Welcome to Building Tomorrow, a show that explores the ways tech innovation and entrepreneurship are creating a freer, wealthier, and more peaceful world. As always, I'm your host, Paul Matzko, and with me in the studio, Will Duffield, a research assistant here at Cato and editor of Libertarianism.org's prototype. This week, we're going to discuss a proposal from the European Union that would change how copyright law functions in relation to the internet. I promise you, it is way more interesting than that bare description sounds. To help us out in the conversation, we've asked Mike Maznick, founder of the tech news site TechDirt, to join us today. Welcome to the show, Mike. Hey, thanks for having me. Mike, you've written quite a few articles on TechDirt about the copyright directive, and we're going to get down in the weeds about some of the implications, some of the individual articles. But before we get there, why don't we start with the basics? So this legislation, it's proposed in the EU. Is the copyright directive, what's the point of the bill? What's it ostensibly supposed to do? So I mean, it's something that's been discussed for a really long time in the EU, and the original idea behind it actually makes some amount of sense. And it was a recognition that within all the different member states of the EU, there were all different copyright laws. And that actually many people believe, with probably good reason, was limiting the ability of various copyright related industries to develop all that broadly. Because if you could work on something that made sense under the copyright laws of France, but did not apply in Spain, that just became a problem. It had become difficult for, in particular, music and video services to develop across Europe or across the EU, specifically, because of the different laws in different places. So the original idea was behind the copyright directive, is can we set up a system that effectively would harmonize copyright law across the EU and hopefully then unleash new businesses and services based on copyright. And it makes sense. It'd be like if every state in the US had a different set of copyright rules, that would be a real mess. Right. Yeah. To some extent, there was a period when we had some of that. And I mean, it's interesting, this might be going a little off on a tangent very early in the podcast, but there is an argument that there is some value in actually doing it that way in that you do get experimentation. And you do begin to see like, if one state or country has very permissive copyright laws, does something more interesting develop there versus very lockdown copyright laws. But in practice, it hasn't really worked that way, especially just because of the nature of the internet and the fact that borders don't really matter that much on the internet, you do kind of want something that is more broadly applicable if you're going to build a kind of service or business that wants to be global. So yeah, I think the underlying concept of harmonizing the basic idea definitely does make sense. There's nothing wrong with it. And you see some of this tension in any move towards regulatory harmonization. The question then becomes, which way are you harmonizing? Right. Yeah. Exactly. That's a really good point where it's like, if you're harmonizing it in a way that is highly restrictive and problematic or that limits industry or that locks in certain winners and losers, that's a problem. If it really is opening up new opportunities for competition and innovation, then that is potentially more appealing. But which of those comes out of it is kind of the big question as always. And unfortunately, in lots of these processes, of course, certain industries are able to influence the way things go so that it does favor them and does hinder competition. So I think now we can probably break down some of the specific proposals. So as an entire policy package, there's lots of pieces that are just about the harmonization that are not overly stringent. But in looking at the criticisms of the kind of omnibus bill, there were two articles in particular that stood out for a lot of criticism. Articles 11 and 13. So why don't we go through those one at a time, what they propose, and why critics are worried about the implications of applying those articles to the entire EU. So article 11, that's the link tax. Do I have that right? Well, I mean, the people who wrote it and support it would take exception to that and say, it's not a link tax. Don't call it a link tax. But yes, critics of it are referring to it as a link tax. It could also be called a neighboring right or an ancillary right. That sounds a lot friendlier, doesn't it? Yeah, I mean, sure, a neighboring right certainly sounds friendly in some weird way. And how would that work functionally? Like, so this neighboring right, when it's applied, what would it actually do? Sure. So the idea is copyright is granted to whoever creates an original work, right? And then you can transfer that or assign that copyright to somebody else. When you are, if you're a publisher, say a newspaper publisher, you know, what normally happens is that, you know, you have reporters on staff and they are either on staff or freelance, but they are, generally speaking, assigning the copyright of the work to the publisher who holds the copyright on those works. And that is a system that, you know, has worked more or less for ever, you know, since for the last couple of centuries at least. But for some reason, a bunch of publishers have decided that in this modern internet era, that is no longer enough and they need an additional right and, you know, it is referred to as a neighboring right because it's not technically a copyright. It is just sort of neighboring copyright next door to copyright. And it is a separate right on top of the copyright, not for the creators of the article, not for the journalists, but rather for the publishers themselves over the contents. And the reasoning here or the thought process behind it is that there have been a number of news search engines or news aggregators with Google News being the most prominent and most well known that for some reason publishers, especially in the EU, and we don't seem to have this complaint in the US, but in the EU, a bunch of publishers have just gotten really upset about Google News and they feel that it is somehow unfair to them. And the unfairness, and I'm choosing my words carefully because I don't, I have a lot of difficulty seeing how Google News is unfair in any way, but I'm trying to be as fair as possible in my description of it. You know, Google News, you know, will aggregate a bunch of different stories together and link people to it. And with the news, it will show a headline and usually a snippet, which will be like, you know, the first two sentences or a couple sentences out of the first paragraph sometimes. And for some reason, the publishers feel that this is unfairly infringing on their rights, except there is no written right for that. You know, it's such a tiny amount of text that it's not violating the copyright. And it's also linking to them, thereby sending them traffic. But for whatever reason, which normally would be a good thing, right? Like you're driving, presumably most people read beyond the first two lines and want to arrive and end up arriving at the site of the copyright holder. And it's possible they'll click on the banner ads on the site of the publisher and etc. And we can actually see in the expressed preferences of the publishers that they actually know this and they recognize this and there are two ways in which we see that. One is that if they really, if they don't want to be in Google News, that's very easy. You can put up robots.txt and a little file on your website says to Google's scanning system, don't use these pages, right? So you can block Google News. It's very easy. It takes 10 seconds. So they could do that. They don't. The second, the second expressed preference that we see is that all of these publishers have search engine optimization people who work very hard to get their sites ranked higher in the search so that more people will find them through search and go to them and visit them in order to get traffic. So both of those things make it really clear that they actually do value the traffic that Google sends them. Yet, you know, what seems to be the case is they're sort of looking at and this is, you know, me who disagrees with their position, stepping in and stating what I believe their their real position is. So take that with whatever grant is all you want. They seem to be saying that like Google is making a lot of money. The publishers are not making as much money as they used to. Therefore, some of that money that Google is making should be ours. Therefore, we need this right whose only purpose is to say Google pay us in addition to sending us traffic. And so the nature of the right is that if you aggregate and post a snippet of text that you are linking to and you are doing that as a commercial entity that you have to license those works. In other words, you have to pay in order to link with a snippet. It's I mean, it seems like a case of legacy paper media versus upstart digital outlets and there's been a shift in both influence and in just finances. And it's because they're being left behind, there's a need to make up the difference in the funding flow. And I mean, I think we can sympathize with the plight of traditional legacy media, but the idea of taking out that frustration on these new aggregators is it's not channeling the energy in a very productive direction. And it's not going to help these legacy publishers in the end either, because if you make it more difficult for people to link to and therefore other users to access your work, fewer people see it, fewer people click on the ads and your revenues continue to decline. Now, Mike, one of your articles gave the examples of how this legislation was kind of tried out on the small scale. Again, in our kind of EU laboratory of states situation that in Germany and Spain, they rolled out similar legislation, but that the results were not what they the proponents might have expected. Can you explain that for our audience? Sure. Yeah. I mean, there's a long history with this and it actually starts before before the German experiment, which was a bunch of publishers in Belgium actually banded together to try and force Google to pay them. And that was a complete failure.  And, you know, and it just showed that, you know, how much they actually value the traffic from there. So in Germany, they passed this law that was similar to to what is in Article 11, saying that aggregators had to get a license in order to do this. And Google responded a couple other aggregators responded in different ways, but Google responded by leaving, leaving the German publishers in Google News, but removing any snippets with them, leaving snippets for other publications. So because the German text was a little bit different than the Article 11 text. And in the German text, it was very specific about, you know, headlines were OK, but snippets were not OK. The Article 11 text is not entirely clear on that. Article 11 text, it could be as little as a single word could be violating Article 11, which is why some people call it the link text. And that's because you see descriptions in the links. Exactly. Like if you have a word in the URL, that alone might be enough to trigger an Article 11 issue. So but but in Germany, at least they made it clear that the shortest of snippets wouldn't count, but but not not much longer than a very short snippet would count. So the way Google News responded was they they took out the snippet part. They left the headlines, but they took out the snippet of German publishers and they left in the snippets of non German publishers. And of course, that drove a lot more traffic to the non German publishers. And it significantly reduced the traffic to German publishers. And so the German publishers freaked out and they tried a whole bunch of things, including claiming that this was an antitrust violation, which was an interesting move, which failed pretty dismally in the courts. In fact, the courts came back and more or less or I don't remember. Sorry, I'm blanking. Now, if it was the courts or if it was like the the it's like a legislative committee or something. Yeah, like a German antitrust. Oh, agents, regulator, regulator who more or less came back and said, you know, if there's any antitrust issue here, it might be with you guys all colluding to try and force and sort of hinted at that and more or less said, like, if you continue to push this, we might investigate you rather than Google.  And then what they did was they actually gave Google a free license. You know, the law required that you need a license. So Google ended up getting a license entirely for free. The snippets came back into Google News. And so now technically, I believe Google was the only one who actually got that license. So you have other aggregators who actually don't have a license.  And so if your concern is antitrust, you've made the biggest, probably the biggest provider, more powerful. And the competitors are going to have to pay. I mean, it's going to be hard. And from the EU's perspective, a foreign search engine. Yeah, which is kind of incredible. And so then, you know, soon after that, Spain passed a similar law and Spain looked at what happened in Germany and said, well, we're going to correct the errors of the German one to make that not possible. And so they made it so that you couldn't get a free license. I forget the exact details of how they worded it, but they basically said, well, you know, it failed in Germany because of, you know, they were able to sort of force Google was able to force the hand and get this free license. And so you can't do that in Spain. So the Spanish law has some weird things, which also potentially, like, effectively makes like creative commons licenses, you know, illegal. It messes up all sorts of things, you know, basically, you know, assumes that everything has to be licensed for money. And Google respond to that by saying, well, we can't, we cannot operate Google news in Spain under this law and they shut down Google news in Spain. And so the result of that has been not great. And so there was a study that was done that looked at, you know, traffic to different news sources and in particular to smaller news sites and, you know, you know, upstart news sources. It's been tremendously damaging and they've gotten a lot less traffic because they no longer get any traffic from Google news. And so, you know, we have these two examples that show that this kind of law doesn't work or, you know, does more to entrench a Google and doesn't seem to to lead to any any money changing hands. Well, but you see like the the third or, well, fourth try. It must be the charm. Just keep staying in your head against the link tax wall and eventually go break through. I mean, there seems to be this this odd belief that like, well, if only the entire EU were covered, then magically it'll work. And yeah, that does not seem likely to be the case at all. Well, in looking to GDPR there, you covered all of the EU and you still saw niche services pop up specifically to block EU users from platforms hosted elsewhere who didn't want to render themselves compliant. Yeah, yeah, as well as, you know, to the benefit of larger established outfits who can afford the, you know, the cost of compliance. And there's kind of a corollary there to the Google news experience in Germany where the big players are better able to meet the regulations. So Article 11, the link tax. Article 13 then was this mandatory upload filter. What so far, listeners who don't when I say mandatory upload filter, it doesn't automatically evoke a concept in their mind. What are we talking about? How does an upload filter work? Yeah, so and just to clarify here, too, as well, because the supporters of Article 13 would argue that it's not a mandatory upload filter. And so another word there. There on Article 13. So Article 13 is basically saying that if you are, you know, commercial platform that has a lot of copyright covered content, which, you know, is basically anything thanks to the way copyright laws are today, almost anything as soon as it's created gets some level of copyright protection. But if you have a lot of it, you have to take appropriate measures to keep certain copyright covered content off of your platform. So if you're Instagram or Google or Facebook or whoever, you have to make sure that content produced by your users. So it's not your own. You're just the platform hosting it, but content uploaded by your users has to you have to take these appropriate measures to make sure it's not something that's copyrighted. Well, that's not unlicensed. Right.  You know, there's a copyright on that. And so, but, you know, so it requires these sort of appropriate measures. And that's sort of the language that they use to sort of try and claim that this does not require mandatory upload filters. But, you know, what everyone has said, and even sometimes the people who are supporting the bill will admit by accident is that they really mean they want everyone to have upload filters. And the idea here is that, you know, they've seen systems like mainly YouTube's content ID, which is this sort of filtering system that will look at a huge database that it has of works that copyright holders have given to YouTube and said, we don't want these things appearing on YouTube, or at least we want the ability to monetize them for ourselves or whatever and matches against that that database. And so they've the regulators have decided, well, this sort of kind of works for YouTube, therefore can work for absolutely everything. And therefore, every commercial service that hosts content for public consumption should be able to install some sort of filter that will make sure that copyright content that a copyright holder does not want on that platform can be blocked from appearing entirely. So now, you know, maybe for some of our listeners, they hear that they say, well, YouTube has this system, it works. If imperfectly, you know, what's the problem with, say, Disney putting up, you know, basically telling YouTube that they want any Disney movie or a clip longer than a certain period of a Disney film, it's going to be blocked, you know, there'll be a cease and desist letter sent. You know, it can be appealed, et cetera. But maybe our listeners might say, well, why is that such a bad idea? What are the unintended consequences of a content ID program? Even the best ones are the most effective ones. Yeah. So there are there are lots and lots of different consequences. And probably we could take more time than we have for this podcast discussing all the different ones. But, you know, you know, at a very basic level, first is just the the cost. You know, YouTube has has stated publicly that it costs them $60 million to build content ID. And that's just for for video. Right. So how many platforms out there are able to spend that kind of money? It's not that many. Right. I mean, there's four or five, maybe. And even then, I'm not even sure. And that's just for YouTube. That's just for for the video content and, you know, cover some musical content, so video and audio content. And that's also in a case where all those copyright holders have agreed to hand over, you know, examples of their their work. And so you have other platforms like Instagram that you mentioned before. How do you handle that question on Instagram? What if you go to a museum and take a photograph of a painting that is covered by copyright? Does Instagram have to be able to recognize that? How do you build a filter that recognizes that? Is it fair use? How do you build a filter that determines what is fair use? You know, the the the one that we have already in content ID is notoriously bad at figuring out what is fair use. You know, smaller platforms are going to have even more trouble with it. And then on top of that, you look at the number of stories out there of content ID completely messing up and pulling down perfectly legitimate stuff. It happens all the time.  And that's, you know, the most expensive, most sophisticated such system on probably the easiest content to make those calls on. And it and it still pulls down all sorts of of content and blocks it. I think my favorite example just out there, unintended consequence was there was a Family Guy episode in which they showed a clip from, you know, some like let's play YouTube user of an old like 1980s video game or something. And so the but then once Family Guy aired it, well, now the company that owns, you know, whatever the media conglomerate is behind Family Guy, it's now covered under their like their their copyright claim. They basically said, look, it was on the show. Therefore it's part of the show. Therefore you have to take down any use of it because it's, you know, it's it's taking off the show without license. And they, you know, there was under the US DMCA system. They they made the original person who they were actually borrowing it from take it off their YouTube channel, who had put up seven years prior to it showing up on the show. I mean, like there's this bizarre Urboros like devouring its own tail going on here, which is just, you know, and none of this was intended. In fact, no one even a lot of the people involved, including the creator of Family Guy was actually opposed to this. But once the machinery is in place, it's hard to resist even even when that's not part of your intent. Yeah. And I mean, part of it is just the fact that, you know, copyright itself, and this is something that I think a lot of people don't fully understand. Copyright is very, very context specific. Right. I mean, the exact same piece of work in two different contexts, one could be infringing and one could be not infringing. You know, it could be fair use, could be de minimis, could be parody, could be, you know, there's all sorts of reasons why the exact same use could be legit in one case and not the other. And that's something that, you know, as sophisticated as, you know, machine learning algorithms may be these days, they're not so good at figuring out the context of these things. And that gets also really problematic when you're dealing with the fact that, you know, these filtering decisions are going to be made, you know, pre upload, you know, if the idea being before you can even get them on the site, they, the filter is going to determine whether or not it can be published or not. And, you know, so we may not even know all sorts of stuff that is not allowed. And that's where the fear or the, you know, some people have been using the term censorship machines to describe the upload filters becomes a real problem. You know, if you don't even know if all these things are being blocked from being uploaded to the internet entirely, just because a machine has decided they must be infringing, even if they're not, what recourse is there? And it's not clear that there's any for some people. And that raises some serious concerns as well. So no filtering apparatus or machine learning system is going to keep up with the speed of culture, the extent to which or rate at which images, video, sound is remixed and recontextualized by masses of users spread out across the world. But it seems to me that underlying a lot of this debate is a lack of appreciation of scale. There's simply so much of this content being uploaded every day, every hour, that in order, even if you were to have a, you know, 99.7% effective filtering mechanism, which isn't something you're likely to approach anyway, you'd still then, given the millions of pieces of content that are uploaded, be taking down tens, if not hundreds of thousands of pieces of legitimate content simply in that 0.3%. Do you see the EU legislators as aware of that scale issue or is it something else? I think it's very difficult for most people to comprehend that kind of scale. I mean, I don't think our brains are designed or evolved to comprehend that kind of scale, right? I mean, we're used to dealing with a small group of people and small groups of things. The idea that, you know, I don't even know what the most accurate numbers are these days now, but like, you know, 100 hours of video are uploaded every second on YouTube or whatever, which is, I think that was the stat from like five years ago, so I'm sure it's much higher now. The idea that you can go through all of that in any reasonable way and not make mistakes, it's hard to comprehend. And I think it's, you know, it's a really, really difficult thing even for people who sort of live in this space and, you know, follow this stuff. I don't even know if I fully comprehend the size of the scale and, you know, and I've talked to people at these different companies and, you know, they just try and keep coming up with different ways to express it to you.  You are going to make mistakes.  And we had a post recently, which, you know, you may have been referring to there where somebody had looked at, you know, the numbers if you were to get that kind of quality, you know, I think there were examples of like 99% accurate or 98.5% accurate.  And that, you know, raises a whole other issue, which is, you know, probably a whole other podcast discussion not worth going into, which is like, you know, how much of this is really a problem? You have certain industries, you know, the music, the, you know, recording industries and the movie industries who continue to focus on this as a problem. And yet the evidence really suggests that this is not that big of a problem. Is there a lot of infringing content online? Absolutely. Are there a lot of people getting it for free? Absolutely. Is that a real problem for their business model? That's a much bigger, you know, bigger open question because, you know, what we're seeing is that when you have good, effective license services that people like to use that offer a good experience, the rate of piracy or the rate of relying on these services drops. And in fact, you know, the people who use these services over and over again, I mean, there's something like, you know, two dozen different studies showing this at this point, you know, those people tend to spend more money on the license services or on content or going out to see movies or on buying music or concerts or whatever, you know, the question is how much of a real problem is piracy on these platforms at this point? It's, you know, there's a lot of content there and that's what everyone focuses on. But is it an actual problem for the industry is a whole other question and will filters somehow solve that? Will filters suddenly make people buy more than they were before? That does not seem to be all that well supported by the evidence either. Well, we had that debate a couple of years ago here in the U.S. I was just thinking about it today in related, so it's the idea that piracy is a customer service problem. In this back during the debates over people torrenting large quantities of music and the pre-itunes, pre-easy internet access to television and video products, piracy was a huge problem. But then once, essentially once legacy TV film and music industries updated how they thought about the, how they made money off this process, the piracy problem became a tiny percentage of what it once was. So I was thinking about this today. I was one of the watch episode of the AMC show Preacher and they have the first episode of the season for free. So you get a taste of it and then sure enough went and bought the season, right? I'm someone who, and that's something that a lot of television film opposed doing at first, the idea of a snippet or a sample. They didn't wanna provide anything whatsoever for free and then there wasn't even a way to really legally buy it online. You had to go find, track down the DVD and wait a long period of time. But the model has shifted. So it feels a bit like there is the wave, the crest of the digital revolution is hitting these legacy institutions and they're desperately trying to paper over the cracks in the dyke rather than adapting their model to fit it. So it's interesting to see that happening over in the European Union right now. Now I saw from the coverage that this directive, the copyright directive was defeated in the EU parliament on a pretty close vote, 318 to 278 a few days ago. So Mike, should we pop a cork, sip some champagne, relax, are we all good now? No. So man, no happy ending. So the issue wasn't necessarily that it was rejected so much as what the EU parliament did was they agreed to actually open it up for possible amendments, right? So, and I don't, I'm in no way an expert on sort of EU regulatory process. So I've been learning some of this as we go as well but more or less, you know, the EU commission sort of created the directive, it got buy-in from, I forget what it's called but there's some sort of like committee of the different member states of the EU and they bought into it and then you had an EU parliament legislative affairs committee, which is, there's an acronym JURY which I forget what it stands for. They then voted for it and then normally what happens then is that sort of from there on the EU parliament would rubber stamp it. Instead, you had enough people in the EU parliament say like we should put this up to a full vote across the EU parliament as to whether or not it should be opened up for amendments. And so that was the big vote and that's the one that was narrowly approved which now effectively opens up the text so that anyone can amend it. Now, it was a really close vote and so there's all sorts of questions about what are those amendments going to look like they could fix the problems of Article 11 and Article 13 or they could make them worse or they could in the end remain as they were. And so there's gonna be basically a big fight over the next couple of months and then there'll be another vote in September on those amendments and then we'll see where these things go. And it seemed like there was a lot there was more support from I could tell among the MEPs for they were, fewer of them were as concerned about the link tax or about Article 11 and the neighboring right as we're concerned about the all necessary measures Article 13, like the way some of the votes broke down. So it's not hard to imagine given how close the vote was that in the amended version that wasn't quite as onerous that took out 13 or watered it down a bit would have a serious shot at passage. Yeah, and that doesn't even get a, I mean there are other articles in the directive that are potentially problematic and too in terms of like for search engines for like scraping data there's a text and data mining part of it that has some potential problems too but you know, there's so many things so many fires you can fight at once. A luxury of problems. That's right. But yeah, you're right that Article 13 is the one that, I mean, and to be clear like Article 13 is the one that's likely to have the most impact on general users of the internet that would have the most impact on kind of how the internet works and feels for everyday people. And so that would have the biggest impact and so we see that in terms of the protests and the focus of the protests and in the way that MEPs are seeing it. So Article 13 is definitely seen as the biggest problem and Article 11 has gotten significant attention but less attention than Article 13. So it is entirely possible that, you know, some sort of compromises worked out where Article 13 is removed or greatly watered down but Article 11 remains. And that to me would still be really problematic but you know, it's possible we could see all different kinds of permutations on that. So this European proposal would certainly affect US internet users or it to be put in place. Do we see anything like it making its way to the US or through the US legislative system? We seem to have been hacking away at intermediary liability with FOSTA not too long ago but are there any similar moves on the copyright front? Yes and no.  If somebody puts content that breaks some sort of law, who is responsible for it? Is it the person who created or placed that content or uploaded that content? Or is it the platform that is hosting that content? And, you know, generally speaking, we've always for I think very good reasons believe that it should be the liability and only should be on the person who uploaded or created that content rather than the platform that is hosting that content. It's, you know, perhaps a more extreme version of saying, you know, we don't blame AT&T when somebody makes a bomb threat using an AT&T phone, right? It seems to make sense to me. But, you know, that's been under attack globally for a very long time. And so the FOSTA debate was one example of that conveniently using a sort of hot button topic of sex trafficking in order to sort of drive a wedge into intermediary liability law in the U.S. But it seemed like if you're opposed this legislation you must approve of sex trafficking, right? It's the framing places. The accusations that have been made. Of course, now since that law has passed we've since seen and I've written a couple of articles now about how police departments, some of whom supported the passing of Cesta FOSTA are now reporting that it is harder, suddenly, magically, harder for them to find victims of sex trafficking. Because these websites are going offline and they used to use them to track down these people.  That's what happens. And so, you know, but there's been this sort of coordinated attempt going back decades to sort of eat away at intermediary liability protections and indeed, you know, some of the same people who are working behind the scenes to get Cesta Pastor, the same people who are working behind the scenes on specifically on Article 13 in the EU. And so I think there's definitely a plan. And this is, you know, this also may be a potential tension but you can go back, you know, basically 25 years now and find examples of how particular industries, especially in the copyright realm, really, really like to use sort of this international strategy where you go to one region or country and you get them to pass some crazy idea to expand or extend copyright protections in one way or another. And then you work on some sort of, you know, international trade agreement to, again, harmonize between different countries, but, you know, it's always harmonized in one way or even better, you build this sort of ratchet system in where you get, you know, one country to pass something horrible and then you tell some other country region that they have to match and you get them to actually do it a little bit, even beyond that and you go back and forth and you keep getting people to push further and further. You get this sort of leapfrogging situation. And so there's definitely some indication of that. And there were a couple of sort of procedural moves with the EU Copyright Directive that certainly suggested or hinted at a plan to do something similar, get the EU Copyright Directive passed in there and then the different member states have to pass laws to apply it and then, you know, pressure the US to harmonize through some sort of trade agreement. And so, yeah, I mean, I think there's a real possibility that that is the plan. And that's sort of the guiding strategy behind all of this. Well, it's certainly something we need to keep on our radars as folks interested in tech, both here in America and we'll keep an eye on what happens in September with the EU Parliament. Mike, thanks for coming on and talking about this issue with us. I don't know how many folks who aren't regularly reading TechDirt would have picked up on how significant this issue was, which is a reminder to all of our listeners, check out TechDirt, find TechDirt's podcast in the iTunes search engine, give it a listen. Thank you guys for coming on and until next week, be well. Building Tomorrow is produced by Tess Terrible. If you enjoy our show, please rate, review and subscribe to us on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. To learn about Building Tomorrow or to discover other great podcasts, visit us on the web at libertarianism.org.


After Pearl Harbor there was just a tremendous sense of shock. The United States had never been attacked in this way. It had sought to remain neutral. The U.S. government and the Japanese government were still negotiating up to the very eve of that devastating December 7th, 1941 morning. And so Congress investigated and they heard from military leaders who had told them, among other things, that Japanese Americans might be dangerous. That there was a risk facing them from the possibility that all of these people, never mind that many of them had never been to Japan, had been born in the United States, that they didn't know Japanese, didn't know Japanese culture, that they were as thoroughly assimilated as anyone else. Nonetheless, there was a sense that, well, now that there's war, perhaps we can't trust these folks. Now some of that was just the product of racial prejudice that had been there all throughout. If you go back and look at the politics of the 1910s, 20s, and 30s in the U.S. West, especially in California, there were efforts all along to say that we don't want any more Japanese. We want to keep those who are here from acquiring land. We don't want them to naturalize as citizens and so on. Directed not just against people of Japanese descent, not just against people of Asian background more generally, but all throughout the 1910s and 20s, there was an effort to restrict migration to close the door. People said that there were too many white ethnics coming. There were too many who were European in background, but they were from Southern Europe or Eastern Europe. They were Catholics. They were Jews. They weren't old stock, real Americans or wouldn't become real Americans. So there's all of this background and what happened is that the leaders in Congress and the White House decided that they would authorize the United States Army to take those measures that they deemed appropriate. Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed executive order 9066 and that allowed Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, who was in charge of the Western Defense, to start issuing orders. Those began with curfews, freezing bank accounts, having people fired from jobs if they worked for the civil service or if they worked with defense contractors, and then ultimately signs started to go up on telephone poles with instructions to all people of Japanese ancestry. And it said that in two days, there's 48 hours notice in some instances, you had to report to an assembly center. You could only bring what you could carry and that's ultimately what led to the camps. Now what's interesting is there's this rich archival history, all of these documents now that we can access. And what those documents show is something truly astonishing. They show that other than General DeWitt and a few others, that the FBI, that other military leaders including in Hawaii, that they all had assessed this, they had investigated, they looked at this and not with our judgment now looking back, but with their judgment then, at the time, with war raging, with a sense of panic, they had concluded the Japanese-Americans did not present a risk. And they had actually counseled, they had written memos internally saying, this is a silly thing to do, this is foolish, we will come to regret this. The very first civilian head of the war relocation authority was someone named Milton Eisenhower. He was the general's brother. He was a bureaucrat in Washington, D.C. He was asked to run the camps. He did it for only a few months and he quit and he said, he said, I predict that these camps will be regarded as a mistake and indeed history has borne him out. So what's truly astonishing is if you go back and look at the record that was compiled at the time and what's so important about that is it shows that it's not a later judgment. It's not with hindsight. It's not with the benefit that we have of everything that's emerged since then, of our sense of multiculturalism and diversity. It's not about politics and it's not in peacetime when things are more comfortable. It's easy for us to condemn what people decided in the past. What's so important about these documents is you can go back and look at them from that time period and see that already wiser heads in Washington, California and elsewhere were saying, this is a crazy thing to do. Why would you round up all these people? This is an example of how the United States with its democratic system can correct itself because even though a mistake was made in the 1980s, what happened is Congress saw that this was a problem and in 1988, based on all of these findings, they passed a different law, the Civil Liberties Act. What that law did was it said we were wrong. We're sorry. It went further. It said to the people who were interned, whose property was taken, whose liberty was lost, who were stripped of equality and dignity. It said, if you are now still alive, we will pay you reparations, $20,000 per person. Now, most people who have calculated this have figured out that it is not enough to compensate for the actual loss, but that's not what's important. What's important is the symbolic aspect of this, that our government as a democracy can correct itself, can look back and say, we made mistakes then, we can do better.


Forever, one of the biggest problems with workers' compensation is it pits, it tends to pit the employer versus the employee, and it, a lot of times, you know, I've had people that have worked for a company for 25 years, and to them it's like a family. And now they get hurt, and they didn't intend to get hurt, they didn't go out and try to get hurt, they're not faking anything, yet they sense when they get hurt, they're no longer a family, they're now an outcast, and even considered by the employers a lot of times to be a villain, because they're seeking workers' compensation benefits, and it would help tremendously if the carriers, and the employers, because most clients don't know who the carrier is, but at least they know who their boss was, they may know who all their bosses were, and if they never hear a word from those guys, what do they think? They think those guys don't give a, you know, what about me? I hear it, I mean, I hear it all the time, and it's the absolute truth. Most people want to work. Any level of work that you do, I mean, that a person does, it becomes a part of their life, that's what they are.   So it's, when that's taken away from you, and I have had cases, for instance, with a UPS worker, UPS driver, makes a good living, he drive, but it's a hard work.  And workers' compensation doesn't take that into account. It really doesn't take that into account. It's, if you can't go back to doing that job, and your employer doesn't have any other job for you, well, too bad, so sad, you know, you don't really care. I mean, it's unfortunate that that's the way it is, but unfortunately, that is the system as it currently exists. And I've had, you know, people don't realize, or a lot of people do, that, I mean, there are people that do blue collar work that make a very nice living for themselves and their families. And those are the people that are hurt mostly by workers' compensation. I mean, if you're an attorney or a doctor, you're rarely going to get hurt and miss time from work, and file a work comp, because we don't do anything, we don't do any hard work. We don't, you know, we just don't do that.  And they got just as much to lose as I do, or anybody else.


Hey, what's up coaches welcome back to the channel now in today's video I'm going to show you exactly the five steps that you need to take before you start your sports coaching business. A lot of coaches skip these steps and typically like they try to start a business and they do it with the wrong foundation. I'm going to show you here how to do this with the right foundation. And the reason why I'm creating this video is because the last couple years I have talked to hundreds of coaches already who have questions about you know what should they do at the beginning, what are the correct things to do. So this video is served to answer these types of questions. And I hope this helps you. Alright, so I'm going to go through this one by one and these are in order. Alright, number one, you need to legally set up a business. So to do that, you should take the time to speak with a CPA or speak with an attorney in your area and learn how to set up a sole proprietorship and LLC or an escort. I mean, there's other types of business formations that you can set up. But you should go to someone locally in your area, meet up with them and say, Hey, I'm looking to start this type of business. What is the type of business I should set up? They will be able to give you instructions. And you shouldn't just go off of someone's advice on YouTube for something like that. Right. There's many different ways you can set up a business. But most coaches don't legally set up a business at the beginning. And I will tell you you run into so many problems in the future. If you don't do that, I have talked to so many people over the last even like the last 30 days who did not have a legit business set up, but they were making money.  So that's that's a problem for them. So number one, set up a business, go talk with a CPA, go talk with an attorney in your area. Like it's a business, you should be investing into yourself. So go pay for their time, learn how to do it and go set it up. You could legally set up a business probably within 24 hours. If you like, just put your head down and focus on it. That's number one. Number two, this is a huge problem that most coaches don't even think about, right? Which is like, you need to have liability insurance. There's two companies I recommend, you can Google them and you can call both of them and you can get quotes from both of them. The first is called K and K Sports Insurance. I've used them for many, many years. Most coaches that I work with have used them. There's also another company called Sadler, S-A-D-L-E-R Sadler Sports Insurance.  Like having liability insurance is so affordable and not having it is very expensive. I know many coaches over the past five, six years since we started helping coaches and we started doing consulting that they have a business, they don't have that set up. If someone gets hurt at a camp, they get sued. That's a pretty common thing that happens to coaches if they don't have liability insurance. So go use one of those two resources that I just gave you. All right. The next is you want to, and this is the third, you want to set up a business checking account at your local bank and the reason why you want to do this is so all of the money that comes into your business goes into one spot and it's easy to track all the income when that happens. So am I telling you to not use Venmo, Cash App and all of that? Yes, I am telling you don't use that. You need to have a system in place where you collect money and then the money goes to your business checking account. Then from there, you can disperse that however you want. I'm not going to give you advice on what to do with your money, but you need to have a business checking account so you can track all of the income that's coming in to your business. All right. Next, what you need is you need a billing system. So this way, like after you have your business checking account set up, now you have a billing system set up. So when people pay you, the money goes from your system to your business checking account. Now you have the money. So the reason why you need a good system is so you can do recurring billing with clients. That means every 28 days or every 30 days, they're automatically being billed. And when you have it set up that way, you don't have to go resell to your clients, which is a huge common problem that most coaches have is they'll do sessions for cash or they'll get checks or they'll do things on Venmo. You can't run a reliable business that way. You need to have one system that controls all of the money. So this way, when parents pay you, you get paid and then every 30 days or maybe you do annual billing, however you have that set up, you should use the exact system that I recommend. I use it for six years now. A lot of the coaches that we work with, they also use it. It's called SAMCART, S-A-M-C-A-R-T. Go to the link in the description. You can get a free trial there, a free 14-day trial. If you don't like it, don't use it, but it is so easy to use. And there's coaches that I work with that are just starting that use that. There are coaches that I work with that run half a million dollar per year businesses that use it. So it's going to help you. It's very affordable. And that will help you streamline all of the money that comes in. And you can't use that though, unless you have a business checking account. Can't get a business checking account unless you have a legal business setup. So this is why I'm going through these things in order. All right. Lastly, this is so important. This is a boring topic, but you need to know about this. You need to understand how much money to save for taxes. If you don't know what that is, you need to go ask someone. All right. And the reality is most coaches and this is how it is with most people. It's not just coaches. Most people are irresponsible with the money that they make. They just make it and then they go spend it. You need to treat this like a real business. So you understand, all right, here's how much money is coming in. Here's how much it costs per month to operate. And here's how much money I need to allocate for taxes. So you should just set up a business savings account. So you move some of your money from your business checking account to your business savings account every month. And then now you have the money for taxes. If you do that, you're never like drawing back from your business at the end of the year to go pay for taxes. You already have the money. It's already set aside because you're responsible. Now, if you go through these five steps again, all right, legally set up a business, talk with the CPA or an attorney, number two, get liability insurance, use those two companies that I talked about, call both of them, get a quote, see what's best for you. Third, set up a business checking account at your local bank. Fourth, get a billing system. I recommend SAMCART. Go to the link in the description, you get a free 14 day trial. Lastly, understand taxes, understand how much money you allocate per month towards that based on what the income that you're generating. That's it for this video. If you have any questions for me either about these things here, or you have any sort of business questions and you want some consulting, reach out to me. My number is<PHONE_NUMBER>. I talk to coaches every single day. This is what I do. We are very good at helping coaches grow their companies. So if you want more clients, if you want a streamline, you want to have systems in place, that's what we do. So reach out to me if you have any questions and I'd love to set up a call with you. That's it for today's video and I'll see you later.


Hey, welcome to Drinks Made Easy. Today we're going to teach you how to make the cherry and paradise, a drink that looks remarkably similar to this drink, this drink, and this drink. However, it's different because it's alcohol all the way through, so you won't have to make it look like seawater to get a bit of alcohol with every sip. You forgetting something? Oh, yeah, and Mike made it up. That's right. He earned his paycheck on this one. That's right! To build the cherry and paradise, you'll start with one ounce of cherry herring into an empty glass. Next, we're going to fill it up with small format ice if you have it.  Next, we're going to add a half an ounce of white rum to four ounces of pineapple juice. Give that a quick little stir to integrate and then pour it over the ice. If you've had a few cubes melt, just add a few more in. And last to one ounce of rum, we are going to add an eighth of an ounce of blue curacao. Now, if this seems like a small amount, a little bit of blue curacao actually goes a really long way. And then we're just going to swirl it to integrate. And for this layer, because it's the trickiest, if you have a little something that will pour slowly, we highly recommend using that. And then use the straw of your choice. But beware when you're putting it in, go very slowly. Otherwise, you may disrupt the layers. And there you have the cherry in paradise. A layered cocktail that's alcohol all the way through so you don't have to make it look like seawater to get a bit of alcohol with every sip. Thanks so much for watching. Please be sure to subscribe, like, and click on the bell icon so you'll be notified any time we release a new video. And if you have any drinks out there that you're dying to see on our show, please suggest them in the comments below. And as always, drink responsibly, because everybody likes to make friends, but nobody likes to make them in a prison shower. Cheers.


Welcome to Think Tech on Spectrum OC16, Hawaii's weekly newscast on things that matter to tech and Hawaii. I'm Jay Fidel. And I'm Crystal Kwok. In our show last time, we gave you part one of our report of the August meeting of the Harvard Club and the talk by John Fink. This time, we'll give you the second part of John Fink's remarks. To recapitulate, John Fink has been involved in media in Hawaii for more than four decades. He began his media career in public relations for a pro-soccer team, Team Hawaii, then in the North American Soccer League, and then radio at K-I-K-I, K-M-A-I, then K-G-M-B-T-V, and K-H-N-L-T-V, which became a partner with K-5 in the 1990s. John is a graduate of Wesleyan University where he took a bachelor's in East Asian history. As you saw from our last show, John is a close observer of the local and national television and media scene. It's changing as we go forward on a dynamic basis because of the way that certainly the younger generation is taking their time in viewing TV. The amount of people who now watch TV with a secondary device by their side is like 60 or 70 percent. We all know that this has basically become an appendage. I will tell you from a psychosociological standpoint, this is causing havoc in terms of people being able to communicate. And we also know what it can do in terms of cyberbullying and all these other horrible things. Many of them are not thinking of it that way. This is another issue that's going to be a major, major consideration in years to come. I remember the quaint old days when you used to go to a movie, and I know this is going to be hard to believe, but the movie ended and you actually turned to the person next to you and you went, what did you think? Now what's the first thing everybody does in a movie when it ends? They pull out their phone because God knows the president might be trying to reach you. I don't understand what happened that we suddenly decided we were so valuable that missing two hours of life on a Saturday night, and the answer is nothing happened. That's the answer. Nothing happened. Do you know that most people, I think it's like 90 percent, respond to a text within three minutes of receiving it? There are married couples who don't respond to each other within a week of receiving a message, so it's a different world out there and I think it's something you keep in mind. So you have your broadcast stations, which I mentioned, so they're independent stations like K5, ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, PBS, in many markets you have a Hispanic station or two, and then you have your cable stations, which I've mentioned, which include ESPN and Fox News and CNN and headline news and the History Channel and all those other channels up in the hinterland of your dials, and you have what are known as the MSLs, the Multiple Service Operators, which is Spectrum, Hawaii and Telcom, Dish and Direct TV. Those are our four major providers here of programming. If you subscribe to one of those, they are providing the signals for you from all of those cable channels and the local broadcasters, and that's how the world is set up now. But the world is changing. We make our money, it used to be we made our money one way, advertising.  That's the way it used to be. We can't pay for the programs, we can't put them on. So thank you for all those of you who advertise. We now get what's known as retransmission consent. We allow the cable company, satellite company or phone company to retransmit our signal in exchange they pay us on a monthly basis. And that has helped the revenue stream because the advertising has started to shift with the whole digital world and people reassessing how they spend their money between regular digital advertising, social media and everything else like that. So it has provided a windfall in terms of allowing TV stations to keep up their revenue models as things have gotten a little bit tougher.  Everybody knows about YouTube and Facebook and Instagram and Google and Twitter. And now there is this thing called over the top which is OTT is the acronym you'll see for it. What it means is you get something directly sent to your computer. It does not go through your TV anymore. So you can get HBO on your mobile device or on your iPad or on your desktop. You can get other cable channels and some broadcast through your computer.  So I mean there's that opportunity also. Right now there are 193 million OTT users in the US. Some of you never heard the term till I just mentioned it. Over half of America is now using OTT. Adults with a paid TV subscription which is you know oceanic spectrum that's declined from 78 percent. It will decline from 78 percent to 69 over the next few years. That's the latest prognostication. It used to be 90 percent. So it's gone from 90 percent 10 years ago to 78 percent to 69 percent. There's an entire generation of people being brought up who as I said will never have a newspaper subscription will never own a landline telephone and will not subscribe to a service for their television. They will figure out another ways to get it. Our other competition on top of that and 300 cable channels of course is the newspaper, the radio, movie theaters, magazine, leisure activities. So to have rules in place now that were in place in 1964 it just doesn't make a lot of sense in a lot of instances. In other instances right on I'm a firm believer in some of the FCC policies and things but they need to be revamped and the way the FCC works is whoever the president is gets three votes on the FCC and the other party gets two votes. So every time you have shifts in Washington which tend to happen every four to eight years you get a whole new group of FCC chair persons in who try to make changes and have to fight with Congress or public interest groups or self-serving lobbyists and things like that and as things move forward to get changed sometimes if it takes long enough a new administration comes in. So it'll be fascinating to see what can happen because now you have an administration that is obviously on its surface much more business friendly in appearance and they do have three Republican FCC chair people and two Democrat ones so any vote that is controversial you would think would always go three to two which most people believe will favor the business interests on a going forward basis so we'll see. We will see. What this means of course is that the consumer has more choices than ever.  Used to be you didn't think like that and you picked one of the five options you had and if you were an hour late you missed it totally couldn't get it back until it came back and reruns so I mean think about that there's nothing you can miss anymore. What it means from our standpoint is we need to put on compelling enough programming to keep you coming back we need to get people to watch us because how many people watch us is part of the reason why people advertise with us and it becomes that whole cycle of what we need to have happened so from our standpoint that's why we've chosen to go with a very local basis. We do shows like What's Cooking Hawaii and Chef Rock and we have high sessions and we have Hot Hawaiian Nights and Voice of the Sea which is a UH educational message about environment and we have Hokkaido TV where local people go to Japan and we have another Japanese show coming up because we feel these are things that people are interested in and it differentiates us. I can always buy another sitcom. I can always buy another hour of old network TV but there are 42 other stations that do that so you wouldn't necessarily need me and of course we have what I consider to be a very compelling news product in our Hawaii News Now product. Now up until a couple of years ago we were the only guys at 8 a.m. the only guys at 6 30 p.m. and the only guys at 9 p.m. well then KITV decided to take their 6 o'clock and go all the way to 7 so now we have competition from 6 30 to 7 and then two years ago KHON decided to do a 9 o'clock news and they brought in Howard Dyshevsky who was my old news anchor and they now have a 9 o'clock news and one month from now KHON which currently has a show called Living 808 at 8 o'clock is going to move that thing to 4 o'clock and that's a pure sales show and at 8 o'clock they're going to continue their morning news for one more hour so we will now have competition at 8 o'clock in the morning so we don't have our own niche we just have to do it better than anybody else is what it comes down to and I'm not really worried I think our sunrise product in the morning is a pretty compelling and interesting product so we'll continue to do that for the time being um so you have hundreds of choices on tv and cable you have millions of choices I had the number here it was staggering to me I want to say there are 644 million websites right now 644 million websites I've not been to every one but but I can tell you if you don't think that there's a niche audience somewhere for for all of these you're mistaken and and in and of themselves we used to say about cable the ratings were horrible on cable but a hundred cable channels doing a point one rating one tenth of one percent of the population multiply that by a hundred that's ten rating points that's a lot of people to be losing so in and of itself none of those cable channels were a threat but as a whole I think the term they use is being nibble to death by goldfish or something like that there's some term like that that they use that has been the problem um the market is going to shake everything out over the next five to ten years um there listen to these companies that have valuations of well over a billion dollars all of which are losing huge boatloads of money snapchat how about twitter it's lost over two billion dollars the last couple of years zenga instagram amazon.com pandora webo which is china's twitter zillow sprint square and sony big old sony has lost money six of the last seven years something has to give somebody at some point is going to have to make a payment and investors are going to have to start going whoa time out so all you hear about twitter and we know it's god knows it's in the news far too often these days but something's got to give with twitter and the theory is that twitter's valuation keeps going down because it's not breaking through and it hasn't figured out a model to start making a lot of money as the stock value goes down somebody will probably swoop in and buy it that's what tends to happen if they see a business model there and maybe it's through economies of scale or something like that so at the end of the day with whatever it is you're interested in or want to watch or when you want to watch it everyone gets what they want when they want where they want it how they want it i mean you can really do that now that is an unbelievable opportunity but at the end of the day content is king it doesn't matter what you put on there if there's not an audience for it at some point in and of itself it's got to fail i i i don't know how else to explain that other than to say that the only thing that is as important as content at some point is probably exclusivity and how you deliver the message i mean one of the reasons you see exorbitant rates being paid for live events is because most of those live events are really not recordable and i don't mean you can't record them i mean who wants to watch the Super Bowl two days later unless you're a patriots fan and you know you want to see the game again but but people don't watch the academy awards two days later once they know who won the best picture so stations and entities are willing to pay a premium i'll give you a good example last year twitter paid five million dollars for the rights to stream nfl football on thursday night they have those those nfl thursday games of the week which is already already a potentially a problem because nfl ratings have come down and some people are suggesting that it's too there are too many it used to be it was just sunday then it became monday night then it became sunday night now we have thursday night so they're saying that maybe it's been spread too far so it's something the nfl has to take a look at so they paid five million dollars for thursday games i think there were eight thursday games so they really paid a huge premium for and they also had to pay production class that's just the rates fees okay five million dollars by twitter last year this fall the nfl thursday night games same number of games will be available on amazon prime and it'll be paid they'll pay 50 million five oh they're paying 10 times what twitter paid now at that number they cannot make money but what they want everyone to do is sign up for amazon prime which costs you a hundred dollars a year and if you do the math and say if a million people sign up there's a hundred million dollars that will pay for the 50 million plus their production cost so my guess is that's the model but the only way you can get it is to be an amazon prime member so if you shop on amazon you're not getting football if you're an amazon prime member and you pay a hundred dollars a year you're going to get thursday night football but this is the world we live in now where the rich will get richer the google's the amazon's the facebook's they will continue to grow and take over other companies and will change the way we all watch and see and hear things good or bad that is what's going to happen my feeling on local broadcast is that we will survive as long as we continue to produce a quality local product and of course quality is in the eye of the beholder i put on a lot of local shows i'm sure people think suck some of them i don't care for that much but i'm not the audience so as long as there's no audience out there you know i was in radio and i did a lot of with music and boy there were cuts i put on there that i said you kidding me but number one is number one so if it's a hit it's a hit um as long as we continue to provide relevant and interesting education entertainment information to our local audience which is really all we care about and serve i think local broadcast will have a future as long as we can make sure that you know if there's a hurricane coming how much time you have to prepare we provide a service to people as long as we can tell you about zika and rat lung worm and hepatitis b and you can go out and do something about it we serve a purpose that no national provider can give you and so i'm not going to suggest we look forward to those types of things but as a broadcaster that's my feeling is if we can give that to a community that that's a really nice service i used to do play-by-play for wahine volleyball when wahine volleyball was on k5 for 28 years and um i loved doing it the team has always been great davishoji is a good friend of mine and the team's always been great but i gotta tell you how many times i'd go and see somebody who would recognize me from tv and they would say thank you for putting the game on and i would realize whatever else was going on in their life however difficult things would be or job was bad or personal life or health was bad for two hours on a friday night i could provide a safe haven for them to watch our wahine play volleyball and and selfishly i felt good about being able to do that and let them know that oh yeah the wahine are on and god they're good aren't they i kind of like what we can do with tv i also know the bad things that tv can do and this is where i get into this new world we have where everything is 24-7 um there is not enough news and there aren't enough people that we can pay and have a business model to provide the news on a 24-7 basis so whether it's fox news or headline news or cnn news they can't exist for 24 hours but they do so either they repeat stuff or they bring in one more stupid expert analysis on an issue that's not even necessarily an issue but understand they've got to provide something compelling and i use that in quotes or else you're going to change the channel how hard is it to change the channel right if you go to numerous news websites the words you will see nowadays is theoretically speculation word has it that you got to be careful with it you got to be careful with it and we can get into the fake news thing in a minute but um if it's not vetted and the one thing i would tell you in a local newsroom is no story gets on unless people have done their homework there's no wild guy sitting in his mother's basement with his own little website making up news every day that suddenly people follow because they go yeah i like this guy well he's he's a liar i i don't you can say what you want about it but this person has nobody is vetting him nobody is checking on the sources nobody is making sure that what you're getting is true you now as a consumer have to have a filter and one can argue as much as you want that 30 40 50 years ago when we watched walter kronkite or dan rather any of the vaunted news people there was somebody who said put the story on and put it on fairly now again i'm using subjective terms here well what's fairly if you didn't like the story you wouldn't think it was fair but if it was balanced if it tried to get both sides of the story if it provided the information and let you make up your own decision on it as a thinking human being as a voter i think it did its job that is much easier to do these days on a local level than it is on the national level and i think we've seen what's happened to the news and and what it's done and now we have a president who would like to tell you that the media is the enemy and i i just i can't fathom that because that's the same media that made him what he is today that he's now calling the enemy because pretty sure if he didn't have the notoriety he got over all these years he might not be in the position he's in and we'll see how that plays out over time now there's a difference between getting a story wrong and fake news fake news to me is oxymoron it's jumbo shrimp okay there's no such thing as fake news if it's fake news it's a lie and that's not news so i want to get the misnomer out that fake news the people doing fake news know what they're doing they're doing it purposely they're doing it to hook people in they're doing it to express a certain point of view but no one's vetting it and they don't care they don't care and if you ask them they'll tell you that okay that is not the same as this where a newspaper puts out the headline that dewey defeats truman that's not fake news that's bad reporting that's an assumption that's a mistake but it wasn't done with mal intent it was they tried to jump the gun and under the old adage of it's important to be first they decided to be first instead of be right and obviously it's more important to be right accurate fair correct and that's what we should all strive to do but don't confuse this type of reporting with fake news fake news is malicious it's cancerous and it's harmful and it's putting a bad name on the people who are trying to put real news out there on a regular basis and there's nothing we can do to control it the internet providers facebook google mozilla youtube and others if aggregators of content are now committed to putting messages by stories that seem questionable they're going they're putting little you probably have seen it if you check those sites they put this has not been verified or but but now we get into the whole well how do you what do you want to do about censorship here you know we can get into this whole another discussion about what happened in virginia this past weekend but you know the people who don't like the guys who went out to protest in the first place you bring more attention to these people by what happened there than if a hundred people had just done their thing and i'm not going to suggest they're right but my point is you you build something into something larger than life by focusing on it and don't think every news organization in the country doesn't love the ability to now cover this thing you've now get remember they're 24-7 they got to have stuff to talk about so we have the right to free speech in this country hateful though it may be we have the right to free speech i've watched and i don't and nobody a couple people who might have been cal graduates but i remember when i was a kid cal berkeley was the bastion of free speech and certainly far left leaning speech in america nowadays cal is taking every other speaker that somebody comes up with and they're telling them no you can't come here because you have views that are important to this group or this group and i understand that but this country is based on free speech that's how we all got here in the first place it's the first amendment not the 12th it's the first amendment so where do you want to draw the line on cutting off speech hateful though it may be where do you want to get to that point and i think we're going to see this tested over and over again as time goes on and um you know for people who talk about fake news i was i looked it up and there was discussion about you guys might not remember this but in 1200 bc ramsey's the great spread lies about his war victories octavian one of my favorites ran a misinformation campaign about mark antony and the list goes on and on through yellow to through medieval times and the the print press the so-called yellow journalism everybody who's old enough or is an historical buffer members macartheism which was complete lies and things of that nature the dewy wins orson wells did war of the worlds anybody who's old enough to remember radio everybody thought we were being invaded by martians so i mean fake news let's be careful and not think this is a current or new trend this stuff has always been out there but it wasn't as prevalent it wasn't as easy to get and we weren't being pulled apart by it like we are now i remember sitting with senator in oa i don't know how long he's been gone for now but let's say this was like eight or nine years ago we're sitting next to each other and i don't get that opportunity obviously very much so i wanted to talk to him about things i said and this was during uh early on in the obama administration so there were horrible things being said on things were being pulled apart nothing was getting accomplished and i said to him what what's it like in washington dc and he sighed and he said his great devoid said well john he said i have been in washington dc now for 45 50 years he said i have never seen such vitriolic language and he said and part of it now is that because of the anonymity and people hiding behind phony email addresses and things people can take horrible cheap shots and say anything they want and there's no accountability for it in a world where our leaders work so hard for public opinion and where they often create public confusion getting honest media is more important than ever before thanks to john fink and the harvard club for more about k5 see k5thehometeam.com and now let's take a look at our think tech schedule of events going forward there's so much happening in hawaii sometimes things happen under the radar and we don't hear much about them but think tech will take you there remember you can watch think tech on oc 16 several times every week to stay current on what's happening in government industry academia and communities around the islands think tech broadcasts its daily talk shows live on the internet from 11 a.m to 5 p.m on weekdays then we broadcast our earlier shows all night long and on the 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remember you can watch think tech on spectrum oc several times every week can't get enough of it just like crystal does for additional times check out oc 16 dot tv for lots more think tech videos and for underwriting and sponsorship opportunities on think tech visit think tech hawaii dot com be a guest or a host or a producer or an intern and help us reach and have an impact on hawaii thanks for being part of our think tech family and for supporting our open discussion of tech energy diversification and global awareness in hawaii you can watch this show throughout the week and tune in next sunday evening for our next important weekly episode i'm jay fidel and i'm crystal quark aloha everyone