to say a couple of introductory words here. This is the second most exciting evening of this week after last night's announcement by the Internet Archive to now have a way back machine for 90s-era gifts. So we're really happy you're here. This is the first event of a series of conversations about policy, about collaboration, and free knowledge that we want to have with you here at the Wikimedia Foundation. We also would love to have you contribute to the conversation by adding your thoughts on Twitter and tagging them with the hashtag Free Ideas. So what do we do here? The Wikimedia Foundation has the mission of empowering people to share educational content under a free license or in the public domain and to disseminate it globally. One of the things that we do in order to accomplish this mission is we run Wikimedia. And a couple of other Wikimedia projects such as Commons, Pictionary, Wikiversity, et cetera. So over the next two minutes or three minutes, I'm going to tell you a little bit about what my colleagues and I, what our team does in public policy. So we work in three pillars of policy. And the users, as you can see here, are always at the center of what we do. We work in five different fields. These include intermediary liability protection, access to knowledge, censorship, privacy, and copyright. The first field, access to knowledge, it's crucial to us. We believe that accessing and sharing knowledge is a fundamental right for everybody, not just for a couple of privileged few. In order to do so, we support open access. We want people to be able to contribute content to the Wikimedia and the Wikimedia projects. We don't just, they need the resources, they need to be able to research stuff, not just edit, they need information to get there. We want to think about how we can overcome barriers such as cost, accessibility, maybe even harassment that keeps people from safely participating in free knowledge. The second field where we are active and what we're concerned about is censorship. Being blocked, being filtered, being altered is a problem. Maybe not here, sometimes here, but certainly in a lot of countries. And we think about how people can cope with this, how they can share knowledge without being censored, how they can use circumvention tools, or how they can be supported through their community. We also do, we will like go to court in some cases. We will try to oppose takedown or removal or requests for alterations when they're in conflict with our values. And this, of course, goes for both private parties and governments. Privacy, the next field of public policy that we're active in. Privacy is essential for intellectual freedom. People need it to be able to speak their minds and to edit Wikipedia. And we think a lot about how we can empower people to edit and write without governments or private corporations spying or reading over their shoulder when they're writing. One of the things that we can do is our own privacy policy. We have a very strong privacy policy in place. What we also have is we have strong end-to-end encryptions for all our projects, which allows people to write and edit without people spying on them. But we do realize that privacy is a very complicated concept. And since we are a global movement, this is an ongoing conversation where there are a lot of different perspectives and opinions on this. The next field is intermediary liability protection from intermediary liability. For Wikipedia to function, people have to be able to edit, to write, and speak their minds freely. And that means that we, the Wikimedia Foundation, cannot interfere with what they're writing or monitor it. But for us to be able to do that, we need the law to have our backs, to provide safe harbors, to actually allow us not to monitor what's going on on our projects. In the US, the DMCA and the CDA help us with this. They protect us from liability for defamation and copyright infringement in Europe. The e-commerce directive is what we rely on often. And this helps Wikipedia grow without us actually just systematically watching. This helps the community do its work on its own. And finally, we also are interested in copyright, of course.  Internet is not a read-only medium. People should be able to create, share, remix content. And we support shorter copyright terms. We support broad copyright exceptions for people to use things that they find online and elsewhere. We also promote free licenses, for instance, Creative Commons licenses that are used on our projects. Because that directly translates into more content being available to be reused on Wikipedia. But of course, you're not here to hear me talk about copyright. There's somebody in the house who's much better at that and also funnier. Mike Masnick has been writing about copyright technology law for almost 20 years. And I only just found out that he's also the author of the term, the Barbara Streisand Effect. Fun fact, I guess. Yeah, again, I encourage you to contribute to the conversation on Twitter. Use the hashtag free ideas. Follow us at WikimediaPolicy. And here's Mike Masnick. We are so happy you're here. Thank you so much for agreeing to give this talk at this first event of our series Free Open Shared. Have fun. I'm sure you're going to be rapid fire. You'll see what I mean. All right, thank you. I'm going to get my slides up here. Here we go. Sure. Here we go. So thank you very much. And hello. Someone speak back. There we go. All right. Welcome, as mentioned, Mike Masnick. I am probably most well known for running a site called Tector, which is a blog that, as Jan mentioned, covers all sorts of things around tech policy and law. I also run a relatively new thing thing called the Cope Institute where we do things around bringing people together around these kinds of policy issues and also doing research and reports to try and contribute to the overall discussion around these things. So when I was asked, I'm going to push this down a little bit for some, when I was asked to do this talk and just described as a conversation about copyright, I started to think, well, what is it that we should be covering in a conversation about copyright? And as I was thinking about it, I was realizing I talk about copyright all the time. And I'm always thinking about it, talking about it, and copyright reform in particular. And I was wondering, how do I explain why it matters so much to me? And I was trying to figure out, is there a way that I could encapsulate that to this presentation? And I was thinking about it more and more. And I suddenly sort of had this idea and the reason why I'm always focusing on copyright and I'm always talking about copyright is that the more you think about it, the more you realize that copyright impacts everything, absolutely everything. And so for this talk, this sort of conversation about copyright, I figured that I was talking about copyright and everything else that it impacts. So it's a nice, narrow topic. We should be able to cover the whole thing in about 20 minutes and then we can have a conversation in about 400 slides. Don't worry, we're just getting started. So as a warning, just to be sort of upfront about this, just this week in the trade publication, this UK trade publication called the Register, there's a writer there named Andrew Arlowski, who I would say he and I don't agree on very much when it comes to copyright. So just this week, he wrote an article about something I wrote about where he basically accused me of making up something entirely, which was wrong. And he noted that our advice on a Mike Masner clock post is that if it tells you that the sky is blue and the grass is green, you'll still want to check for yourself. So consider that a warning that not everyone happens to agree with my views on copyright and everything. And some people may sense that, as they say around here, there's citation needed. And for the stuff that I talked about here today, I'm happy to provide citations later. If anyone has a question about where I'm getting this from or sort of what the background is. Now also to include more warnings because I want to be totally upfront about this. When I post an on tech dirt that I was coming here tonight and posting this, I got a comment and it's an anonymous comment, but I'm pretty sure that it's coming from someone who is sort of regularly mocking the kinds of things that I have to talk about and who may just possibly live in Washington DC and may possibly lobby for a certain industry. And so that comment was kind of mocking the speech that I'm about to give here and wrote it out as well, okay, I can summarize the shorter mic is going to be copyright is bad, copyright is dumb, and we need more and more exceptions. And so I just want to set the record straight on this, which is that reality is that I actually think that copyright is perhaps too frequently bad that copyright is sometimes dumb. And I agree on the last one, but we need more and more exceptions to copyright. So anyway, so this talk about copyright and everything, what I want to do is I'm going to start out by kind of explaining, I think sort of the more expected reasons, the reasons why lots of people talk about the problems of copyright and where the problems come in and why it's so important to understand copyright and understand copyright reform and kind of what's going on there. Second part is I'm going to go into slightly more unexpected reasons. These are the reasons where people who I think are really deeply involved with copyright fighters sort of aware of these things, but who are sort of loosely aware of it, don't necessarily realize that copyright is impacting all sorts of things that you wouldn't normally think of as copyright. And then finally, I want to go even a step beyond that, way beyond that to areas that I think the sort of fights around copyright and copyright reform are actually impacting much, much more and going way beyond anything that normally should or has to do with copyright and the kind of stuff that people just don't normally think about. So, now I'm really starting the presentation. All right, so starting with the expected reasons, I want to go back, I'm going to go back to the US Constitution, sort of the origins of copyright law in the US and that is sort of famously Article I, Section A to the Constitution, which reads that Congress shall have the power to promote the progress of science and the useful arts by securing for limited times authors and inventors the exclusive rights to their respective writings and discoveries. And I should say that I'm not going back to the Constitution because I'm sort of strict constitutionalist and I have to live by everything that the Constitution says, but actually because I think the reasons that are put forth in Article I, Section 8 about why we have copyright and patent, see are actually pretty good reasons. The idea that we should promote the progress of science and the useful arts is not a bad thing. And so I think it's a good idea and I think we should support it. And I should note just because this is somewhat important, people often get confused about the science and useful arts part of this. And in fact, I think most people get it backwards. They just read it and they don't know the history. They think that science means patents and useful arts means copyright because it has arts in it. That's actually wrong. It's actually the reverse. If you go to sort of language of the time when the Constitution was written in 1787, useful arts actually meant invention. So it's about patents like that. Science actually meant things like learning and education. Copyright was about encouraging learning and education. It's also why the very first Copyright Act of 1790 is subtitled an act for the encouragement of learning. So when we talk about to promoting the progress of science, we should be judging copyright law on whether or not it is promoting the progress of science or learning and education. And I think that many people, I'm assuming lots of people here would agree that today's copyright law in many, many cases does not promote the progress of science and education and learning. And in fact, that copyright is often quite the opposite of that and that it actually often encourages censorship. So if we look, one of the important things and understanding sort of the history of copyrights, that copyright really used to be a very, very limited concept. If you go all the way back to the 1790 version, it just covered bookstarts and maps and sort of expanded gradually over time and then expanded massively. Required registration before you get the copyright and it's limited to 14 years. You can get a 14 year extension. Whereas modern copyright law is very, very different. Copyright Act of 1976 expanded copyright to just massive levels. It's very, very different. No longer have to register anything. Everything is copyright as it was created. It was basically any sort of creative content that is new. And of course, it's life plus forever, definitely.  Whereas today basically, this is that same chart where copyrighted covers just about everything that was created. Any creative work basically today that is fixed in the tangible form under the Copyright Act of 1976. So that means that almost anything that anyone creates is covered by copyright as soon as it's created. This is a really important thing to realize because I don't think it will recognize it all the time. So I'm going to just repeat it again to make this very clear. Almost everything that anyone creates is covered by copyright as soon as it's created. Now, if you think about that, in fact, that that's true as of 1978 when the 1976 Copyright Act went into effect, we begin to realize that this runs into a bit of a conflict with this invention that was very much brand new in 1976 and was this academic toy in 1976 called the Internet. Of course, the Internet has gotten much, much bigger and more since then, but suddenly you have this internet where anyone can create, they can share, they can distribute, they can promote and as a few decades ago, they can monetize stuff on there. And that's true of just about any content. Now, I'm going to quote this guy. This is Clay Scherke, who's a professor and a thinker and a very good speaker. He's better than me. You should have him come here and do one of these presentations. He wrote this thing a few years ago, which I thought was really, really compelling, which where he talks about the idea that publishing is now a button. This is a very shortened version of it, the longer, fuller version of it. It says publishing is not evolving, publishing is going away, because the word publishing means a group of professional who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. That's not a job anymore. That's a button. There's a button that says publish and when you compress it, it's done. So keeping that in mind, I want to go back now to what I was saying about copyright being about promoting the progress of science and recognize the true history of that, which is that promoting the progress thing is a little bit misleading. If you really go back to the origins of US copyright law, you have to go back past the Constitution and past the Copyright Act of 1790 to this, which is the Statute of Anne in England, 1710, and which very much like the Copyright Act of 1790 is officially an act for the encouragement of learning. But the reality is that the Statute of Anne was really about the publisher's monopoly. Prior to the Statute of Anne, what they had in England was something called the licensing of the press act. What that did was it had this group skilled the printers called the stationary company and gave them the exclusive power to print. It was a monopoly law. They gave the printers, not the authors, the exclusive power to print and also with it the responsibility to censor content. Now the licensing of the press act in the late 17th century was not renewed. So the stationary company got kind of upset about this because they had a monopoly and they still wanted their monopoly and they didn't want to give it up. They were trying to figure out how did they get back this thing where people were complaining about them having a monopoly. So they repositioned the licensing of the press act and turned it from a monopoly printing right censorship power over to what they preferred to frame it as an artist rights regime, even though it's never actually about that, it's really always about publisher and their monopoly rights. Now, remember, as I was just saying, and as Clay Scherke said, publishing is now a button. So you have this problem when you design an entire monopoly to support a publishing industry and that everything that's structured around that industry is going away. And so when you talk about the internet and all of the things that the internet allows that I talked about before create, share, distribute, promote and monetize, there's one more thing that the internet allows very easily and that is the ability to copy. It's about anything very easily. The internet, as some people have said, really just a giant copying machine. So what we end up having with copyright, the internet is something of a conflict. It's a pretty big conflict that keeps coming up over and over again and nobody's necessarily solved this issue and it seems to keep getting worse and worse. And it's something that we see all the time with copyright being used to stifle free expression and to be a tool of censorship. And now there are thousands and thousands of examples of this and I was trying to figure out which examples to use to sort of give you just a sampling of how copyright is frequently used to censor content and I was trying to figure out which of the thousands of examples to pull and I was having trouble and I finally said, well, let's just narrow it down. I'll just use examples from the past week or two just to make this easier. So these examples I'm gonna give are just from this, they're not necessarily the best examples, they're just the most recent. Now I'm gonna start the first example is Samsung. I don't know if you can see this but this was Samsung pulled down, sent a DMCA notice to YouTube to take down a video. It says at the top, if you can see it, video no longer available, if you do a copyright claim, Samsung products America. That video is now back up. You can see it, it was a video of a Grand Theft Auto modification in which they turned the Samsung Note 7 which you may have heard has a little problem with exploding into a weapon that you could use in the game. It's actually kind of fun to watch. Samsung apparently didn't like this video very much. I'm sure it doesn't make them happy but it doesn't something to give them a right to take down that video based on a copyright claim and yet they did. So it was like, what does this have to do with copyright and how is this voting progress anyway, shape or form? So a second example also from the last week, this is a company called Geopedia. I don't know if you've heard of this company. It's made some news in really the last week we can have. It's because the ACLU came out with a big report about how this company, Geopedia, had done deals with all the major social media platforms to basically get access to their API and their data and then they were turning around basically selling it to law enforcement and to some schools in order to allow law enforcement to do sort of widespread surveillance on social media accounts of different individuals. It was kind of a big deal. Most of the social media platforms then cut off access to Geopedia. Geopedia was not happy about this. So they did what you would normally do in a situation like that, which is start filing DMCA takedown requests. In fact, one after there was a reporter from the site, The Daily Dot named Del Cameron who had posted a brochure, a sales brochure from Geopedia on the script. And so Geopedia, rather than responding to the actual issues, is copyright trying to disappear its sales brochures. So this is a case of copyright as censorship. And so now the third example I'm gonna give and the last one in this sort of series of examples is from this woman, Kelly Marshall. She's a professor at the Paul Professor of Communications. And she also happens to be, I don't know if you can see it, she's a Gene Kelly fan on her website, a little thing down the side that says Gene Kelly fan among other things. She in fact runs a website called Gene Kelly Fans. It just talks about Gene Kelly. And she's written scholarly and non-scholarly things about Gene Kelly. And so last year she happened to get a book contract. It was a book contract for an academic book editing a collection of Gene Kelly interviews. You know, an interesting thing if this is the stuff that she's interested in. But right after that the news came out that she had this contract, she got a notice from Patricia Ford Kelly, obviously Gene Kelly's widow, saying that she was claiming copyright over every interview that Gene Kelly ever gave. And claimed that in order to do a book analyzing the interviews that Gene Kelly gave, she would have to license it from the estate of Gene Kelly. Now you can get into a whole discussion which I don't have time for about whether or not you can actually copyright interview because that someone gave. There's a lot of questions about that and the answer is probably no in those cases. But it didn't really matter because Patricia Ward Kelly still sued Kelly Marshall earlier this year and sued her for copyright infringement and also the University of Pennsylvania, Mississippi who had given the contract to Marshall. Now thankfully this case was actually dismissed earlier this year a couple of months ago but it wasn't dismissed because there was no copyright or because of their use. It was dismissed because it was considered not right. She hadn't actually written the book. There's no way to tell if the book itself was actually infringing on the copyright. So the course basically I'm gonna deal with this right now. So the case was dismissed but even so there's not going to be a book written by Kelly Marshall about these interviews as Kelly Marshall said she has neither the time or the resources to endure another potential lawsuit. Once again this is a case of copyright being used to censorship. And remember these three examples which I think are all kind of crazy but are all pretty good examples of it are ones that came from just this past. Copyright has a very serious free speech problem. And the thing is and the really incredible thing is that this isn't just something that has come up because of the internet. I think the internet has sort of accelerated the recognition of the free speech problem of copyright but it's been known for really centuries. I often like to go back to something from 1841 which is a speech given by this guy Thomas McAuley who's in the House of Commons in England and he was giving a speech when they were debating copyright term extension whether or not they should make copyright longer in England. It's a really great speech. You should look it up. Speech itself is now very much in the public domain. You can find it on Wikipedia. There's so much good stuff in that speech. I had trouble sort of marrying it down so I'm actually gonna quote a fair amount from it. You know I still have an hour down but I think it's important. He talks about the balance of copyright and recognizing that copyright is a monopoly produces all of the effects which the general voice of mankind that gives you the property, recognizing that there are costs to having a monopoly and specifically he explains what they are later in the speech where he says the effect of monopoly is generally to make articles scarce, make them dear and to make them bad. And think about that in the age of the internet where we have this sort of abundance, this sharing of information, the ease of sharing of information. You have a tool which is a monopoly which is designed to make things scarce and you see sort of the conflict that's coming about. Now Macaulay concluded in that speech the sort of way he pulled it all together was he actually said it is good that authors should be remunerated and I think most people agree. This is good. We want people who are creating to actually be able to put money and do what they want and get support for their creation. He claims that the least exceptional way of remunerating them is by this monopoly of copyright. Yet monopoly is an evil and therefore for the sake of the good we must submit to the evil but that evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good. And this sort of sets out the fundamental balance that is supposed to be there around copyright. That there are good things in terms of incentivizing that erosion the ability to support artists and creators making stuff but then also recognizing that it creates an evil and therefore you have to make sure that if you are setting it up that way that you limit the evil side of it. This is clearly a good argument for the way copyright law is structured today. And again going back to the sort of constitutional thing we talked about promoting the progress before but what Macaulay was talking about is the second part of this that you have this monopoly right in order to make this work you're securing from limited time so authors and ventures exclusive right for their writing. Now these monopolies are granted in the belief that it will promote progress. So what Macaulay was saying was that this first part and the second part has to be very, very carefully balanced but I think that with the internet that it's maybe it's time that we actually have to start to challenge the belief that the least exceptional way of remunerating creators is by giving them a monopoly. We're seeing all sorts of new things happen and after all on the internet we're creating all sorts of ways to create, share, distribute, promote, monetize and copy all with the push button. And the entire idea that people need a monopoly to be the incentive to be the incentive to be a publisher, which again was the original purpose of the copyright monopoly stops making sense because it's like shirking noted the entire idea of a publisher makes less and less sense. And that's because we have the internet that allows us to do all of these things and to place on top of it new models that allows us to support these things to create, to share, distribute, promote, monetize and copy without the monopoly. There are lots and lots of examples of that. There are certainly all sorts of examples of peer production. We have mostly open source software, we have things like what kind of community of fan fiction and of course we have media which is probably one of the best examples out there of a peer production thing. These are all sort of non remuneration for the most part non-monetary remuneration but we also have new models of commercial creation. Seeing a whole bunch and there's all different ways of it supported by the internet and new services on the internet. I'm just gonna give a few examples of there's many, many more. You see direct support from fans on wonderful platforms like Bandcamp, see project crowdfunding, things like Kickstarter and you see ongoing crowdfunding from new platforms like Patreon which is a really cool platform. I don't know if people are not as many people seem to know about it. It lets you sort of support artists that every time they create something new they automatically get money. It's a little tough to see these but some of these will get like $7,000 every time they create a new video. All these people pledge that they're gonna give money every time a new video is created. As soon as they upload a new video they click a button, they get $7,000. It's kind of a really amazing platform. So there are all these ways to something connect with fans and to make money to be supported without having to actually make use of the monopoly and it is not necessarily the best way to support creative artists. And this is why I think we're seeing a massive explosion in content creation today despite the fact that a lot of it is not copyrighted. This is the infographic that came out with a report that we put out a couple years ago called the sky is rising where we looked at the actual state of what's happening in a bunch of different creative fields and books and music and videos. We saw that creativity is going way up. We're seeing more music, massively more music in the last 10 years alone there's been more music more than in all of human history before that. Seeing more books being produced at a massive scale thanks to the ability to do easy digital publication on platforms like Amazon. Seeing more and more video. So if we're taking a step back and looking at copyright from that constitutional standpoint of going in the progress, it actually sounds like we're doing a good job as we're seeing all of this burst of creativity and people have all these options and new content and experienced new things despite the fact that very few of the creators of that massive growth of content are actually relying on the monopoly copyright. They still get it because it's a copyrighted structure but they're not necessarily relying on copyright. So if we're looking to promote the progress without relying on that monopoly we should make sure that when we do have copyright that it's actually necessary for the purpose because of the ability to use like sensor and blocks. And where it is necessary we should make sure that the evil ought not to last the day longer or be more expansive what is absolutely necessary for the purpose of securing that particular. So when I first wrote this presentation this is kind of where I stopped but I'm not gonna stop yet because I said I was gonna talk about copyright and everything and I just kind of focused on the straight copyright part. So now I'm gonna go into the part that's a little bit more expansive on the stuff that some people refer to as copyright creep or some people refer to as copyright integration. And this is areas where copyright is starting to show up in places that it obviously does not belong. I think almost anyone who looks at these cases says what the hell is happening with copyright? Now a lot of these come from a part of copyright law called DMCA 1201 which for the copyright geeks is the anti-circumvention provision and that's basically saying that you can't get around a technological protection measure for any purpose even if it's not to infringe the copyright of underlying material just circumventing the technology protection measure is considered infringement in itself which is kind of ridiculous and therefore you suddenly have copyright showing up in all sorts of ridiculous situations that don't seem to have anything to do with creative works. So questions about like what ink can you use in your ink shed printer? Questions about can security researchers analyze vulnerabilities and all sorts of things including e-boating machines which is suddenly a very, very important topic. Can you modify things that you buy such as your Xbox, not a copyright issue? Can you move your phone from one provider to another? So from Verizon to T-Mobile, is that a copyright issue? It certainly came up as a copyright issue. Can you access the data that is collected by your vehicle, tractor or car? How are any of these things copyrighted? It doesn't make sense, it has nothing to do with the progress of learning or education or science. I wanna go back to that last one, the final one that can you access the data in your tractor or car? This one's actually important because you have companies like John Geer makes lots and lots of tractors and Chrysler obviously makes lots and lots of cars who argued at something called the 1201 Triennial hearing about exemptions to this anti-circumvention rule that when you buy a vehicle from them you don't actually own that vehicle, you own parts of the vehicle but they retain ownership of part of it because of the copyright software that is included in there. Now again, how is this a copyright issue? It seems like copyright free for copyright immigration. The most incredible part of this story to me, whoops, to me at least was that, sorry. The Environmental Protection Agency actually weighed in on this and they agreed with John Geer and Chrysler and so that they agreed that you should not be able to get around the technological protection measures in vehicles because they don't want you to modify the vehicles in order to protect the environment, their environmental standards. Now, I think most people I think will say that this is a good idea. We want to protect the environment, right? So that's a good idea. But the EPA, they have all sorts of rules and powers to protect the environment that don't involve copyright and they shouldn't be using copyright for this particular purpose. It's an example of copyright creeping into other areas completely. One more example on this that I think is just another example of copyright creeping into other areas is this company Omega, they make all sorts of fancy watches. They got really upset because Costco was buying a bunch of Omega watches that were sold cheaply overseas, bringing them back to the US and selling them in their stores for much less than Omega wanted to sell their watches in the US. And so they sued them for copyright infringement. How is selling watches a copyright issue? Well, Omega did something really sneaky, which is, I don't know how well you can see, but on the back of the watch, the part that nobody ever sees, they put a little design and then they registered that as copyright and they said that in selling these watches, they were violating the copyright. This is an example of copyright creeping. We're seeing over and over again that industries are realizing that copyright can block otherwise legal activities and therefore it's a really great tool to block competition. And this is a big problem with copyright. Copyright is simply a tool for blocking activity and as such, it becomes just too strong an incentive for companies to use to block efficient or any kind of action that they don't like and it begins to impact absolutely everything. And even when it gets beyond copyright itself, it inspires all sorts of bad ideas around taking this and blocking activity. And one of the examples that came up recently was that at Couric, the makers of the famous coffee machines put DRM into their coffee machines so that it would only accept official cake cup coffee pods from Couric and you would get these error message. That's right. We reached to the stage where we have coffee DRM, which just is insane. And then the final thing I wanna point out is that I actually think that the copyright issues and the fight over copyright reform goes even beyond all of these examples. And one reason why I say that copyright impacts everything is because the more I've spent almost 20 years looking at the fights over copyright and copyright reform I recognize that it's really a precursor to the fights over almost every other major topic in major industry. The disruption that we're seeing today or that we've seen over the past 20 years that hit the content industry, the disruption that Clay Surkey talked about when he said that publishing is not evolving, it's going away, it's not a job, it's a button, that's going to repeat. It's going to repeat over and over and over again in almost every industry. They're all going through this kind of disruption for technologies changing the very nature of how they work. So we're already starting to see it. We're seeing it in housing and in transportation and in manufacturing with things like 3D printing. We're seeing it in finance with things like cryptocurrencies. We're seeing in education with online systems for educating and new tools. We're starting to see it in areas of healthcare, which is a difficult one. Every one of these industries is going to have these fights or are starting to have these fights and these fights are all the same fight that we're seeing in the copyright space. These are fights about control, who has control over it, about who gets the monopolies and about who can control the restrictions in those spaces. So as we see these fights, as they start popping up, every one of them looks like the copyright fight that we had five or 10 years ago. So I want to go to another statement that Clay Surkey made, again, it's a really good, it comes up with all sorts of great sayings. This was in a different article that he published. He noted very perceptively that institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution. Think about that for a second, right? Institutions are trying to solve a problem, but they don't want to solve that problem permanently because then they have no more business, right? The copyright industry was the solution to the problem of publishing. How do you get your content out to the public? That's what the copyright industry was all about for centuries, but today, publishing is a button. The fight over copyright is really just the start, right? All of these things are happening to all of these other industries, and that's why when we're looking at the fight over copyright, it's so important that we get it right, that we learn this lesson so that we don't have to go through the same fight, this fight that now has gone on for 20 years and is still going on today, we don't have to go through the same ridiculous fight for every other industry that impacts so many people. When we're looking about how can we promote the progress with copyright, that fight is still going on right now. In the copyright space, people very frequently like to talk about SOPA, and there was this big uprising of people coming together and speaking out and Wikipedia took part in it and lots and lots of other people took part in it, and of course the famous thing is that we killed this bill, SOPA, this horrible bill. The reality is that SOPA is not actually dead. Just a few weeks ago, the recording industry filed a lawsuit where the basis of that lawsuit was basically as if SOPA had passed. They're asking for the exact same penalties that would have been put in place if SOPA had done law, even though it did not. We're seeing things like safe harbors, which is the DMCA safe harbors, which Jan mentioned earlier, that protects innovation, that help enable these new business models that make it so that you don't need the copyright monopoly or under attack. Over in the EU, the EU commission just came out with this proposal, which is absolutely horrifying in so many ways. It completely undermines those safe harbors in really, really dangerous ways. The e-commerce directive that sets up those safe harbors is basically being wiped away in some areas. It's effectively going to kill startups. Some of the big companies might be able to get through it. Smaller companies will have a lot of trouble. That includes deputizing tech companies to basically be copyright police for Hollywood and basically forcing them to wave a magic wand and say, be gone infringement. It has some other weird things in it, such as what they call leveling the playing field, which reality is forcing business models on certain players deciding that this is the proper business model for music streaming, for example. Therefore, everyone else has to do it that way, taking away the ability to innovate over some of these new models. Back here in the US, there are some big changes under foot. We don't have a copyright reform bill yet, but it's expected that it's going to come. But just last week and really in the last few days, we discovered that the US copyright office is going to be under leadership because the new Librarian of Congress effectively just fired the head of the copyright office, Maria Palente. And that opens up all sorts of opportunities and also challenges to really reform copyright and to make it work in a way that fits with the internet rather than is in conflict with the internet. And it's very important, again, that we get it right in order to have that we can actually promote the progress and in doing so that we can support free speech and open innovation and still enable creativity at the same time. And that is why I spend so much time thinking about and talking about and discussing and writing about copyright because it impacts absolutely everything. So that's my talk and now I'm open to questions and answers and everything along those lines. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Mike. Are there any questions from the floor here? Got someone in front, right up front. Coming. Considering the way legislation has been rammed through Congress like the DCMA and they also the extension of the Copyright Act to infinity, it was done over massive amounts of protest and it seems like the industry has complete control over Congress. Why do you even think it's possible to turn that back? Well, that's a good question. You know, I think that's a big concern, right? I mean, the industry has a lot of lobbying power and a lot of say and a lot of people who listen to it. But I think that the public is getting more and more engaged on this thing. And I think like the soap example, while I have concerns about kind of what's happening now, I think that's actually a really powerful example where you had a bad policy proposal that was proposed and which the industry thought was gonna go through easily very much like you said, all these other bills went through no matter how much protest there was and everyone expected that with SOPA. If you looked prior to SOPA over the previous 30 years, there had been 15 expansions of copyright law and each one of them just sailed through like that around sort of anti-piracy rules. And yet when SOPA came about, you've got enough of a groundswell and a lot of people speaking out and getting involved and talking and making it public that it was actually able to kill that bill. And that sort of two purposes. I think one, it killed a really bad bill and a really dangerous bill, but it also woke up Congress to the fact they couldn't just rush through these bad policies out anymore, right? So there's still this fear in Congress right now of any new copyright reform. One of the reasons I think they haven't actually seen it bill yet is because they have this fear of getting SOPAed that any copyright bill that they put out is going to lead to this massive groundswell of public chain and public outcry. And that's important because that's, that is a moderating influence on Congress. That doesn't mean there are other problems and the copyright industry has basically gone through other processes such as international trade agreements and trying to get bad copyright policy like TPP and TDIP. So there are also concerns but the fact that the public was able to get together and speak out I think is actually kind of an encouraging sign. And one other thing which I'll say to that too which is that the sort of going around the legislative route entirely, the fact that we're seeing things like, these sites that I talked about Kickstarter and Patreon showing more and more examples, we're seeing more and more case studies of content creators that are not relying on copyright and don't care and don't need stronger copyright in order to make a living and as we have more and more proof and evidence of that, more and more people begin to wake up to the fact that like saying that you support creators doesn't mean you have to expand copyright. There are other ways to support creators and to help them make money and make a living and encourage them to create. And the more examples we have of that, the more we're able to tell a story as to why there are better things to focus on and a tool that can also be abused. Thanks, Mike. I think that, I guess, optimistic assessment of yours. And I mean, that's part of the reason why there is optimism, I guess, is we are having this conversation here and that's why we are starting this event series because it's important to talk about this and not only within the echo chamber of people who are already like aligned.  Hi, Mike. Hi. I was wondering when does a picture of somebody become copyrighted because let's say they're holding a copyrighted item or they're wearing a copyrighted shirt, flesh toy, whatever. Yeah. So I should say I'm not a copyright lawyer and I also, because of that cannot give legal advice and so there are all sorts of questions on that that are perhaps better answered by a copyrighted lawyer but it does raise all sorts of questions about exactly that. I mean, it's become, especially in Europe right now that's actually a big issue where it's not just about like taking pictures of things there's this concept of like the right of panorama which is when you're dealing mainly with like architecture or sculptures or things like that. There's an issue where, and this is a big issue for Wikipedia actually where you take pictures of certain objects. There's a question of whether or not there's like a copyright and I forget the details on this so I might not be entirely accurate but I think there's like some sort of rule with like the Eiffel Tower in Paris where you can take pictures of it during the daytime or fine but like you're not allowed to take pictures and publish them of the Eiffel Tower at night and I don't fully understand this but like there are these issues where when you're taking pictures and everything is copyright you get these sort of overlapping claims and different issues and it creates all sorts of problems. Specific cases that you have to sort of talk to a lawyer to figure out how to deal with it and whether or not there's fair use or whether or not there's even meets the necessary standards to be copyrighted by copyright. I'm sorry, a picture of a person. What about a picture of a person is it, so a picture of a person again I'm not a lawyer, right? So a picture of a person is generally not going to be a copyright issue because there's no copyright in the person. There are potentially other issues such as publicity rights which is sort of this new ridiculous other issue related it's sort of a form of intellectual property in the US it's sort of a state by state issue which means different states have different rules and it's a complete mess but you have situations where like and like the right of publicity was initially designed to basically be so that a brand couldn't take a famous person and like put them on a box of cereal and pretend that they endorse them. It was about the sort of false endorsement but now it's used in all sorts of ways and so like an example of this was blanking on her name but there's a famous actress who was photographed walking out of a Dwayne Reed drug store with a bag, she was just gone shopping and picked up the nose watt and Dwayne Reed, the company tweeted the photo of her walking out of the thing with the bag and she sued them for a summer tickets amount of money like $10 million or something claiming that that tweet was a violation of her publicity rights and I think they eventually settled that case but there are all sorts of, so there are other issues it's not a copyright issue but it's also, it's an issue and then it's one that is very concerning for these kinds of things. I'm sorry, it's very difficult for me to hear you. There's a microphone or? So hi, I'm Jacob Rogers. I'm one of the attorneys for the Wikimedia Foundation and I feel like that's an important preface cause I'm gonna ask you a bit of a devil's advocate question. Okay. So even though I spent a lot of my day fighting inappropriate copyright claims, I'm curious what you would say to someone who has a different theory of copyright because in addition to the sort of like economic incentive, not really theory of copyright, there is the theory in many parts of the world that copyright is about the personality of the author or the artist. The artist would say, why do I have to give up my rights when some investor I know who buys a bunch of houses can pass those on to his children and his children's children's children forever. So what would you say to somebody that has that theory of copyright about how they should approach it and why it may not make sense to keep it forever? Yeah, sure, sure. So there are actually, there are a couple of definitions sort of buried in that question that I think are interesting and important. And so there's sort of, I think, your question sort of covers two different areas of sort of copyright theory. One is the sort of property rights concept that copyright is the same thing as like a house or a car or some sort of property. Pass on and on. And the answer to that is that it's not, right? So there are fundamental differences between content and a piece of physical, tangible property. And in economic terms, they talk about being like non-rivalrous and non-excludable, where a real piece of property is rivaled and excludable. If I have it, you can have it. I can keep it and block you from taking it. That's not the case with content. Now, I think, and I've written about this, I think where people make this sort of mental switch, which is, and hopefully I can explain this in a clear way because I think it's a little tricky. The copyright itself, what people confuse is the copyright and the content. And they assume that the two are one and the same. The copyright itself is sort of meets the criteria of a kind of property, which is that if I hold that copyright, you can't hold that copyright. The content, the underlying content is different. And I think that's, people play this sort of judo trick where they pretend that the two are one and the same. The intellectual property is the content itself as opposed to the copyright, the sort of legal monopoly that's granted over it. And those are two different things. And so when you think about that way, you can understand where there is a property right, but it is in the monopoly itself, not in the content itself. So that's sort of the property rights question. And then you can go into all sorts of things about why property rights in content itself don't make sense, especially in a world where the internet is infinitely copyable and where you have this abundance and where abundance is good.  So like people go back and some people talk about economics as sort of like the allocation of goods in a realm of scarcity. How do you handle the allocation of goods and scarcity? Now, if you have an abundant situation where something is infinitely available and infinitely copyable, you don't have scarcity. You also don't have an issue with the allocation of goods because anyone who wants that can have it. Now that should change the equation now. For some people, they get this sort of divide by zero issue where they just see that this abundance and they've only learned how to understand the economics through a prism of scarcity and it freaks them out. They're like, this is impossible. Everything's breaking down. The entire system is breaking down. That's not true. What you're having now is this sort of infinite resource and you can do stuff with that infinite resource and you basically use that in sort of my view of thinking you use that infinite resource to find new scarcities that you can make money on. You stop trying to make money on the thing that's abundant and you find the scarcity show and people say, well, but all the scarcities are going away. I'm like, no, that's not true. You have scarcity of time. You have scarcity of attention until we create immortality, we're not getting rid of those things. And so you figure out ways to take that abundant resource and people are doing this implicitly without realizing it. Things like Kickstarter are actually a really good example. They're creating people to fund a new project, a project that hasn't been created. That project before it's been created is scarce. It doesn't exist. So they're getting you to fund the scarcity and then once it's out there, let them put it out and let them spread it around. People are doing things like, musicians are making more and more money from things like live or merchandise. These are things that are scarcities. So figuring out ways to take the abundance and turn it into scarcity. Now the other part of your question which I didn't get to and I'm sort of going long but is the sort of moral rights question which was buried in there too, which is that some people have this view of copyright that not only is it sort of a property right that there's a moral question to it which is that I created this piece of content and therefore I have power over how it's used and I should have say over how it's used. So the classic example of this is say I write a song and someone I don't like uses that song. Hitler uses that as his theme song. That's the sort of extreme example where like neo-Nazis take it and turn it into a theme song.  So some people say that there should be sort of a moral right to take that back and say like, no, I don't want my song being used by Nazis, right? And there's, can have a very sympathetic argument to that because who wants their song to be used by Nazis? Now, on a legal status in the US, we really don't recognize moral rights even though we're required to by the Berne Convention, we sort of, you know, we wrote this thing into our law that said like, oh, we'll abide by moral rights in this one tiny area which is like visual arts, right? And so therefore we're in compliance with the Berne Convention even though we're not like it's, we're not. Europe for the most part actually does recognize that and it creates all sorts of weird things and I think like, I understand the emotional argument there but I don't think it makes sense on a wider scale and you have people who point out like, we have a sort of example of this in the US every time, every presidential campaign where a candidate will use music from an artist who disagrees with that candidate and it's almost always the Republican, you know, candidate use music from artists who are Democrats and then they freak out and they scream legally, they're allowed to do it for the most part, they're, you know, basically they have to get a public performance license from ASCAP or BMI, there's no legal question here even though there have been some lawsuits over it, some cases, but the thing is like, it actually presents a platform for that artist to stand up and say like, don't like this candidate and give them sort of a bad press cycle and this candidate can't find any artist or actually supports what they're talking about and things like that. I think that there are ways to deal with the sort of moral question without creating a legal right around it that, you know, with the fact that everyone has the internet, everyone has the ability to publish and to get their points out that it actually creates a solution to that without creating this sort of legal monopoly in there. Cool. Sorry. Hi, my name is Rahul Nath and I also want to play, continue this role as devil's advocate. Go for it. So you mentioned that there has been an explosion of just creativity over the past 40 years since 1976, almost since the creation of the internet, but I think like it's interesting to wonder whether there's been, whether that's a result of copyright protection, whether people were incentivized to have this explosion of creativity and post things on the internet and feel free to share things because they knew like, eventually they could trace it back and actually have a second part to the question. Do you think that the internet could eventually evolve to fixing itself in terms of like the copyright issue where information is so abundant and diverse that it's almost impossible to kind of like trace back like who got like a line of code from an open source like repo or something like that. So there are a couple of points there. I think, you know, and there are some people who claim that like right, the explosion of content that we're seeing out there, we do have this sort of copyright system that's out there and therefore we should credit it. I think it's hard to make the argument that actually makes sense. If you look at the explosion of content and sort of what makes up that content, very little of it is directly relying on copyright. Now it's tough to really completely parse that out. I'm not saying that it's like the sort of clear hot situation because all of that content is technically covered by copyright. But the fact is you very rarely see copyright being used to actually stop people, to actually make use of that exclusive right to stop it. And you're seeing much of that content being distributed in ways that suggest that people don't care about the copyright right. And to be honest, this goes back to sort of pre-internet. And there's this chart that's really useful about, and it was in one of Bill Patrie's books about copyright. He's a copyright lawyer, worked for the Copyright Office for a long time, now works for Google. And he wrote this book, he's written a bunch of books about copyright, but he wrote one where looking at basically the copyright term question. If you go back to before 1976, I forget the exact years of the chart, like he sort of picked the year around when there was like 1955, 1956. And back then, you had copyright less to 28 years and you could get a 28 year renewal. But you had to actually apply for the renewal. So it went through all the different types of copyrighted content, to see what was renewed at the 28 year mark in like the early 1950s or whatever. And what you saw was like movies, almost all the movies were actually renewed. Like they actually value that copyright. But almost every other kind of content, they didn't. I don't remember the chart, I haven't put that in probably years. But it had like very, very low percentage of books were renewed after 28 years, very, very low percentage of like paintings or other kinds of writings or any kind of hard work. The only one that was really renewed with any regularity was movies. And what that says, pretty clearly you have this sort of experimental data, natural experimental data, that says the copyright right is not that valuable to most of these works of art beyond 28 years. Now, we don't know where that cut off might be, where it's really, really valuable. But for most of these works after 28 years, they won't go through the basic process of filling up some forms to renew the copyright. That suggests that, going back to some colleagues thing that it goes way beyond the necessary period to inspire. So again, I'm not saying there shouldn't be any copyright at all. Just think you should figure out how can we create copyright that incentivizes enough creation and that doesn't get in the way of all these other. So I think that there's fairly strong evidence that the creation is not coming from because of the copyright. There are arguments on either side and certainly most of that content is copyrighted and sometimes certainly people want to have that as kind of a backstop and be able to step back and do something with it. But I don't say enough evidence that it's really that important to the creation. Number of artists that you've talked to and there was a survey. This is from a couple of years ago and I don't remember who conducted it. So this is, maybe not entirely accurate, but I think it was. They were kind of asking like how important, I think it was remembering, I think it was done by CDPB, which is another sort of directive and music distribution service. And they were asking how important is copyright, getting the copyright to you for distribution. It looks like a very, very small percentage. That's not the inspiration. People aren't creating music because I get the copyright and I get this monopoly and I get to exclude people, right? That's not the excitement. The excitement is getting the music out there, getting people to hear it, hopefully then making a living from it. Now if you can make a living without using that monopoly and in fact by not using that monopoly make the music or the content or whatever more widespread and more available and you can build a bigger fan base and still get money through other sources, like that's a lot more powerful. So I think, and then did I answer? Was there a second part that I didn't answer? Oh, right, right. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of interesting. There are some sort of like interesting projects that people are trying to think about now, especially in the music world, there are a couple of people who are trying to do this. They sort of try and attach, they're trying to sort of build a giant database using Bitcoin and blockchains to tie music usage to like all sorts of information so that you can track like every bit of usage. And they have some interesting ideas and some interesting projects and I'm kind of curious to see how it plays out. But it's really early and who knows whether that's going to be another question. Yes, my given name is also described by Q361-309. My question is, that's Mike on Wikidata.  I'm not actually sure I understand your theory there. Those other industries will, even if copyright goes away completely, those fights will suffer. I also have a follow-up question. I'm not, could you expand, you sort of got to a little bit in the last about what you think getting copyright right really means. You indicated that some, now please, okay, exactly what kinds of work should we be, or are you personally okay with granting that wedge to you? Sure, so there are a couple of things there. The idea of the other industries sort of going through the same fights, the reason I'd like to get it right with copyright so that we have an example that we can go and explain to people whether or not that actually works and whether or not people see like you don't have to fight, you don't have to try and retain control, you can actually take advantage of the new things that the technology is allowing. I would like to see that just because, there are a few reasons why I'd like to see it, but part of it is sort of, I like innovation and I like innovation to move along in a place that I will see more and more of it as long as I'm alive. And many of these battles in my mind are holding back that innovation and actually hurting lots of people by not allowing this stuff to happen. So the more that we have an example of actually evolving an industry in a way that is less and less painful, it would be very useful for these other battles. And I can get into specifics of what those battles might be, but it starts to go down into grab at home pretty quickly. In terms of actual copyright policies that I think are good, unfortunately it's a little difficult to figure out what the right policies are because we've sort of strayed so far from what I think are reasonable copyright policies. What I would really love to see is something that at least gets away from something like the burn convention or these various trade agreements that sort of force everyone lockstep into the exact same sort of copyright regime and actually allows for experimentation because I think if we saw more experimentation between different countries in terms of how they set up different copyright policies, we can actually get natural experiments about what actually encourages creativity and output and the ability to support creators and artists without the sort of harms of the monopoly. Now there are things that I think would probably need to a better result. I think going back to an opt-in system where you actually have to register in order to get the copyright, I think would be very important. I think drastically reducing the terms of copyright I think those are the really big and sort of obvious steps. I think then layer on things that perhaps create incentives for people to let go of the monopoly rights earlier. And what structure that takes is there are all sorts of different ideas and I don't think that much thought has been given to it and I haven't given enough thought to it to say like this is a great idea. But there are things like, I had this conversation not too long ago with some people about this idea of what if you took away the cost of registering the copyright, which right now is $200 to register a copyright, if someone agreed to basically give up their copyright after say 14 years. So if you give someone that monopoly right for 14 years without the cost of registering and they're in doing so, they're agreeing to give it up after 14 years, for creating this sort of natural incentive for them to put works into the public domain. They get a benefit that they don't have to pay for the copyright registration upfront. If they don't think it's going to, the copyright is going to be that important to them after 14 years, which that study that I mentioned earlier is just lots of works don't actually value beyond that. There's a trade-off there and in a sense would be really interesting. There are things like that that I'm interested in. We have time for one final question over here. Hi, my name is Dylan Brown. I'm a psychologist and researcher at UCSF. Mike, thanks for your talk this evening. I wanted to revisit something that we were discussing a little bit earlier regarding big publishing, owning the academic journals, which are viewed to hold the highest level of scientific integrity in the world and the pressure there is for academic folks to publish in these outlets for purposes of tenure and so on. We were also discussing open access platforms and some of the challenges regarding those, including exorbitant publishing costs, paid to publish, which is very challenging for early career people such as myself. So I was wondering if you knew of any innovative solutions or had any insights into tackling this kind of stable problem whereby big publishing is also the dwelling of scientific integrity. Yeah, the whole academic space is a really difficult one and I think that we're in the middle of open access week or I don't know if it just ended. I know it's found now. The academic space is a really tricky one because the copyright incentives in academia are ridiculously messed up. You have the publishing platforms which have these margins on what they do, they're ridiculous because the big journals don't pay for content and in fact in some fields, in psychology is one of them for example, people submitting articles actually have to pay to submit. Then the journal gets the copyright even when people are paying them to take the copyright on the work. They get, so they're getting either paid or free labor for the writing. They get free labor for the editing because they get peer review and everyone feels they need some peer review for free so they're getting sort of some free editing. They have some paid editing that goes along with it. And then they have a captive market in universities and university libraries that have to subscribe in order to have access to the latest and greatest research and stuff. Vice's computers tell me it's gonna shut down so this disappears. And then so because they have this sort of captive market and monopoly position, in fact they can charge ridiculous rates. I mean hundreds of thousands of dollars for libraries to subscribe to a journal that people are going to access in a year or something just like that. So I think there needs to just, and so the way that people, as you described, there's sort of the way that people are trying to get around it right now is through like the rise and support of open access and you have certain academics that are boycotting the large publishers and the sort of pay up from publishers. And but those have trouble because they have all different issues of how do you fund open access platforms and there are different models there. And some of it, you know, again, you have to pay to submit as sort of their funding model. And I don't think people are necessarily sure how that's all going to work out too. I think part of the problem is just sort of the whole structure of the system that kind of has to be upended. This idea that, you know, to get tenure and to be respected in your field that you have to publish in a prestigious journal kind of messes up all of the incentives. And it's created all sorts of problems. And this is true with both sort of both copyright and patents in certain areas where they really sort of messed up the research field. And there have been all these studies in terms of like how often professors are collaborating is less and less these days because of the intellectual property issues between collaborating, being able to share information and get knowledge and spread knowledge. So I don't have a good answer other than it's a huge mess. And I think the mess is from this sort of legacy setup of the way academia is structured and that they look for publication in prestigious publications as like a mark of whether or not you're moving up the scale and you deserve motions in tenure and whatnot. In a world where, again, publishing is a button, the idea that we need this kind of setup, especially when traditional peer review is not very good. You read like Retraction Watch or something like that and the number of peer reviewed studies that turn out to be completely bogus. I suggest that peer review is a complete joke whereas you have this ability now with the internet to do real peer review where you can publish something and say, this is the work in progress and have everyone go in and criticize and check the results and maybe redo the research and things like that. And you have this wonderful platform for real sharing of information, real growth of knowledge and real interplay and inter exchange of ideas that doesn't go through this sort of narrow legacy system of all publishing, but that's never gonna happen until university's actually buy into it. And that, I don't know, you're gonna know better than me. I don't try and stay away from academia as much as I can, so that's it. As you should. Yeah. Well, I'm glad we brought this full circle back to the topic of open access and what it means for free knowledge and sharing or research. And I just wanted to thank you so much with a bottle of free wine from Europe, of course, because that's where all the good copyright ideas come from. Thank you. And please join me in thanking Mike for this wonderful talk. Thank you. We're hoping to have more of these events, probably on a quarterly basis, so not to overwhelm you or others who probably will join us here. And we, some of you probably have provided their email addresses and people then reach out and let you know via the channels, Twitter, Facebook, on wiki and email to let you know when the next talk comes up. Thank you so much for joining us here today tonight and go mingle and have a good way home and good night.


We all want to know, should we be taking supplements? Which ones, how much, will they help us live healthier and longer lives, or is this a waste of money or even counterproductive? In this study, researchers wanted to know if a combination of dietary supplementation and physical activity could reduce inflammation. So, of course, they did a study. They studied other studies. Welcome to Lifespan News, I'm Amit Short. Today, we're talking about inflamaging, chronic low-level inflammation, often found in many hereditary and age-related diseases. Inflammation has been associated with fatigue, which obviously makes you not want to exercise, which, ironically, is one of the things that can reduce inflammation and cure your fatigue. So, it's really one of those chicken and egg situations. It's like, well, if I wasn't so tired, I would exercise. Well, if you just exercise, maybe you won't be so tired.  It's a real thin line we're walking as we try to stay in shape and live longer. So, they studied 11 randomized controlled studies that differed in design, but mostly included healthy men and women and all compared exercise and supplementation to control groups. The studies looked at protein or amino acids, omega-3s and vitamin C and D. The exercise regimes also varied, but most included resistance training and light aerobic exercise. In general, participants exercised two to three times a week and the study duration varied from four weeks to 24 weeks. The results showed that in six of the 11 studies, inflammatory markers were reduced after exercise combined with dietary supplementation. The researchers concluded that in addition to the beneficial effects of exercise, the anti-inflammatory properties of plant-derived proteins and micronutrients like vitamin C and D might be responsible for the suppression of inflammation in these studies. The study did reveal some evidence though of the synergistic anti-inflammatory effect of exercise combined with the dietary supplementation, but they couldn't really nail down enough of it to give you guidelines on an ideal combination of exercise and supplements. But every study uncovers a little bit more and when it does, we'll be here to tell you what's uncovered. So make sure you subscribe so you don't miss out. I'm Emmett Short and we'll see you next time on Lifespan News.