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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| We're suing California, because we're culture warriors, I guess. | ||
| Welcome to the show, everybody. | ||
| What's going on, guys? | ||
| Hey. | ||
| Who are you? | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| Hey, good morning. | ||
| James Lawrence with Envisage Law. | ||
| I'm a partner there. | ||
| I'm an attorney. | ||
| Yeah, I'm Bill Oppmann, founder of Minds.com. | ||
| And yeah, we're suing California over a censorship law. | ||
| So Bill Ottman, you guys probably know, many of you may know, because he's the founder of Minds.com, which is a very large social media platform that we use, and a lot of people have used, and it's got a cryptocurrency involved, but also you've been on the show a bunch talking about censorship and other stuff like that, and then this lawyer fellow over here, Very successful in fighting against unjust censorship. | ||
| You want to give a quick context as to your past victories? | ||
| Yeah, thanks. | ||
| So I had the opportunity to represent Alex Berenson in his path-breaking case against Twitter. | ||
| It's the first case that I'm aware of where a deplatformed user of any social media platform Successfully sued a platform and got reinstated and that happened in July of last year. | ||
| So I do a number of other things. | ||
| Currently, I also represent Jamie Rogozinski and his lawsuit against who is the founder of Wall Street Bets and his lawsuit against Reddit for his de-platforming from that website as well. | ||
| Yeah, how come these tech companies are such... I'll try to avoid swearing, but why are they such bad people, you know? | ||
| I mean, the ideology has seeped into the terms of service. | ||
| I don't know, I kind of feel like a lot of it may be ideological, like maybe with Twitter and Twitter's past leadership, but a lot of it seems to be just parasitic leeching, you know, like these companies just want to make money, don't care, plow through whatever gets in their way, you know what I mean? | ||
| It seems like they're alienating a huge percentage of the population, and it would arguably be bad for business in a certain sense. | ||
| I mean, you are constantly talking about get woke, go broke. | ||
| But I wonder if they're looking at it like, we'll lose X dollars if we do this, we'll lose X plus Y dollars if we don't, so we may as well just accept the loss. | ||
| And then just plow through or something. | ||
| But anyway, let's talk about what's going on. | ||
| So I guess the big news, especially for this show we're doing, is that California has a law, which is... I'm gonna avoid swearing for now, because like YouTube's got rules where it's like, don't swear in the first minute or something. | ||
| So we'll keep the swearing to a minimum for the time being. | ||
| But it's BS. | ||
| It basically is literally putting pressure on these companies to effectively censor, create unjust policies. | ||
| I think it outright violates the First Amendment. | ||
| So that's the news. | ||
| We're suing California to fight censorship. | ||
| Let's start with this and then we'll get into the bigger picture with all the tech stuff. | ||
| So what's this law and why are we suing? | ||
| Yeah, so I'll just give the audience an overview. | ||
| So this statute, AB 587, was passed by the California legislature, and it really does two things. | ||
| One, it imposes a requirement on covered platforms Which would include at the very least Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, among others. | ||
| But it imposes a requirement on those platforms to have terms of service that require content moderation at some level. | ||
| Okay, that's that's point one. | ||
| Point two is | ||
| The law requires these platforms to submit periodic reports to the California Attorney General's Office regarding actions that the platforms have taken to police several categories of content, including, among others, hate speech and racism, misinformation and disinformation, and extremism and radicalization. | ||
| Those are terms in the statute that are undefined and aren't anchored to any kind of basis for the regulated parties to understand what their obligations are under the statute, which is highly problematic. | ||
| But to your point, Tim, The statute also has the effect of incentivizing these platforms to engage in censorship across these various categories because, as Governor Newsom announced in his signing statement with respect to the law, the aim of it is to prevent or to have the state of California say, hate doesn't have a home here. | ||
| And that has troubling speech implications. | ||
| It's an overt and very obvious First Amendment violation. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And again, the endgame, if you want to look more broadly, is They're going to be certain platforms that are going to submit reporting to the Attorney General of California that are going to be good corporate citizens. | ||
| They're going to be taking action across these various categories, perhaps in sufficient number and quantity and timing. | ||
| And then there are going to be other platforms, perhaps, that are lagging and The end game there is to what we've already seen, right, with respect to the reforms that Elon Musk has tried to make on Twitter, an attempt to paint those that aren't taking an aggressive approach to these issues as pariahs and as problems and as hotbeds of fill an attempt to paint those that aren't taking an aggressive approach to these issues as pariahs and as When did this law pass? | ||
| It was passed last year, and its provisions went into effect on January 1st of this year, and the reporting requirement will kick in on January 1st of 2024, but of course, the regulated entities are going to have to start taking steps now to comply. | ||
| And again, we're not against moderation. | ||
| Like, we're open to, you know, we try to have a First Amendment-aligned content policy, and the reality is that disinformation and misinformation hate extremism. | ||
| I mean, extremism about what? | ||
| You could be an extreme skater. | ||
| You could be, like, you can't put the word extremism, with no definition, in a law. | ||
| I mean, one way to go about it is just to only ever report Antifa and be like, here's what we've done, here's the far left, here's what they're doing, and they're gonna be like, well, what about these other groups? | ||
|
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What other groups? | |
| and be like, oh, you know, we don't consider that to be extremism. | ||
| You know, like the, because they're going to try, they try and claim that like libertarians are far right or whatever. | ||
| Right. | ||
| No, that's not extremism. | ||
| We, I mean, if you can define it yourself. | ||
| But I think the obvious thing is that when the government intervenes and tells a private business to regulate speech or create pressures that will result in any kind of speech regulation, that is just like plainly, and I don't understand how they thought this would fly in the first I kind of feel like this is a rubber stamp lawsuit. | ||
| I mean like they'll try and fight it. | ||
| Of course, it's California. | ||
| They may get a favorable judge. | ||
| But I mean, when can the government be like, we hereby impose speech regulations on corporations? | ||
| That's just a violation of the First Amendment, plainly and obviously. | ||
| Well, to your point, I mean, a court in New York, a federal district court in New York enjoined New York's law, which is similar in some ways, which required reporting regarding platforms and defined platforms very, very broadly in that case. | ||
| Who for needing to take action against hateful conduct, which they defined as, among other things, inciting violence against protected categories of people. | ||
| And of course, we've seen how that rhetoric has been used in the context of stochastic terrorism, which is a concept that carried to its logical conclusion would mean the end of free speech in America and also the end of freedom of the press. | ||
| And at least they defined hate in the New York law. | ||
| They're not even defining any of these words at all in the California, which is honestly lazy of them to have not done that. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| There aren't any definitions of these arguably very ambiguous terms, but nothing is ambiguous about the potential consequences of violating the statute, which are fines that could amount up to $15,000 a day if The, the platforms that are at issue do not comply and do not bend the knee to the censorship regime. | ||
| The reporting is extreme too. | ||
| Like they want number, you know, clear analytics of all the reports of hate, misinformation, disinformation, like, like these are extensive data sets that are required, you know, multiple times a year. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| It's a major cost on the business, too. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
|
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Just take the speech issue out of it. | |
| It's a burdensome regulation on private businesses who are now going to have to hire employees and get staff together, to Bill's point, to create reporting on ambiguous terms. | ||
| Even if they could do the work. | ||
| And it would be one thing if this law was just saying, listen, you have to have terms of service, and you have to, you know, report it once in a while. | ||
| But they chose to pick these six words, or how, that have, like, it's, they're arbitrary, I mean, they're, well, they're very specifically chosen words, but they don't, why don't they choose other words? | ||
| Why don't they choose, um, drugs, illegal, like, there's so many other categories of content that they could have- Right, because it's political. | ||
| It's political. | ||
| You know what has me worried is that conversations like this are particularly esoteric. | ||
| Hard for the average person to follow. | ||
| It's easy when you see a video on TikTok of some woman in a gym complaining about men and be like, hey here's a cultural issue. | ||
| This weird, like here's an artifact of the culture war. | ||
| You got these stories where these women are in gyms and they're like, excuse me, are you looking at me? | ||
| And like the guys are like, what? | ||
| And then the woman drops the barbell or whatever on her foot and she's screaming and then everyone laughs. | ||
| You know, stories like that. | ||
| Or there's one that went viral where this woman got kicked out. | ||
| Those are so easy for the average person to understand. | ||
| Like, hey, there's something clearly wrong with the way our culture is developing. | ||
| But stuff like this is extremely hard to understand. | ||
| Most people don't even know it happened. | ||
| And this will probably have one of the biggest, if not the biggest impact on whether or not you can even talk about the other issues. | ||
| So the difficulty here is, how do we get a message like this? | ||
| Like, hey guys, California is trying to do one of the most egregious violations of the First Amendment we've seen in decades or more. | ||
| And we need people to understand and care about this element of the culture war fight. | ||
| I mean, seeing the Newsom and others in California, you know, their rhetoric about hate is alarming. | ||
| Like that is a cultural media artifact that is kind of, can you explain that? | ||
| What, what specifically what they both said and, and who, and, and, uh, explain Banta. | ||
| So, so yeah, uh, Attorney General Banta is the chief and law enforcement officer of the state of California. | ||
| And it is to his office that these reports have to be, have to be made, uh, to your, to your, your, your question about hate, Yeah, I mean the the the governor I think was very candid in. | ||
| The way he described the effect of this law and the goal of this law. | ||
| It is not merely to provide consumers with more transparency about how decision-making is done within these platforms. | ||
| It is about curbing the spread of hate in California and the state of California taking A stand against hate, which again is an undefined term. | ||
| I mean, even legislators who supported this measure were out in front of the press with terms like, stop hate blazoned on front of the podiums that they were standing behind. | ||
| It's weaponized. | ||
| They're weaponizing the word hate. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And to return to Bill's point, We mentioned the categories, and there are, as he pointed out, some notable omissions. | ||
| I mean, child pornography, for example, is not listed in this laundry list. | ||
| Well, that's actually not surprising at all. | ||
| You don't need a policy against that. | ||
| You don't need a policy against that. | ||
| But you better not say naughty words. | ||
| But again, misinformation and disinformation, and we've seen, right? | ||
| We have seen the way that those two terms, in particular, have been weaponized against political and ideological enemies in this country. | ||
| And that is why this effort, among others, is so important to draw a line in the sand and say, "No further. | ||
| We're not going down this road." So we're suing. | ||
| We're gonna put our money where our mouth is. | ||
| And we're challenging this. | ||
| So I'm glad to be a part of it, obviously. | ||
| Because we've got to do more than just complain about it on the Internet. | ||
| We're complaining about it now, but we're also letting you guys know, like, we're taking action. | ||
| So then the big question people are probably asking is, what do we want? | ||
| What do we win if we win? | ||
| Yeah, what we will be asking for is an injunction from the court. | ||
| That will enjoin the Attorney General's office and the other responsible state actors in California from enforcing this. | ||
| And that will be the relief that we will seek in the litigation. | ||
| So there's an interesting view, right? | ||
| So we've got Bill here who runs a big social media platform, and then you've got me who produces content like this for social media platforms. | ||
| And there's a few big issues. | ||
| One, I mean, you guys at Mines, We'll be directly impacted because the law targets you. | ||
| For me as the producer, I'll be directly impacted because it indirectly targets me, because now what's gonna happen is these companies are gonna be like, well, it's ill-defined, but look, if Newsom is threatening some kind of fine, unless we take action against their political rivals, it's, I'll put it this way. | ||
| I remember talking to the guys over at Patreon. | ||
| They had suspended some dude, terminated his account, destroyed his income, and the CEO was like, Tim, If I don't ban this one guy, hundreds of thousands of people lose their jobs. | ||
| Or it was like tens of thousands of people lose their jobs. | ||
| If we don't comply with this regulation and this guy is allowed on the platform, everyone loses their account. | ||
| So the idea is I hate to do it, but I gotta ban this one guy to save the 99 guys. | ||
| You specifically spoke with Conte? | ||
| This was years ago. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Yeah, years ago. | ||
| This was, um, because he had banned, uh, who was banned first? | ||
| Was it Lauren Southern? | ||
| I think Lauren Southern was banned first. | ||
| And then we were like, yo, like, to abruptly destroy someone's income. | ||
| And, uh, so this was around the time Lauren Southern had gotten on a boat, and she was, like, waving a flare in the air at one of these migrant, uh, human smuggling ships. | ||
| The right- the left tries to call them refugee ships, but, like, when a boat goes to another country and picks people up and brings them back, they're just trafficking. | ||
| So, um, but then they were, like, because of that, they were terminating her account or something. | ||
| They didn't give her any notice. | ||
| So all of a sudden, her income's gone. | ||
| And they were like, well, you know, too bad. | ||
| But it caused a huge backlash. | ||
| Patreon then was then like, okay, we'll never do this again. | ||
| We'll always make sure to give notice. | ||
| Then someone dug up like a year-old podcast on a tiny channel from Carl Benjamin. | ||
| Also, he runs the Lotus Eaters podcast. | ||
| And he was using a racial slur against racists. | ||
| Basically, the idea was, I'm gonna call you what you call them, see how you like it. | ||
| And they went, up, up, up, up, doesn't matter. | ||
| He used a slur. | ||
| Not on Patreon's platform. | ||
| Yeah, both were off-platform. | ||
| Both were off-platform. | ||
| And Carl's video was from a year ago. | ||
| It got a few thousand views. | ||
| It was on YouTube, not on Patreon. | ||
| They banned him anyway. | ||
| And so this caused a major backlash and a bunch of large creators left. | ||
| Jordan Peterson, I think, had left. | ||
| I don't know if he was on it. | ||
| Sam Harris. | ||
| I mean, Sam Harris defended Carl. | ||
| Talk about La La Land when we talk about Sam Harris now. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He defended Carl. | ||
| He leaves the platform. | ||
| I ended up talking with the CEO and he was basically saying, because there was another issue where this guy, Robert Spencer, had his account deleted and they said, it was reportedly, I think Patreon said this, MasterCard went to them and said, we will not handle transactions from you unless you get rid of this guy. | ||
| And so the mentality from Conti, from the CEO was, You know, if I've got 30,000 people who make a living on this platform, and they all rely on it, and we have to get rid of one guy, and if we don't, 30,000 people lose their income, I have no choice. | ||
| My response was, stop being a fucking pathetic coward, and call their bluff. | ||
| Tell them, MasterCard, I would like to see how you handle 30,000 unemployed, Famous people, celebrities, influencers, all of the people with millions of followers each waking up one day to find they have no revenue anymore, and it's your fault, make my fucking day. | ||
| And the coward at Patreon said, but I don't want to do this, so he did nothing. | ||
| So, excuse me, my attitude with all this is, You got to stand up. | ||
| You got to call them out. | ||
| If Twitter, if Facebook, if these platforms are presented with this law, they're going to say, look, we really don't want to ban Tim Pool, but if we've got to ban one guy to save a hundred thousand, well then we're going to have to do it. | ||
| So fuck that. | ||
| Fire away. | ||
| Let's get this lawsuit done and stop them from being able to do that. | ||
| And how did the Patreon lawsuit end up? | ||
| Because they did get... there was a complaint against them, right? | ||
| Well, there was the Owen Benjamin thing. | ||
| I don't remember exactly what happened. | ||
| That was crazy because the mass arbitration was potentially going to bankrupt the company. | ||
| I don't know where they went with that. | ||
| I just know that that's the mentality of these companies. | ||
| I mean, the reality was Jack Conde had all the leverage in the world. | ||
| He could have got on the phone with Mastercard and been like, you done fucked up boy, because I got, I'm gonna make a phone call to one, one of our top podcasts that bring in 100k per month, that have 10 million subscribers, and I'm gonna say, hey, you are about to get banned because Mastercard is threatening to pull the plug on the platform. | ||
| Why don't you make a video explaining it? | ||
| Here's the paperwork they sent us. | ||
| That one guy makes one video, it ripples across the entire internet, and in two seconds, MasterCard's lost 10% market share. | ||
| Make my day! | ||
| But these people are all cowards, none of them do it. | ||
| At least we got Bill Ottman, CEO of Mines, being like, I will sue. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And me as just one creator being like, I will also sue. | ||
| So we may be the little guy in this David versus Goliath, but let's fucking do it. | ||
| I mean, changing policy is our only tool. | ||
| Well, it's not our litigation, but it's a primary. | ||
| Where's E.R. | ||
| Musk in this? | ||
| I mean, it's been what? | ||
| When was this bill passed? | ||
| Almost a year ago? | ||
| Yeah, and I think it was passed before he took ownership of Twitter. | ||
| To your question, I don't know what his position is on this bill or if he is even aware of it. | ||
| Maybe he doesn't know. | ||
| Yeah, hopefully this will make him aware. | ||
| Well, I guess we will see. | ||
| But to your point, Tim, I mean, yeah. | ||
| It takes tenacity, it takes fortitude, it takes courage to stand up and really do the right thing. | ||
| And that's what this is. | ||
| It's doing the right thing. | ||
| It's speaking truth to power in California and standing up for free speech and the First Amendment. | ||
| You know, we're a media company here at Timcast. | ||
| We have a bunch of paying members who help support the work to produce media. | ||
| But I'm almost feeling like we're on the verge of needing to be an activist organization because it's one thing if we can spread the word to a large audience and let them know about the problem. | ||
| But knowing is just the first step. | ||
| If we have tens of thousands of active participants in the stuff that we're doing, and we create an activist component, something like this, that's 100 times more effective. | ||
| You know, 50-60 million views per month across our network, mostly on just the content I produce for TimCast, and then to a small degree the other stuff. | ||
| That goes a long way in running a business, but what if we were to take those viewers and then also create some kind of active element to it? | ||
| Like, stand up for what you believe in. | ||
| That would have a powerful impact. | ||
| You look at these leftist organizations that are way smaller. | ||
| A thousand people making phone calls and all of a sudden they're changing policy and they're banning people from events. | ||
| We've got to leverage that. | ||
| We've got to find all the people who care about the culture war, who care about the stuff that's going on and want the world to be better, to be an active participant in making that phone call, sending that tweet and sending that email. | ||
| Because what they'll do is, The activists, they have organizations that go around collecting postcards, and then one day a member of Congress gets 8,000 postcards on their desk, and they're like, yikes, this is a big effort, we better do something about it. | ||
| The activists will spam phone calls to companies and get people banned. | ||
| They'll mass spam emails. | ||
| It's time to play ball. | ||
| It's time to get in this game. | ||
| Right? | ||
| If there's a company that's producing a show and they're like, we're gonna have Steven Crowder do a backflip live, then the company gets 100,000 emails, but from only 10,000 people. | ||
| They freak out and think it's a bunch of different people. | ||
| So what we need is we need people who are actively paying attention to this stuff, who are watching stuff like this, to be the person who's going to send that email and be like, dude, I am not okay with this. | ||
| Maybe if every single person who watched it like this would send an email to Disney or to Netflix or to Twitter. | ||
| Twitter right now, especially with Elon, you might actually see some larger direct action. | ||
| So this law is going to impact Twitter. | ||
| Twitter's got a lot of leverage here, you know? | ||
| Elon Musk runs Twitter, right? | ||
| Newsom just convinced Elon to move Tesla back to California. | ||
| Did you guys see that story from a month or so ago? | ||
| Fucking crazy! | ||
| So now Elon says, I'm also the CEO of Twitter, and if you make me do this, we're not gonna bring manufacturing back. | ||
| Yeah, and Twitter is also negotiating with the EU and Germany and they're abiding by those content policies as well, which is kind of problematic in itself. | ||
| One thing we were talking about earlier, James, was The indemnification stuff with Elon in the merger. | ||
| Can you talk about that a little bit? | ||
| Yeah, I'm happy to. | ||
| So I know, look, let's kind of level set the conversation, give people some context. | ||
| So I'll just give an example. | ||
| So I represented a doctor from Rhode Island, Dr. Andrew Boston, who was kicked off of Twitter for allegedly violating the five strikes rule for COVID misinformation. | ||
| And what has come out of the Twitter files, some reporting that was done I believe by David Zweig, is that internally Twitter had Reviewed Dr. Boston's account after I wrote a demand letter to the company, trying to explain how what he said wasn't violative of any of their policies. | ||
| By the way, he was reposting and commenting on peer-reviewed scientific literature. | ||
| I mean, it's the most kind of, I mean, and it's no insult to him. | ||
| I mean, this is dense scientific material that he was trying to discuss like scientists and researchers do. | ||
| And yet, Twitter banned him under the five strike rule. | ||
| What David Zweig reported out on was that Twitter had internally subjectively concluded that only four that only one of the five strikes were actually valid and yet and yet they banned him anyway which led me to tweet out to my followers You couldn't run a lemonade stand like this. | ||
| You could not engage in this kind of bait-and-switch and abuse consumers the way Twitter abused Dr. Boston and get away with it. | ||
| To your question about what does that mean for accountability for the people who engaged in this kind of conduct. | ||
| Now, if you go and you read the papers, the deal documents between Elon's new entity and old Twitter, | ||
| There are, you know, it's dense, there's dozens and dozens and dozens upon dozens of pages, but one question that comes up is, is it possible to hold the people that were engaged in this bad faith conduct individually accountable for cutting off, in the case of my client Dr. Boston, his access to more than 45,000 followers for his content, or anybody else, right, who's using these platforms to | ||
| Support their livelihoods is there any accountability and the answer to that is in the contracts it the indemnification obligations that Elon Musk's entity has to the old regime are extraordinarily broad and so if you wanted to sue one of these individuals what would happen practically is you could sue them and they're going to send the bill for their attorneys to Elon Musk who will have to promptly pay them and | ||
| Ultimately, Mr. Musk would have to pay out damages in the event there was even a judgment. | ||
| I wonder if this is why Elon tried to back out of the Twitter purchase. | ||
| Because at first it was like, I can buy this, I can fix it. | ||
| And then after reviewing with his lawyers, they're like, you're also going to be liable for all of these lawsuits. | ||
| Everything you know about what Twitter was doing wrong is correct. | ||
| And then when you buy it, now it's on you. | ||
| And now he's almost blown the whistle on himself and put all this further evidence out there despite the fact that, you know, he would have obligations if, you know, more people sued Twitter in the same way that Berenson's did. | ||
| Right, and to your point, I mean that's a truly, I mean it is... | ||
| And I know there are people that will criticize Elon Musk, but it is a really extraordinary thing that he would allow that kind of level of transparency into the inner workings of the censorship apparatus. | ||
| Despite the risk to himself! | ||
| Well, so this opens up risk to him and his entity, Twitter. | ||
| Let's talk about the inverse. | ||
| So, are we fucking up by announcing that we're doing this lawsuit? | ||
| Giving them advance notice, you know what I mean? | ||
| Like, declaring to your enemy, heads up, we will be, you know, coming at you in one week's time, sharp your defenses. | ||
| I don't think it's enough time. | ||
| We already have it written. | ||
| I don't think they're going to be able to get any corrective measures through the legislature out there. | ||
| Yeah, I guess that's the issue with government. | ||
| You can scream it, but they're too slow to do anything anyway. | ||
| It would take too long for a committee hearing to happen on addressing or assessing anything. | ||
| I wonder though, how are they able to respond quickly to lawsuits in that case? | ||
| I mean, certainly some state lawyer or whatever has to just immediately start drafting up a defense or something. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I mean, the Attorney General's Office in California will defend the suit as they defended, for example, The medical misinformation statute that was passed and that was enjoined recently. | ||
| Oh, that was enjoined? | ||
| Yeah, it was enjoined, yes. | ||
| So that was the one where they said doctors can only say what we tell them to say, right? | ||
| Yeah, that's the thumbnail sketch of it, that unless they advance a particular narrative, then their medical license could be at risk. | ||
| And now that's Enjoined, basically blocked. | ||
| That is blocked, that is enjoined right now. | ||
| Were you involved in that or no? | ||
| I'm not, I'm not involved in that. | ||
| That's great though, fantastic work to whoever did that. | ||
| Some great work I believe by Janine Yoon. | ||
| You know what else we need is the ATF ruling on the, totally as an aside and just as a short derailment, the ATF executive, the arbitrary change of policy from the ATF making it illegal to have a pistol brace. | ||
| Like, we are increasingly seeing government just abandon legislation and go straight for, we've deemed it to be illegal, have a nice day. | ||
| That is something that I'm very passionate about because, Tim, to your point, some of the folks that are the most ardent advocates of that approach to governing will talk approvingly about those kinds of measures and then they'll talk about our democracy. | ||
| Well, interestingly enough, And not coincidentally, many of these major decisions are not being made by the Democratic branches of government. | ||
| They're being forced through administrative rulemakings. | ||
| It's an absolute contradiction to People need to just start telling these people, fuck off. | ||
| advocate for democracy and self-government when at the same time unelected bureaucrats within the federal government and at the state level too and we saw that throughout COVID announced these unilateral edicts that bind men and women, businesses and infringe on our core rights. | ||
| People need to just start telling these people fuck off. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| But the scary thing is like there's just too many people who have, we see it with the COVID lockdowns. | ||
| It's It's easier for them to get on their knees and lick the feet of these bureaucrats than it is to just tell them to screw off. | ||
| Well it's interesting watching Elon navigate the whole hate speech thing because obviously no one likes it when people are hateful. | ||
| No one's a fan of hate. | ||
| So when we go into this position, it's like, oh we're defending misinformation, disinformation, hate. | ||
| No, no, no, no, no. | ||
| We need those terms to be defined and clear. | ||
| You see Elon showing these graphs of how hate on Twitter has gone down, and he's playing the game. | ||
| You know what the real definition for misinformation and disinformation is? | ||
| Anything not reported by corporate press. | ||
| If the Washington Post or the New York Times lies, they will use them as the official source. | ||
| The New York Times could write, Sky is green. | ||
| And then if you tweet, the sky is blue, they'll say, that's misinformation. | ||
| Here's our proof. | ||
| And they will cite the New York Times. | ||
| But the New York Times is just human beings writing bullshit on computers. | ||
| There is no reason to believe the New York Times is any more credible than anyone else, other than they're a corporate entity with worth lots of money. | ||
| That makes no sense. | ||
| But that is the standard by which these people operate. | ||
| It's misinformation and disinformation. | ||
| We have to stop it. | ||
| Well, Why is it that Breitbart, for instance, has like a low news guard rating, but has broken major stories that are confirmed to be true? | ||
| The New York Post publishes the Hunter Biden laptop, and they say, oh, it's fake news. | ||
| It's the New York Post. | ||
| I think it's like the oldest paper in existence now in this country, or one of the oldest, at the very least. | ||
| If it doesn't fall in line with the democratic establishment and the corporate press, it's disinformation. | ||
| But if a month later, the New York Times is forced to correct, then it was actually true, but retroactively, you know, I'm surprised they didn't include the term malinformation. | ||
| Have you have you heard? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Oh true, but inconvenient information. | ||
| Malinformation. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's literally the definition. | |
| I know. | ||
| And you can see in the internal communications in Twitter. | ||
| The Twitter files, this is amazing, when they were talking about censoring true information that may cause vaccine hesitancy. | ||
| Like they're outright saying, we have a political outcome we seek and must inhibit the spreading of information that is true because it goes against our agenda. | ||
| That's what they're saying. | ||
| Incredible! | ||
| Here we are, we are sitting here, and it's frustrating because I know for a fact that if I make a video showing like some, you know, if we had a video of a morbidly obese Purple haired Twitter employee saying, breaking it down, you'd get a million views. | ||
| You get a lawyer in a room who explains, this is a crisis we're facing, and you get 100,000 views. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You gotta dye your hair, dude. | |
| I guess I need to, you know, I have that clean cut appearance, I suppose. | ||
| But Tim, to your point, About mis and disinformation. | ||
| And I know that this is a sort of a cliche that's out there. | ||
| It seems that mis and disinformation is, you know, it's just six months away from being true information, right? | ||
| And we see that with the We see that with the vaccines in particular, right? | ||
| So my client Alex Berenson was deplatformed and his fifth strike was for saying, among other things, but the core of what he said was that the vaccines don't stop infection and they don't stop transmission. | ||
| He said that on August 28th, 2021. | ||
| When he said it, it was demonstrably true. | ||
| It was being conceded. | ||
| I think CDC had said it. | ||
| They had conceded that it was true. | ||
| And yet he was de-platformed anyway. | ||
| And now, of course, it's accepted as gospel truth. | ||
| Have you seen that meme where it's like, I need new conspiracy theories because my old ones came true. | ||
| Or all my old ones came true. | ||
| Yeah, that's why everyone keeps saying Alex Jones was right. | ||
| And it's like, well, you know, Alex Jones was right on all the things that were based in reality. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, there's a lot of stuff he, like, he went on Joe Rogan a few years ago and he was talking about fifth dimensional aliens and like chimeras and stuff. | ||
| And it's like, okay, look, I get it. | ||
| Epstein, censorship, politics. | ||
| Like, Alex Jones has got a pretty good batting average, but then he does a lot of stuff, you know what I mean? | ||
| But I digress. | ||
| I'm not here to rag on or compliment Alex, just to point out that It's become apparent that all of these quote-unquote conspiracy theories end up being true. | ||
| And so you have these active tech billionaires, elites, and government actors who are trying to suppress true and correct information. | ||
| They're not going to win this one. | ||
| It's insane to think they can control information. | ||
| It's like standing in a river, holding your hands up, trying to stop the water. | ||
| That's what they're doing. | ||
| But with laws like this, they are calling upon the forces of government to try and build dams on the flow of information, true and correct information. | ||
| Can you speak to your time in the FDA a little bit? | ||
| I wanted to make sure you get that in because explain, explain what that experience was like. | ||
| Well, yeah, I mean, I, I can go over it a little bit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, I, so like a lot of people, um, I was sitting on my couch and March of 2020 was working at a large law firm, had a successful commercial practice, uh, 15 days to start the spread happened. | ||
| My wife and I had three kids at the time. | ||
| She was pregnant with our fourth child. | ||
| And the opportunity presented itself to leave what I was doing and go and serve in the Trump administration. | ||
| And my wife and I thought about it. | ||
| We prayed about it. | ||
| Believe that God was calling us to make the sacrifice. | ||
| I went into the administration. | ||
| I worked as a deputy general counsel at HHS and worked for the general counsel there. | ||
| And we did a lot of really amazing things in the time that I was there, the relatively short time that I was there. | ||
| To go back to the issue of our democracy, one of the things that we did was Create a rulemaking that would require all of HHS's various components, including the FDA, to retrospectively review the rules and the regulations that they are foisting upon the American people for various reasons. | ||
| And if they didn't retrospectively review those and publish an analysis showing that the cost and benefits lined up, and show their work to the American people, the regulation would expire automatically. | ||
| So it was called the sunset rule. | ||
| Yeah, I love those. | ||
| It was called the sunset rule. | ||
| And the Biden administration, after the new incoming administration came in, they promptly undid it. | ||
| And by the way, this is a concept, and it's outlined in the rulemaking, it was a concept of retrospective review that has been endorsed by basically every president since Ronald Reagan to include Barack Obama. | ||
| So it's not like it's a radical notion, and a lot of states do similar things with respect to sunset rules. | ||
| Yes, I worked on those kinds of things, on drug pricing initiatives, and at the end of the administration I was the outgoing chief counsel of the FDA, of the Food and Drug Administration, and I continue to represent clients and businesses and entrepreneurs who are trying to commercialize Medical technology, medical devices, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and so on. | ||
| I was going to say, I'm just thinking about maybe a Friday afternoon wasn't the best day to announce that we're suing the state, you know what I mean? | ||
| But I'll make sure to bring it back up on Monday because Friday is where news goes to die. | ||
| Yeah, the what's the process for getting is it once a sunset law has been initiated, but then overturned, is it easier to get it reinstated later because it existed at once in the past? | ||
| Well, there's certainly things for the agency to draw on to be able to promulgate a new rule. | ||
| So just to give the audience a quick synopsis. | ||
| So when when you hear about these regulations that come out, you mentioned the ATF rule. | ||
| There's a requirement that the agencies give notice to the community through the Federal Register So they publish a proposal of this is the regulation that we intend to implement They explain how it works. | ||
| They explain the economic and legal and scientific rationale for it. | ||
| There's an opportunity to comment on it and And then the agency typically has to take in that feedback, incorporate it, and then finalize the rule. | ||
| And that's what we did in the context of the Sunset Rule, which was opposed, interestingly enough, by, I believe, even by some members of industry who didn't want the uncertainty that the rule would require. | ||
| But to answer your question, if a regulation was sunset, That means that the agency would have to go back to the drawing board because what we saw and what is, I don't think it's a radical statement to make, is when agencies promulgate rules that bind the American people, and there are a lot of them that date back to before the internet, for example, | ||
| I mean, the economy's changed a lot in the last 25 years, and so when you've done economic projections that say that the benefits are X and the costs are Y, and you then look at that through the lens of the current state of 2023, you know, it's not X and Y, it's A and B, and A and B are a lot more than X and Y, and so that's why the retrospective review process is so necessary. | ||
| But again, I mean, The agencies would have to go back to the drawing board if the rules were sunset. | ||
| And again, this is driving toward what Congress already requires under something called the Regulatory Flexibility Act, which Carter signed into law in 1980, which is that these agencies have to do this work. | ||
| And they aren't doing the work for the most part, or in very rare cases are they're doing the work. | ||
| And the American people are entitled to have them do the work and see the work and analyze the work. | ||
| Isn't it crazy that the lockdown was three years ago? | ||
| Which is totally derailing. | ||
| I don't know, I was thinking about like, you're mentioning it's three years when this, you know, and I'm just like, wow, three years ago. | ||
| It was. | ||
| And, and, you know, my time jump, my, my, my regret is that I wasn't representing clients in litigation from the day they started. | ||
| A partner of mine at Envisage actually, Tony Biller, he and I at our prior law firm represented at the very outset, this was very early, this was in early April of 2021, we represented people who wanted to go out into downtown Raleigh and protest the lockdowns. | ||
| And remember there was a tweet by the Raleigh Police Department that said protesting is not an essential activity. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So we represented those protesters. | ||
| We stood up for free speech. | ||
| We stood up for the right to protest. | ||
| And ultimately, the governor of North Carolina caved and allowed the protest to go forward without having- Allowed? | ||
| Well, right. | ||
| But- Surrendered his impedance. | ||
| So that those people could go out on the streets and protest without being threatened with arrest. | ||
| But again, my regret, in some ways looking back, is that I wasn't more aggressive on what happened. | ||
| And again, let's talk about our democracy. | ||
| Hindsight's 20-20, man. | ||
| Well, it is. | ||
| But our democracy, let's talk about our democracy for a second. | ||
| Think about how many of those COVID lockdown measures were never voted on. | ||
| In my home state of North Carolina, Governor Cooper issued these edicts deciding which businesses could stay open and which businesses had to shutter, which organizations could gather and which couldn't, which were Which were essential, right? | ||
| But to be fair, I mean, we know that free speech and Second Amendment protests were spreading COVID and Black Lives Matter protests were actually stopping the spread of COVID because the virus was actually recoiling in fear of the thought of racial equity. | ||
| So, you know, I understand why these governors allowed one and not the other. | ||
| Makes perfect sense. | ||
| Well, but remember the public health community came out and did the about face that it did. | ||
| And if you remember, I'm sure you do. | ||
| There's videos of nurses clapping and cheering for the protesters who are marching. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But then also of them holding up signs blocking right-wing protesters who are talking about free speech. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They're like, these people are, it's a zombie cult. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And unfortunately, a lot of people were harmed by it. | ||
| And my heart goes out to a lot of the ordinary working class people who couldn't work from home. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| and were dependent on, for example, the restaurant industry to put food on the table for their families. | ||
| - All that food's spoiled. | ||
| - I mean, the double standard for hate misinformation, like, you know, a certain ideology is allowed to physically protest during COVID, but another ideology is not allowed to, same online. | ||
| It's like, certain ideology is allowed to be hateful and spread misinformation on social networks, Another ideology is not. | ||
| I mean, misinformation is permitted on social networks, which—and we all know the issues. | ||
| We all know— It calls for violence. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| To your point, Bill, can you think of an—and Tim, I'll ask you this too—can you think of a single time Content has been flagged on Twitter or any of the other social media platforms because somebody said something too flattering about the vaccines that they were, that they were, I mean, you've seen them referred to, and I don't think this is, I think this is hyperbole, right? | ||
| But you see the vaccines referred to as a miracle. | ||
|
unidentified
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You see people say that if you take it, you won't get it, right? | |
| Those aren't flags. | ||
| All right, I'll tell you the story. | ||
| The policy, the rule for YouTube, for instance, is you can't discourage people from going to the doctor or encourage treatments like ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine. | ||
| You can't definitively say that they're effective. | ||
| Not that I think they do. | ||
| I honestly, I don't understand why people are so adamant on believing that they do. | ||
| I think it's tribal, the same way people think it isn't. | ||
| I'm like, I don't know, man. | ||
| But here's a funny thing. | ||
| Casey Neistat, I like the guy, but he tweets out that he's like, go get vaccinated. | ||
| And I'm like, isn't giving medical advice a violation of the rules? | ||
| I respond, no, comma, talk to your doctor if it makes sense for you. | ||
| And he responds with, that's weird. | ||
| I didn't talk to my doctor. | ||
| I went to a drive up and got the vaccine in my car. | ||
| And my attitude was like, you drove into a parking lot and let a strange man inject your arm with an unknown substance. | ||
| Are you fucking insane? | ||
| Go to a doctor, man. | ||
| And then the people respond to me, they're like, Tim, you're such an idiot. | ||
| The doctor is just gonna take the vaccine anyway. | ||
| And I was like, then why are you mad? | ||
| If we agree on this, and the doctor should be the one telling you to do it, people were allowed to go on social media and encourage you to go to a 7-Eleven parking lot to let a stranger inject your body, and that was allowed! | ||
| Yet someone might be like, there's actually a medication that's very famous and well-known called Ivermectin. | ||
| Banned. | ||
| Totally and outright. | ||
| That is absolutely insane. | ||
| These people, look man, I'll say it again, the media tried painting me, Daily Beast called me the poster boy of ivermectin, despite me saying consistently and insistently, I don't think it does anything. | ||
| Even arguing with Joe Rogan, I'm like, I don't know that it does. | ||
| And Joe was like, it's a protease inhibitor, it does this. | ||
| And I'm like, look, I think it's tribal. | ||
| I think it's true. | ||
| I'm not saying it doesn't, I just don't know. | ||
| I'm not a doctor, talk to a doctor. | ||
| But think about how insane that is, that it is acceptable To walk into a parking lot and have a stranger inject you without knowing your medical history? | ||
| Without knowing your allergies? | ||
| That should fall under the same medical misinformation policy. | ||
| But it doesn't. | ||
| Because these people are a cult. | ||
| Let me just say it again. | ||
| For all that are listening, I know it's very difficult. | ||
| A lot of people are like, Trump supporters are in a cult. | ||
| Many are! | ||
| I acknowledge that outright. | ||
| A lot of these Trump supporters are cultish. | ||
| But y'all are in a cult too. | ||
| And you know how I can tell you, definitively? | ||
| Because you drove into a parking lot, where you met a strange man you did not know, and let them either stick a Q-tip into your nose, or inject your arm with something, and you just said, sounds good to me! | ||
| Me? | ||
| I'm like, I'm just gonna go talk to my doctor. | ||
| My doctor said not to get the vaccine because the concern at the time was, I'm young, I'm healthy, and older people need it. | ||
| So they were like, you're not at risk, you shouldn't get it. | ||
| Of course, that changed when they went, everyone should get it no matter what. | ||
| But at that point, I'd gotten sick, we got the monoclonal antibodies and all that stuff. | ||
| It's just that should be the clearest indicator that this whole thing was political and made no sense. | ||
| I was going to say, I'm curious if, you know, this censorship industrial complex that Taibbi and Schellenberg are referring to, do you think that the AB 587 in California, this law that we're talking about, | ||
| Do you think that that bureaucratic infrastructure that they're trying to create, where basically private companies have to have this conversation with the state about content moderation, is that related to this censorship industrial complex that was happening in the Twitter files? | ||
| Is it the same infrastructure? | ||
| I think if you don't have it, right, in your platform that's subject to these regulations, you've got to build it. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Otherwise, how are you going to comply? | ||
| So to your point, I think it puts people in positions within these companies who are, I would argue, predisposed to censor because this is their industry, this is what they do. | ||
| And who's determining the enforcement? | ||
| So they start fining us $15K a day at some point in the future. | ||
| If we have violations, and who's the board determining these violations? | ||
| Well, I mean, ultimately, I think, practically speaking, the way it would work is you would end up having the attorney general's office would file a complaint against the company and eventually try to sue to collect the, I believe, again, it's $15,000 a day. | ||
| Per violation. | ||
| Penalties, right. | ||
| So I think that's the way that it would practically work itself out. | ||
| But yeah, to your point, To comply with this, folks are going to have to, the platforms, maybe they have the existing infrastructure, maybe they're going to have to hire additional people. | ||
| But these portals that exist on Twitter for, you know, basic communication with the government for the takedown requests, like, who? | ||
| I'm curious if this is still going on Twitter first, because, you know, these portals were set up between Facebook and Twitter. | ||
| Does it, you know, does that still exist at Twitter? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, where's Elon? | ||
| Has anyone asked him about this? | ||
| I have. | ||
| I've tried to reach out, but yeah, I think that... Well, I sent an email to press at twitter.com to ask him a very serious question. | ||
| What does Elon Musk eat for breakfast? | ||
| And they responded with shit. | ||
| I couldn't believe it. | ||
| A delicious poop emoji. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| We did that. | ||
| Delicious poop emoji. | ||
| I'm like, more people need to throw pies. | ||
| No, but the story there was that Elon changed the press at Twitter to always just auto reply with poop emojis. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| And so I immediately was like, I got you. | ||
| I'm going to get you. | ||
| That's funny. | ||
| But no, in all seriousness, you know, where is Elon in terms of whether or not they're still doing this portal? | ||
| I don't think he's ever said he deleted it. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| And I think that it was funny when Dorsey, before he's kind of gone dark on Twitter. | ||
| If you notice, he's like barely post there anymore. | ||
| I think he's an evil dude, man. | ||
| I mean, he actually called out Elon when the Twitter files were first starting. | ||
| He was like, you should just publish absolutely everything. | ||
| that exists. | ||
| He should. | ||
| Including now and in the future for what you're doing now, which was an interesting move on his part to kind of, you know, he'd try to see if, you know, he could play chicken with Elon. | ||
| But, you know, it's understandable why Elon wouldn't publish absolutely everything. | ||
| But present day, Twitter does matter. | ||
| Apparently, they're going to open source the algorithm in a couple of days. | ||
| I know, that's really amazing. | ||
| I think Elon's doing great work. | ||
| You know, we had Bannon on Timcast IRL, and he said that he thought Elon was a shill for China and all that stuff. | ||
| and it's just like, come on, man. | ||
| I've got my criticisms of Elon with China and questions about it, but Elon's doing such good and important work on this end. | ||
| I mean, I don't know what else to say. | ||
| Do good work, get credit where credit is due. | ||
| And it takes a long time to turn a ship that's that big. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| My main concern is a lot of people... It's like turning a building. | ||
| Like, how many people were banned that don't have audiences? | ||
| I'm curious if they've been let back on Twitter, because, like, you know, a bunch of high-profile people have come back. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| Tons of progress to Twitter, obviously. | ||
| Like, Elon's doing very good work. | ||
| But, like, what about all the people who just are screwed? | ||
| And they got banned for posting some COVID thing. | ||
| Well, that's what Bannon was saying. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a lot of patriots that Elon has not let back on the platform. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, he won't let Alex Jones on the platform for personal bias reasons. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Not a good thing. | ||
| I think Elon's doing a massive net positive. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| But there's some things where it's like, come on, bro. | ||
| You know, I think the issue is that the reality is he has a limit to what he can do. | ||
| And letting Alex Jones back on would be too much and it would nuke Twitter because then... Advertisers. | ||
| I mean, probably Apple. | ||
| I mean, he went and met with Tim Cook the other day. | ||
| I would not be surprised at all if they had conversations about, like, certain limitations and, you know, what was acceptable, because... Oh, I just wish... Yeah. | ||
| I just wish people were not so cowardly. | ||
| Here's my recommendation to Elon. | ||
| He should open a $1,000 a month option for people who just want to support Twitter, because, you know, he doesn't... He needs to become not dependent on advertisers. | ||
| He still is. | ||
| That's why he's doing Twitter Blue. | ||
| So, Twitter Blue, but it's like eight bucks. | ||
| Tears! | ||
| Launch a huge tier! | ||
| So what we're doing, all of you listening, become a member at TimCast.com, click the join us button. | ||
| We launched the Discord, where we've got the time-gated lounge, after six months you get access to the VIP room, or 25 bucks. | ||
| Then we've got the silver lounge, 25 bucks, and the elite club, which is 100 bucks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And there's a lot of people who are like, "$100, that's insane, who would spend that?" And it's like the people who want access to the internal workings of the company, who want to be directly involved with the projects we're working on, beta testing stuff, checking out the video games. - Yes. - These are the people that are supporting us to such a degree that we're involving them in the insider information. | ||
| And if you don't want that, you don't need it, don't worry about it. | ||
| The point is, we're thinking like, how can we give more to the people who support us so that they support us more? | ||
| Like, if there are people who are willing to spend $100 a month to be part of the Elite Club, and it means we get to do better and more work, and they get something of value in return being involved, and we're going to do the physical space at the new coffee shop with, like, games and stuff like that, Elon Musk needs to make those tiers as well. | ||
| He's got the Twitter blue for, you know, what is it, eight bucks or whatever? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Then I think on iPhone it's like, what, twelve or something? | ||
| Because of the stupid percentage? | ||
| In-app purchases are stupid. | ||
| Yeah, make another one. | ||
| Make Twitter blue, make Twitter silver, make Twitter gold, make Twitter platinum, and let people and businesses spend more. | ||
| I said this There should be a Twitter Premium Elite Business Package where it's like 300 bucks a month. | ||
| I'd sign my company up instantly if it meant that I could then type in to an account like, here are all my employees. | ||
| They all instantly get verified. | ||
| They're part of that network. | ||
| Here's the thing. | ||
| We thought about, can we get all of our employees verified? | ||
| We want them to be using Twitter. | ||
| We want them on Twitter Blue. | ||
| Well, how do you do it? | ||
| Do I make a new account for every person? | ||
| Do we have them use their business account? | ||
| What credit card do we use? | ||
| We need a simplified business plan where I can go in as admin and just say, here's a list of my employees, and then they all instantly get verified. | ||
| And then later when that employee leaves, I can remove them from the business plan. | ||
| I'm like, why? | ||
| I mean, maybe he's just got his hands full. | ||
| I know what it's like to run a company, so do you. | ||
| There's only so much you can do. | ||
| So I think that's a tremendous opportunity for Twitter to get away from these advertisers. | ||
| I also just think, to go back to what I said earlier, I don't mean to say Elon's a coward, because he's certainly one of the least cowardly people. | ||
| I'm just like, call their bluff. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like imagine just every time you're trying to negotiate a business deal, You just back down and take the lowest number. | ||
| That's what our political system is. | ||
| At some point, you've got to call them out and be like, I'm willing to bet you will not let this deal fall. | ||
| So what I do in negotiations, because, and maybe the reason I want this is because this is how I am. | ||
| I've done business negotiations where it'll be like, I sued someone once. | ||
| And I'll keep the details very vague. | ||
| Let's just say the number was $10,000. | ||
| I went to them and said, I want $10,000. | ||
| And they said, OK, let's negotiate. | ||
| We'll do $7,000. | ||
| I said, now I want $12,000. | ||
| And they went, what? | ||
| We're negotiating. | ||
| And I'm like, uh-huh. | ||
| And you're wasting my time. | ||
| If you don't accept $12,000, I'm going to $14,000 next. | ||
| Now it's $12,000. | ||
| And they went, OK, OK, it's $12,000. | ||
| It's $12,000. | ||
| Because I'm like, either that or we go to court. | ||
| I told you 10, I was being reasonable. | ||
| And then you came back and tried to waste my time. | ||
| Now it's 12. | ||
| If you want to try me again, 14. | ||
| And if you think that's not good enough, I will see you in court and we'll ask a judge. | ||
| And then you can spend the money on that. | ||
| Good luck. | ||
| Here's the issue. | ||
| These people all play this game where they're like, you don't want to spend the money in court. | ||
| Bro, I'm bored. | ||
| Bring it on, dude. | ||
| I'll spend the money. | ||
| I will make it as painful for you as possible. | ||
| Why don't we have that in business and politics? | ||
| You get people who go, well, it's not worth the fight. | ||
| Well, then what are you doing? | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| Call them out. | ||
| I'm willing to bet. | ||
| I think about this in terms of like muggings and crime. | ||
| That dude who's walking up, What's his end game? | ||
| I've been in so many countries. | ||
| I've seen so much of, you know, criminal behavior. | ||
| They want an easy mark. | ||
| They wanna get the cash. | ||
| They wanna get out. | ||
| Nobody wants to get hurt. | ||
| We know this about animals. | ||
| Should you worry about a grizzly bear? | ||
| If the bear is starving or if you're near its babies? | ||
| But for the most part, the animal's gonna run away from you. | ||
| Wolf gonna run away from you. | ||
| They're more scared of you than you are of it, unless you threaten it in some way. | ||
| So if someone comes at me and they're trying to like take something from me, my response is, You've got an option to go find an easier mark, or this will be the most painful experience of any mugging you've ever dealt with, because I will do everything in my power to make sure it hurts. | ||
| And they're going to be like, I'm going to find somebody who's going to hand me their phone. | ||
| I've been in situations. | ||
| I've experienced this stuff. | ||
| We need that attitude in politics. | ||
| I don't even think necessarily Trump had that to a certain degree, but he did have it more than anybody else. | ||
| I wanna see Elon Musk go to Apple and be like, I'm bringing Alex Jones back. | ||
| You wanna ban us? | ||
| Bring it on. | ||
| You will see the biggest news story. | ||
| You will see 300 million angry users, and I'll tell them all, guess what? | ||
| If you've got a problem with this, Android still allows the app. | ||
| I think Google would be very happy to hear that they're gonna get, hey, let's say 10% of Twitter's user base decides to switch from iPhone to Apple. | ||
| You willing to lose 30 million iPhone customers? | ||
| Try me, motherfucker. | ||
| And Apple's going to be like, calm down. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| Bring Alex Jones back. | ||
| We don't want to go to war. | ||
| The problem is too many people are like unwilling to just lay it down and say, I will burn this whole thing to the ground. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| You may win in the end, but you will be burnt along with us. | ||
| You want your company horribly disfigured and damaged? | ||
| Fine. | ||
| You'll survive. | ||
| Maybe I won't. | ||
| But are you willing to go to those lengths? | ||
| I am. | ||
| I wanna see that in politics. | ||
| I wanna see that in business. | ||
| I'm getting so frustrated with this. | ||
| I've often said I would never run for office. | ||
| Now I'm entertaining, maybe down the line in 10 years, running for office so that I can be the person on the debate stage saying, I will destroy you and everything you hold dear if you play stupid fucking games. | ||
| And if it means the end of my career, I ain't got nothing to lose anyway, baby. | ||
| Do you wanna go to war? | ||
| Bring it on. | ||
| Can we get one person to just say that? | ||
| One time, one time, someone do that. | ||
| Yeah, hey, you can find Alex on Mines. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You didn't say it the way I did, but you were like, we're going to let Alex Jones be on Mines. | |
| I did want to bring up Bandcamp a little bit. | ||
| Let's talk about Bandcamp. | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| I mean, you didn't say it the way I did, but you were like, we're going to let Alex Jones be on my... | ||
| Of course. | ||
| I mean, it's... | ||
| But the... | ||
| Anyway, we don't need to get in... | ||
| I did want to bring up Bandcamp a little bit. | ||
| Let's talk about Bandcamp. | ||
| Before the end. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because I'll play that game too. | ||
| I mean, should we... | ||
| Let's, you know, just... | ||
| People know the situation, but I mean... Yeah, I only intend to file litigation against Bandcamp. | ||
| We released a song today called Bright Eyes. | ||
| You can find it at Timcast Music on YouTube. | ||
| Admittedly, you know, I think I'm at the point with the music stuff where We put a lot of weight and power behind the first several songs we released. | ||
| Now we've got to get to the point of just sort of releasing the music and letting the music carry itself, so they'll probably do not as well because they're not going to get the full weight. | ||
| But I'm going to be promoting the song pretty heavily throughout the next week, and I'm really hoping we can get four of four on Billboard. | ||
| So if you want to support us, trashhouserecords.com. | ||
| For those that don't know, Bandcamp We had three songs on Bandcamp. | ||
| Those three songs charted on Billboard. | ||
| Three for three, 100%, all out of the ballpark. | ||
| That's not common for musicians. | ||
| Bandcamp abruptly deleted our account, as well as Five Times August, Bryson Gray, and a few others. | ||
| I think Bryson Gray, I know Five Times August. | ||
| In the same time period? | ||
| I don't know exactly when. | ||
| We've received no notice. | ||
| We have no idea what's going on. | ||
| They've refused any and all communication. | ||
| Now, there are several concerns that I have. | ||
| One, Do the people who purchased the song have access to the song? | ||
| If not, well, that's a serious infringement on the arrangement I have and they have with their customers. | ||
| Some people have said they still have access to the song, which brings me to the next problem, copyright infringement. | ||
| They have terminated our working relationship and my access to revenue for those songs, but they are still distributing that song? | ||
| Whoa, whoa, whoa, we got a problem here. | ||
| They have my song on their platform that they are distributing without my control or access or say? | ||
| Well, that can't work, can it? | ||
| I mean, they're playing my music. | ||
| I say copyright infringement. | ||
| And also, another major component, I don't know if they're holding money of mine. | ||
| Because they have no communication with me. | ||
| Considering we were doing sales on the platform up until they just abruptly banned us, I can only assume they have my money. | ||
| Until they can release a report and at least email us and say, here's what happened. | ||
| Here's our breakdown. | ||
| They haven't done it. | ||
| So I think they've also violated the rights of the customers. | ||
| When people were buying a song on Bandcamp, they weren't just getting access to that song. | ||
| They were getting access to a community around my music. | ||
| None of our songs broke any rules. | ||
| None of our songs made direct references. | ||
| One song was a love song, one song was generic anti-establishment with no references to any person, no hate speech, nothing like that, and one song was a story about a fictional revolution that never mentioned anything violent, and it talked about tearing down statues. | ||
| That's all. | ||
| They banned us without notice. | ||
| So, I intend to pursue litigation against them so we can, first of all, I mean, I need to know if they have my money. | ||
| And I'm assuming they do because I think these people are acting maliciously. | ||
| I need to know what, we have no access to any of our data. | ||
| We have no access to our customers. | ||
| I don't even know if the person emailing me asking for a refund is a legitimate person because they've taken all of that away from us and given us no access. | ||
| What is the legal strategy with these companies just providing zero notice? | ||
| Or zero communication? | ||
| Is that calculated? | ||
| And not just that. | ||
| I don't have access to the information about who has my music. | ||
| So I have customers that currently have a license to my song. | ||
| I don't know who they are, where they are, I don't know what they've spent, I don't know if they have my money. | ||
| A lack of access to this information puts me in a very difficult position business-wise in dealing with my copyright rights and my obligations to my customers and those holding licenses. | ||
| I mean, this is a problem that confronts so many creators of content. | ||
| And let's face it, you don't go, no one's going to Bandcamp or Twitter or Facebook or any of these platforms just because the platforms are interesting. | ||
| They're going there to see content. | ||
| They're going there and these platforms make money because people create content and they put it on and they host it. | ||
| The problems with respect to this industry, and I was in a debate earlier this week and I'll reiterate what I said there about this at UNC Law School, is you could not run businesses in any other industry that I'm aware of | ||
| Where you engage in this kind of bait and switch behavior, where, let's just use Twitter because it's an example that I'm most intimately familiar with, where you say, for example, we're the free speech wing of the free speech party. | ||
| When Vijaya Gadde says in a blog post in July of 2018, we do not shadow ban. | ||
| We do not discriminate on the basis of political ideology or viewpoint. | ||
| When you have Jack Dorsey the following month reiterate the same thing on Sean Hannity's show to a national audience. | ||
| And yet, as the Twitter files have shown, that's exactly what they were engaging in. | ||
| I have a question. | ||
| If you are a pizza restaurant, Can you arbitrarily deny service to anyone for any reason? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I think the answer to that would be no. | |
| Those are places of public accommodation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| Well, the reason I asked, and to clarify, a lot of businesses say we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone. | ||
| But I have to wonder if a public accommodation opened its doors to the public and says, anyone is welcome to come in. | ||
| You come in. | ||
| You order a piece of pizza, you quietly sit down, and then they walk up to you and say, you get out right now. | ||
| Is that something a public accommodation can just do? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, I think they might be able to do it. | |
| I mean, they could do it and they'd be at litigation risk. | ||
| I mean, if they came up to you, particularly if you're a member of a protected class, you might have a claim for race, sex. | ||
| Let's say a mixed race person comes and sits down at a pizza restaurant, says nothing, insults no one, eats pizza, and then the white owners walk up and say, you're not welcome to be here, get out. | ||
| Then I think that person would have potentially a viable claim for racial discrimination. | ||
| So it sounds like Bandcamp banned me for being a mixed race person. | ||
| Well, they're going to say, right, they're going to say that they're not a place of public accommodation. | ||
| The platforms, and I think there have been efforts to try to loop the platforms in as places of accommodation, but let's get, I mean, they're going to say, they're also going to say is Section 230 Trump's any, right? | ||
| Please, okay, absolutely. | ||
| I absolutely do think that one of the components of the removal was my mixed-race status. | ||
| I mean, the people who put out these, we watched one of these videos, it's all white people. | ||
| It's clearly all white. | ||
| They clearly have an issue with the fact, because I mean, these people, Derek Bell, for instance, has advocated for segregation. | ||
| Well, mixed-race people are clearly at odds with that ideology. | ||
| So, Derek Bell, the critical race theorist, argues that black people were better off with their own economy, which is wrong, in my opinion. | ||
| The critical race theory idea is that, before the end of segregation, black people made more money, they provided service for themselves, he thinks that schools should remain segregated, and these people likely share these views. | ||
| Now, they've said nothing to me, but I think that actually makes sense as to why they actually removed my account. | ||
| I can't speak for anybody else, but here I am, breaking no rules, minding my own business, just some mixed-race dude making music, and they delete my account. | ||
| I think there's a racial component to this, and if they want to argue that they have a Section 230 right to be racist, I would love for them to tell the court and the world that, in fact, It doesn't matter whether or not we are. | ||
| We're allowed to be. | ||
| I'll say okay to that. | ||
| Fine, I guess. | ||
| If the law allows them to ban me for being mixed-race, then I would love for everyone to know that. | ||
| That was actually a question, I believe, that the court posed to Twitter during our hearing in Berenson versus Twitter. | ||
| Could you discriminate? | ||
| Could you kick somebody off on the basis of race? | ||
| And there wasn't a clear answer from Twitter in that regard. | ||
| Bryson Gray's a black man. | ||
| They banned him. | ||
| I think we've, I think we're not seeing a pattern of behavior. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I, I, you know, I, I, I don't know without looking at, uh, at all the facts, but again, I mean, they're not going to argue that black men is racist, right? | ||
| There's no reason to ban them. | ||
| But setting the, you know, setting the racial component to the side, just from a pure contract theory perspective, the hypothetical that you present, right? | ||
| You come in, you're, you're, you're eating your pizza. | ||
| You've relied on a public representation, a sign on the front of the door that says, all are welcome here, right? | ||
| You walk in, you're enjoying your slice, but mid-bite, you're told to get out. | ||
| Is there a contract problem there? | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| I actually, I would say so. | ||
| I think a better example would be, the pizza argument has a metaphor, has an issue in the scale of Monetary value involved. | ||
| So with this band camping, we're talking about tens of thousands of dollars and tens of thousands of customers. | ||
| So this would be more like I go to a mall and I spend thousands of dollars renting out a space. | ||
| What does it say when you try to log in? | ||
| having a bunch of customers come in, and then one day abruptly, the owner of the mall pulls down the gate, locks it shut, and says, "Get the fuck out." And I'm like, "For what?" And then he has security escort out of the building. | ||
| I have no access to any of my assets. | ||
| I have no access to, I don't know who's got my pizza. | ||
| I don't know. - What does it say when you try to log in? - Nothing, it says this account doesn't exist. - Okay, so what is the strategy I'm trying to get at of nothing, no communication, no reason, like is, That has to be an intention. | ||
|
unidentified
|
For all I know, they're giving my song away for free now! | |
| Is it intentionally trying to limit communication because that reduces their exposure in a certain way? | ||
| Most companies are going to say, minimal amount right i mean sure right right i mean it's just in their but i think that actually interest to to do that but it seems like sometimes twitter will ban people or you know old twitter would ban people just out of nowhere and like it's gone versus there actually being a strike come through an email same with youtube like sometimes people just it's just gone well versus other times and then they'll go ahead | ||
| i i think the lack of information makes them uh more at fault because the mall analogy makes more sense. | ||
| I don't know where my assets are. | ||
| I don't know who they've distributed them to. | ||
| They do not have the copyright on this music to give it to people I am not aware of. | ||
| We track who has a license to my intellectual property. | ||
| They have severed that, and for all I know, they're withholding my money. | ||
| They've not told us. | ||
| And they're withholding our information as to who they have given this music to. | ||
| There may be people who do not have a right to have that song. | ||
| They're distributing it. | ||
| This is copyright infringement. | ||
| They're hosting my song on their platform without my consent. | ||
| So we got a big problem here. | ||
| And is your name still? | ||
| Is your name Tim Pool still? | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| So if you go to TimCast.Bandcamp, it just says TimCast Chicago or something. | ||
| But people have told me that when they go into their account, they can see the song. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Which means they have my copyrighted information on their platform without my consent. | ||
| And they're trading on your name. | ||
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| They're monetizing that. | ||
| So if they wanted to ban it outright, they'd have to eliminate that content from the platform. | ||
| The reason they didn't, in my opinion, because then they would have tens of thousands of arbitration and litigation claims against those who use the platform in the first place. | ||
| They can't be allowed to do this. | ||
| This is a clear, clear violation of all of the rights of all parties involved. | ||
| Well, and look, and again, unfortunately, it's not an isolated case. | ||
| I mean, these companies are very powerful, and again, I mean, the general principles that would apply to businesses, and I represent men and women across the country who have to deal with legal issues and claims against their businesses, Uh, that are, that are, you know, in, in many ways frivolous or without foundation. | ||
| And yet you've got the reliance interest that you're talking about here and the investment that you've made in building these brands and others have made on these platforms, having the rug unceremoniously pulled out from under them, in some cases with no explanation whatsoever. | ||
| We have tremendous monetary damages in this regard. | ||
| Tremendous. | ||
| Well, and the other thing, I'm glad you brought that up. | ||
| The other thing that you'll see is these platforms with their one-sided terms of service will say you're limited. | ||
| For example, I believe Twitter's terms of service still limit damages to $200 on the basis of any legal claim that you can make. | ||
| But they can't stand. | ||
| And that would be an argument. | ||
| That's unconscionable and should be invalid. | ||
| People need to understand this about law. | ||
| For some reason, I think a lot of people think that the law, it's like, the judge looks at a piece of paper and goes, whoa, this piece of paper says $200. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| The judge can be like, not only am I going to award you $200,000, bailiff, arrest the defendant. | ||
| And you're like, what? | ||
| The judge can do it. | ||
| The judge can be like, I'm gonna be imposing a daily fine of X amount of dollars on you. | ||
| And you're like, how can the judge, judges have the like, judge, my point is more so that's not necessarily gonna happen. | ||
| It's that, Judges are human beings with a lot of discretionary power. | ||
| And so, there's like, you ever watched Yellowstone? | ||
| Yep, I have. | ||
| In the show, there's a, spoiler alerts, there's a woman, and again, spoiler alerts, a woman gets arrested for assaulting a cop. | ||
| She's an activist. | ||
| She gets a plea agreement from the prosecutor saying you'll get like, you know, a few months and a slap on the wrist, go home. | ||
| So she agrees to plead guilty. | ||
| And the judge says, my understanding is the prosecution has offered you a deal, this is what the deal would be, in exchange for a guilty plea. | ||
| And she goes, yes, Your Honor. | ||
| He goes, do you plead guilty? | ||
| She goes, yes, I do. | ||
| And then he takes his glasses off and goes, okay, I'm sentencing you to 14 years in prison because you've now pled guilty. | ||
| And she's like, wait, what? | ||
| And he's like, this agreement means nothing to me. | ||
| I'm the judge, done. | ||
| Bangs the gavel and she like freaks out and she ends up going to jail for a long time. | ||
| And then she gets out of it. | ||
| Well, she gets pardoned a year later. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But the point is this. | ||
| If Twitter or any other company is like, you can only sue for $200, a judge can just laugh and be like, nice try. | ||
| End of story. | ||
| Well, yeah, I mean, look, it depends on what state you're litigating in. | ||
| It depends on what the case law is. | ||
| It depends on the composition of the appellate court. | ||
| Let me also explain something to you. | ||
| We sell ads on TimCast.com, on TimCast IRL. | ||
| These ads are not cheap. | ||
| Not only do we have a high viewership, we also have a very, very high response rate to our ads, which gives us a premium offering. | ||
| In, I would estimate, 50 of our videos, I ran sponsor spots for Timcast Music, which is a separate company. | ||
| Those sponsor spots have a value. | ||
| Or I could just say, we allocated within our company advertising space to promote this music In lieu of selling other sponsor spots. | ||
| That's lost revenue because they've done this. | ||
| And those, my point is, those videos still exist and will always exist and I cannot change them where they say go to bandcamp.com. | ||
| That means those videos are promoting their website on my platform and I can't get rid of those unless I take all the videos and delete them all. | ||
| That was a good faith effort on our part to promote our product on a platform where we have abided by all the rules. | ||
| Now they are getting free promotion despite abruptly and arbitrarily cutting us off. | ||
| Yeah, and again, I mean, it is the question that I asked during the debate on Wednesday. | ||
| What is it that is so special about these platforms that make it so it's inconceivable to so many people, so many people that they should be held to the | ||
| Public statements they make with respect to free speech and inclusivity and the rest of their commitments to social justice or what whatever I mean the it's particularly interesting in the context of California because California was a leading pioneer in the legal world with respect to innovating doctrines like strict products liability and consumer protection Across many different industries. | ||
| I mean, Justice Roger Traynor on the California Supreme Court was somebody that I was taught in law school to revere for developing these doctrines that kind of tied the hands of large corporations. | ||
| And yet, here we are. | ||
| In 2023 and trainer was working in the 40s and the 50s and the 60s. | ||
| But the many people in the legal world and attorneys are unwilling to apply trainers principles to big tech. | ||
| And the question I asked on Wednesday, I'll ask it again is what is so special about big tech? | ||
| Why did they get, in many ways, a pass on the same scrutiny that would apply to somebody that's running a pizza restaurant or who is running a lawn care service, right? | ||
| Well, and it's bad faith. | ||
| I mean, because they're using 230, but 230 actually says that it has to be good faith. | ||
| But how do you… You can't debate that. | ||
| It also says it has to be voluntary, too. | ||
| Actions taken voluntarily in good faith. | ||
| Sorry, I cut you off. | ||
| No, no, I mean, I just, I think that that language is very difficult to talk about. | ||
| Well, right, and now we know, right? | ||
| I cited the case of Dr. Boston. | ||
| We know that they subjectively, in bad faith, kept him off the platform, even though they internally concluded he had not committed five steps. | ||
| This is bad faith by Bandcamp. | ||
| It's the same thing with Bandcamp. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| Like, if they want to make an argument, so I'll try to avoid bringing anybody else into it. | ||
| If they want to make an argument that if a creator has music that's offensive, they get banned. | ||
| They have an argument and say, look, it's disruptive. | ||
| We don't want hate speech. | ||
| It violates our rules. | ||
| None of my songs do that. | ||
| The three songs we had make no direct references to anything. | ||
| The lyrics in one song are, you know, a general's waking up in the morning, calling his soldiers to gun down rebels. | ||
| It's just like a generic revolution story. | ||
| One song is, did you know you left me there staying at the heartache in my soul? | ||
| Completely generic love song. | ||
| One song is, We follow, we're shadows of the current enterprise, institutions made to control your minds, inside breeding, concocting all the lies. | ||
| No direct references, no insults, no invective, no way in any way did any of these songs break the rules. | ||
| They deleted the whole account. | ||
| So there's literally no argument other than it was a political attack against us. | ||
| I'm wondering if beyond just everything we've stated, if there is just, simply put, you cannot terminate contracts abruptly like this, and especially when you add on like, they'll make the argument they can. | ||
| I'll make the argument they are retaining my copyrighted information without the right to do so. | ||
| So they're going to have to make a decision of whether or not to reinstate our account or remove this from their platform entirely. | ||
| But that creates a problem for all the people who've paid for the song who now have claims against them for removing something they've paid for. | ||
| Because I have no access to those people. | ||
| I have no idea who they are. | ||
| Yeah, that's typically not how deplatforming works either. | ||
| Typically when something comes down, it comes down for everybody. | ||
| This is like an odd case. | ||
| That's a great point. | ||
| So my understanding at first was with the page gone, the music was gone. | ||
| But we started hearing from people that they still have access to the song, which opens up a whole other can of worms. | ||
| They can't have it both ways. | ||
| They can't ban me from the platform, but keep my music on. | ||
| That makes no sense. | ||
| And your name. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Your name up there. | ||
| They're now profiting off my likeness while stripping me of my rights to the fees they owe me. | ||
| So for every, I would argue that for every day, for every minute, my name is on their platform, assuming it is, they are benefiting financially. | ||
| From my name, without my permission. | ||
| By the way, anyone listening who does have access to the song, send screenshots, you know, or, you know, send information. | ||
| And if they don't, and if you've lost access, they have now seized from you a licensing right that you've had. | ||
| I don't think Bandcamp can do this. | ||
| I think by the nature of their industry, they have created a binding circumstance that cannot be terminated, not without mutual consent. | ||
| - Yeah, this is a highly unique case. | ||
| - There are three parties. | ||
| There's the music buyer, the music exchange, and the individual. | ||
| We all have rights in this. | ||
| They cannot just sever the rights of two of the parties involved. | ||
| Not without the agreement. | ||
| I think it's pretty-- - Yeah, because the financial transactions are not as common where like a product was purchased. | ||
| Most deplatforming is like, okay, your content was up there, but people hadn't paid for it. | ||
| This is really fascinating. | ||
| I think we're going to need some precedent on this one because we're entering an interesting area of laws that pertains to the subscription economy. | ||
| We used to buy songs, we own them physically. | ||
| If you owned the CD, you didn't own the music, you owned the copy, that one individual copy, and a right to have that song in your possession. | ||
| No one from Best Buy could go to your house, knock on the door and say, give me that CD. | ||
| The owner of the copyright, you know, Dire Straits, who made the music, couldn't come to you and say, we're revoking that. | ||
| They can't do it. | ||
| You can't even force a refund. | ||
| That sale happened. | ||
| But we're now in an interesting period where music is digital and the information persists, which means I do not allow Bandcamp to keep my name on their platform. | ||
| But that means they got tens of thousands of customers who are going to say, I paid for this music and I own the license to it. | ||
| Well, I don't give Bandcamp the right to host it. | ||
| So Bandcamp's going to have to send out a notice to all those people saying, download the song now because we're not allowed to host it. | ||
| Then those people are going to complain and say, no, I paid for the Bandcamp player with this song on it. | ||
| Not just for the song, because you guaranteed me that this is going to get really interesting. | ||
| And they're going to rely, as most of these platforms do, on their terms of service. | ||
| On which their attorneys had eyes, and of course, consumers don't have the opportunity to bargain and provide input on, which is why courts- But that's fine, but I think we're entering a period where the courts must rule on how this will be done. | ||
| Because the platform can't argue, we have the right to sell you a product and then deny you that product. | ||
| That's a consumer rights violation immediately. | ||
| Yeah, and you make a good point about the first sale doctrine because that's what you're talking about in the context of copyright. | ||
| You know, you have the CD and yeah, I buy a video game and you know, at Best Buy or a CD, a music CD, and Best Buy isn't gonna come and repossess that, right? | ||
| But we've gone to a completely different model now in music and video games and the entertainment industry where you're renting it, right? | ||
| You're licensing it. | ||
| Let's put it this way. | ||
| Let's say there's a music, a big electronics store that sells CDs. | ||
| And they have a thing where you can come and hang out and listen to music. | ||
| Someone goes into the store and they buy my song, and it's in the store, and in order to listen to it, they have to go to that store and press play. | ||
| The store then says, we will no longer allow you, Tim Pool, for no reason, to be in here. | ||
| We will no longer pay you any fees. | ||
| We will no longer sell your song, but people are still allowed to come in and listen to it. | ||
| That's the equivalent. | ||
| And it's like, whoa, hold on. | ||
| You can't play my song in your store to make money. | ||
| People, so understand this. | ||
| There will be people who are like, I don't like that band Tim Pool, but it's the only way to access the song now through their platform because I can't buy it anymore. | ||
| So I'll keep using their platform and buy other music. | ||
| They're effectively, people will come into the store and be like, I'd go to a different store, but the only place to get the Temple of Music is here because he's been banned. | ||
| Like, they're using me to make money. | ||
| They don't want to lose those customers, and those customers are going to keep buying, might keep buying stuff too, and they know that. | ||
| They're profiting off of my name and likeness without my permission. | ||
| Well, and in your hypo, right? | ||
| People would be entering into that store and They might think that you endorse the content, right? | ||
| There's a aspect, and that's trademark law, the term is consumer confusion, that you endorse or you're affiliated with a entity or a platform that has unceremoniously kept you off and removed you. | ||
| Now again, this is under the premise that the music is still there. | ||
| Because we don't know. | ||
| My assumption was it was gone. | ||
| And I said, all the people who bought the song now don't have access to it. | ||
| And then we got some messages saying, no, actually the song is still in my library. | ||
| If that's the case, it's even worse. | ||
| There's no circumstance where it works. | ||
| Let's get evidence of that sent over. | ||
| But it doesn't even matter. | ||
| Let's operate under the assumption they removed the song from everyone's libraries. | ||
| So they just swindled all these people and stole their money. | ||
| They took a cut of all that money. | ||
| I don't know who these people are because they banned us. | ||
| I don't have access to that customer base anymore. | ||
| So if they remove the music, they have convinced people to buy a product, take in a percentage, and then deleted it. | ||
| Now that's theft, isn't it? | ||
| Or is that fraud? | ||
| Well, I think the terms are different now with this kind of digital leasing of media compared to buying the physical product. | ||
| Like, the actual contract has changed. | ||
| But if I said, Bill, give me a dollar and I'll give you that pen, you say, okay, and then I don't give you the pen, then what? | ||
| Breach of contract, right? | ||
| But to Bill's point... Interesting. | ||
| Is it a buy button on the Bandcamp page? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And people could pay whatever they wanted. | ||
| The word buy matters, because there's a difference between buying and renting. | ||
| Well, in the expectations of consumers, too, in terms of what they thought they'd be getting when they clicked buy, were they thinking that They were walking into a virtual record store and walking out with that proverbial CD? | ||
| Or did they think they were buying two blocks of fine print about a license that's limited? | ||
| People thought they were buying a song and access to my community page because people were commenting and talking about the music. | ||
| So this is what Bandcamp's value proposition, it's not just you're buying a song. | ||
| You're getting access to Bandcamp. | ||
| To a community. | ||
| Right, and they've denied that from people. | ||
| So let me see what Bandcamp says when you... | ||
| I'll pull up a random song. | ||
|
unidentified
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Actually, it doesn't seem easy enough to do. | |
| Let's just do this. | ||
|
unidentified
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Let's do a little search for Timcast. | |
| Oh, also, there's covers of my music on the platform, which I find fascinating. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right, here's a random guy. | |
| Buy track, it says. | ||
| Buy track. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yep. | |
| Do you think that there are going to be changes to 230 on the horizon, or do you think that 230 should stay? | ||
| Well, I mean, I think that in theory, the statute really, in some ways, it codifies the common law rule that a distributor of content... Okay, so let's set 230 to the side for a second. | ||
| If you are a bookstore and you are publishing newspapers, the general rule or any other content, and let's say that some of the content in those books was defamatory, The general common law rule was that unless you had specific notice that it was defamatory, that you as a distributor could not be held liable for defamation because you were just distributing. | ||
| That's just the line that we drew as a common law rule. | ||
| Um, we get to 230 because of a case called Stratton Oakmont versus Prodigy that was decided in 1995, which interestingly enough cast, I think is the plaintiff, Jordan Belfort of Wall Street, Wolf of Wall Street. | ||
| They sue Prodigy for defamation and Prodigy defended itself, um, by analogizing itself to the bookstore. | ||
| Hey, we don't, we don't moderate. | ||
| We don't, we're not responsible for third party content. | ||
| And the case should be dismissed. | ||
| But the judge said no. | ||
| But most people don't pull the opinion and actually study and see why he said no. | ||
| And the reason he said no is because Prodigy specifically said and analogized itself to a newspaper. | ||
| Publicly it said we were creating a family-friendly environment. | ||
| We're moderating content We are supervising and policing the space and so the judge in that case said okay we're gonna hold you to what you said and We're gonna find that you could be held potentially liable for defamation. | ||
| And of course, that creates interest in Congress, on Capitol Hill. | ||
| All of a sudden, the Republican Revolution Congress in 1996 gives us Section 230. | ||
| I've sarcastically said on Wednesday, let's not pretend that this came out because there was a grassroots America, ordinary Americans were pushing for this bill. | ||
| We all know how it came about. | ||
| Lobbyists were involved. | ||
| K Street was involved. | ||
| And all of a sudden we have Section 230. | ||
| So I think a lot has been misread. | ||
| Who won the Stratton Oakmont Prodigy? | ||
| I think it ultimately was settled. | ||
| That's crazy, isn't it? | ||
| People don't know that. | ||
| It was the Wolf of Wall Street. | ||
| When you first said it, I was like, I know that. | ||
| The Wolf of Wall Street guy, Belfort, again, was involved in that case. | ||
| My argument has been that what should have happened, and I say this as somebody who's more of a classical constitutional Right-leaning person that let the courts decide on a case-by-case basis. | ||
| Let the law develop in this space. | ||
| Instead of having a one-size-fits-all solution to the problem imposed by Congress, let state courts, let individual states, you know, police this issue, handle and resolve individual cases. | ||
| And as I said on Wednesday, you know, as I suppose I would identify myself as a conservative, I don't think it's a requirement of the American right or the reason for the existence of the American right to create an environment for businesses where they don't have to buy a 50 state survey and figure out how they're gonna comply with different laws in different states. - I mean, that's how it is already. | ||
| Like, you run a business, I mean, Bill, you probably know this. | ||
| You've got to do all the different registrations. | ||
| Well, that's right. | ||
| But Big Tech doesn't. | ||
| I will say, without 230, I think it would be a ton more work for platforms. | ||
|
unidentified
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It just needs to be operated in good faith. | |
| These businesses are not operating in good faith under 230. | ||
| They're exploiting it for personal gain. | ||
| So we need enforcement. | ||
| But with that being said, we were running behind today, so we'll need to wind it down if we want to get this one up in time. | ||
| So if you guys have any final thoughts, we'll wrap it up. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| Again, James Lawrence at Envisage Law. | ||
| You can follow me on Jay Lawrence at JayLawrenceNC on Twitter. | ||
| I would also ask, I'm the attorney for Douglas Mackey and represent him and his, excuse me, represent his defense fund and would ask people to learn more about his case, which has significant First Amendment implications at memedefensefund.com. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, thanks for having us, man. | ||
| Find us at Minds.com, M-I-N-D-S dot com, or on the app stores, or you can get the app directly at Minds.com slash mobile, and keep an eye on, you know, how the case comes, and, you know, we'll keep you updated. | ||
| I mean, we'll update, obviously. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know. | ||
| Alright, everybody. | ||
| Thanks for hanging out. | ||
| Sorry this one was a little short today. | ||
| We're running behind, and we just gotta, we gotta, we can only do what we can do, so thanks for the support. |