about these eight-note melodies everybody is reliant on these eight-note melodies and Emmanuel at the outset here mentioned that you know what you had developed were permutations of these eight-note melodies 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 in this case they're eight-note melodies and not necessarily passwords 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.
I love that you said that and I'm gonna say that that's actually the impetus of my idea is that I we worked in cybersecurity.
Noah and I and I and as I was also a musician I've been a I was a music major in college I have a degree in music and I also have been coding since 1985 so while I was on the cybersecurity engagement I thought yeah you could brute-force a password saying a a a a a b a a c I wonder if you could do that with music do do do do do ray do do me do do fa and so that's what I did I went to Noah we were actually on a cybersecurity engagement on-site at a client's location I said Noah do you think we could be able to do that and I and as I recall it Noah said yeah I think that's a interesting problem.
And with that it's it's now I'm now leaving Washington DC because the mayor has declared a state of emergency so I need to jump on a plane right now but Noah is you're gonna have a great conversation with Noah about the way that he programmed this and the implications he's he has great stories to tell anything for your listeners he's probably the best programmer I've ever worked with you're gonna love hearing about how he did this. 
All right well Damien thank you so much for talking with us and have a safe flight and try not to breathe too deeply.
Thank you very much take care of us.
All right and that's Damien Real he is the musician and lawyer who helped put all this together we still have a Noah Rubin with us who programmed this whole thing and Noah you still there.
Yep. 
Great so what was involved in actually having a computer or computers do all this?
Good question so we went through a number of different iterations the first proof of concept we put together in about a couple hours we quickly realized there are a number of hurdles so MIDI has 129 pitches and for those that don't know MIDI is a format for storing music and so that the piano has 88 but MIDI has 129 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.
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 and that's how we arrived at the 68.719 billion we actually generated at first 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 but it turns out that most computers don't like storing a whole bunch of individual files like that so we had to come up with a storage mechanism that could handle that as well.
But once we got over those initial hurdles it was really just a matter of hitting go and watching it run for a little over five days. 
So that massive 600 gigabyte file there are two of them right now that you can access off of your website and I'm assuming one is the major and one is the minor? 
That's a good question. 
It was going to take 12 days to download so I couldn't get there. 
Right you have Comcast to thank for the fact that we haven't uploaded all of them to archive.org yet. In short I don't 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 so it is a work in progress we are uploading more. 
Wow how long did it did it take from the beginning of the project to actually announcing it?  
That's a good question so Damien's TED talk was on August 10th of last year I think we started talking about this in June. 
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. 
That's not too long but that's it's a good project it's an amazing accomplishment. 
I have a question what was the solution to being able to handle the volume of MIDI files, I believe it was MIDI files that were created how did you get around that or what kind of file structure or system did you choose? 
That's a good question so our initial attempt was to use a file system called XFS. 
Which you know if you use a Windows computer today the file system that Windows computers use is NTFS and because of the way that NTFS stores data on the file system you can only have at most four billion files or directory. 
Wow that's good to know. 
Yeah so it's just 2 to the 32 that's how we get there. 
So with XFS you can have 2 to the 64 theoretically which is orders of magnitude larger 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 and so after a number of iterations what we came up with was we separate MIDI files into batches so a batch could be let's say 22 to 25 MIDI files and we compress each batch and then we store all batches inside of a single file like an archive it's called a tar file so all of the output is actually in a single file on the file system. 
That's incredible that's a great great description of what exactly is being shared.
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? 
Yeah I'm glad you asked. Most people don't want to know all the technical nuance but I'm glad someone's interested. So our prototype was in Python those familiar with that probably one of the more popular programming languages but we encountered a few issues mostly because Python doesn't allow you to run I excuse me for getting a bit technical here but Python doesn't allow you to run multiple threads within the same process if you've heard of like multi-threading before. 
You actually have to run multiple processes and we were encountering bottlenecks just because Python is slower than some other languages but also some memory leaks 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. 
So we switched to a language called Rust those that are familiar it's a newer language kind of like C a little bit or C++ and so Rust allowed us to have better memory management and it was also much faster. 
So the solution we have now and are continuously improving is written in Rust.  
I mean that that's fascinating it's interesting to hear that Python had these limitations you know could that have been solved by just adding more RAM to the machine you know with respect to the memory leaks or you know this was something that we're going to encounter over and over and over again with Python. 
It is not necessarily a Python issue I don't want to blame Python and I personally have a deep love for Python I don't want to put it on blast. 
Our quickest solution was to use a different program I find debugging memory errors in Python a bit difficult which is a Python issue. 
A lot of the like scientific computing that people do in Python that is very fast it's actually running C under the hood and so our thought was let's just use a systems programming language that we know is fast and then we can manage memory. 
I mean that's fascinating and you know you sound like somebody who's been programming for a while so you had a lot of familiarity with C's it sounded like it wasn't a difficult transition.  
One of the other questions I had and I guess this might have been you know for Damien as well I know I had to catch a plane but you were probably privy to this as well. 
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. That's a really great question the short answer is I'm not privy to anyone reaching out but that's something that we're actively working on. 
We had an interview last week or a couple weeks ago where someone asked you know are you are you posing as are you giving expert testimony and the answer was well no but that's actually a really great idea and we should definitely do that. 
So my hope is that someone in the near future does reach out and try to help them. 
Well I think that's great it sounds like you guys would be wonderful expert witnesses 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 and you know we are definitely going to do what we can to get the word out and you know nobody's perfect I'm a lawyer as well so obviously stay in touch with me and if there's ever a matter that comes up we'll be in touch with you. 
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 is there do you have a sense of that kind of traction? 
Yeah 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 I like the technical side of this but the larger societal implications or implications for music copyright are honestly more important and so I'm glad that we've had more interest in that side of it. 
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 they want to offer or need help writing the code for whatever they're trying to accomplish and so I'm personally very excited about those opportunities. 
Somebody actually reached out recently that they're having a hackathon which for those unfamiliar it's just like a it's an event where people get together and write software in a short period of time. 
Someone wants to work on a project related to generating melodies during the hackathon and so that's something that again I'm really excited about but but something that Damien likes to say at the end of every interview is that we really like talking with smart people and the entire point of embarking on this journey was to get smart people talking about this topic and you guys are some of those people and we really really appreciate the time and getting the word out. 
Hey well Noah you know we have a hacker conference coming up this summer and you and Damien sound like you could put together a pretty awesome pitch for a spot at the conference so we would love to hear from you on that note, no pun intended, of course and you know but I think this is a super interesting topic and you definitely exemplify the hacker spirit in doing what you did and sharing your knowledge and sharing the code and helping others and we would definitely love to see both of you over at HOPE this summer in Manhattan, I'm sorry, in Queens this year Hackers on Planet Earth conference so you know think about that and thank you so much for your time and for sharing your knowledge with us we love talking with smart people as well.
And thank you for your delightful compositions also as a music lover I think I'm a fan of your work or will be at some point.
All right we're gonna listen to the rest of how long will it take us to listen to all of this by the way for that one that one piece amazing okay well we're gonna listen to as much as we can and double-back later perhaps but we should get this on to Shazam as well make sure that it recognizes but Noah I want to thank you so much for joining us Noah Rubin I program this whole thing and of course we had Damien Real before the musician and lawyer also part of this project their website is all the music dot info and people can find out all kinds of additional information there, Noah final question is there anything people can do to help you guys out?
Yeah, 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.
Okay we'll consider that done we will definitely spread the word around and spread the tunes as well.
Thanks again thanks appreciate it have a good night
You know I think if I if I ran some kind of institution like a school or a motel or or
something I would just have this playing constant instead of elevator music you just have this going
because it won't repeat in quite a long time and it'll be somewhat somewhat unique and different
what do you guys think I think that's I think that's neat also I know we have a lot of musicians
and creative people among our listenership 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 so it's in the public domain and what we're listening to right now because like I said
the the full tar file was gonna take days and days to download because again 600 gigabytes so
what this is is a slightly more manageable chunk of music that's available in the FAQ section of
all the music info this is about an hour 62 minutes worth of music that we're dealing with right now
and yeah I'm definitely gonna be humming this later 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 and I haven't
gotten to that yet give it time give it I will give it time got nothing but time it's gonna be
spending a lot of time indoors listening to music so folks this is how you get through this this
crisis you listen to lengthy periods of melodies and this is this is our secret well the other
thing that 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 that the lawsuit situation
that I was thinking of was a few years ago when Sam Smith and Tom Petty worked out they didn't
even get to court they worked out a they worked it out out of court that Sam Smith said oh I guess
I inadvertently he claimed never to have heard this the Tom Petty song which somebody help me
out I won't back down thank you very much which I don't believe but Sam Smith said oh whoops and
now Tom Petty and Jeff Lynn have twelve point five percent of the songwriting for Sam Smith song stay
with me 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
Wow you know it always annoyed me I don't know if you guys remember the Rutles this this incredible
mockumentary about the whole Beatlemania and it was created by this musical genius named Neil Ennis
who we lost last year and he was forced for the songs the amazing songs that he wrote that were
parodies of Beatles songs he was forced to give songwriting credit to McCartney and McCartney
they had nothing to do with it they appreciated the humor of it but is because of the publishing
rights and all this this legal mumbo-jumbo that if you look at the songs you'll see their names
on them it makes absolutely no sense but it shows you just how the the legal world clashes with the
artistic world that's right 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 and yeah I mean it look it's it's a crazy system but
look on the flip side of it as well you know to play devil's advocate for a second you're a lawyer
you're already the devil yeah well I'm sorry it depends on the day depends on the client I guess
but I mean there there is an argument to be made that doing something like this could perhaps be
considered to be anti-creative right that that music needs copyright to ensure that an artist
is in fact credited both morally and financially for their creative endeavor right but how how far
it down do you define that you know that just a number of which is eight notes we're talking
about here that's right can you really define it down to eight notes I mean uh you know if you take
a sentence a quote is every word copyrightable is you know can you say that you own the word the
because you said it in a famous quote at some point it just gets to be uh so tiny so minuscule
that um uh copywriting it just cripples everybody who's who's trying to create anything yeah look
I agree and I think Damian addressed this really well and 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 uh and I think that you know there could be some criticism that perhaps
this project if it does work out and 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 exactly for others and so you know that's the distinction I think that makes a difference
here and makes us a super fascinating project that involves hacker culture music math programming
it's uh it's incredibly fascinating a little rebellion too and and certainly a lot of rebellion
and I really hope that they put in a proposal to speak at hope I agree I think it's also very
interesting for me to see where this place is at the nexus of um 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 and somebody wrote these four
words and then you know my brother liked to talk about this one song that's popular that had 14
credited songwriters and three of them wrote the harmonica solo wow right so I'm very curious to
see how this is going to change the face of that going forward yeah I just I just love this as 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 and at this point like I think if you take a piano like hit any eight keys in a in
a row that'll probably be somewhere in a copyrighted song that you're technically not allowed
to use and you know this uh this this project I think really really challenges that in a fun and
interesting way yeah yeah I just I can't wrap my head around it because what is it that you're
you're protecting 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 what someone else sings your song
and doesn't give you the credit for it okay uh but you you know you have the credit for it
and and and and people who do um studies of music will know that you wrote that song it's it's it's
archived someplace in that in that uh in that uh manner um if um if though you you control it to
the degree where every single note is um uh owned by somebody or every single melody is owned by
somebody it just makes it impossible to do anything because everything you do has been done before I
mean try try saying something clever on twitter someone already has done it but imagine if it was
all trademarked and you got sued every time you said something that someone else had the same idea
it's um it's really they're incompatible worlds the legal world and the creative world I just
I don't think they they get along it's like if you write a novel and then uh like some time later it
becomes successful and then somebody sues you because you used a three-word uh you know piece
of piece of a sentence that somebody else had used in another book before you um the basic building
blocks have to be available at some point you know you can't copyright the english language
you can't cop you can't copyright the you know quick brown fox like uh you know you you've got
to you've got to leave some tools available for other people to be able to build anything out of
it yeah I mean I understand counterfeiting you know if you if you sell something that someone
else did and say it's you that's obviously wrong that's that's easy to understand and I think easy
to prosecute I imagine Alex you might know more about that but certainly yeah but it's just simply
the creative part of it to say that um I said this first or you know I I hum this melody first
to turn that into a controlling uh method is just um it goes against everything I think artists
stand for and to think that the legal system can reasonably resolve these types of disputes too
I think is is sort of ridiculous as well because you know to go back to Gila's 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 you know and it's based on credibility or based on the famousness
of a particular song and you know maybe somebody heard a song maybe they didn't but the simple
fact of the matter is that the original song that is allegedly being infringed those royalties
aren't being disturbed those that author of that song still owns all right entitled to that
particular work this subsequent work that came after it you know maybe has an homage to it maybe
they acknowledge that they stood on the shoulders of that particular song and and that's not
necessarily wrong to 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 what if I um what if I say to be or
not to be now is Shakespeare going to come after me for using that I mean I've said it a million
times and it comes up a lot copyright on that is long expired I would presume but is the copyright
on that sentence is it on the play is it on a couple of the words in the sentence you know 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 well same thing
you you have that issue come up mostly in trademark law right I mean what are the things that can be
trademarked what are the things that it cannot be a slogan I can understand you know if coke decides
that you know I have a dream is their slogan well who's anyone else to stand up and say that they
don't have the right the exclusive right to that phrase well true that's the craziness we live in
you know you think about you know geographic terms right you know cities you know to have certain
emotions associated with them NYC New York Trenton of all places you know something like that right
so cop I'm sorry trademarking terms that are used by the public geographic terms isn't necessarily
allowed but if you combine that with something else then you can have it become a trademark if
you see something say something I think 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 that's
the absurdity well New York I think also owns I love New York why would anybody else want to own
that though I don't but if you express love for New York and in that exact way I think technically
you should put a little TM after it yeah I mean it gets absurd because what you're going to sue
somebody because they say they love New York they're not going to love New York anymore
so you're going to fix that problem yeah I mean and like there's 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 so there is a an assumption that you're not going to clash with
the other trademark holder of a similar term or the exact mark so look at you know it's a
complicated system I mean intellectual property law is it's certainly fascinating was one of my
favorite topics when I was in law school but it it can really you know be quite dry frankly in
practice 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
it always should be that if something is created a work of art that work of art
should be shared by definition it should be available it should never be hidden
yeah I mean in copyright reform is you know a hot topic these days as well if you think about
you know the length of a copyright you know perhaps one way of leveling the playing field
would be to to shorten the length of any particular copyright so that these things
can happen more freely and more fundamentally without fear of litigation all right and with
that let's shift gears talk about a couple of other issues that have been going on this week
of course the the big elephant in the room is the coronavirus and how it's affecting everybody
everybody in the world and yeah things like this do do tend to unify they can also terrify
what have you guys noticed in the last week I noticed all the the schools are starting to
shut down online only classes I mean you know my son is in public school here in in Manhattan
and you know it's kind of scary they're testing the emergency
text system we're getting messages almost daily from the principal 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 and these things are you know
very scary for a parent to hear you know there's lots of telecommuting plans being put into place
as well I think tell I think telecommunicate telecommunication and telecommuting are
holding together the economy at this point I mean there's a lot of people that can't do that
so I don't want to exactly I don't want to you know say it's it's somehow you know what everyone's
doing I know that's not the case at all but a lot of businesses small and large are really
emphasizing distancing if they can help it 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 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 but the fact
that we have that I think from our perspective and talking about phones and and computers all
the time it's kind of amazing to actually see this this form of work become a necessity in
under the circumstance well you know my main concern is when you tell students going to college
that they need to go home now they need to just conduct their their education online first of all
broadband isn't a right in this country a lot of people don't have broadband a lot of people don't
have uh necessary um speeds gila you just demonstrated that this this multi-billion
melody file you couldn't download in time for the show it takes days but the thing is with with um
with college classes is everybody going to have the right software does everybody have a computer
do they all have a connection a lot of assumptions being made there so it's it's not necessarily
going to uh to work out advantageously 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 and I said to our IT director who
had sent out instructions on connecting remotely I said this is great the computers in my home
run linux can I use this and he said oh no oh no let me do some consulting and find out what to do
wow yeah so we're back at that again the old the old anti-linux battle and what you say about
broadband is especially interesting 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 and so I got that access in places
of gathering coffee shops libraries cafes um you know things of that sort 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 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 link nyc wi-fi into your apartment wow okay uh we
have some news about link nyc but uh go ahead alex first yeah I mean back to the broadband point I
mean this manual is absolutely right not everybody has broadband 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
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 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 so um yeah maybe the FCC should reconsider those particular rules and roll
them back a lot to think about a lot to consider uh but speaking of link nyc uh turns out yeah who
guessed uh new york's high-tech solution to the payphone we talked about this last week the link
nyc is basically kicking out payphones everywhere you're seeing them all over the city but new york's
high-tech solution has run into a low-tech problem the lack of money yeah the google-backed link nyc
program that was supposed to replace new york city's payphones with nine foot tall links on city
sidewalks has ground to a halt yeah the city bridge consortium stopped installing links in the fall of
2018 you guys know this they stopped over a year ago they stopped installing them and um that leaves
new york city with just 1800 of them they're supposed to have 4500 of them by the middle of
last year yeah and many of the links that haven't been installed were meant to service guess what
low-income neighborhoods where residents are in greater need of free internet access and
phones yeah 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 city bridge is delinquent
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 their commissioner jessica tisch uh said this
to the city council 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 so that hasn't
happened either city bridge owes the city tens of millions of dollars going back to 20 fiscal year
2019 all of this is against the backdrop of millions of dollars in advertising revenue that
city bridge has reported they received over the same time period so yeah now in a situation where
we're pulling out all the pay phones and replacing them with with uh link kiosks and the bills aren't
being paid and what does the city do now well i'm fascinated i guess by the link nyc kiosks in
general as we were saying last week from the pay phone standing in front of that pay phone we could
see three different link nyc kiosks and what i've found interesting is that most of what i see on
the various link nyc kiosks is not advertising i see a lot of fun facts about new york i see
how you can get places i see the weather i have not seen ads per se are you complaining not at all
oh okay but i'm asking where they think the money is going to come from if they're just like
fun facts about new york and here's a drawing we found well i think the the idea was they were going
to have advertising and somehow that didn't work out either or maybe since they stopped paying rent
or whatever nobody's advertising with them maybe it depends on where they are because i definitely
have seen paid advertising on link nyc uh kiosks um i i think it's i think it's uh not constant i
think it's interspersed with the uh here's fun facts about new york and uh hey the subway exists
and things like that but um but yeah i i think it it is pulling in some manner of advertising money
but uh like if if uh if the if the concern that owns these things is reporting advertising income
obviously that's coming from somewhere and that isn't being spent on paying their
obligation to the city just to be clear though i'm not against these things they're fun i had
a lot of fun with it last week remember i held my cell phone up to it and it made uh it made reverb
that the whole city block was able to hear for a while good times uh but i want to have the old
technology as well i want to have the pay phones and the link nyc is that so much to ask 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 and maybe even a third thing
and i was saying i was saying so last week 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 pay phones on every corner
yes absolutely so that's the um that's the deal with uh link nyc not quite as as as nice as as
people thought it was i just imagine that um buying ad space on one of those things is probably
not a cheap endeavor and perhaps they'd sell more if um if it was a matter that well there was less
of a barrier to entry because i find any ads i have ever seen it's always something huge it's
not like a community thing 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 but how many like businesses in the
neighborhood or like a bodega or any place really has access to that no you have to be a massive
fashion campaign or some entertainment thing yeah bring the price down a little bit let's have some
some local businesses advertising these things hey there's a drugstore down the block or something or
or there's a conference this july or that or that or hey where can i find the nearest pay phone just
around the block there's only one left i don't know something like that but local info yeah make
it so that the people can can help run these things i like that idea and that benefit in the
area yeah uh-huh gila oh no i was just clicking my pen but i did sorry about that but i did get a note
passed to me about you want to share it with the rest of us that's what i was going to say yes i
will read it to the class um about an effect that the coronavirus is having on new york city
specifically okay the saint patrick's day parade has been canceled well okay after 200 and what
54 years if i can math it correctly uh-huh yeah so we won't have a lot of drunken people smashing
windows and and and causing terror throughout i mean you know i i'm playing both sides here
the saint patrick's day parade walks right past my workplace yes i am thrilled that it's not
happening this year how do we cancel santa con give it time all right give it time but uh that
is something that tells you something about about how serious this is and how um how crowds should
be avoided it doesn't it's not the end of the world it doesn't mean that we have to panic and
i haven't seen many signs of panic i have to say in new york i don't know about the rest of the
country uh maybe people can write to us oth at 2600.com and tell us but in a drug store recently
i well no you know what i'm staying away from drugstores because where are the sick people
going to go they're going to go to drugstores and not going to go to chinese restaurants folks
so go there they will be so happy to see you they are so thrilled when they get customers
and any restaurant actually we've been to some places recently that were empty and um that's
not where the real threat is the threat is in in in crowds people coughing people not being
considerate yeah i just wanted to put an appeal like if anybody notices or uh sees good stories
about interesting uses of technology in approaching either vaccinations and stuff in
the future or just testing in in your area or or around the country we'd be really fascinated to
hear about that 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 all that kind of stuff it's kind
of interesting how um begrudgingly a fair amount of cooperation and coordination is
is happening either at the state or federal um but also international level so any cool
technological things we'd love to hear some some interesting stories and also about uh using
technology to to study this um disease this virus a lot more as well as regular flu i mean it just
kind of puts hygiene into the the four so we're really it's a real opportunity to actually reach
out and learn from uh from scientists to cooperate with uh people all over the world and to um combat
ignorance speaking of which trump is speaking in about an hour we'll see what he has to say
hopefully he's getting the message finally that this is nothing to be trifled with i would like
to see that because it's literally costing lives when when uh bad policies are enacted now uh alex
i know you are i'm sorry we don't have a theme for this it should be a regular part of the program
now but let's just use this melody it's time once again for coronavirus of the week domain
registration and we'll come up with a better name for that too what alex is doing is he's scanning
the internet every day to see what domains people are registering so if you really want to uh throw
him for a loop register something like coronavirus hey there alex how you doing dot com and he'll
he'll see that and it'll it'll put a smile to his face and otherwise uh a boring day as i imagine
what have you found this week what kinds of domains are being registered i'll tell you again
more and more of an uptick every single day in the amount of registrations just today
for the string corona we have seen 784 domain name registrations which is incredibly just within
the last 24 hours that's got some highlights um yeah some highlights would be you know on a somber
note coronavirus funeral.com coronavirus funerals.com would register i mean really craziness
uh corona chaos app.com we've got corona doc corona mask store corona vaccine.online and again
you know we're not endorsing any of these sites a lot of these sites are going to present you with
misinformation erroneous information try to sell you masks that are not manufactured properly
coronavaccine.store there's of course a couple of lawyers that are getting in on the game here
we've got coronavirus-attorneys.com of course then we've got um who do you sue exactly
i don't know there's got to be a defendant somewhere in wuhan that's got some deep
pockets i'm sure you know look some some lawyer will figure it out right or let's say if the
emergency uh management of this has been completely mishandled then maybe you know
there's a there's a city municipality with uh with some deep pockets but then you have
a whole bunch of really interesting ones that seem to have incorporated uh area codes
coronavirus 210.com 213.com 214 215 305 512 which i recall is uh austin texas 602 615 617
coronavirus 619 6 uh coronavirus 713.com so a whole bunch of area codes being being registered
also really fascinating and this wasn't within the last 24 hours but corona warriors.com
appears to actually be an application that is under development it's going to be an app that
will be soon available perhaps in the apple and google play store and it's made by the guys uh who
were the who were behind eczema tracker as well and e-care platform but essentially what
corona warriors.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 so people are getting in in the app development
business side of this as well so check that out we'll report back with more next week and our
melody seems we've got a little bit more sophisticated uh we're being pushed out of
here right now but we'll be back again next week uh please write to us oth at 2600.com
stay tuned to wba on new york because we have all kinds of updates constantly being broadcast
we're local radio and uh at times like this local radio has never been more important
and we're very happy this place is here we will see you next week stay healthy good night
so
Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, 
you've got to do something now
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now take a look at your job, baby
and see what's wrong,
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WBAI.org. Coming up next is Exploration with Mishio Kaku.
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