Stalking Stalkerware + FTX Spending Sprees + the Uncertain Future of AI Game Dev

Speaker 1: What does a crypto and weed bank, an inappropriately named yacht, and a $600,000 unpaid bill to Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville Paradise Island all have in common?

Speaker 2: Let's just assume it's what crypto billionaires buy when they have nothing else to buy.

Speaker 1: Due to a recent public filing, we know there's some of the crazy stuff that Sam Bankman Fried and FTX bought during their reign of crypto supremacy. I love it. On this episode of Hacked, we are discussing all the wild stuff FTX bought before it all came crashing down. We're gonna talk about Let Me Spy and the uncomfortable question of what happens when software designed to let folks spy on people gets infiltrated by a spy.

Speaker 2: I think the big news story, maybe not as cybersecurity related, but just worth discussion is Facebook's founding of threads, Twitter's new competitor, enlightening speed.

Speaker 1: They sure did whip it up quick. Yep. And then I wanna talk about a Reddit post in a subreddit about AI game development that blew up, and the response to which suggests we've entered this interesting new act in the story of AI and copyright. Mhmm. All that and more on this chatty episode of Hacked. Scribbledy, bib bop, boom. Someone on Twitter loves our theme music.

Speaker 2: I saw that.

Speaker 1: Yep. Mhmm.

Speaker 2: They love the specifically, the outro music. That's a big, big shout out.

Speaker 1: It just means you made it to the end. I I will say, it's the same as the intro music, but I'm not I'm not I'm not correcting anybody. If you're vibing to it, you know, it maybe we put it on Spotify. Then we make

Speaker 2: And $54

Speaker 1: that, like, you know, get those royalties.

Speaker 2: Makes 7¢ a a year.

Speaker 1: So ruthless. Before we get to that, you know who I wanna who I wanna thank, Scott?

Speaker 2: Who would you like to thank, Jordan?

Speaker 1: Well, I think you can guess.

Speaker 2: I'm assuming you are talking about our new patron, Spawning Grounds.

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Speaker 2: And Merlin

Speaker 1: Could never forget about Merlin, who we owe a response to on Patreon, sent us a message.

Speaker 2: That's true. We do. We do. I'm gonna totally destroy this person's last name. So I feel like this is where I awkwardly just hand hand you the mic and say, why don't you give it a go?

Speaker 1: Why don't I take a take a a running jump? Thank you so much, for your support, Mark Slocirec.

Speaker 2: There you go.

Speaker 1: Looked pretty good.

Speaker 2: I feel

Speaker 1: good about that. See, the

Speaker 2: next one as the next one, I feel very confident in. I think I could do Benjamin.

Speaker 1: Yeah. You know, I think you might stick

Speaker 2: the landing on Benjamin. Benjamin.

Speaker 1: Benjamin. Thank you so much for your support. It really does mean the world to us. Again, that's hackedpodcast.com to jump over to our Patreon and, show us show us a little love.

Speaker 2: Do we wanna talk about lavish toys purchased by what I would say is artificial billionaires, but they're not artificial. They're actual billionaires.

Speaker 1: They are real billionaires. Were were real billionaires. Were they were real billionaire.

Speaker 2: Maybe?

Speaker 1: Sam Bankman Fried, for anyone that doesn't know, is the former CEO of FTX, currently awaiting trial in October following his extradition from The Bahamas. Mister Bankman Fried was arrested in December after the collapse of FTX. They were one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world. He agreed to be extradited on these charges that he had orchestrated this sweeping fraud in which he used billions of dollars in customer deposits to pay for crypto trading, charitable donations, and lavish, very, very lavish, real estate purchases. Gets to The United States. He's granted bail. He's currently under house arrest in his childhood home in California. Very, very briefly, there have been some recent developments in that case. Additional charges were pursued. They were then withdrawn with this big caveat, that there will be a second trial in 2024 regarding these new charges. None of which is why we bring him up. For the last five months, we've been getting this flood of bankruptcy filings and public disclosures relating to this case, which means during that whole time when they were allegedly defrauding people of billions of dollars, We know what they spent their money on, Scott.

Speaker 2: It's it's a great list, honestly.

Speaker 1: It's it's a it's a really, top drawer list. During this multiyear stretch when SPF and FTX were, you know, the darlings of the emerging crypto world, they went on this spending spree, and we know what they paid for. You can't buy taste, but you can buy a guy on Twitter a Tesla for the lost, Scott. Bloomberg recently published a select list of stuff that SPF and FTX bought during their time in the sun. We'd be fools not to talk about it ever so briefly.

Speaker 2: There's some real doozies on here. It's really, really great.

Speaker 1: It's, they did a really good job because I'm sure they had to come through a lot of not funny stuff, but they did. And they found the funny stuff. In no particular order, for 11 and a half million dollars for an equity stake, they purchased, Moonstone Bank, a community bank in Washington that, at some point decided to rebrand as a crypto and cannabis bank, which drew, you know, the interest of SBF and FTX. Since the collapse of this, they have changed their name back to Farmington State Bank, saying it was a, quote, returning to its original mission, presumably of being a normal bank.

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: So they started by buying a bank. Mhmm.

Speaker 2: There's that's the that's a reasonable one. You can you can look at that and go, like That's honestly the best. Like like like, that's that's a business expense. You buy a bank, you become a bank.

Speaker 1: Banks make money.

Speaker 2: Banks make money. They also bought some generic real estate. And by generic, I mean grotesquely expensive, fancy real estate.

Speaker 1: Lavishly expensive. Totally.

Speaker 2: Yeah. They bought a penthouse for $30,000,000 just as, like, a hangout inside of, some fancy private resort area in The Bahamas. Like, you know, the reasonable things.

Speaker 1: Well, reasonable and also kind of funny Yeah. Because it showed that they wanted to go to this super exclusive resort in The Bahamas, but that they didn't really seem to wanna hang out with the other people at the resort. So they used the crypto money to buy the penthouse of the resort for $30,000,000. So they could go to the cool place, but then not have to hang out with other people, which is a really

Speaker 2: crypto billionaire thing to

Speaker 1: do in my personal

Speaker 2: It's like, hey.

Speaker 1: We're

Speaker 2: all a bunch of serious introverts and, you know, have Yeah.

Speaker 1: There's a

Speaker 2: bunch of other I could make reference to a bunch of other news regarding the in crowd at at FDX, but I won't. But I'm assuming Certainly. Assuming they needed some some private spaces for some of their private going ons.

Speaker 1: Google it if you're curious what we're talking about. Anyhoo, they also went on a, naming rights buying spree. K.

Speaker 2: There's one here I really wanna talk about because it's it Please. Breaks my mind. Yeah. So they they bought one. Yeah. They bought they bought an esports they bought the naming rights to an esports organization. And, like, I don't know how many of you follow esports or, Jordan, even if you follow esports, but it's like Yeah.

Speaker 1: A little.

Speaker 2: I follow esports a bit. And Mhmm. I've been trying to figure out how that industry survives because I don't think they really make any money. And, like, these these organizations, like, spin up and go away, like, in a five year cycle. Right.

Speaker 1: Right.

Speaker 2: Right. And and if this is any indication, esports teams are wildly successful because FTX bought naming rights to an LA based esports team, most notable for their Super Smash Bros team for $210,000,000.

Speaker 1: Get that bag, team solo mid FTX.

Speaker 2: Like, that is like, for 200 and like, let's just contrast that with with the other crazy naming rights they bought. So they bought the naming rights to, like, Miami's premier NBA facility where the Heat play for twenty years or nineteen years. They only paid 135,000,000 for that.

Speaker 1: In contrast, a deal. They got a real deal on

Speaker 2: that. So it's like some esoteric Super Smash Bros esports team for 210,000,000 versus naming one of the most premier sports facilities in North America for twenty years for 130,000,000. Yep. Wild. Wild to me. Yeah.

Speaker 1: They all they didn't a minor correction, they didn't buy une sports naming rights thing. They bought a bunch of them. They bought the brand into the League of Legends championship series. The important thing about all of these naming rights things is, like, when the person who bought the naming rights to your thing becomes the poster child for a a whole new genre of fraud, do you have to keep the name on your thing? The answer to which will be figured out in court because all of these things are currently suing FTX. I think the League of Legends championships series is suing FTX. I believe formerly FTX Arena, now the Kaseya Center. I think they're in a lawsuit. It they I'm not totally sure about that.

Speaker 2: I would assume as much. Like, the con I guess the contractual value for their for their sponsorship deal is massive. You know? Also, the the Mercedes f one team was a big FTX partner. Right. It's not on this list, but I know it because I watch f one. But the, Mhmm. Yeah. Like, the the amount of money that they threw, it's, you know, it's reminiscent of a of a not gonna say it was a Ponzi scheme, but, like, you know, that's a lot of money to spend on marketing.

Speaker 1: Well, we'll wait for the next couple years' worth of, court cases, to to to to decide that one. And team solo mid FTX, the, Super Smash team has dropped FTX from their name. So in addition to a bunch of naming rights stuff, in addition to a penthouse inside of a clubhouse so you don't have to talk to the people in the clubhouse, they also bought a a yacht. Mhmm. A pretty Pretty modest. A pretty conservative yacht. Pretty modest. Pretty modest yacht. Alameda Research, the hedge fund that was sort of embroiled in this whole drama, bought a 52 foot yacht for its chief co chief executive officer Sam Trabuco for 2 and a half million dollars. That's not really the interesting part. The name of the vessel, this fine seafaring vessel, soak my deck

Speaker 2: Soak my deck. Is what they named their boat. What happens Did they bought it? When you give a bunch of I'm not I'm not gonna finish that statement. I I don't need to say anything else. The the

Speaker 1: There's nothing to say about that. But, anyway, they bought a 2 and a half million dollar boat and then named it that.

Speaker 2: Pretty, like, in the world of of billion dollar boats, spending only

Speaker 1: Really concerned.

Speaker 2: Spending 2 and a half million dollars on a boat seems It really like a reasonable expense

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 2: Among this list of insanity.

Speaker 1: Given that they bought $24,400,000 in Board eight Yacht Club nonfungibles, I would tend to agree. They they played it real conservative, when they bought Sam the other Sam. Sam two about Oh

Speaker 2: my god. We we we have to do an episode on NFTs one of these days. I know we talked about it. We talked to like, we've touched on it.

Speaker 1: About it a yeah.

Speaker 2: But, like, $24,400,000 for a bunch of ape photos that were digitally generated. Like, it just I do wanna I do wanna talk about this one because we were talking about marketing promos and and getting sued. Yes. The Larry David commercial. Yep. Don't be like Larry. I'm sure if you haven't seen it, you need to see it. It's essentially Larry David saying that, like, crypto is a scam. That's literally the commercial and that he's not gonna buy into it.

Speaker 1: That's the whole ad.

Speaker 2: And then Larry was consequently sued for promoting FTX, you know, as many of these people that started in their commercials and and use their channels to promote FTX are are have found themselves pulled into lawsuits. And Larry's like Mhmm. Larry's like, no. The whole commercial, I was telling you not to do it. So it's

Speaker 1: like they paid me $20,000,000 to tell you not to do it, which is very funny.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Very funny.

Speaker 1: A very funny thing to say. Like, I not unintentionally funny. Like, credit where it is due. I I That's a pretty funny way to respond to this whole situation.

Speaker 2: Yeah. But I honestly think because he also apparently, I don't know if this is true, but I'd heard that a lot of other the people that did promotions for them and and were offered major gigs, they were offered to be paid, like, exorbitantly more in crypto. And Larry was like, absolutely not. I want real money. So, like, true true to his words, he was like, no. That's fake money. Give me real money. That see, the thing is is is, like, I think he's got a I don't I'm not sure what's happened with these lawsuits. We should pull it out, but I think he have a decent legal leg to stand on because, like, FDX, the company is like, don't be like Larry, but Larry, at least consistently, is like, no. I don't believe in crypto. Like, I don't wanna get paid

Speaker 1: in it. Television.

Speaker 2: I went out to watch an Yeah. Like, sure. Like, it's not like I'm and and then FTX, like, paid me to be me and then said, don't be me. Like, I think that's a I think you could build a pretty strong legal argument there to get out of it.

Speaker 1: And I'm sure some of the best lawyers in the world will.

Speaker 2: And Yes. Absolutely.

Speaker 1: And I think last on this list that we should talk about before we move on Is? For $599,409, there is a unpaid bill unpaid bill to Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville Paradise Island. This whole drama, quite a remarkable story. I would I would forget all of it if I could just know, oh, what that bill was for. What did they spend $599,000 at Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville Paradise Island on? Presumably, there's very fancy hotels. I just wanna I wanna be a fly on the wall for that whole weekend because out of all of these, like, these are pretty garish purchases. I'm not even really that mad at that. There's something about spending over a half $1,000,000 at Jimmy Buffett's that I'm like, that's that's that's pretty punk rock. I'm I'm pretty okay with that's actually the least punk rock thing I've ever heard, but it's pretty bad.

Speaker 2: Tell you what they spent it on. I almost spent money on it.

Speaker 1: Do you know?

Speaker 2: No. I I don't know, but I but I'll tell you what it was because I could just I I I just know what it's from.

Speaker 1: The You're a big parrot head. I feel you.

Speaker 2: Oh, man. Yeah. So you got to assume, like, FTX was, what, like, 200 and some people at its peak? Oh, I And they were Yes. Sure. And Sure. And you know, they're most of them parachuted into The Bahamas. And we're living this like dreamy 24 year old post, you know, graduating university lifestyle making probably exorbitant money unfathomable for this company for this company that that literally didn't care about the expense breakdown in their income statements. Like, obviously, they didn't didn't didn't didn't put the brakes on any buying pressure. I would assume There were no brakes. FTX had tabs open at K. Most major places in the, in the, in, like, the region. And if you work for FTX, you could just wander in, blow a grand on lunch, expensive to the company, and it goes on a tab. And I bet this tab is unpaid. I bet they, you know Yep. They didn't have the credit card to process before the before it all blew up and got frozen.

Speaker 1: Sure. Now James So that's James is stuck with the

Speaker 2: my thoughts.

Speaker 1: No. I think that's really Exactly. I really, really buy that. $600 at Margaritaville.

Speaker 2: Here's the scary part is, like, most of those tabs are probably, like, monthly.

Speaker 1: Oh my

Speaker 2: So you've got to assume Oh, yeah. That in, like, the year preceding this, they might have dropped $7,000,000 at Jamie Buffett's Margaritaville Paradise Island. Which Maybe that's where they like to have after work drinks. Honestly,

Speaker 1: not mad about it.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Get get get that money, Jimmy. Like, get yours.

Speaker 2: If you work for a company that will literally just spends money on anything and takes care of the staff, like, that's pretty amazing. Like, you know? Sure. Fair enough. Granted, they they were spending other people's money when they when they were buying you those drinks and food.

Speaker 1: Yeah. No. For sure.

Speaker 2: Trips and first class flights and

Speaker 1: Oh, don't get me wrong. I'm mad about it in a much larger sense, but I'm not mad about Jimmy Buffett getting paid. Never have been, never will be. I'm gonna get a message after this about some war crime Jimmy Buffett committed or something. But

Speaker 2: Yeah. Of course.

Speaker 1: Going by his beachy breezy attitude and reputation. I feel pretty good about it. Nice. So that's just some of the crazy stuff that SBF and FTX bought. To hard pivot, let's do the hardest pivot that will occur in this episode. Okay. From that fun, light, breezy story, that Margaritaville Paradise Island esque story set in The Bahamas, let's, let's take a turn towards a little story about something called Let Me Spy. Let's talk about Let Me Spy and what happens when the bad thing that your product has empowered other people to do happens to you. In case it was not totally clear from the name, Let Me Spy is a phone monitoring app for Android. You install it on someone's Android device locally, and Let Me Spy kind of quietly uploads text messages, call logs, and precise location data from the phone to their servers, which is then accessible to the installer. The app is importantly designed to remain concealed on the phone's home screen, making it challenging to detect and remove for the person who's had it installed on their phone. This type of app is part of a larger product category, kind of known in the the industry as stalkerware or spouseware. This is because of its remarkable utility to, untrustworthy spouses who often have physical access to their partner's devices, and because if you use it, you're acting like a big old stalker. Yeah. Not a great product category, suffice it to say. Not a great look. Yeah. Not a great look. Not a good thing to do. Don't use these apps. The big irony of these things, the irony here is that despite their deep access to a person's phone, these surveillance apps are notorious for bugs and basic security errors. Over the years, a bunch of these spyware, stalkerware, spouseware apps have been hacked, leaked, and exposed resulting in the theft of private phone data from the actual victims here. These breaches have included mSpy, MobaStealth, Flexispy, all had breaches. The FTC is currently, pursuing legal action against Retina x, who had two data breaches involving sensitive victim data last year. These things get hacked a lot, and now it is Let Me Spy's turn. Last month, the company disclosed this big security incident on its login page stating that unauthorized access took place on June 21. The hackers managed to access email addresses, phone numbers, and the content of messages collected on the accounts. A Polish security research blog called Nibas Pieksnik Wow. Well done. I feel pretty good about that. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Well done.

Speaker 1: Reached out to the spiro reached out to the spiro manufacturer for comment. And instead of the manufacturer responding to that email, the hacker responds, claiming to have gotten extensive access to the spyware maker's domain. The identity of the hacker behind the Let Me Spy breach and their motives is currently unclear. They suggested that they had deleted the database stored on the server, but copies of that database have appeared online later that same day. Had they just hacked and destroyed this data, I think that would have been much better. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Robin Hooded it instead of, you know, raided it.

Speaker 1: They were on the edge of Robin Hooding it. Yeah. So then DDoS Secrets, who we've talked about before, very interesting nonprofit transparency collective, they get a copy of the hacked Let Me Spy data. They verify with TechCrunch. To both of their credits, there's a ton of personally identifiable data included years of victims, call logs, text messages, all this very private stuff dating back to 2013. 13,000 compromised devices. In January, Let Me Spy's website stated that their their software had been used to track just shy of a quarter a million devices. Tens of millions of call logs, location data, texts. As of right now, the counter on the site reads zero, and much of the site's basic functionality, including the app itself, seems to be broken by this hack, which I think is good. The data suggests that the majority of victims were located in The US, India, and Western Africa. Interesting. Yeah. So let's dig into the customers here a little bit. The data also contained the spyware, kinda what they refer to as their master database Mhmm. Which was information on the 26,000 customers who used this this spyware against other people. It also revealed who makes this thing. Linked database reveals that Let Me Spy is built and maintained by a Polish developer named Rafael Lidwyn based in Krakow. Kinda went combing around a little bit. Bunch of different press outlets reached out for comment. Doesn't seem Lidwyn has responded to any of them. Shocker. Shocker. It remains unclear whether Let Me Spy is going to be notifying victims whose phones were compromised, if they even have the ability to do so. But this is the tough part about all this, and making software in this terrible stalkerware, spouseware type category is that if you notify the victims of a device compromise, there's a nonzero chance at scale that you're actually gonna put some of those people in danger. By providing a product for a fundamentally unsafe situation, it alerting people that they're the victims of this compromise is alerting them that they've been compromised, and and some bad stuff can happen. So it's it's a pretty pretty rough situation all around. As I mentioned earlier, this is not the first time these things have been hacked or breached. As many of them as you can name, they've probably all been hacked at some point. XnSpy, KidsGuard, TruthSpy, Supportking have all had breaches. These are not trustworthy apps, ignoring the fact that you need to be a generally not trustworthy person to even think think about using them. Yeah. And as always with these things, the tragic irony is that when these things get breached, the people that were being victimized tend to be the first people to be victimized by that hack because it's not always the customer's data that gets leaked. It's the victims, their calls, their texts, their movements.

Speaker 2: Interesting. Yeah. Bad. Yeah. I the Bad. Bad. The Interesting bad. Interesting bad. The few a few things. One, I feel like if you're in a situation where you're even considering using spouseware, that- Yep. Joshua Landry (zero fifty seven:forty three): You should probably just become an unspouse at that point.

Speaker 1: And save I think so.

Speaker 2: Save save both save both parties the, the headache. The as I'm sure nobody wants to be a spouse of somebody who's going to install spouse wear on their phone. Let me tell you that. So you're about to A 100%. You might if somebody's crossed the line, the other person's about to cross the line. And I just think that that's a you know, actually with your head high. Yeah. The the

Speaker 1: I think if you need to install something on someone's phone without their knowledge,

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: You're not off

Speaker 2: to a risk. A great partner. No. Exactly. Mhmm. I think on the flip side of that coin, the the place where, like, having the ability to just throw a hacking tool on or like a, like a spying tool onto someone's phone without them knowing, you know, that has a lot of corporate security aspects. Yeah. Because, like, you don't you don't need to be they don't need to be stalking the person. You don't need to be spying on your spouse. Like, the software is good for everything.

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 2: If you've got a made reference to it a few times, but, like, you got a mergers and acquisitions lawyer who Sure. Works in Wall Street, and you have this on their phone, and you get to read their messages and other going ons, like, that's a ton of valuable data. Heaps. It's heaps of valuable very financially valuable data. It's like, I I just feel like this I I'm what I'm roundabout getting to is that I'm shocked that the App Store has even let this stuff exist. Yeah. Is this is this a is it delivered via the App Store, or is it like a back ground install?

Speaker 1: I believe Let Me Spy was available through the Google Play Store, but I don't know that definitively. I mean, here's the thing. If if Let Me Spy wasn't available, I I think I named eight of these things that have been compromised Totally. In the last few years. A bunch of them were available in the app stores. I think the the story that a lot of them tell on their websites is that this can be useful for parental control.

Speaker 2: Of course.

Speaker 1: And that's exceptionally frustrating because, like, iOS and stock Android both have parental control features. Yep. And the important thing about parental control is you don't have to hide to your child that you have parental control on the device because you're the parent. You're allowed to do that. They can bump into a thing saying you're not allowed to do this. This is being looked at. Like, that that's that's okay in that dynamic

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: To have to make a version of those exact same surveillance and control, programs that don't alert the person they're being used against should tell you that you're going down the road to doing something not okay. That consent and awareness angle is sort of what all of this turns on.

Speaker 2: And I do completely agree that, like, when it does come to Mhmm. Parental oversight Mhmm. You know, seeing as we're giving these devices to to children now, Mhmm. They should really just be bulking and strengthening up the parental controls on them. That would be much better, I don't know, much better for me than kind of letting these things exist outside of their own controlled ecosystem.

Speaker 1: I think iOS makes it harder to do some of these things, and it makes it easier to figure out if it's on your device. I think that's Yep. Something that they're doing right. But at the end of the day, as long as access as long as certain software has access to some of these permissions, people are gonna do dodgy stuff with it, apparently.

Speaker 2: Shocker. Shocker. Shocker. And people will do dodgy stuff if given the opportunity to do so.

Speaker 1: Famously, people love doing dodgy stuff. Let's talk about, AI game development, threads, and whether a thumbs up emoji is legally binding right after the break. Starting some new isn't just hard. It can be downright terrifying. You put a lot of work into a thing. You're not entirely sure it's gonna work out. You're taking a huge leap of faith. I've started a few things. Now I know I was right for believing in, you know, the idea, the product, despite all of those fears and hesitations. But boy, does it sure help when you have a partner like Shopify on your side. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e commerce in The US. From household names like, well, hacked podcasts merch, to brands just getting started, you can get started with your own design studio with hundreds of ready to use templates. Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store that matches your brand style. Did I mention that that iconic purple shop pay button is used by millions of businesses around the world? I don't know why I wouldn't. I should. It's why Shopify has the best converting checkout on the planet. It also helps boost conversions, meaning less carts, sort of getting abandoned in the parking lot, and more sales for you. It's time to turn those what ifs into sign up for your $1 per month trial at shopify.com/hacked. Go to shopify.com/hacked. One more time, that's shopify.com/hacked.

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Speaker 2: Just a quick hit on this one because it's funny and it's local to us ish.

Speaker 1: Yes. Yes.

Speaker 2: Ish. So a Canadian court

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 2: Has just ruled that a thumbs up emoji is a legal agreement.

Speaker 5: Mhmm.

Speaker 2: So a farmer this is in the province next, next to me. A farmer was in some discussion with another grain cooperative or something, and they signed an agreement for something. $8,082,000 Canadian dollars, you know, about $60.60 k US. Mhmm. And, the farmer replied to the essentially, an a contract via text. He sent a thumbs up emoji, and the court has now agreed that that is legally binding. He essentially had a verbal commitment, and it is a contract. Mhmm. So we we have evolved Beyond language. We have evolved technologically a thumbs up. Now anytime you're like, hey. Are we meeting at five for drinks? And somebody sends you a thumbs up emoji and then go

Speaker 1: I'll see you in court.

Speaker 2: They have legally broken they've broken a legal contract.

Speaker 1: Yeah. It's a pretty amazing story. My favorite part was the sort of so so you have this farmer and you have this grain buyer and you have this essentially, like, puts this thing up to tender, sends out a contract, guy responds with a thumbs up, and this all ends up in court, which means that this justice, Timothy Keane, in the, Court of King's Bench in the province of Saskatchewan has to go I'm just gonna read the quote. This case, quote, led the parties to a far flung search for the equivalent of a Rosetta Stone in cases from Israel to New York State and tribunals in Canada to unearth what a thumbs up emoji means. This whole thing sparked this, like, national treasure global journey to, like, figure out what is it that a thumbs up emoji means. The best part, though, is that in all of the court documents for this, they do not refer to it as a thumbs up emoji. They use the thumbs up emoji, which means that you have, like, legal documentation It's full. And it's just it reads like an iMessage thread.

Speaker 2: It's just pampered with emojis the entire way through of

Speaker 1: them trying to figure out really what does it mean. Is it a confirmation? Does it rise to the level of a signature? This, like, weird legal, like, digital etymology thing that this justice had to figure out because of a bushel of grain.

Speaker 2: Could you imagine if because, like, you know, they had to do this for the thumbs up emoji. But, like, if we're now considering emojis Yeah. As part of of legal language, Could you imagine if they had to make, like, essentially a terms of reference for every single emoji and what it legally means?

Speaker 1: That's fantastic. Sure. We talking GIFs? Does a reaction mean count? Like, the Pandora's box that this opens. Extraordinary. Extraordinary.

Speaker 2: It would be I I would I would love to see a legal definition for each emoji.

Speaker 1: Well, interestingly, that yeah. I would love to read that. So that that justice Keane, and they talk about this a little bit, stated that while a thumbs up emoji is a nontraditional means to, quote, sign a document, that it was a valid way to convey, the two purposes of a signature under these circumstances. Importantly, for our discussion, he dismissed concerns that allowing a thumbs up emoji to to signify acceptance, quote, would open up the floodgates to new interpretations of other emojis, including the fist bump and the handshake. What I wanna start doing you know how people will do something just to take it all the way to the Supreme Court? Like, that idea of I'm gonna get into a situation so I can pursue it legally, to sort of set some kind of a precedent? Totally. I think this opens the floodgates for that. What's a poop emoji mean? Like, there's so much we don't know about these symbols we use every day now that they've entered the legal sphere, and I intend to find it.

Speaker 2: Not only that. Like, could you like, imagine being somebody later in their career who maybe doesn't speak Yeah. Emoji as as well. And all of a sudden, you're like you know, maybe you use them occasionally in text messages and in conversations. You know, you use the ones you know. Maybe you, like, you know

Speaker 1: Yeah. Sure.

Speaker 2: Like, you didn't grow up with the palette, so you're not familiar with all the colors. And then all of a sudden, you're being legally held to these things. Like

Speaker 1: It's good. I think that's explicitly what happened here. I don't get the sense Kent Mickleboro knew when he was texting with farmer Chris Actor that that's what like, I I I have to assume the thumbs up emoji didn't mean to be a signature, but maybe I'm making maybe that's

Speaker 2: the wrong assumption. Maybe that's

Speaker 1: exactly what he meant to do. And then when the price of that crop went up, he tried to renege. Maybe this is exactly how this should have gone.

Speaker 2: See. But but, like, the I don't know. Like, you know, in in more contemporary uses of the thumbs up emoji, it's essentially used to kill a conversation. Like, you you're it's essentially like a okay with a good like, a wave goodbye. So, like, maybe somebody's like, hey. Here's that contract. And he's like, got it. Yep. Like, thumbs up. Like, I got the contract. I'll take a look at it. Not like, thumbs up. Yes. It's agreed to. I signed it digitally with my thumb.

Speaker 1: That is what, I believe actors' lawyers argued was that it was a it was a confirmation of receipt, not a signature of the contract. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Which to me makes like, that's hard to that's a valid argument.

Speaker 1: It's a valid argument. It's a valid argument. And then justice Timothy Timothy Keane goes on this, like, Da Vinci Code research quest about what an emoji means. The response to which is, well, my client did not. Exactly. They weren't using it. It's valid that that is sort of it's you found the Rosetta Stone. You translated it. You used the codex. That's what it means. Great. The client didn't know that. Yeah. You're you're up. Does it matter if you don't know what a signature means when you sign something? I have no idea.

Speaker 2: You're applying a you're applying a not

Speaker 1: immediately clear.

Speaker 2: You're applying a definition to something that everybody uses differently, and nobody really Sure. Nobody really has a dictionary for this this language. Yes. You've created the first entry of it, and you're now holding somebody legally. I think I can't wait for this one to go. Like, this is gonna go up in courts for sure. It's gonna get appealed up.

Speaker 1: And and I say this earnestly, not because I agree agree or disagree one way or the other. I really wanna interview justice Timothy Keen. I just wanna understand what this person learned about the thumbs up emoji because it's it's got to be more than has ever been studied or read or assembled about the thumbs up emoji. Like, they might have become the foremost expert in that symbol over the course of

Speaker 2: the I guess. And I wanna talk news for you, Jordan. When the decision is launched public and is released via the court, services, you'll be able to download it and read it. It might even be up now. It it was pretty but it was pretty recently, so it might it might not quite be up, but it it you you'll be able to read the entire justice's decision and all of their substantiation, which should be, I think, actually a pretty fascinating read.

Speaker 1: I will nuke our audience. I will eliminate half half of people will unsubscribe when we release our three part deep dive.

Speaker 2: Oh, it is out. Is it? I'm looking at it. Sick.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Oh, man.

Speaker 2: Maybe you should just do a Patreon episode where you just read this entire thing.

Speaker 1: Okay. It's all coming together. That's what a a thumbs up emoji means. Before we get to the future of AI and copyright, let's, let's let's chat about a little development in the, social media and consumer tech world this past month, the dawn of threads. Interestingly, five days of launch, it's a 100,000,000 sign ups. That's the sort of big headline this last week is that it grew. I think it beat ChatGPT as the fastest growing online platform to hit that milestone. Quite impressive. Makes a lot of sense. You have this massive social graph from Instagram that just gets cleanly ported over to your new thing.

Speaker 2: Yep.

Speaker 1: It's, like, two clicks to to jump over to this. And there's a a great deal of chatter amongst, you know, Twitter users as to whether or not they like the platform and where it's going and its, current ownership. So it sort of opens up this big ole fun conversation about which social media owning tech billionaire

Speaker 2: are you currently aligned with? Well, the I just wanna talk about the growth really quick because I'll tell you that the the the main reason why I popped popped into the app, downloaded it and popped into it because it's not online, very Instagram one point o e, y, is like name squatting. Like, I went on there just to make sure that I got a a handle that wasn't, you know, user three eight six nine four seven two three, you you know, classic. Sure. New platform exists. People jump on it just to make sure that they get whatever username they want or, you know, try and get great usernames to hold them and sell them later. Like, it's just a classic, but it it does I was disappointed to see that it was just well, I guess I'm not disappointed to see. Probably happy to see that it just uses Instagram's username stuff, so you just instantly get your Instagram handle. So I count on one, and it's an account on both.

Speaker 1: Sure. This last, two weeks, we kind of watched the trough of disillusionment start for chat GPT. Anyone doesn't know there's this idea that as we get new types of technology, we all go, oh my god. This is incredible. It can do everything, and then we realize what it can't do. And we get disillusioned and think it can't do anything, and then we inevitably end up somewhere in the middle where we have a more accurate understanding of what the thing really is. And people were talking about how ChatGPT's user base, started shrinking for the first time since it came out seven months ago. Interestingly about threads, by pegging it to a Instagram account and making it so that you can't delete the threads account, individually from the Instagram account. At least for now, you have essentially made sure that you're probably never going to have, user base Shrinkage. Shrinkage. It's it's super clever.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: I'm sure they'll pull that back at some point, but it is a They'll

Speaker 2: have to.

Speaker 1: It's a very, considered choice from a very considered company.

Speaker 2: I think the I think the the it probably comes down to the fact that the usernames are linked.

Speaker 1: Of course.

Speaker 2: So your username on Instagram becomes your username. So, like, essentially, your account is already threads enabled. You just need to turn the binary flag from do I use threads to yes from no. Mhmm. So they'll just make a a flip to flip it back. Sure.

Speaker 1: But I

Speaker 2: don't think you'll ever get to the situation where, like, like on Twitter, if you delete your account, you know, Jordan, I'm not actually familiar with what your account is, Jordan Bloomin, I assume.

Speaker 1: Mhmm. You got

Speaker 2: it. If you were to delete that, somebody else could grab it, and then boom, they would be Right. Right. Your thing. And I just don't think I I I think the thread has a bit of protection against that as long as you keep your Instagram account, which I don't think is a bad thing. Sure. Because, you know, that's a classic misinformation kind of hack.

Speaker 1: No. I I I think building some kind of security against name squatting and all that stuff make from the outset makes total

Speaker 2: sense.

Speaker 1: It is fascinating to imagine what kind of security, issues they're dealing with as you have a 100,000,000 people flood into a thing. It's obviously built on the back end of Instagram. So pretty pretty robust security infrastructure as, applications go, but it's gotta be, it's gotta be a lot, which is my transition to you talking about exploiting redirection.

Speaker 2: Well, apparently, after that great transition, there's been a rush, like a frantic rush of, criminal syndicates buying, similar domains to try and do URL obfuscation and things like that.

Speaker 1: So Yeah. I got you.

Speaker 2: Make make thing make things look like they're threads links and threads, short URL redirections, but they're actually not. So apparently, there was a massive rush into that. So I'm sure that that, you know, when we talk about what billionaire you wanna align with, I guess the one beauty of aligning with a billionaire as big as Facebook, is that they've they've their teams have dealt with probably every type of social media hack ever at this point. They are the the proving ground for them. So they're probably well used to it and ready to combat all of these things out of the gate, I would assume, rather than, you know, have to have to learn on the go, which I guess is the perk of jumping in bed with Mark Zuckerberg. So but I did let's let's just that's a good transition to to to talking about which billionaire you wanna align with. I saw this align with. Funny. Align with. Hey, you use that term. I'm just I'm just repeating it.

Speaker 1: I did. I did. I did. I really did.

Speaker 2: I'm just using your words. The, I I think I know where I saw it. I I wanna think it was like Reddit Wall Street Bets or something like

Speaker 1: Sure.

Speaker 2: Somewhere like that. And it was like, two years ago, we were all, we love Elon Musk. Tesla's the greatest thing. He's saving the world. Let's buy it. It. Invest in invest in Tesla. Invest in Elon. Elon's, you know, the genius savior of the planet. Two years later don't start what we need. Yeah. And also, like, you know, Meta and Facebook are terrible, and we need to be against them and blah blah blah. They're monopoly. Yep. Exactly. Two years later, we're all we don't like Elon. Rie, rah rah, Mark Zuckerberg. He's saving us again. And it anyway, that's just Yeah. The current Internet, you know, the cyclicalness of the Internet is is is its own comedic thing. But the

Speaker 1: Yeah. Sure.

Speaker 2: I I don't know. It's a it's a like, I'm a fundamental rights person. I've said that before, and I've talked about it in other episodes. And it's like, I believe in free speech. And I don't agree with strong moderation as it limits dialogue and can limit discussion on things. So I don't think whether you like the current state of Twitter or not, I think it's better than having, you know, speech and thought policed. That's that's me. So I I've always been one for free speech on the Internet, so it is what it is.

Speaker 1: I think Twitter needs to figure out their exact standards of what is free speech and what isn't because there's some ways where they've they've totally opened things up, and then there's other ways where they've closed it down.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: And I think that, ultimately, if you're looking to tech billionaires for your morality, if you're trying

Speaker 2: to impose a, like,

Speaker 1: rebels versus empire, there's a good guy and a bad guy type dynamic on top of it, you have lost the thread, not to make a pun there. Like, there there's it's it's empire v empire. Yeah. They're they're neither of these are the scrappy underdog.

Speaker 2: Totally.

Speaker 1: They're both multibillion dollar corporations fighting over, fighting in a turf war, essentially, for your little snippets of content that they can monetize with ads. It is not a good guy versus bad guy situation. It's a business fight that we're all a little too emotionally invested in.

Speaker 2: The the other thing is too is that, I feel like Elon is I feel like that like, Elon's always been a unique social media personality. You know? He's always

Speaker 1: been a little

Speaker 2: off the cuff. The least. I feel I feel like since he bought Twitter, he's embraced I don't know what he's embraced, but he's he's he's turned it up. Yes. Like, his posts in the last few weeks, his tweets are not something you would expect from the richest man in the world. Like, he called Mark Zuckerberg a cuck the other day, which

Speaker 1: I was about to quote the cuck thing.

Speaker 2: Yeah. That's not And that's you no. You know, you're like, you're both multibillionaire successful people. You run-in similar circles. Yeah. If even if you have a beef and somebody's trying to steal your business, it's like, guess what? You tried to steal other people's businesses. This is just the way this works, and this is what free competition is. You are a market capitalist, deal with it. The writing, Zuck is a cuck in the tweet is a strong play for somebody with so much social power and fiscal power. You know, I just with great power comes great responsibility, and I I just I don't know if he's just embraced the the bad boy image or what what's up with him, but his he's he's definitely

Speaker 1: Such a bad boy.

Speaker 2: Well, he's definitely Got

Speaker 1: his got his leather jackets

Speaker 2: and his little Exactly. Motorcycle. He's just like the if he a bad boy now. It seems like he's embracing a bit of the dark side of the of the discussions lately, and it's like, you know, being a promoter of free speech and stuff is great, but it's like, at the same time, you don't you don't need to

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 2: I don't know. I I'm gonna end it there. I don't know I don't know how to say it nicely. I don't wanna I don't wanna beef with Elon Musk. He's definitely gonna win. He's gonna win. But but it's like

Speaker 1: He would definitely win.

Speaker 2: It's like going going from somebody who, like, three years ago, four or four years ago, could've run for president and probably won handedly to now being somebody who I don't know. And it just it's an interesting twist to watch.

Speaker 1: From From Tony Stark to shitposting on a social media app you bought for the lulz Exactly.

Speaker 2: Pretty is a pretty weird turn. Yeah. Exactly. So, anyway, threads. Threads. That's threads.

Speaker 1: Let's, let's wrap it up by talking about a little development in the world of Steam and Valve and AI and copyright. So about a month ago, a Reddit user named potter harry ninety seven posted in r/aigamedev, a post that has been, like, very widely reported on and circulated. It got a response from Steam and their parent company, Valve, on an issue that they're typically quite tight lipped about, which is their approval process and content moderation. Title of the post. I'm just gonna read it in its entirety. Title, Valve is not willing to publish games with AI generated content anymore. Body, Hey, all. I tried to release a game about a month ago with a few assets that were fairly obviously AI generated. My plan was to submit a rough version of the game with two to three assets slash sprites that were admittedly obviously AI generated from the hands, like nine fingers, I'm guessing. Mhmm. And to improve them prior to actually releasing the game as I wasn't aware Steam had any issue with AI generated art, I received this message. Hello. While we strive to ship most titles submitted to us, we cannot ship games for which the developer does not have all the necessary rights. After reviewing, we have identified intellectual property in, game name here, which appears to belong to one or more third parties. In particular, game name here, contains art assets generated by artificial intelligence that appear to be relying on copyrighted material owned by third parties. As the legal ownership of such AI generated art is unclear, we cannot ship your game while it contains these assets unless you can affirmatively confirm that you own the rights to all of the IP used in the dataset that trained the AI to create the assets in your game. Yikes. The post blows up, gets widely covered, and Valve responds. And they confirm. They will no longer accept products that have been created using AI content that infringes on copyright. Given that that policy applies to almost all current AI generated content, it is being, I think, rightly interpreted by many as, like, a de facto ban on AI on the platform. Mhmm.

Speaker 2: Just just for art. I'd say there's probably still a lot of AI copy generation going on these days.

Speaker 1: That that distinction is more to do with that it's harder to prove

Speaker 2: Exactly. How he was Exactly.

Speaker 1: Was generated by an AI, though there are some lawsuits we'll talk about that are getting into the tech side of things. Valve spokesperson Casey Boyle clarified that the company is not trying to discourage the use of AI in general, like, as a broad category, but it they're really focused on existing copyright laws saying that it makes it really difficult to demonstrate that a developer has sufficient rights to use AI assets in a game.

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: For anyone who is unfamiliar, we've both worked on game projects before. When you make a game, there are multiple stages during that process where you essentially make a promise to someone up the line saying you own all the stuff in the game. If you're a developer, when you sign on with the publisher, you say to them, I'm signing this contract saying I made or have rights to everything in this game. Any vendors that provided you assets sign a similar thing. When the publisher then goes to distribute the game, they sign something similar. So everyone just saying, yes. We have the the rights to this. There isn't, like, a Beatles song hanging out in this game that we didn't pay the money for. For.

Speaker 2: Yeah. There's not there's not a lawsuit waiting over the over the next

Speaker 1: There's not a lawsuit waiting over the next horizon. Exactly. So the question here, and it's super interesting, is that if you make content using an AI tool like DALL E or Midjourney, can you say that you own the copyright when the models were trained on content without consent of the copyright holder? That question is at the heart of, like, nine court cases going on in The US right now.

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: That is the question that Valve is waiting to be answered. ChatGPT, DALL E, MidJourney, DreamFusion are all trained on these big bodies of data scraped off the Internet. You've got, Getty Images versus Stability AI, a bunch of novelists against, OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. And these are all kind of arguing that AI companies like OpenAI are essentially repackaging and selling products based on millions of people's copyrighted work, which is both, I think, true and a way of using the word repackage that has never really been done before. Mhmm. It's not repackaging in the way that you would understand that term. The companies defend themselves by arguing that training an AI generator to produce new text or images based on ingested data is more akin to a human writing a novel after being inspired by other books. A painter painting a painting having been inspired by paintings. But data is different than a memory, and so that answer also isn't immediately clear.

Speaker 2: It's gonna be a fascinating outcome. See what they decide on that one.

Speaker 1: Yeah. The results of those cases are going to entrench into law the answer to that fundamental question. Is this infringement or interpretation? And, also, interestingly, as different legal jurisdictions, as different places reach different answers to that question, the future of generative AI is probably going to fork and start evolving in some very interesting ways.

Speaker 2: The, the one with Getty Images, I think, is interesting because I remember seeing art assets generated by the AI that had literally the Getty tag in it. Like, if you've ever seen Getty stock Sure. There's a little bar that sticks across. It's like, property of Getty Images. I don't don't exactly remember what it says, but it essentially has, like, a little bar that demarks

Speaker 1: Well, Getty Images watermark. Yeah. It's a watermark.

Speaker 2: And it was generating things with essentially an AI version of the the Getty Images watermark, and and people were like, well, this is

Speaker 1: strange. Yeah.

Speaker 2: So so, yeah, it's It's hard

Speaker 1: to argue that your content wasn't scraped in that process, but can you argue that then you have to argue whether it is an interpretation of that content or just a repackaging and infringement of it. Yeah. It's really interesting.

Speaker 2: I I I think that what will I don't know. I'm intrigued because I I think at some point, you're gonna get a situation where, like, maybe Getty will release their own generative AI and train it using their

Speaker 1: I I think that's exactly.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Their tagged photo set because what what better way to train something than to give it a massive pool of images like Getty owns that are completely tagged with what they are? And, you know, it's it's just a a real easy way to to to train an AI is to have a dataset that large for a training set. So I think that is you're gonna start seeing massive licensing agreements, which I I think is reasonable. Like, if if somebody wants to yeah. Like, it's like if you I don't know.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 2: It'll be

Speaker 1: I agree.

Speaker 2: I think it'll be I think it'll come to an end, but this this is a fascinating little twist in the story.

Speaker 1: I can imagine a world where there's some sort of, like, central maybe someone makes a product where you can basically check a box to pay a certain licensee. Do you want the Getty Images plug in? Like, do you want that dataset fit into the model when you generate this next batch of images? That's a $3.03 99 a month subscription. Do you want the Flickr one? Do you want the deviator one? Do you want the this, this, or this one? Those are all essentially little boxes you check that pay a small stipend to the original rights holders. I think that will quickly reveal that people that have uploaded content to those sites aren't actually entitled to compensation

Speaker 2: for the but

Speaker 1: that's a separate thing, and it it kinda has to do with how we economically treat artists on the Internet. But I can imagine a world where there is money exchanged, and I can't really imagine a world where there

Speaker 2: isn't. Exactly.

Speaker 1: Because at a certain point, really well funded IP holders are gonna realize that, like, yo, Mickey Mouse is in that. Like, at what point does that become the discussion of, no. You can't generate new Pokemon, and I know you're infringing on Pokemon because I can make Pokemon with this. Yep. That's gonna come up at some point. Yep. Getty Images is a big fish, but they're not as big as Disney.

Speaker 2: Well and the the the thing is well, I don't know. Yeah. They're not as big as Disney, but they are very big fish.

Speaker 1: They're big. They are they are big. They're bigger than stability AI.

Speaker 2: Like But but your your your comment about people creating intellectual property and realizing that they don't actually own it or that they don't have complete moral right or

Speaker 1: that they've given it a way.

Speaker 2: Exactly. I think Instagram is this is, you know, to go full circle, this is gonna become a become a piece of that puzzle too. You know, there's so many like, I don't even know how many posts there are on Instagram. It's gonna be millions, billions, trillions, and, you know, that's another massive trading data set. Like, they they essentially know what's in every one of those images too. Like, that that's how they're, like

Speaker 1: Yep.

Speaker 2: Discovery algorithm works. It's It's like, oh, Jordan's recently been looking at Zelda posts. It's like, here's a bunch of Zelda posts. None of those are tagged as Zelda. It just knows that they're Zelda posts.

Speaker 1: They just know. They know what Zelda post looks like. Exactly. They they don't, but some black box algorithm has a vague digital sense memory of what a Zelda post looks like and can make that connection.

Speaker 2: Exactly. So I I yeah. I don't know. It's gonna be I think this one's gonna be pretty cut and dry, honestly. I think this one's gonna come back as saying that that the models don't have license to the datasets they were trained on. Even though the dataset is somewhat publicly accessible, it doesn't mean that they have the rights to use it commercially. I think that that's pretty Yeah.

Speaker 1: To re monetize it. Yeah. I think that's probably gonna

Speaker 2: be where it goes. Yeah. I think I think this one's gonna be pretty easy. So I do think it's gonna be the little mini indie game developer, you know, solo project style. Yeah. I know people were really getting into you know, it's really easy way to generate some basic art assets. And, you know Sure is. If you're a a developer, non designer who's building yourself a a small test game in Unreal, and you just need some assets and sprites, You know? Totally. It it

Speaker 1: You have to imagine that the game submitted by, Potter Harry ninety seven had some very prominent assets in it. If you were able to tell, hey. This person has nine fingers and fifty eight teeth

Speaker 2: in their mouth. This is clearly an

Speaker 1: AI generation. But it kind of reminds me of samples. If I can clearly identify that that's Stevie Wonder singing on your beat, it's very easy for me to say, hey. You can't use as the rights holder to Stevie Wonder, you can't use that sample in your song.

Speaker 2: Yep. But I think we

Speaker 1: all kind of intuitively know that there's probably some uncleared samples buried in song somewhere because they've been broken and chopped and reversed and turned into something fundamentally new. So a lot of this is gonna depend on can you identify that there's AI content in your thing, which then hinges on either some sort of, like, unremovable watermark, or AI not going past the point where the hands are bad and the teeth are weird. Like, you have to be able to identify that it was AI to be able to say, hey. Get this AI out of your thing. You don't own the rights to it. Mhmm. As AI gets better, that's just gonna get harder to do. So at what point does AI become adversarial to the copyright copyright holders and saying, we don't really care, whether you like this or not? Mhmm. It's gonna be it's gonna be a really interesting for as interesting as the last seven months have been since this all really kicked off, I think it's gonna be a very interesting couple years ahead, and we're gonna have to answer some questions about copyright that I don't think any of us thought we were gonna have to answer.

Speaker 2: But I feel like they this is the thing for me is, like, I feel like there's so much precedent in these cases. That's a very legal episode of Hacked. But but

Speaker 1: It is. Yeah. I didn't realize it.

Speaker 2: Yeah. But the, like, what was the song that came out? It was, like, the three male vocalists, and it I think it it was, like, very controversial and kinda like you know? Oh, Blurred Lines? Blurred Lines. Thank you. Wow. Yeah. You took nothing from me there and turned that into Blurred Lines. That is that is commendable.

Speaker 1: It had three guys in it, and it did. It had TI Pharrell and Robin Thicke, and it was controversial. And it was at the heart of a copyright case.

Speaker 2: Yes.

Speaker 1: It was not a sample. It was a rhythm. If I'm if I'm remembering right, it was it was the drum and bass combo that was at the heart of that.

Speaker 2: It was essentially found to be inspired to the point that the original copyright holder required payment. Yep. So they had to give, I think, $5,000,000 to, Marvin Gaye's family as as as it wasn't a sample. It wasn't a reproduction. Like, it wasn't exactly the same. It was just sim it was just similar enough that they had to be awarded awarded money. And I think that that's that's Steam's fear right there. Yeah. It's like this isn't a reproduction. It's been modified. Like, a lot of copyright law has the ability of, like, if you modify x percentage of it, it's no longer the original work, etcetera, etcetera. I think this is their fear is it's it's like, yes, you generated assets. They are definitely not the same thing. But there's enough of, you know, a style borrowing or whatever you wanna call it that it infringes the original original copyright holders thing. It's derivative. And therefore Yeah. Yeah. And Steam doesn't like Steam's just making sure that they're not named in lawsuits, and I completely respect that because they'll get if DISH is a distribution platform, when was it potter harry seventy three? '97. '97. When potter harry ninety seven gets sued, Steam will get Steam will get named in that lawsuit.

Speaker 1: And it's like Steam gets sued along the way, essentially. They will be Exactly. Sued on their way to potter harry at 97 completely.

Speaker 2: The the way law the way lawsuits work is the more people you can name in the suit, the higher amount of people need to settle, and you'll make more money. So everybody will get named, and Steam will get named. I think that that's wise by Steam to sit sit on the back seat and wait for this stuff to all flesh out because they'd just be putting themselves into, especially with how many games get published on Steam and how easy it is to publish a game on Steam. If they allowed anybody, to put any kind of game out there with any kind of, you know, AI assets in it, they'd just be opening the door to a a a the lawyer bill of the century.

Speaker 1: I think it is it is the shrewd move, and it is juxtaposed against Disney's choice to publish a TV series with an intro sequence that features AI generated assets in it. Totally. One of those companies has decided to sort of step back and wait for the legal circumstances to get resolved, and the other is, in a a small way, forged ahead in using these tools. And, it's gonna be really interesting to see how that all shakes out. Totally. Thanks very well. Stalkerware hacked, Steam rejecting games, Margaritaville bills, and thumbs up emojis legally binding. This has been a fun one. Thanks for listening everybody. We'll catch you in the next one. Take care.

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