Your phone call after this meeting? Yeah. Depend upon how long it goes. I mean, the answer is yes, regardless. Chris has an FYI on the invite. I've got John as a question mark. I don't know if he accepted. I'm not sure either. He emailed me today and I sent him the updated link. So I believe he is planning on attending. Awesome, thank you. Well, let's go ahead, let's not wait for him. Let's get started. Madam recording secretary, if you could call the roll to establish the quorum, that'd be great. Chair Rogers. Here. Member Schwedhelm. Here. Member Sawyer. Let the order reflect that all subcommittee members are present with the exception of member Sawyer. All right, we'll go ahead and start with our public comment for non-agenda items. So folks in the public have a comment that's within the jurisdiction of our committee, but not on today's agenda. Go ahead and hit the raise hand feature on your Zoom. I'm not seeing any, so I'd keep going then. We have one set of minutes from our special meeting on January 27th. Tom, did you have any amendments to those minutes? Look good to me and it was a special meeting, thanks. Yeah, I'll see if there's anybody in the public who has any additions. All right, seeing them, we'll keep moving. Let's go on to our item for the day. It's item 4.1, our fiscal strategies presentation. Allen, I'll kick it over to you. Thank you, Chair, members of the committee. So yes, we, let's let the thing get up on the screen there. All right, so we are bringing forward an update to our fiscal policies or fiscal strategies in some case kind of working on the branding of that. In some cases, we do think a policy would be in order and others maybe just a strategy on going forward. So toying with titles here. So next slide, please. So as we've been come to you a couple of times with how to develop strategies for a more proactive and transparent approach to address significant known costs that affect the city's budget. Most of these are centered in the general fund, but I think that this also can help with in the enterprise funds as well. So the strategies that we've been looking at relate to pension stabilization, capital replacement, and deferred infrastructure maintenance and really focusing there on city facilities. So for this presentation today, we're addressing pension stabilization and capital replacement. We're still working on the deferred infrastructure maintenance and we'll come to you with that in April. Next slide, please. So as I mentioned, what we're looking at is developing these proactive long-term approaches and looking at our unfunded liability costs. Capital replacement, we have large items that are mainly in the fire department that are not part of our equipment replacement fund. We end up paying those costs, but they're not really shown in the budget in a way of reflecting the true cost of the operation. Instead, we come to you in an emergency saying we need to buy this truck because it's about to go out of service and we're trying to move away from that. And then we need to also look at our city facilities infrastructure in general, but our city facilities are really struggling. We have deferred maintenance on that for not even years, decades. And there's a whole slew of things that need to happen. We need to figure out a way to program that cost over a long period. So we have some funding mechanisms to be able to help us with this. Some of which are the fiscal stability funds that you've set aside out of the PG&E settlement money. There was $40 million of that. Some of these things I think also need to be addressed in the annual budget, not only to supplement the existing or the initial funding of it, but just to begin an annual budgeted practice for dealing with these costs. And then if available, any year in surplus money could go to those. And that's where we get into the talk of how much we're going to a particular budget or a bucket or into another one. And then for where it's appropriate, we need to finalize these with the council policy. What that does is it sets the strategies in place for the long-term in the future going forward. Next slide, please. So the way I'm going to try to lay this out is what our current practice is and then what we're proposing. So we pay the normal costs and we pay UAL payment, unfunded liability payment. When I'm talking about these things, I'm looking at it from combined costs of our three CalPERS contracts. So there's one for miscellaneous, one for police and one for fire. And I'm also including all funds. So the majority of the costs is in the general fund, but there are other enterprise funds that is like they have personnel costs and they reallocate the pension costs out to them. But for general terms, this is what we're trying to pay. So we have a normal cost payment that's roughly $20 million a year and we will always have a normal cost with PERS. So the strategies that we're dealing with is really looking at the UAL payment. Currently that's about $30 million, although we project it to grow in the next year or two, up to 34, but as I'll show you in a future slide, that has kind of leveled out. And then we have existing debt service on our, well, we have debt service on our existing pension obligation fund. That's roughly $3.7 million a year. Again, that's an all fund basis. And that will be paid off in 2024. So what we're proposing is again, we still pay the normal cost in the UAL and the debt service. So for the immediate future, we still make those payments. Going forward, we would still make the normal cost payment. We're still gonna have to make a UAL payment as well. But what we're trying to do is come up with a method for putting money aside that will help address the UAL payment. We use the trust to help keep down that unfunded liability. None of this is gonna happen overnight. You're talking very long-term plans on this and I'll get to that in the future slide as well. And again, as I mentioned earlier, we do have ways of being able to fund the trust both from an initial funding coming from the PG&E fiscal stabilization fund including in putting in an annual budgeted amount and then using a percentage of urine surplus and that will help enhance those funds going in, help augment the funds. We wanna set a goal of how much we wanna put into the trust that not only that, but when to actually use the money there. We think that our goal needs to be to achieve 100% funding status. The trust will help us get there. It'll be combined with our regular purse valuation but we'll be able to get to that funded status over time with the combination of those two funds. Next slide, please. So again, I mentioned the UAL payment. What this does is it shows the current projection pay down over time. You'll note, I don't have a pointer but I'll say that from the beginning of the chart in the fiscal year 21, going out about 14 years that would be amount, if you remember, to those POV presentations we gave where we were talking, it looked like a mountain. It went up from our base amount that we would pay and it just looked like a mountain top and the aggregate amount of that was about $110 million. So that's what we were coming to you to say that we could issue POV to help address that. Well, the return or the stock market performance for the CalCurse Fund, essentially leveled off that mountain. I guess that's what a 21% return will do for you. And so, which is great news, the means that that aggregated costs over that period was reduced down from $110 million to between $30 and $40 million. So that was a significant reduction. We still, like I said, we still have the UAL payment. It's still more than what our baseline amount was, but it's nowhere near as dire as it would. That said, you probably realize that the market is really taking a tumble right now and we don't know what effects that will be in the future. It may be that a couple of years out, we'll see that peak again, all the more reason to try to do something out from a local basis to be able to help wherever possible offset some of those additional costs that are coming in. Alan, if I can jump in and ask a question just for clarity. So when you talk about the return from CalPERS last year leveling off the peak, you also make comments about how the current slide means that we don't know what it'll really look like. Can you give me kind of a year, how many years out do we typically start to see the impact from the existing years stock market? So if this is a bad year, we'll start to see that in our projections five years from now? No, I mean, the great stock market returns happened last year, but typically we see things around in a three to five year period. So that's what we're looking at. It is a little bit forward facing. So let's go there around three to five years. And that was what the 110 million was based on a three year period? Yeah, it was our prior valuation that we had. And so that's had it when we started to factor in not only the stock market performance, but also the lower discount rate, that even the two of those combined in the discount rate is something that a lower discount rate actually needs a higher cost of us. But what that ended up doing was that's what you're seeing now is from CalPERS, their projections on that and showing how it leveled off. So that's taking all of that into account using their performance. Okay, and then one more quick thing. If we can get John promoted, just in case he wants to jump in with some questions instead of making him wait until the very end. Thanks, Alan. Sure, no problem. Okay, next slide, please. So this just shows the funded status where we are right now and it's historical. So it shows that at one point back in 0607, we were actually overfunded. That dropped down significantly when the recession happened and the huge losses that CalPERS took in that 2008 year. And then it shows us kind of where we are now. And we're right now around a 70, I think it's around 76, 77% funded. Again, that's a combined of all of the CalPERS contracts that we have. And next slide. And this one shows what our unfunded liability is. Again, it's over that same period. And we're looking at our, we're around, I think it's around 330 million dollars of unfunded liability. Next slide. So what are some strategies that we can do? And so again, as I mentioned earlier, the purpose of the trust is to build a balance that at least, or what we can use the trust for is to build a balance that is at least a year of the UAL payment. So in this case, it would be around $34 million for all funds. So why do we pick a year amount? And I should also mention that this is not only from staff, but this is also from PSM, we met with them to talk about these strategies to what would seem to make sense. A good target, one that we could put that's attainable and it's attainable in a reasonably short period would be to try to get enough money in the trust to equal one year of UAL payment. And we'll continue to build on that in future years, but there is a goal that's out there. You don't wanna, I don't think you want me to say, you know, our goal is to get, you know, all of that $300 million of unfunded liability into the trust. I mean, that's, I don't know if we'll ever see that, but what we wanted to do was to provide you with a reasonable goal to achieve one that we continue to build on, but at least you'll be able to have that. It'll get us closer to, again, as we combine our DAP fund with our regular CalPERS account to get us closer to that 100% funded status. It's gonna be very favorable to look down by the rating agency. And in the future, it will allow us to be able to, especially once we get that funded status to if there is a particularly negative years that's out there, we can target supplementing our normal cost statement with the balance that we built up in the trust. So there's a lot of benefits to go with it. Some of the risks, though, is that I don't think that we can just do that based on an initial amount coming in from the stability fund and then hoping for whatever type of surplus might be at the end of the year. I think the surplus should be looked at as a way to augment an annual payment towards this. The good news is, is I think that we have a way of doing this that is essentially budget neutral and the general fund, and I'll explain that in a minute, but one of the things that we'll have to look at is that if we go ahead and put that line item in there, at some point, if there's a significant downturn and we aren't able to, you know, if it comes to paying for this or to pay for other things that are paid for out of the general fund, this is a line item that we would suggest that can't be cut, it's one that's in there. And for all the reasons that I've mentioned early, let's go on to the next slide, please. So, and I apologize, some of this is a little bit redundant, but we'll actually, I think we could probably, let's move and talk about funding. So let's go to the next slide. So doing a funded model, what we're looking at is we built this trust that's using up to around the $34 million. And the way we would do that is, and the way that I think we can do it budget-neutrally is that if you recall, we are making debt service payments or we're making debt service payments in about 3.7 million, I think about 2.5 million of that is general funds. We think that we can go ahead and find the funds to be able to offset the, or to meet the minimum amount that PFM suggests that we put in, which is $500,000 a year. We think that we can find $500,000 a year on an annual basis that wouldn't be detrimental to the budget. After 2024, we would simply take the debt service payment and then lump that into what we have already established as a Y-9 in the funding. So if you look at that as $500,000 there, plus about two and a half million dollars from the general fund side that then goes into that, now you have your $3 million a year. If you look at it from just the standpoint of if we use $10 million, which is what we would recommend of initial funding that drops us down to $24 million that's needed, we think that we can achieve that in around eight years. It depends on performance in the trust itself, but it is an achievable goal that's relatively short in period. And then of course, to use surplus funds at the end of the year to go into it as well, that will also help bolster that amount. But you know that you would have at least $3 million a year that would just continue for imperfectivity that would go into this fund. And eventually what it would have is that it would create an actual pension stabilization fund, something that as staff we were talking about, again, it's looking in hindsight, but imagine if we would have done something like this, not only when prior to the recession, but when we were fully funded, but even when we recovered out of the recession and started to be able to, we were generating little bits of surplus on an annual basis. If we would have started doing that then, we would have gotten a lot quicker than where we are now. It's still a humongous amount of money that we can deal with with this, but at least it's these things that would have been able to reduce the burden of future taxpayers of the current pension costs, which again, I think is a very important thing to do. Chris, can I get a question in real quick? Sure. Go for it. You mentioned two and a half plus the 500K. Slide four, you talked about the existing POV debt service at 3.7 million a year. Yeah. Isn't that the figure that once that expires, wouldn't we have that 3.7 that we could apply towards this? We could. The 2.5 is a general fund only amount. So I haven't talked to the other funds to see if they would do it. And I do have a meeting with water funds tomorrow, which I believe the bulk of those costs would go for and to, but I don't want to commit them before we've already gone through this. So I've focused this on the general fund and where we are from now. So. Okay, great. Thanks for that clarification. Yeah. So yeah, so the next slide please. So, all right. I think so this, this is where I am. Somehow the slides I have are a little bit different than what's in the slide jack, but being adaptive here. So again, here's where I laid out. This kind of verbally shows it. We do have $40 million of this whole utility fund. We're proposing using 10 million of that, needing an additional 24, like it says, how would we get there? We would get with the, go a couple of years at the 500,000 plus whatever would be their year-end surplus, that could possibly make up the difference of the three million, it could be more than that or whatever. But we know that after 2024, we have a budgeted line item that we can just move from paying debt service to move for funding the trust and so there would be no increase of budget. We would just continue that payment out again in perpetuity. And then again, once we get to 100% funded, if we do notice that at certain points in the future that we are forecasting additional costs, we may be able to use the balance of there to supplement payments to helpers on that. So next slide please. And this just is a graphic representation of it. That's what happens when you start looking at all the graphics and PowerPoint and go, ooh, this looks nice. Anyway, just trying to figure out a different way other than to show this as we would go forward. But this basically lays out what our funding strategy and goal would be for. And so this is the end of the CalPERS part. So we can do questions or if you have, if you're okay with how we're going out strategy and both determining the annual payment, if you think that there should be an annual payment, the amount of the initial funding. And then we need to come back, I think to talk about the percentage of the year and surplus that might be able to go toward this. Because looming out ahead would be the infrastructure, the deferred infrastructure. And if we're going to be putting money towards that, you may want to have a higher percentage going for that. And then this, especially if you have an ongoing budgeted amount going into the trust fund, it's just that you can count on every year. But John, we can't hear you, John. Doesn't surprise me. Can you hear me now? Yep. Okay. Nothing has worked all day. So I like the, I mean, dedicating funds to lower this obligation. What I'm not clear on is what kind of narrative you're going to use to get future councils to understand the commitment, especially when you attach the word perpetuity to it. I like the word. I like the concept. But how do you, how does one impress on future councils unless you use, well, we could use the past like you mentioned earlier, had we started this before, you know, some time ago, we would be in a different place than we are now. But what I'm, what concerns me of course is, not of course, what concerns me is being able to convince future councils the value in not using these funds for projects, for anything other than getting this debt reduced. Now, one could, I guess if you mentioned the problem with the year-end surplus. You could come up with a range, I guess, and say this percentage to this percentage would be a reasonable range. They, there will be pushback on difficult years. They'll want, I would think that they're going to want to go to the minimum. But if we don't impress on councils in the future, the concept of a minimum and a ceiling or a floor and a ceiling, they're going, it's getting it spent in other ways. And I don't know what kind of strategy one uses to impress on future councils the need to be dedicated to this on an annual basis. So I thank you for that. I appreciate that. And I don't have a fully fleshed out narrative right now. But two things come to the top of my mind. So one, we're relying more heavily on annual budget than we are at the percentage at the end of the year. Also, in setting this up and even embarking on this, and I think I've mentioned this before, I'm very cognizant of tying not only this council but future council. So what I'm trying to do is leave something left over of one time money of surplus, which is for one time use, that could be used for those projects that aren't going to pension and that's not going to deferred maintenance, right? That's going for whatever other project that I can't foresee. The other thing that I would say is that one of the things that when we go out for a sales tax measure or for any type of revenue measure, usually the main, at least one of the main arguments against it is that pensions are at its hand and get all that. This is your way of addressing pensions. This is your way of getting those pensions in hand. Yeah, it's going to take a long time to do it, but you're making it, going down this route, you're making a conscious effort to address the pension problem that exists. And I think that that can be a very positive message. It doesn't go away overnight, but it's something that is headed down a path that maybe we could promote. I agree, I mean, it's vitally important and coming up with that narrative that speaks, because in 10 years, they're going to look back. Someone's going to look back and say, why did they do this? And why did they want to tie our hands? And having explanations like the one you just used that if you start getting rid of this debt that it will start to take away the argument against future sales taxes, et cetera. Anything that may resonate with future councils is the best we can do. We can't tie their hands. So unless we put it in the charter, so I'm not, I'm sure you can do that. So in any event, I like what you're selling and anything that we can do to help convince future councils to support this, what the structure and is will potentially work. The strategy is sound, it's just getting them to embrace it. Tom? Thanks, Mr. Mayor. Yeah, I really appreciate this, Alan. This is just what I was hoping we'd be seeing. We've been talking about it now to see in this, these are the next steps. And I'll start with just what John was talking about. For me, I think we should have something in concrete and if future councils wanna change it, it requires an affirmative vote. In other words, default is whatever we come up with. So that puts an aim. I'm making a motion that we take funding from reducing our pension obligation and put it to something else. Requires a second, put it out there and let them make the argument in front of the public at that point versus every year you can go either way. No, make them do affirmative. Because I'm with John, this is a strategy. And for me, alls we have to do is look at 2006 where over 100% funded to 2009 were barely above 60% funded. It can happen that quick. So that's the type of pressure that I think quite frankly, the community deserves to put the council under because a lot of members of the public are not following these funding challenges. It's really easy to say, yeah, you're just wasting your money. Let's make it challenging to change that. So for me, how do rating agencies, if we go to with this trust 115, how do rating agencies look at it? I would assume favorably. Very fair move. Okay, good. And are there costs to set this up? Yeah, there are. There is a fee structure that's based off of the amount that you have, have in. So the more that you have in, the lower the fee. I don't recall right off the top of my head what the firm that we're going with, TFM, what their fees were. I think it's pretty consistent. There's only really two groups that do this and the fees were very, very close. So there'll be a small amount that will come out of that and it just comes out of the fund. And then I know we set aside some of those dollars for the budget stabilization. I'm not sure if that's exact term and I'll do it. I also recognize though that with the decisions council made regarding the use of ARPA funds, we're funding things that we're doing a fund from the general fund anyway, namely homeless services, safe parking. And there's one other, oh, the in-response team. We had found some other funding, but now that's not being debited from the general fund. Could some of those funds be allocated so that we get closer to being 100% funded with the section 115 trust? Or have those dollars already been identified for other things? Well, I don't think they've been identified for other things, but what I would say is that for all of that, it's a short-term, it's a short-term release to the general fund. And ultimately, I'll have to pick that cost up. I think what you would wanna do is at the end of the year when we are looking at what we have returned back to the general fund, then to make that decision on whether we augment the amounts going into the trust. I think the important thing to set up is, initially is what can we consider an ongoing amount to go in there? And then look at anything that's in the end of year amount as just kind of cherry on the top, right? That's just gonna help us get there closer. You're absolutely right. But I think we just have to have a more nuanced discussion about that when we know exactly what all those funds are. So we'll say that we're in the process of developing our budget right now. We know that there are a lot of ongoing expenditures that are part of that budget as we continue to try to bounce back from the pandemic and get to our service expectations. So I think that you're right. Some of that could go for there. I think that we would want to take a good assessment of where we are both on an ongoing structural basis, but also on a one one one off each year basis and then use the funding for that. And like I said, in April, I'll be coming back and we'll be talking about deferred infrastructure. There may be that after seeing that, that it makes sense to start putting maybe more of those dollars into our facility infrastructure that's been neglected for a long time as well. Yeah, I get there because I was planning on bringing it up to our next topic, the replacement cost. And I was looking at those dollars as one time costs just to seed the funding of it. So we have something to start with versus started from zero. Absolutely. And like I said, at the 40, I'm saying 10. I think that when the council dedicated the 40, they had it, as I recall, this was the plan, was we need to try to stabilize our general fund budget on an ongoing basis. This provides us some time to do that. We also have the ability to pre-fund some areas that have long been not addressed. And so that's why I didn't take, I didn't suggest more than 10 of the 40s because I know we have those evidence to do. Great, thank you. Yeah. So Alan, I know it's probably pretty hard to predict, but obviously in the last 20 years, you've had the economic downturn in 2008, 2009, and then you obviously had a good year last year in terms of stock market returns. If we look at sort of what the average is over the last 20 or 30 years, if we were to hit average and go with it, how long do we think that this plan would take for us to get to 100% funded status? Like I said, I know there's a lot of guesswork, a lot of variables. Are we talking 20 years, 10 years? I would hope that it would be less than 20. I would hope that it would be closer in that shorter period. Here's the thing, and Scott and I were talking about this today. I anticipated this blessing coming. And unfortunately, we just don't have a good answer for it. What we'll end up happening with this is that once we fund the trust, we will have to do an annual actuary study of that. And that will be combined with what CalPERS is doing at their own actuary study for the CalPERS program and our particular portion of it. So it's the combination of the two. So I would hope that it would be closer to the 10-year period than the other, but I couldn't tell you one way or the other. Obviously once, and there's a lot of things that could happen that's outside of our control that could cause us to deviate further from 100% funded status. So I would say for right now, hopefully less than 20 years. I don't know for sure, but once we start getting this funded and the actuary report from that going and being able to compare that with CalPERS and then we can start giving you on an annual basis, just how we can say annually how what our funded status is overall, we'll be able to tell you that it'll be factored in. I just wanted to hear a bit. It's what I expected. I know how many different variables go into it. And I know that 100% funded is a tough goal. I get that. The other question that I had and it sounds like given everything that's happened over the last six months or so, the different variables that are in place, it sounds like we are not anticipating moving forward on a pension obligation bond as one of our primary strategies at this point. At this point, I would not recommend that. We continued with the validation process, which is still ongoing. Once that's complete, it's good for the future. So should things change? And there's a way that it made sense to do that type of an issuance. We would already have the validation process done and we could move forward with it. But right now, no, that's not the recommendation. Is that largely because of how well the stock market did last year compared to how it's doing now? Or is that because we've sort of missed the window on the low interest rates? No, it's really because, so we actually received the initial graph, not the one that I showed you, but one that was actually in hindsight, that would have been the better one to show you because it actually had a dashed line of what that peak that I was talking about. Yeah, I think it would have to have 42 million, I think was the original what we were looking at. Yeah, that was what the peak where we get to, but the aggregate of being over that base UAL payment was 110 million. And the effect of where we currently are, that aggregate amount is only about 30 to 40 million. So like I said, it took care of itself. And so what we do is we continue to watch it, if we have that as a potential, I would want to talk with you about all the risks that can come with that as well as whatever benefits that there may be and give you that type of a presentation. And if it made sense, that's a tool that we would have in our tool kit. Okay, John? Hey, it's Chris. Alan, you're gonna get asked that question is gonna come every year, is how long are we gonna have to do this? And I don't know how one comes up with some kind of strategy to deal with that question, but there's gonna be a time in the future when it's only gonna be a couple more years where the councils are gonna have to be, have dedicating these funds to deal with that obligation. And sooner or later, it's gonna become an asset to us. The information will be an asset. Right now, it sounds like a long time out, but the time goes by really quickly and we're gonna need to be able to answer that question with some, with a optimistic slant to it so that it doesn't sound like councils and forever are gonna have to be dealing with this obligation.  And we're gonna have to be able to give them hope in a sense that if they stick to the recommendation of your recommendation and your successor, whomever that might be in the next 10 or 15 years, I mean, we're gonna, it's that kind of planning ahead is what's gonna make this strategy work. Right. And your point's very well taken and it's that we know we'll, we have to figure out a way to come up with something just right now at this point, I don't wanna set an expectation that we can't. So that's- I get that, believe me. Thank you. All right, Alan, let's keep moving through the presentation. Okay, next slide, please. All right, so this is, I need you to adjust my screen. Okay, capital replacement. So currently the way that the capital replacement fund works, the most city vehicles and equipment are included in there in the fund. There are some notable exceptions, fire apparatus, equipment that's under $5,000, generators, buses, special revenue, grant funded vehicles. So what we do is we figure out what the cost is to replace the asset over a period of time. We determine what that annual per rated amount would be and that goes into each department's budget. So, and then that money is then moved over into the Equipment Replacement Fund, which is a internal service fund. So when we go to council to purchase an item, a piece of equipment, a vehicle, and it's coming out of the fleet and we say that it's out of the replacement fund. So that is how that happens. We've already budgeted for it over a number of years, accumulated the fund in there and then we spend it out of that replacement fund. So what we are proposing to do is to, and this is, we still need a little bit of work on this and I'll get to that in a second, but what we are proposing to do is add the fire apparatus to the replacement fund. So in doing that, we would now have the budgeted cost on an annual basis of what it costs to operate that the fire function, the fire operation, including the cost to replace the vehicles whenever that should happen. And we're not asking for any additional vehicles. What this is is these are just, these are what we know it's gonna cost to eventually replace them. And so you would see that whenever you would develop their budget. Right now you don't because when we need to replace a vehicle, even though we know that we're gonna have to replace one at some point, we come to council and say, hey, we need a million dollars to do this. So this now is it's putting that million dollars actually more than that into a fund and you see it in the budget and you know that that is the cost to learn that operation. We unfortunately because of the number of apparatus that there are there and what we would need in order to get them up to speed it's gonna require a rather substantial initial funding point to bring those assets up to date in the replacement fund. What does substantial initial funding mean, Alan? You're gonna see that in the next slide. Let's just go to the next slide. So we're thinking that those costs are gonna be anywhere from around $67 million. We're still finalizing that number. It may actually be closer to the six. But what that will do is that it will basically assign a replacement value to each of the fire vehicles. They would then be in the fund. We are, you know, part of the problem is that you have some vehicles that are on that maybe once had a 25 year life or 20 year life and they're now shorter, that's oddly enough as things become more electronic and computerized, they need to be replaced a little bit quicker. And there would be, so we go through and the way this will work is there'll be an initial cost that would happen as we're proposing that we come from those fiscal facility funds or other funds that would be, you know, outside of the annual budget process. That gets them into alignment, but there will be an ongoing cost. There will be a cost increase to the fire department budget because now we have started the practice of putting money away each year for that. And we're estimating that additional ongoing costs would be 1.5 million. Next slide please. So that was basically it for that. So let me go into that a little bit more. We think that this could just be done more for the, from the budget process as opposed to anything policy related. Once you have the replacement cost that's part of a budget and tied to the equipment replacement fund, it's there and that's not one that we would touch. I would say that I do recall and I'm fuzzy on the details of it, but I do recall that back during the recession when we were looking at any way we could come up with a way to benefit or ease the impact on the general plan that I think we did do a equipment holiday at that point. I would never come to you and suggest that we do anything like that again. It's just what it ends up doing is it does more bad than it did good. So what you would have here is you had to have an ongoing cost, equipment cost in the fire department and it would be a little bit higher than what it is now, but there would be no need to develop a policy around it. It would just be the act of committing the initial funds in order to get them up to place. And we would come back to you at budget with what that actual cost is and request that action at that point. So, and then I'll just we're at the next step to let you know before we go into questions on the capital replacement. So we are working with the other departments to come up with a strategy on deferred maintenance for city facilities. I expect that to be a significant cost just in terms of HVAC units. I think we have a public safety building that literally has a crack running through the middle of it and other things like that. The strategy in the past has been, we've deferred a lot of that. A, because we didn't have money to spend on it, but B, we were hoping that these assets might be used in like a P3 or something like that. So we didn't wanna put money into fixing facilities if we were gonna turn around and give those up at a reasonably sooner date. I have no idea when we're gonna do anything like that. And meanwhile, we have facilities that are now crumbling even more. So there is something that needs to be done. Obviously there, we still have a lot more work to do from a staff level to be able to provide you with a good strategy moving forward on it. I'm just giving you the heads up that that's there and we'll return to April with a strategy very much like what you saw today. And then we are working, not only are we, we're working on all the documents to get the PFN in place for the trust management of that and getting the funding there, but we'll come back to the council or to the LC-PFA with a more of a direct policy on how we would go. It would address the year-end amounts, it will address the ongoing funding. You know, and we'll make it clear in there about the affirmative votes for council to change the policy. That's something that we've done before in other ones where we say that the council could change it via council action. And with that, I'm available for any questions. You have. John. Thanks, Chris. Thanks, Allen. I think I was probably around for that holiday vote and it probably seemed like the right thing to do at the time. We were, it was definitely a struggle, but if we ever think about doing that again, I hope you bring that up. I'm curious about the funding procedure and how that six to seven million initial funding, what could one have the possibility of taking the estimated ongoing additional cost and increasing that for a few years and then reducing it after a period of time and by not, the reason to do that would be to reduce that initial funding required from six to seven million to some other number. Is that, would that be a strategy that would work or are we expecting to need to replace some of this big equipment so quickly that we needed to get that initial funding up to that level faster? Yeah, I think, so I'm gonna be kind of general in my comments here because I haven't seen the, I know I was sent the replacement schedule. I think we're still working on it between the fleet folks and the fire folks and getting that aligned. But what I would say is that you know that you have a number of vehicles out there and they're gonna need to be replaced. They have needed to be then replaced. You're gonna, we just had to do two of them, right? They were like the council on that lease purchase back in December and that's in process. You know, we're gonna, I'm sure that there's one or two or maybe three that are ready to go real soon. I think you have the benefit of having not only the fiscal stability fund, but you have year-end surplus money to be able to make this right.  But you actually have the funds there to be able to set that right and to get it moving forward. So that would be my recommendation on it. I think that would be the better course to go is it's a big full of advice, but it's one that is, I think needed and you have the ability to do that now. Okay, well, I appreciate that. Thanks for your candor. Tom? Yeah.  No, I think I'm anticipating your question. I left it out, so.  Anyway, my question was because this is a capital expenditure and obviously with the different streams of funding that have been available through the state and the feds would measure O for this purpose, potentially be an option. I know it might require implementation change to what's there, and I know fires different than police, but they do some capital expenditures for their measure O, might that be a way to at least help or contribute to the initial funding required? So my recollection of how measure O works is that it would need to be a enhancement. And these are replacements of existing ones. So to use measure O money, that would be supplanting and wouldn't be allowed under the ordinance. I guess I'm just suggesting it is an enhancement to use a vehicle that is near its end of its life stage because I'm guessing not only do these new fire apparatus have more bells and whistles than the old one. I'm just wondering if it's been explored and they say, no, it's not an option, that's fine. I just would like consideration for it. Is that a possible funding stream? Not for all the six to seven, but again, we're cutting and pasting to come up with that figure and that is a revenue source that could be available. Right, I think also that they're using some of those dollars for facilities that they have for that building stations that are also part of it. If you know that they do also buy equipment, they have that ability where they've had the fund balancer to be able to support both of those tasks. What I'll do is I'll confer with the city attorney's office on this, but I do remember vaguely a lot of heartburn with the initial measure of COC when we were figuring out how we were gonna do the police vehicle. And the planting was a really big issue there. I just, yes, they're probably a more modern fire engine that we would get that I just don't think that we can stretch that definition that that being an enhancement. But I know what you're saying and absolutely, we'll give that every look. I've been involved with that for a number of years and that just raises the flag. Yeah, and I'm sure I'll have a wonderful conversation with Chief Westrop at the appropriate time. I'm just thinking more also with the community just thinking more also with the current administrations built back better, if there is infrastructure that may be coming, if it passes through federal legislation that could go for infrastructure, AKA fire stations, but it wouldn't be eligible for this type of use. And that's all I'm thinking if we can get creative. So thank you. I know you did and I appreciate that. Any other questions, John? All right, thanks, Alan. Let's go to public comment on this and see if anybody wants to provide comment. If you do hit the raise hand feature on your Zoom. I see no hands. That and recording secretary, did we have any voicemail or email public comment? No emails were received. All right, I'll bring it back. Thanks, Alan. You know, I speak for the other two council members as well that this is exactly the kind of thing that we have been trying to drive toward. And you're right. When we set aside $40 million, it was the intention of this group to make sure that we were stabilizing the organization in the short term and making sure that we had the funds available should haven't forbid another disaster happen while we got our fiscal health in order and looking at our long-term liabilities to try to provide options. I know John asked the question a lot and no, we can't tie the hands of future councils, but we can put in place the processes that we need today to be able to then 10 years, 20 years down the road, say we put the city in the best position and hopefully not, and I told you so. So I appreciate you and your team and all the work they've been doing on this. I look forward to us bringing this to council and I like your timeline of being able to implement this with the adoption of this next year's budget. I think that that would make the existing council very happy to get that across the finish line. Right. John, Tom, any additional comments? Which you said, I really appreciate Alan, because again, you're spot on, I really appreciate it. You're tackling the bear that we've been looking at for years and it's not easy, but it's the right thing to do. And I think this council will agree with that. It's hard to know what future councils will do, but if we make the case, we'll have a better chance of success in the future. All right, with that, let's go ahead and move on to our next item. That's the next meeting agenda item. Alan, do you want to give us a preview or do you want to hear from council members to see if there's anything compromise for them? Well, we have, so one, we'll need to move that meeting towards the end of the month because it'll be our quarterly budget performance thing. So I have two things that would be on the agenda. So one would be doing our third quarter budget performance to port out. We'll focus on the general fund again, although I think I'm also gonna bring the parking fund there so you can get a sense of where we are with that fund and moving forward there. And then the other item will be that third component of the fiscal strategy being the first payment. So that is probably gonna take the full two hours to do it. We'll send out a meeting thing, but generally when we do the quarterly report outs, we do it that last Thursday of the month. So that's what we'll try to target that and hopefully that'll work. Okay, and I will be out of town probably for that and that's fine if that's the best time for the rest of the committee. Let's just make sure that John and Tom can be there and I can get you questions ahead of time and I can watch the video after the fact. Yeah, just to understand with doing the quarterly reports, the first two weeks out of that month is takes just to get everything posted and to where it's report ready. And then it's a week for us to get the information together for you to do. So moving it up is really difficult for us to do. That's unfortunately where we are in those end of quarter end of year items. Yeah, understood. John, Tom, anything to add? No, I know if you're talking about April 28th, are you talking about the last Thursday in April? I think off the top of my head that's how hard it would be, yeah. Okay, I just have a 5.45, I would have a... Well, I could actually move into six o'clock if it's gonna take two hours. I can just tell the other board that I'll be a little bit late. Yeah, I'll try to go through it fast. But I do think that, you know, I thought we would be out under an hour today. And so again, we went a little bit longer, that's my bad. But we'll try to hone that down as quickly as we can. I wasn't gonna say that, so. You know, my only suggestion or thought would be for a few... And again, this is long term because we're having similar conversations with some members of the continuum of care. A lot of our efforts towards homelessness, like what we've done, housing focus, safe parking. That's very expensive as we know, but to sustain that effort with the wraparound services, what's that funding stream gonna look like? And whether we need to go to our federal lobbyist to find some other funding streams to keep up that effort. I would love to talk about, because right now we have the money, but I'm looking four or five years down the road that we're actually housing people. We're not to functional zero yet. What is the sustained funding? Because I'd hate for some of the efforts that this council has taken to have evidence-based approaches. We just haven't identified what are the funding streams quite yet. So I would like to, I think this might be the appropriate subcommittee to at least start those discussions. Unless Mr. Mayor, you have some other thoughts as to where we might want to do it for sustainability. Now that sounds good to me, Tom. Great. All right, let's go to public comment, see if anybody has anything to add for future agenda topic item. And I'm not seeing any. So I'll go ahead and bring it back again. Just thanks to Alan, thanks to the team. And with that, we will adjourn today's meeting. Thank you all. Bye-bye.


what's up guys welcome to another episode of bass lady pick one today I will be showing you some simple bass techniques you can make use of okay get your bass let's get started actually I was not slapping on that groove I was just applying force on that note to bring out that slap sound out so I was doing the so you can actually apply force on that note to bring that slap sound so it's almost the same thing okay then okay that's exactly what I'm doing so I'm not doing this is soft this is harder the next one I want to show you is the ghost note you can hear the ghost note in between the chord changing of that groove there's another good technique of beautifying your bass groove your bass lines the ghost notes climbing up to the two okay I thought about ghost notes my previous lesson you can go check it out I talked about how you can start building your ghost notes so that your playing won't be empty it won't be just plain okay you see all these techniques are bringing out different feel okay different feel different dynamics that's what they're bringing out the next technique there is so you can practice that you didn't just walk down that was what I did the groove is one three four two flat five five that was what I was doing on b-flat okay so okay instead of you going this way you're not applying any techniques it's just natural you're just grooving it plain it's just plain but when you want to the same groove when you want to apply the ghost note the clock had the string bend okay I did that I dragged the G string down all these things work also with timing let me rephrase everything again with the ghost note underneath going to your two two two five so the clock had will be this way okay it's different from okay so that was it that's the vibrato on the notes I am this is my five okay so that's it so you can practice them string bend the muting so practice them honestly you'll be amazed how you start sounding when you play so guys basically these are the techniques the few best techniques there are a lot of techniques out there so if you're playing just try them they bring out different fields from every the normal way of you playing they spice up your playing they spice up your groove there's no big deal about everything I did here it's simple they are simple techniques you can just walk on get used to them slowing very soft not applying force on the string okay so just as if you're floating so you can practice this on all the strings hmm okay so that was it so guys hope this is helpful hope you got one of the things from this video if you're new to this channel do not forget to hit the subscribe button before you leave okay you can afford to miss new videos I upload every week hit the subscribe button turn on the notification bell and um if you need private lessons from me every information is right there on the screen all right there in the description below okay chat me via whatsapp send me an email indicating you need some private lesson and I will tell you how you can go about the whole stuff okay I will see you in my next video bye


The scholarly communications librarian here at UCLA, that's a photo of me on the left pointing out the fact that we seem to have matched the day that I saw the Picasso at the Ontario gallery. So on the right, you'll see a number of different things that I work on here at UCLA library. But we're only going to really touch on a couple today. The first being copyright and fair use and then we'll also be looking at licensing for a little bit. So I do have a quick poll set up for you. So I'm going to go ahead and send that now. Two simple questions. First, what brings you here today. You can answer I love all things copyright my instructor here for the DND. And then the second question is how familiar are you with fair use. Right. So we'll go ahead and give everyone a chance who wants to respond to go ahead and respond to the poll it's completely voluntary it just helps me to know kind of who we have here in the room with us. Okay, we'll give it another 30 seconds for the poll if you'd like to respond please feel free to. So it's looking like half of you are here for all things copyright and just a little bit less than half are here for DND. So we'll get into all of those topics and I'll give you an idea of when we'll hit on those topics pretty soon. It looks like there's a few of you who are who are fair use is new to you, and few that have heard it before, and then there's probably one or two copyright fair use experts in the room. So I'm going to go ahead and end our poll here. So you can all take a look at the results that we have. So thanks for all of the responses to that poll. And without further ado we're going to launch into our content here. Okay. All right. So if you're here today.  Now, first is with many things that are law related a quick disclaimer. I'm not an attorney and I cannot offer legal advice. And even if I was an attorney I cannot and am not your attorney. So the following information here we're presenting today to educate about us copyright law in general terms. If you're unclear about your options when it comes to a specific legal issue related to copyright. We encourage you to consult with an attorney who has a background in copyright law. Right. Now that the disclaimer has been delivered on to the content says promise today's talk is going to involve some copyright. There will be a little bit of data science and then of course it'll be some DND for questions I'll pause at the end of each of these sections, and we'll also reserve some time at the end for questions. If you do have questions, please make sure to type those questions into the Q&A section that should be available in your toolbar for zoom. And if you do have any technical issues you can let us know in the general chat. All right. Thank you. So now we'll get started with some copyright and fair use. So for the purposes of this section, I will be generally sticking just to copyright, but I think it's important to place the context of copyright within this larger concept of intellectual property. And also to distinguish it from other types of IP, such as patents and trademarks, which we are not exploring today. So here the US Copyright Office says that creations of the mind form intellectual property. These are creative works or ideas that are embodied in a form that can be shared or can enable others to recreate emulate or manufacture them. You'll hear me talk about this again as tangible. There are four ways that intellectual property is protected patents, trademarks, trade secrets and copyright. So again, we'll be only exploring the copyright aspect of things today, but all of these different forms of intellectual property do intersect with our daily lives on a regular basis. So what's copyright? Well, we're going to only be talking about copyright in the United States. And here in the US copyright is a type of intellectual property that protects original works of authorship. As soon as the author fixes the work in a tangible form of expression. So, a type of intellectual property, we are all copyright users. And we're also all copyright owners. So everyone in this room here has used copyrighted material and everyone in this room has certainly either in their career as a student or as a librarian, or in another creative capacity created materials that have been eligible for and receive copyright protection. These are the standards for receiving copyright protection. For the US copyright protection actually is something that is very much linked to our historical roots, and it is in fact the first nation to have included a reference to copyright within its constitution. To quote, to promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for limited time to authors and inventors, the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries. Now, these works need to be original works of authorship in order to qualify for copyright protection. They must be in a fixed and tangible medium of expression. There must be the result of some creative effort so they cannot just be a list that is a list of facts for instance. Right, and then another thing to note here with respect to copyright is really really looking at copyright from a perspective of it's a jurisdiction of use meaning the law that applies is a law where you're using the copyright where your location is physically so here for the context of our students, the only thing that we're talking about and all of the copyright law that applies is US copyright law. So what rights does a copyright owner get. Actually, they get a lot. It's a bundle of them. So, under copyright, you have the right to make copies. The rights create derivative works like translations or adaptations. The right to distribute which includes selling renting leasing lending, the right to perform in public, such as the play or public performance, the rights to publicly display a work this can be a painting, it can be a sculpture, a manner of different things. And then finally the right to digital audio transmission it's also sometimes called bright for broadcast. All of these rights collectively make up copyright. The right owner may decide that he or she or it, if it's a company wants to license the material to other parties to third parties. So when you see an older publications things like all rights reserved. They're referring to the specific rights here. How long does copyright protection last. Well, under the current law because copyright law has changed a bit since the founding of the United States in the later adoption of the Constitution. Works created on or after January 1 1978 enjoy a copyright status that's calculated as life of the author plus 70 years. So that's generally true for individually created works. There's a different standard for corporate works. And also, there's an exception for copyright protection when it comes to us government works. What if you're not a copyright owner. Well, copyright grants exclusive rights to the rights owner, but there are some exceptions and we're going to really focus on one today. The exceptions are fair use the first sale doctrine and exceptions specifically for libraries and archives. There are also options of licensing or obtaining explicit written permission to use copyrighted material. All right. So some of you mentioned or indicated in the poll that you knew a little bit about fair use but for others you mentioned that it was new to you. The important part of United States copyright law is the fair use doctrine because it permits the use of copyrighted content without need to seek permission of copyright owner if it meets certain criteria. So what is that. Fair use is a case by case test found in copyright law. When met, it allows a use of a copyright protected work without permission. For example, using a quote from a book in an article may be a fair use. The fair use concept is central to copyright law and helps promote freedom of expression and innovation. Let's look at some basic concepts. There is no formula to ensure that using a particular amount of work will qualify as fair use. Also, it's not as simple as declaring I think my use is fair. While the law gives some examples of things that are traditionally fair use, not all uses that fall under these categories are actually fair uses and some specific uses that do not fall under these categories have been found to be fair uses. Fair use is a case by case inquiry. We have to analyze each use of a work. Essentially fair use asks us to think through our actions. Federal law sets out four fair use factors. The first evaluates the purpose and character of the use. An educational non-commercial or transformative use is more likely to be considered fair. A transformative use adds new purpose, meaning or message not present in the original as opposed to merely replacing the original work. A use that merely replaces the original use or purpose of the work is less likely to be considered fair. The second factor considers the nature of the copyrighted work and will favor fair use if the work is factual or previously published. Here, consider copyrights purpose to encourage creative expression by providing exclusive rights to authors. The third factor evaluates how much of the original work is used. In addition, pay attention to the importance of what was taken from the work. Are you using a lot of the original work or the heart of the work? Taking too much when not necessary is less likely to be fair use. The fourth factor analyzes whether the new use harms the existing or potential market for the original work. Fair use requires an analysis of all the facts and factors. The factors may point in different directions and may not lead to a clear result. It is important when thinking about fair use not to jump to conclusions. Only a judge can make an official determination of fair use. This usually happens during an infringement case. Sometimes it can be hard to rely on fair use, especially if there isn't a lot of case law available. Finally, if you don't know if a use is a fair use, you can always ask for permission from the copyright owner. If you decide to rely on fair use, be thoughtful and deliberate and keep these core points in mind. To learn more about how fair use is applied in different situations, visit the Copyright Office's Fair Use Index. Does everybody feel prepared with fair use now? So just in summary to go over that again because there may be a reason to know this in a few minutes. Fair use doctrine is codified in the limitations on exclusive rights fair use in the Copyright Act of 1976. It's in section 107. And it allows for the use of copyright protected works without seeking permission of the rights holder. Purpose and character of use is really important to consider. So examples of potentially fair uses would be things like parody satire, political and scholarly commentary, reporting the news. And so something like a class paper would likely be an educational use and would also potentially qualify as more likely to be fair. In terms of nature of the original copyrighted work, there's a question about how creative or original was it? Was it just a list of facts or was there a lot of creativity involved? There, the amount and substantiality of the portion taken really looks at your use of the new of the copyrighted work within your work. Did you take what you needed? Was your use excessive or was it necessary to use the amount that you used in order for you to make your point? And then finally, the fourth one is sometimes known as the market effect. And that really looks at the commercial impact that your use of that copyright protected material had on its market abilities. Did you profit commercially? And did that commercial profit actually impact the market of the original? So these are all things to keep in mind. Now, these four factors happen to emerge out of a court case of Folsom v. Marsh in 1841 and really very little has changed since then. Judge Joseph Storey's four factor fair use test is in fact what we use today and what courts use today to determine whether or not a potential use or use case is fair. Now, show of hands, yes or no. How many of you have heard about public domain? We sometimes hear from people, students, faculty, everyone really that they found something online. So, does that mean it's a public domain? It looks, yeah. Okay, great. Looks like some of you have heard about public domain, but public domain has a very specific meaning when it comes to copyright. And in this context, public domain means something that is not or is no longer protected by copyright in the United States. This applies to works that were produced before 1927. There are some exceptions that apply due to changes in US copyright law that was brought on by us adopting the burn convention. But in most cases, this general rule of thumb would apply. Now copyright protection has expired or was never eligible for those things that we consider to be in the public domain. And when I was mentioning different works earlier, one of the exceptions to works that have copyright protection is US government publications. So, this one also has a little bit of an asterisk in that if you are a government contractor, you may potentially have negotiated a contract where you're allowed to retain copyright. In most cases, most US government documents that are directly produced by the government do not have copyright protection. This means that these types of documents can be good ways or good sources rather for you to utilize in research and remix and reuse purposes. The other thing to keep note of is simply being able to find and access something online does not put this item in the public domain. When it comes to copyright, if you're looking for something in the public domain, it's going to enable you to be able to use it for any purpose without restriction under copyright law. But again, it's because either the copyright protection has expired, or the object was never eligible for protection in the first place. The public domain is appears form of open and free reuse since no one owns or controls the copyrighted material in any way. Just a quick note here, if we're not sure about who owns work, but it was published after 1927 and presumed to still have copyright protection. Just because we're unable to at the moment identify the entity of the copyright owner does not put that work into the public domain. Unfortunately, they get another name which is a little bit sad but it does describe the state that they're in where they're called orphan works. So, just keep that in mind not being able to determine at the moment who a copyright owner is does not place an object immediately into the public domain. In most cases copyright protection would still apply. So are you all feeling comfortable with fair use yet, because I think it's time for a little test. So, you be the judge here, I'm sure that many of you have seen this poster it's sometimes referred to as the Obama hope poster. And this poster was created by shepherd fairy in 2008. It's also a challenge here. Should it be considered a work by shepherd fairy, or is it in fact, either something that should be copyrighted to the Associated Press, or does it violate or infringe upon the copyright of the Associated Press. So I'm going to ask you to determine whether or not you think this poster is a fair use or not a fair use let me give you some additional information. I'm sure that the copyright office video stated that only a judge in a court of law can make that official determination. So, let's play judge here. I'll give you the facts and you'll be able to determine and make a vote as to whether or not you think the help poster is a fair use. It's a little bit complex in this case because when it comes to things like images there can be multiple entities involved, and it's not always immediately obvious who owns copyright. Why do I say that. Well, because here the photograph that I'm showing you was photographed by freelance photographer Manny Garcia. However, the copyright for this image is owned by the Associated Press, the reason being that Garcia created this photograph as a work for hire. What does that mean. Well, in copyright works for hire created by an employee as part of their regular duties, or they occur when a certain type of work is created as a result of an express written agreement between the creator. In this case that would be Manny Garcia, and a party especially ordering or commissioning it. In this case that would be the Associated Press. So when a work is made for hire the co hiring or commissioning party is considered the author and therefore the copyright owner. So, let's take a look here. And we can actually see a progression. I'll give you a little bit more information about what we're looking at. So, very began selling the Obama poster, the Obama hope poster in 2008. And it ended on design on the photo that was taken by Manny Garcia. However, it took until January of 2009 for the Associated Press to determine, in fact, that the photograph that was used by shepherd fairy was the one that they had the copyright to. In 2009 by July of 2008, there had been more than 200,000 vinyl hope stickers that have been created 75% of which had been given away to support the Obama presidential campaign. The image became one of the most widely recognized symbols for the Obama campaign, spawning many iterations eventually appearing on different items of swag. And it was also commissioned in some cases by the Obama campaign for additional production. fairy had reached out to the Obama campaign for permission to use a photo, but fairy never contacted the Associated Press to license the image that he used. So, looking at here, you can see that there are a number. There are two photographs that were taken over Obama that appeared to be very similar. However, it was later determined that it was the top photograph the Manny Garcia AP photo. That was the basis of the hope poster. When the AP made this determination, they began to negotiate with shepherd fairy for compensation. What happened is a little bit interesting, rather than going to court and waiting for fairy waiting for himself to be sued, he actually sued the AP first and asked for a declaratory judgment from a judge to confirm that his use of the photograph was a fair use. So fairy went to the judge and asked him to say, Hey, my use is fair. Can you just give me that judgment so that I don't have to give the AP any royalties. Well, the AP showed the image that I show you here, and they maintained that all of the same angles of Garcia's photograph were maintained, and the general coloration of the photo was also inspired by the composition that Garcia created. Or they claim that fairy and fenged on their copyright. So what do you think, is the hope poster a fair use. You should be able to select a yes or no option in zoom. If not, folks who think it's a fair use can just give me a thumbs up. Let's see what you all think. Seeing a couple saying that the use is fair. Anybody else wants to chime in. Do you think that it's a fair use. All right, it looks like about half of us think that this was a fair use, and maybe the other half either are abstaining or think that it's not a fair use well. As I said, only a judge in the court of law can render a verdict on whether or not a use is officially fair. And so in this particular case, we don't quite get there but we get very close. Because what actually happened is the judge in this case told the two parties to settle out of court, because he felt that going further in trial would mean that the AP or the Associated Press would win the case. This means that the judge did not think that shepherd fairies use of the many Garcia photograph was a fair use. While we have no official verdict on the question of fair use, the statement strongly suggests that this failed the four factor test. So there's a little bit of information that came out after this settlement. And this sometimes happens with copyright suits and IP related suits. There's just a little bit of trivia here, which is that in the following year in February of 2012 shepherd fairy actually ended up pleading guilty to destroying and fabricating evidence showing that he had used the AP photo. In that period of time, it was revealed that yes he had in fact used many Garcia photo it was not a fair use, and he was actually sentenced to two years of probation and 300 hours of community service along with a fine of $25,000. And interestingly, because this case did generate a lot of interest and attention. They went back to the original photographer and he was quoted as saying that he was so proud of the photograph. And of the work that fairy did artistically with it and the effect and impact that it had, but quote, he did not contain take people taking things just because they can off the internet. The way from all of this is just because you find something online does not make the work of work in the public domain. So are there any other questions about copyright and fair use before we move on to the next section. All right, we'll be moving on to licenses. Here that I'm talking today about licenses in terms of explicit written permission there is another part of copyright law, where licenses refer to compulsory and statutory licenses this only applies to recorded music so we will not be talking about that context, in terms of copyright and licenses. So for today, a copyright owner can give another party a third party or multiple third parties permission to use their copyright at work. This permission is granted through what we call a license and it gives explicit explicit written permission, and usually in exchange for monetary payment. So, the thing to note here that's emboldened is that written permission is necessary verbal agreements do not work for copyright. I'll copyright related licenses must be executed in writing. If you want to use someone else's copyrighted work, especially if there is that commercial purpose remember that's related to that fourth factor in the fair factor for factor fair use test, you'll usually need to obtain a license in order to exploit the work commercially. So, there are things that licenses can do generally speaking they'll do what we have here listed at the top which is that they will grant an individual who is not the copyright owner, more rights than they would normally have under fair use so they would be able to exploit one or more of that bundle of rights that we talked about earlier. But licenses can also sometimes restrict and grant fewer rights than an individual might have under fair use. This is not a typical use case, but there are examples that exist and I'll show you one at the end. As we talk about the dungeons and dragons situation. So, there are two general categories of licenses. They're what we call exclusive licenses, which only the licensee can use the work in the manner that's described in that license during the period of time in which it's valid. This means even the original copyright owner is not able to use that work in the manner that's described, unless the licensee also grants permission for that individual to do so because they are the exclusive licensee of that particular manner of use. There's another type of license and that's what we would call a non exclusive license this means that you can give the same right to multiple entities multiple individuals multiple corporations if you want to be able to use a copyrighted work in a specific manner that the license describes. Here the copyright owner can also exercise those same rights during that period. There's no restrictions on them to do so. And one big thing to note here, and also a reason why it's important to maintain a relationship with the copyright owner, even if you're the licensee is the fact that only a copyright owner can pursue infringement claims so if you have a license and somebody is violating the license you need to have the original copyright owner pursue that violation with you. That's something to keep in mind. As we go on. Now we're going to talk a little bit about what we call public copyright licenses. Has anybody in this room heard of public public copyright licenses.  This is a term that most people are not as familiar with, but tends to be something that there's some degree of interaction that we have with, especially if you're working in an academic context. So, all right, I can see there's a couple of you that have. Okay, great. Thanks. So a public copyright license grants additional rights to the general public. So there's not going to be just a specific named licensee as it would be in a normal license rather this license makes this work available in a particular way to all of the general public. There's no additional action that needs to be taken by the copyright owner to do this the in other words they don't need to execute a separate license. And the public does not need to do anything in order to take advantage of the effects of the license either public licenses grant permissions for certain rights that would otherwise be normally considered most likely copyright infringement. So, here are some examples of some more popular models of public copyright licenses, there's the new GPL license. There's also the Creative Commons license we're going to take a look at both of those in a bit by no means are they the only public copyright licenses, but there are quite a few, particularly with those who are involved in open source and freedom and free software movements. So, you'll see these types of public copyright licenses being utilized. There's a subset of public copyright licenses that are what we call free and open licenses. And so these actually in most cases, reserve almost no rights. And the only thing that they really typically asked for is attribution. So, in these cases, there's an acknowledgement that you make as the user of that copyrighted material, and no other permissions are necessary for you to remix reuse the material as you see fit. So, here I list two different Creative Commons licenses that would qualify as free and open the first being CC by SA SA standing for share like by standing for the attribution requirement. And then the second is CCO or CC zero, which is a complete waiver by the individual of all of their natural copyrights to that creative work. There is another license that is the CC public domain license that that one really just declares that the item is already in the public domain. And so as you'll remember, as we talked about earlier, public domain is either expired or never eligible for copyright protection to begin with. So it's a little bit different from you, affirmatively giving up any of your copyrights, which is what the CC zero one does it's a waiver license. So we'll take a look here on this next slide you can see here is a GPL. And it's really important to note that there are some foundational tenants essentially for these licenses with GPL that they're specifically for use for software for any purpose it does not matter if it's educational use or commercial use or personal use you can use it under all of those conditions. There's a freedom to change the software as needed so you can essentially hack that or jailbreak depending on what the circumstances of the item that you're using. There's freedom to share the software with your friends and neighbors, there's no, you bought it, you're the only one the copy sort of restriction like that at all. And then there's the freedom to share any of the changes that you made as well so this is an incredibly open license to make what we would call free software. In academic context probably what you're more familiar with is the Creative Commons license. This is a license that does not wave copyright there is sometimes that misconception here copyright protection does exist with items that are licensed with a CC license it really depends on here the degree, because what you're doing is you're publicly conferring a particular permission or right to the public without them having to contact you for permission so we're skipping. That permission step and making things more readily available for reuse here. So you can see here pictured is actually the license tool that helps individuals to select the level of openness that they want for the license that they're going to confer on the creative work that they have permission to make a license for. So, the important thing to know here is for CC, you must have, you must be the copyright owner in order for you to create a license for your copyrighted work you cannot use a CC license on someone else's copyright work. Because you don't have the legal permissions to do so. The other thing that's really important to know about copyright and Creative Commons licenses is that Creative Commons is an irrevocable license so once you make the determination of which license you want to use. That's it. That's the license that goes on to that particular version of that work in perpetuity. Really important things to keep note of. So if you're not sure which license you should use for a work that you want to give a Creative Commons license but there may be some considerations that you'd like to walk through. This is definitely something that you can reach out to us at the library to help you with. So, with that, are there any other questions for licenses. Either Creative Commons or otherwise in this section, because we're about to move on to Dungeons and Dragons so any last questions for licenses. All right. Okay, so we're moving on to what half of the room really wants to hear about so thanks for bearing with me hopefully we have now the foundation to understand what's really been going on the past several months related to Dungeons and Dragons. So first, a little bit of background from for the folks in the room about DND. So DND or Dungeons and Dragons, sometimes with the letter and then sometimes with the ampersand. It's easier when talking about DND to use a letter and particularly when we're talking about technical things like having it appear in URL since the ampersand doesn't really work in that context. So this is going to come up a little bit later. So Dungeons and Dragons was and is a very popular tabletop role playing game or TTRPG. It was first published in 1974 by TSR. The copyright and intellectual property were then assumed by Wizards of the Coast, which has been publishing and maintaining DND since 1997. So DND was designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, and it's currently in its fifth edition. But as you can see kind of from the image, hopefully on the right that red box. It's now also been licensed and associated with some different other commercial IP. This is especially true since its incorporation of Wizards of the Coast into Hasbro in the reorg that took place in 2021. So in this particular example here, I'm showing the DND version that is affiliated or licensed with Netflix's Stranger Things. In fact, the relationship between these two properties is arguably really intertwined and I'll talk a little bit more about that in just a moment, but more information about the evolution of DND. So the popularity in just three years after its release, 1977, it was so popular that it was decided that we should split DND into two different versions, a basic DND, and then an advanced version. So sometimes called a DND for those who really, really love the rules. Now for anybody who's played DND, you'll know that there are a lot of rules and in fact, that's kind of the core of the publication of the game is that there are these big rule books that explain the game mechanics and how it works by a show of hands. Is there any folks in this room who are fans or players of DND? I'm seeing quite a few. Don't be afraid to self indicate. So, I'm sure there are a couple of DMs maybe in the room as well. So here, basic Dungeons and Dragons, it's going to be really important that we understand that the split occurred because it will have something to do with the controversy that happens next. So the popularity of DND for those of you who play in for those of you who don't really spawned a lot in the world of gaming, especially in tabletop gaming, both in terms of encouraging free materials to be created and commercial. So you can see here at the right, there's on YouTube, a couple of YouTubers creating resources for folks who want to make their own custom stylized D&D maps, and also folks who are learning how to create 3D printed minis or custom miniatures. So that kind of information is made freely available by these creators on their respective social media and YouTube channels. But in the background, you'll also see a big array of dice. And DND in particular is very famous for that 20-sided die. And you can see there are a few in that photo there on Etsy and other marketplaces. There are a lot of options these days for customizable D&D dice. Some of these have been the subject of very successful Kickstarter campaigns that have raised a lot of money to create custom paraphernalia just for D&D. All of this will become very important in just a moment. Now here's a bit of the data science. So here's a Google Trends analysis of the popularity of D&D tracking from the beginning of the service of Google Trends, which is 2004 to the present. We're looking specifically at the trends, interest levels of D&D on the web. And you can see here in this particular chart that D&D appears to experience a gradual increase in popularity starting roughly around 2015. But for folks who were around earlier and also fans of Stranger Things, you'll note that D&D was extremely popular in the 1980s. So 2015, an increase in popularity in D&D. By the following year in 2016, a lot of Hollywood was either secretly or openly playing D&D and hosting sessions with many A-list and B-list and C-list celebrities. Here's an article about that very thing in the Hollywood reporter that appeared in 2016. And then, what about Stranger Things? Well, set during the 1980s, the series really reflected the popularity of the CTRPG. That was true through that period of time in which it was set. You can see here in this trend graph from October, actually from July of 2016 to May of 2022, there are several spikes that I show here with red arrows. They happen to correspond roughly to the periods of the season releases of Netflix Stranger Things show. There's July 15th, that's that first leftmost arrow. There's a little spike there. Then October 2017, then again in July 2019, and then in the summer of July, I mean summer of 2022. So you can see here, there appears to be some correlation where there's a little bit of a spike every time Stranger Things seems to drop another season. But in 2019, during the innocence of our pre-pandemic days, D&D was already getting extremely popular. It had been growing since 2015, 2016. By 2019, there were live action role playing groups that were playing D&D sort of in person in real life in a way. And so there was ever more popularity of the game or so it seemed. But the period of COVID isolation actually did not hurt D&D. In fact, popularity of D&D peaked around the summer of 2022, which is that first leftmost red arrow, which was within a month or two of the dropping of the fourth season of Stranger Things. One could also argue that the popularity went up as well with the pandemic raging on. But here we can see there was a very visible drop in popularity at the beginning of 2023. In fact, we can precisely take the crash in popularity and identify its cause, which was between January 5th and January 13th of 2023. So does anybody in the room know what I'm alluding to? I'm assuming some of you probably do. If you know what happened in January of this year that caused an impact on D&Ds and dragons, please raise your hand. If not, I will show you in just a moment. Yeah, something definitely happened and the data certainly backs it up. So what actually happened? Well, corporate greed is what happened according to this article. Dungeons and Dragons fans faced, prepared to face their greatest adversary, corporate greed. And this is an article that appeared in the New Republic. But why? What actually happened? Well, what happened was Gizmodo leaked or received a copy of a license. So we're coming full circle now. We're going back to licenses and now we're going to talk about two very important licenses. There are two important license events that occurred in the world of Dungeons and Dragons. The first being the dropping of the original open gaming license in the year 2000. So this came out in 2000 and it came out along with the D20 system manual. So this was all released together. The 900 word open gaming license was a quote perpetual worldwide, non exclusive license. I don't know if you remember what I said earlier about Creative Commons licenses being perpetual and irrevocable. So they're kind of the similar idea here in that these things when you put them out into the world, really, you can't change them or so we think. The OGL allowed independent publishers to use basic D&D. Remember I told you that SWIT would be important and they were able to take that D20 engine and incorporate that into a lot of other games. Because the OGL allowed companies other than Wizards of the Coast to create new properties, this also meant that new games could just be created that did not belong to Wizards at all. This effectively made the D20 engine, if you will, the core of the tabletop RPG industry. It also helped to establish careers for thousands of writers and streamers as a result of this because many folks started to comment and create content around D&D. The license also contributed to the growth of the universe of accessories for D&D like the materials that I showed you earlier, as well as the development of gaming YouTube channels that focused largely around this D&D world. But all of that was shaken up on January 5th of 2023. When Gizmodo published in Linda Kodoga's article Dungeons and Dragons new license tightens its grip on competition, an exclusive look at Wizards of the Coast's new gaming license. It showed that in a 9000 word long 1.1 version of the OGL that there were going to be a lot of changes. Independent publishers were now being asked by Wizards to register. This is something that you would not normally have to do even if you were using the materials under fair use. But they were being told that whether you were large or small, if you were a creator of content related to D&D, if you were an independent publisher, you needed to register with Wizards of the Coast and tell Wizards how much money you were making off of the D20 system or anything related to D&D. Wizards also was asserting in this 1.1 version license this right to siphon off a portion of their revenue of these third party creators. And finally, because of this type of language, it effectively revoked the original OGL. And they don't say in this 1.1 version license that this license OGL 2000, the 1.0 version is revoked, they just basically tell you that you can't use it anymore period, no exceptions. So effectively that's kind of the same thing. And looking at a couple of the other differences that are significant between the two licenses is that in the original open game license rules could be used in new tabletop RPGs without paying any sort of royalties. And in fact, we know that this happens. So games like Pathfinder, for instance, use that D20 engine have nothing to do with Wizards of the Coast and have never paid royalties to Wizards. And so because of the fact that publishers were building this content around it, the D20 engine essentially became the dominant way that TT RPGs were basically being played out in real life. The January 5th OGL leak said, and this is a quote directly from the language of that 9000 word license only allows for creation of role playing games and supplements in printed media and static electronic file formats. This does not allow for anything else, including but not limited to things like videos, virtual tabletops or VTT campaigns, computer games, novels, apps, graphic novels, music, songs, dances. And if you wanted to do a pandemonium in your larping session sorry but you can't do it. That's a pretty extensive list of restrictions. You may engage in these activities only to the extent allowed under the Wizards of the Coast fan content policy, which is a separate policy that is viewable online, or separately agreed between you and us. In other words, or if you don't follow the fan content license and you need something more you need to execute a new license with us directly. Well, what happened next. I call it revolts. Here's an article from the Guardian people are leaving the game, Dungeons and Dragons fans revolt against new restrictions. Wizards of the Coast which owns the game is preparing to change long standing licensing rules. Again the license that was originally in place the OGL, the literal OG is from 2000. More than 20 years have passed with those particular licensing terms in place, and many would argue that the world of DND has only grown and expanded as a result of that. What else happened as part of the revolt. Well, it's interesting. Of course, social media was involved social media users urged other players to go ahead and cancel their paid for subscriptions to Wizards online portal, DND beyond so this was a portal that's the official digital tool set of the game. It's a companion for the DND fifth edition, and it is owned by Wizards. So if you wanted additional functionality you had a paid subscription and a lot of serious DND fans did. Secondly, there was also a major open letter that was created by a group of D20 developers that called Wizards of the Coast quote, the dragon on top of the horde willing to burn the thriving village if only to get a few more gold pieces. And it characterized the version 1.1 OGL as an attempt to dismantle the entire RPG industry. So if you got from those words that people were furious, you are correct. And what happened next was not what Wizards or Hasbro wanted. In fact, so many people rushed to cancel their DND beyond subscriptions that a lot of things happened like they crashed the server for DND beyond. So if you can see here, what I call the Exodus and the continued Exodus, so many fans cancel that it crashes the page following backlash, and many many gaming related online magazines and publications reported on this particular news. It was definitely the talk for the first two three weeks of January of this year at least so this is relatively fresh. And what we are seeing here in this particular talk. Well, I mentioned also there was that open letter with that colorful language about a fire breathing dragon destroying and thriving village. Well, the cancellations, the irate folks, the folks who signed on to the open letter of which there were more than 77,000 players of DND. So that got Hasbro's attention and Wizards of the Coast chose to fully reverse course and revoke any of the 1.1 license. In fact, the current license that's still in play now is still OGL. The other thing that also came out of this that's a positive and also refers to some of the other things that I've mentioned in this talk is that the entire 5.1 SRD is now available under a Creative Commons license so the desire for players to have open access in some way to some of these different elements that were granted to them in that original license that they followed and that they insisted that the Wizards of the Coast follow really did have an impact. So we're getting very close to the end here I only have a couple of slides left, but what I wanted to reiterate here is that when we started at the beginning of this talk early in the slide I told you that we were all copyright users and we were all also copyright owners. And I also want to leave with you the fact that I hope you will exercise your voice as a member of the creator community because when we're all owners and all users this also inherently means that we're also part of the creative community and the creative commons. So because of this, you have a voice and as was demonstrated in this big revolt in Exodus with respect to D&D against a massive corporation like Hasbro, the users one. And I think we rolled a 20 so if you have any questions comments about that. I see there is a comment here in the chat. Alright, and I'll leave us with here this last slide with content which is we hope you'll exercise your right to fair use support open public licenses and we do have a guide for creators here so that's the URL for our guide for creators. And there's also an email address if you have any questions related to copyright. If you want us to help you navigate a potential fair use license. Please take advantage of those things and get in touch with us. So I did really prepare the talk to last just an hour I know we have a little bit of extra time both just in case folks might have questions but I do want to thank you for all of the attention and participation that you gave today. Thanks so much. And we hope that you will join us for the rest of Fair Use Week. If you're available tomorrow at noon. So I'm going to stop my screen sharing. If you'd like to ask any questions in the chat. We can definitely try to address those but again I want to thank you for you coming today and for your attention and interest in this topic. Right. We can go ahead and stop the recording.