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The One Where We Try To Draw Copyright Law From Memory
74 Plays11 months ago
We're back! With a mishmash episode. Few links, lots of shooting from the hip.
Recommended
Transcript
Jokes & Jabs
00:00:00
Speaker
I miss you guys. We do have breaking news though that we should cover. I know you don't have like an agenda. Uh, breaking news. Sam Altman is back at open AI. Yeah. People have been relying. They've been just waiting because we talked that he was out, I think at our last episode in episode 29, right? And they've just been wondering like what, what might have happened. Are you guys trolling me? Are we doing something from the past? I thought he's been back for a long time. Uh, yeah, we are trolling.
00:00:26
Speaker
And we have a theme song. And we have a theme song. The theme song is the real trolling. Yeah. Okay. I can't do too much. Everyone gets the joke. Okay. Everyone gets the joke. Our theme song is awful. We're not going to use that one. I'm so sorry. Sam Altman has been back for a long time. The joke is that it's been a long time since we recorded. And the last time we recorded, I believe we spoke about Sam Altman being out. And so obviously all the listeners have just been waiting to find out from us if he's back and he is. So you guys were conspiring against me while I was getting my AirPods to actually do the recording tonight.
00:00:55
Speaker
Actually, I didn't run this by Andrew at all. That was like, do you remember what Jake explained? How conspiracies usually are just two people acting of their own accord and not actually working it out. That's what happened here. We didn't work it out. It's, it's two people with, it's an under unstated understanding that we were just going to do it. We didn't mention Sam Altman at all. No. Awake is as good as a nod to a blind man, right?
00:01:17
Speaker
Yeah. I don't think you're the one that works. I don't think that's how that works. Yeah. All right. So you'll be canceled. You'll be replaced. It's like a common saying, isn't it? No, it's a common saying. And also it still took me. I was still like trying to figure out what it means.
00:01:34
Speaker
It also just doesn't fit with what was happening there. So anyway, guys, hi. Yes. Hi. OK, so this is episode 30.
Hosts' Introductions & NFL Chat
00:01:40
Speaker
I think I usually did the introductions. I'll do it quickly. Today is January 11, 2024. You have not missed any episodes if you've been waiting. It's been like a month. But I think we're going to get back to sort of a right. You might have. You may have missed us, but you didn't miss any of us. I would have gone on that. OK.
00:01:44
Speaker
Like,
00:01:56
Speaker
I think we'll get back to regular recording, we hope more or less now that the holiday season is behind us. So this is January 11th, it's episode 30, Esquiring Minds, three lawyer friends goofing around, own enjoyment, own enjoyment, own enjoyment. Wow. You just tried to fix it and it continued.
00:02:15
Speaker
Suddenly I tune into a law podcast and you're talking about enjoying things, own enjoyment and nothing should be taken as legal advice. Thank you. I'm Andrew Leahy. I'm one of those friends. The other two people are the people making fun of me. Uh, I'm trying to think of who made fun of me more. Jason, Jason, Jason. I'm Jason. I am a plain of side employment litigator, primarily in Indiana. I touch some other States every once in a while with the litigations. Uh, but that's me. That's what I do. I live in Indianapolis. I am a Colts fan recovering from the
00:02:45
Speaker
Sad and sad elimination of the Colts from the playoffs, but I'm very glad that the Jaguars were also eliminated. So. Because the because the Jaguars always seem to beat you randomly at the end of the season. Is that is that it? I don't know about that. I don't know if that's consistent with my experience. It's like in the AFC South, who do you despise the most as a Colts fan? And like, is it the Titans? Not really like they're just never very good.
00:03:11
Speaker
Is it the Texans? Yeah, kind of a lot of the time. But really like Jacksonville is like, yeah, they're the easiest to hate. They used to beat the Colts all the time when Maurice Jones Drew was playing for him. Yeah. It was just miserable to watch that guy run on our terrible run defense for years and years. Plus Jacksonville sucks. As a city or just as a team?
00:03:33
Speaker
I don't know. Most of what I know about Jacksonville, I learned from The Good Place. I was going to say that's, you know. Yeah. And like, yeah. So everything I know about Jacksonville, I learned from Jason Mendoza on The Good Place, which is an excellent show if we're skipping straight to recommendations, but we're not.
00:03:49
Speaker
I was surprised that Jacksonville has like rivalries because they've been bad for so long. They've been bad for what, like 13 years or something or more than their entire existence. Basically, quietly. I mean, but they had they had some good years with Mark Brunel. Is that right? And then like a fluke, a fluke that is like in the late 90s, early 2000s. And then they had a fluke, one or two good years with Blake Bortles, where they Bortles. That was very funny.
00:04:19
Speaker
Like, and then they, of course, built that into the good place where they were like, you've you've messed with the you mess with the timeline and how the Jags are good. And then they went back to being bad. I don't know. Football. So all I can be is a stats narrative. It looks like they were 10 and six in 2017. That seems. Yeah, that was the flu here. Oh, OK. Sorry. Yeah. That was the weird one. They were pretty good. Oh, seven. Yeah. Yeah. That's how far you have to go back.
00:04:47
Speaker
Otherwise, not good. Is there a team? 17. Yeah, but 17. Is there a team? I don't know anything about football. Is there a team that is universally despised by every fan from every other team? Is it the Patriots? Patriots? In the way the Patriots are. I was going to say the Cowboys are despised by everybody who's not a Cowboys fan. I think it was more the Cowboys in the 90s and maybe early 2000s and now less so.
00:05:13
Speaker
Yeah, Jerry Jones is pretty despised the Cowboys. Oh, he's he's
Podcasting Techniques & Gear
00:05:18
Speaker
despicable. Yeah. Well, this has been football talk with yeah Two guys from from Florida or whatever You're down there easy. Yeah, he's yeah, he's down. Well, not even anymore anymore. Yeah now he's over here in Florida. I was in Florida in November. There you go
00:05:39
Speaker
Yeah. We cooked his brain a little bit. We gave his brain a little bit of a cooking. It has a kind of a Florida glow. A little bit. He's insulting him. Like, wow. I don't know. Is that an insult? No, Florida glow. That sounds pretty good. Yeah, I don't think that's too bad. The glow that you're seeing is just my crappy webcam.
00:05:57
Speaker
Oh, OK. I see. Unrelated. I'm Jake, by the way. Yes. Oh, yeah. We're still doing introductions. And we better. Well, I hope we're recording because I invested thirty dollars into a mic stand for my new desk. And so I hope that doesn't go to waste. Otherwise, you know, maybe I'll soothe some some judges and opposing counsels with some very nice
00:06:20
Speaker
audio quality as opposed to the normal thing. It might be different since it lights up though. That seems a little like you're playing a game while you're talking to opposing counsel. Well, you all see my light up mic right now, but on the Zoom non-HD, which is good, me not being an HD is generally good for me. I do the same thing. I click that off immediately. Yeah.
00:06:42
Speaker
click it off, it doesn't show the mic anymore because it has a more limited field of view. Oh, for whatever reason. OK, so you just see you just see me and my giant headphones, which might be OK. These don't these aren't obviously gameery. So right. Right. No, no, without the thing in front.
00:06:59
Speaker
Yeah, you don't have the little Tony Robbins microphone in front of your face. That's good. This is why professional podcasters don't use video, and we do use videos, because you get that really rich comment on what things look like while you're listening to us in an audio format with no video, so you can't see what's happening.
00:07:15
Speaker
Yeah. Okay. So you're right. We should
Legal Document Copying & Copyright Issues
00:07:17
Speaker
move on. Let's move forward with our, uh, we have no agenda. We're going to try to lay out the agenda, figure it out. Yeah. I got, I got rants in my, in my, uh, in the hopper if needed. And then, you know, that's the stalking horse is that Jake wants to talk about chess. So if Jason and I can't scramble to come up with something to talk about, and there's too much dead air,
00:07:37
Speaker
Jake will just begin opining on chess drama and stuff. And so we have to try to, I'm filibustering right now, hoping Jason is coming up with something to say.
00:07:46
Speaker
Well, no, I mean, we've got a couple of potential items in here that seem a little bit interesting. And what I want somebody to tell me about, because I haven't been following this at all, the Winston Strawn copyright suit. Can somebody tell me what's going on with that? Yeah, I don't think it's the first one. But yeah, Winston and Strawn allegedly copied a sixth lawyer group in Boston.
00:08:13
Speaker
just taking taking briefs, like just copy and pasting like briefs and complaints and legal theories from the from the complaint. And it's not like there there isn't any real dispute as to whether or not it was actually stolen because it was definitely because it was definitely stolen. Like they stole a bunch of it was word for word. Yeah. Yeah. It was all a whole cloth. And Andrew, you can correct me if I get any of this wrong. But like there is this like, yeah, you still you stole our work product and therefore
00:08:43
Speaker
you know, you're violating our copyright or whatever. But it's, you know, it's just an interesting thing to think about, which is I don't think this is like, I don't think you can have a copyright over something that you have, something that you filed in a court of law as like a briefer emotion or something like, I don't think. Public domain defacto, like by being open to the public domain in the not in little p little d sense, wouldn't it be public domain?
00:09:13
Speaker
But and also you're theoretically not really. So there's so much creativity that goes into legal writing. But theoretically, everything you're writing is supposed to have legal significance. And so like, it's not really expressive because you're somewhat supposed to be put into a path.
00:09:31
Speaker
Right? You're doing the best to arrive to the correct point of law. This is in theory, though obviously there's so much artistry that goes into like good writing, especially briefs. Have you ever heard, obviously none of us are copyright attorneys, but I know there is a functional writings are not, I'm remembering that from IP class, are not copyrightable. Is that what you're talking about?
00:09:51
Speaker
Maybe I thought like a functional dot, like can a, uh, like a VCR manual be copywritten? I guess it can be. It can it. Oh, oh, I don't think, I don't think it can. Doesn't that sound familiar? I think there's a copyright. I think there is a copyright for a VCR manual. I might be wrong about that. Maybe I'm wrong. Okay. Well, anyway, the, the quote that I wanted to pull out from, I mean, you, you, this was your story, but I, when I read it, I thought it was interesting. Um, this, uh, it was a Reuters article that, uh, this guy's name is Angstrom. He's a legal ethics expert Freeman Angstrom. He's a Stanford law professor.
00:10:20
Speaker
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Nora Freeman Engstrom, she is a Stanford law professor. She says in litigation, efficiency and judicial economy are of greater importance. And so it would be wasteful to write every court document from scratch. And I think that's a pretty good argument, right? Like the most efficient way to do it would be to just copy it verbatim. I think practically, like, that's how lawyers work. Like, I don't know.
00:10:45
Speaker
Any lawyer that has the ability to copy and paste a document will do so and usually tries to find a copy and paste document if they're doing something that isn't very unique to their situation.
00:10:55
Speaker
I like was planning on, I'm planning on getting on my former PD nine alumni group to ask for something soon. And like, you know, be like, anybody, does anybody have a copy of one of these that they can give to me? And the, and that happens all the time and we give it to each other. Cause like, like there isn't a benefit to having a copyright to a legal document, really. Um,
00:11:17
Speaker
I don't even know if you can ethically charge. I'm trying to think, could you even ethically charge for to license a form? I mean, I guess, I guess. Yeah. Lexus and Westlaw do that through practical, practical guidance and all that. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess they're also not lawyers. So, uh, lawyers. Yeah. Yeah. That's your legal. Right. Those tend to be lawyers. So yeah. Yeah. Um,
00:11:45
Speaker
Yeah, I was just thinking like it's not a, you know, what's the, it's not legal practice. So it's there. It's not governed by the legal rules of ethics, I guess is an idea. Right. I mean, and so you know this as well, but like their entire areas, forget about like,
00:12:01
Speaker
All of transactional law is copying and pasting, to a large degree, because it would be potentially malpractice not to, to go in and go, here's a form dealing for the same issue from before, and it's been tested for the last 25 years, now I'm going to rewrite this whole thing. That would be insane. And then even in, I don't know if you want to call it litigation, but I'm thinking of public finance, that's all of the practice of public finance, is just rinse and repeat. This has worked before, you do it again.
00:12:31
Speaker
incredibly inefficient on the person drafting and then on the person reviewing it. And think about even like, why do you redline a document other than to check for these sorts of, you know what I mean? To run it against another precedent. And I think this might get back to what you were saying about functional writings. Like the form that you file, what's the name of that
00:12:56
Speaker
What's the name of that document that corporations file before they do an IPO? It's like an S1 or something. S1, yeah. And it's like hundreds of pages long. Like you can't have a copyright over that because everybody's supposed to read it. Right. And you're writing that as like the legal, because you legally have to in order to put this thing on the market, even if it might be persuasive and all that. Right. I feel like you should not have copyright to it even if you do.
00:13:26
Speaker
Like because for that reason, everybody should be reading it. There's no benefit to you being able to sell it because there's no like why you should like what is the purpose for how you don't care about protecting it from other people, other people making copies because it's not written to make money. And that's the purpose of giving copyrights out. Right. Is to incentivize people to do
Public Domain & Legal Filings
00:13:52
Speaker
things. So the analogy
00:13:54
Speaker
The analogy that you're making here is because that S1 form or whatever it actually is, you guys are probably right, that's it, is the analogy that you file that S1 with a government agency and when you file a legal pleading, you're filing the same thing with a government agency, the courts. Why should you have the right to prevent somebody from copying that for some commercial value, especially because it's openly, publicly available and
00:14:19
Speaker
This is like buying the penguin press version of A Tale of Two Cities. It's been public domain for like a century maybe. Do you buy the penguin one or do you download the PDF of it and print it off your printer?
00:14:37
Speaker
Is the 290, would you rather have the 299 or would you rather have the, is that what's going on? Is that what's going on here? There's no real value. There is at least fiction, there's value in the original creation, right? What I'm talking about is something that's... Let's say it's all copyrighted. What is the value for commercial exploitation of this thing that I can go with a little bit of savvy and find on the internet?
00:15:04
Speaker
or somebody else can sell to me for $2.99 because, hey, look, I did the printing for you, like Penguin Press does with the Tale of Two Cities. Is that what we're talking about here? And it's different because the exploitation of that, let's say copyrighted or uncopyrighted, it doesn't really matter, but let's say exploitation of that work by this one law firm who's copying and pasting another law firm's work, that's got
00:15:31
Speaker
pretty significant commercial value because you better believe that they're gonna send a big fat bills to the clients for that, you know, scare quotes work that they did. But isn't that a reflection of the work they did rather than the work itself? Like that is the thinking they did reduced to a writing, right? And if there's not like a, ostensibly, there's not a creative element to it. It is a reflection of reality of this whole treatment of the law as being a hard science rather than being, you know, more akin to interpreting A Tale of Two Cities than physics, right?
00:16:01
Speaker
is that that's the argument I think they would make is that this is just a reduction. This is a reducing to writing of all the work they did. And so we're not selling you the brief, we build you for writing the brief because it needs to be or whatever, right? But we're not selling it to the client. So there is no value to it, I guess.
00:16:16
Speaker
Though I like thinking thinking that through, like some things are copyrightable and are just aren't creative, valueless, but they're very valuable, like like maps and guides and stuff like that, just like the yellow pages like that are probably copyrightable because they generate value by existing, even if it's theoretically not, even it's theoretically
00:16:45
Speaker
not creative. I think the government part, there are things you could submit to the government that retain their copyright. If you submit a book for some kind of approval of some kind, and you wrote the book and you want to keep the copyright for the book, you can probably keep that copyright. But you're submitting that, but you didn't write the book for the government to get approval from the government for something. Or maybe you did, and then I
00:17:15
Speaker
don't think it should be copyrightable. And by the way, I'm just, I'm not a copyright lawyer. I'm just talking about what I think should and shouldn't be and why the rules are where they
Sovereign Immunity & Copyright
00:17:23
Speaker
are. That's an interesting question. So like, I don't, again, I'm not, this is, you know, somebody's going to listen to this and they're pulling their hair out, but let's imagine that somehow, so mad at us right now. He gave us that one rating on iTunes and then he just, he left.
00:17:36
Speaker
So let's say somehow a book becomes like an appendix to some sort of filing that would wind up on Edgar So that the entirety of that book is public like it is available. It's pub posted on you see Edgar You can see it would the holder of the copyright for that book not continue to hold the copyright? like would I be free to take that those words and now like Run off a penguin version and sell it. I don't think so. Yeah, I don't think so Like so Edgar
00:18:05
Speaker
Who runs Edgar? Sorry. The SEC. Edgar's a stupid example. It could just be anything where it becomes a part of the public record, basically.
00:18:14
Speaker
There was recently a Supreme Court case about whether or not, uh, states have sovereign immunity against copyright law. And I think the answer is yes, because they just, because like one of the states, I know, I know you love sovereign immunity, Jason. That's irony. I hate sovereignty. He hates it. I think it was like South Carolina just like put a guys diving video on their website, like for like,
00:18:40
Speaker
It was like a guy dove in a bay and took video of it. And then they just took it and put it on the website and South Carolina like tourism type. Yeah, I think so. OK. It's sovereign. I love it. Yeah. Y'all get to listen to me being this being the boy that we're calling it.
00:19:01
Speaker
sovereign immunity for people who aren't lawyers, which actually could be some people listening. It's just the idea that you can't sue the government in some instances for some things. Yeah. You cannot sue the government unless the government has said you can sue them for it. And yeah, the March 23, 2020, the Supreme Court said that you can't sue governments for violent and copyright. Wow. Okay.
00:19:25
Speaker
That's why they can put it on Edgar, but that doesn't mean that they can't sue the private person that makes a copy off of that, right? Because you still retain your copyright. Yeah, there you go. That's it. That's exactly it, right? It doesn't destroy the copyright. So take that video, the example you just gave. If I go find that on the South Carolina website, take it off and put it on the Esquiring Minds YouTube page, and I make that our whole thing, they could still set a DMCA takedown notice and get it taken down. Because
00:19:49
Speaker
the holder, they being the original holder of the copyright of the video, they still hold the copyright. It doesn't just become public domain because of a unilateral act. Because of publication. Right, by publication, or even by infringing publication. Infringement. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, that's a good point.
00:20:04
Speaker
Okay. All right. We got to the bottom of that. We figured with that. Here's the thing. If I write a paper, an essay, a novel, I write a short story, I write an opinion column that I ship out to every newspaper because I'm mad at my homeowner's association. I'm not. My homeowner's association is fine.
00:20:29
Speaker
But I write that, I immediately have a copyright on it. It attaches at the time that I commit it to some sort of medium. A fixed medium, and as long as you mail it to yourself. Yes. Yes, I know that too. Yeah, that's a joke. That's not serious. I did that once though. Did you really?
00:20:48
Speaker
Yeah, but the whole point is you don't open it, right? I think so. I don't know. That's the point is you mail it to yourself so that you don't open it so that if you ever have a deal, you ever need to prove when you wrote it, you have the post mark in a sealed envelope. That was the point.
00:21:04
Speaker
as though a tea kettle can't make a sealed envelope, no longer sealed. Right. This is an airtight thing. I'm sorry. Okay. This is your, you know, this is a theoretical scenario in which you care enough to get forensics on this freaking envelope. Whenever you wrote in this stupid thing. Okay. So ordinarily you write something, it's copyrighted. You don't have to jump through any special hoops unless you, unless it's specific, like enforcement related things, like mailing it to yourself so that you can prove and verify the date when you, before which you wrote it.
00:21:34
Speaker
So, why should legal filings be any different than other things that I sit down and I write in a notebook or I type out on a computer? Why should legal filings be any different? And the quickest, easiest answer is because of the
00:21:51
Speaker
Well, maybe used to, maybe the value that we used to place in precedent before this particular Supreme Court kind of just said that we don't care about precedents anymore. But law for centuries has been hyper concerned with precedent, what has happened before, what has come before, and it is compulsory practically
00:22:12
Speaker
to cite to, to quote and refer to prior precedent and to case law when you're making your arguments in front of courts on certain things. I literally lift from a court opinion my statement of the summary judgment standard under Indiana law.
00:22:35
Speaker
I'm compelled to copyright or I'm compelled to copy something like that. Now, that's a little bit different because that's an opinion written by a judge who's a government employee and copyright doesn't really attach to that. I take your point.
Precedent & Originality in Legal Writing
00:22:50
Speaker
It builds out from that, right? Yeah.
00:22:52
Speaker
Let's say there's this great case that was in Indiana in 2014 that's related to non-competes, Clark Sales and Service versus Smith and Ferguson. In that case, they wrote some really smart things and made great arguments and got this great result at the Indiana Court of Appeals.
00:23:10
Speaker
Heck yeah, I want to copy the arguments that they made there because they were good and winning arguments that get converted into a different type of text in the legal opinion, but if my goal is to persuade the judge like the judge was persuaded in that case, then I want to look at the opinion, yes, to see why the judge said that was persuasive, but I also want to look at what the person wrote so that I can persuade like that person.
00:23:34
Speaker
Should that be copyrightable, shouldn't it? I don't know. We place a lot of value on copying people intentionally, purposefully in the law and in legal writing and especially litigation writing. I guess transactional writing too. Should any of it be copyrightable? I tend to think that the answer should be no. The problem here shouldn't be a technical legal problem with the copyright infringement. It should be an ethical problem where you're stealing.
00:24:05
Speaker
where you're stealing this and you're not thinking for yourself. What are the odds it actually applies without attribution? Yeah. That's one thing is that Blue Book doesn't have, as far as I know, it doesn't have a citation form for, I jacked all this persuasive writing from somebody else.
00:24:25
Speaker
There's no like, the blue book is, uh, for anybody who's listening, who's not a lawyer, doesn't remember law school blue book is the citation guideline that you would follow. Like when you were doing a, an APA guideline or what's the other one that you do in high school MLA. So it's like that for lawyers. Yeah. It's awful. It's pretty worse. You know, it's it like, like the APA, like Chicago style, whatever.
00:24:48
Speaker
Oh, yeah, Chicago style. There's always one kid in the English class that would try, can I do Chicago style? Why? Why? You're at community college. Why do you have a specific style you want to do? Yeah, my legal journal did Chicago style. Really? But anyway, it all presumes that you wrote the thing, that you wrote the creative aspect of the thing. There's no citation form for I copied from this person, even though that's understood that
00:25:18
Speaker
I would say of the filings I get in an average litigation,
00:25:25
Speaker
there is maybe one or two, which is completely new. In most cases, I never see a single unique filing. Never. And writing something persuasively is just so rare. Maybe there's like a sentence or two. So rare is the wrong word. Like writing something new that's persuasive. If you're not doing appellate work. Appellate work, you gotta write it new every time.
00:25:55
Speaker
if you're dealing with the summary judgment case, a case where there's a lot, there's a potential summary judgment, and it's not like a standard form summary judgment, which so much of our litigation is standard.
00:26:07
Speaker
It's just not that common. It should only be when you have a unique situation, right? That's what you're saying, right? Since the writing should reflect the realities of what you're writing about, it only should be where there truly is no precedent for this that you're writing anew. Otherwise, you should be using what worked before. That's especially fact-sensitive where you need to make specific factual allegations that, obviously, maybe there's some crossover between one case and another, but you're not going to be able to copy them whole cloth.
00:26:36
Speaker
Yeah. So here's the point that I was, I was saying is that basically there, I feel like there should be a way of saying I've copied this, this persuasive part of my legal reasoning from some other, from some other lawyer, just because it would be nice for the lawyers to get some kind of recognition when they write something that's particularly persuasive.
00:27:00
Speaker
Oh, I get that. Yeah. Just the same way a case could be cited. It would be, here's the plaintiffs filing in this particular case. I used this. Here's a whole quote from that. And then Google Scholar would show up, you know, cited 55 times or something and you would know. I guess theoretically you could. You could do it through a block quote.
00:27:17
Speaker
Imagine you have a trial court order that grants or an appellate opinion from a persuasive appellate opinion. It's not binding, is what that means. You cite that as opposed to a binding opinion.
00:27:34
Speaker
You cite that opinion holding in your favor. And then you say, here's what the, you know, as explained in the prevailing brief, blah, blah, blah. And then you say the name of the lawyer. So I guess there is a way to do it, but it just looks silly. I feel like I may have seen not maybe the block quote thing, but I've definitely seen like, yeah, the plaintiff's brief cited to or something like the argument. I think you said it before, right? The argument they made here was this. And so little quote. But so here's the question. Here's the wrinkle, I think.
00:28:03
Speaker
So then we talked about Lexus and Westlaw, right? They say they create forms for people to use. Yeah. Can they copyright that? They're not filing that. And if they can... Yeah, they... Yeah. Well, I bet you... What happens now? I intensely believe that they would say, yes, these are copyrighted works because they say them on them. I think they are. Yeah. I think they are because they are not filed.
00:28:24
Speaker
because they are nonspecific and therefore not functional yet. That's for you. The filing, you're trying to say that, and I'm not saying that you genuinely believe this opinion, but the position that you're taking there is that by filing it, essentially what you're doing is giving an unlimited license to people to use that work for whatever purpose.
Implied License & Copyrightable Legal Forms
00:28:44
Speaker
I'm not sure that that's the case because when I file something in a case,
00:28:49
Speaker
I don't think that I'm giving you the license to then copy pasta in my brief and use it for whatever purpose you want. I'm making a communication to the court. It's not an unreasonable position for you to take though either because you said this thing publicly.
00:29:10
Speaker
What would happen if I tried to then transcribe and print in a newspaper? Maybe this is diving into a new territory, but what if I transcribe and print in a newspaper that speech that you gave in your closing argument? Is that copyright infringement? You didn't fix it to a medium, so it's not.
00:29:26
Speaker
Well, I think, yeah, that's, uh, well, I thought you were, I thought you agreed with me. Are you versing on me? I thought you agreed with me that none, that a pleading is not copyrightable. That a motion file is not copyrightable. I think they should not be copyrightable at all, but not because of the filing, because of what they are. So then why does Lexus and Westlaw get to have a copyright?
00:29:47
Speaker
Because they're creating it, it's a creative work and it's not for purposes of being filed. It's for purposes of being sold. Because they have a lot of money. They have a lot of money. They'll outspend you in litigation and because they have a strong lobby in DC and in every state, that's why.
00:30:05
Speaker
Yeah. But I think, I think the filing might not be the right like concentration, but the second that it became that it was submitted to the court as part of a persuasive. Yeah. So that's why I said file. But the, uh, the, the point isn't that it entered a court file. That wasn't the, the point isn't that like, Oh, because the government possesses it now, it, it loses its copyright. The point being that it switched to a functional document that was.
00:30:33
Speaker
put forth as part of an actual mechanism of justice. And so you as a lawyer are an officer of the court, theoretically, and you are actually engaging part of the immune system that is the justice system every time you're doing something as a lawyer. And so
00:30:56
Speaker
As opposed to if you are writing a form with blanks and stuff, you are providing a service for the lawyer to use. And so it's not functional yet. I mean, it's helping lawyers when it's a form sitting on Lexus practical guidance or whatever it is.
00:31:16
Speaker
What if you are a lawyer and you write something but don't file it and I steal from that? Is it the fact that it becomes public? I think that is copyright infringement. Yeah. That one's much clearer. Yeah. Because you haven't... And I'm starting to come around on this, Jake, to the act of filing it is giving a license to people to use it for at least a similar purpose.
00:31:43
Speaker
Yeah, I think I see that. Oh yeah, that's an interesting question. What if somebody took your story from your brief and just copied it into a for-profit novel?
00:31:53
Speaker
Like, yeah, that's, you know, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like adapted it into a story. It gets a movie rights. It gets the whole thing. And now you're saying like, that's the, the, the little typo I wrote in my argument. I made right for some, for a slip and fall in a supermarket or whatever, incredibly compelling story that you then did this big blockbuster or whatever. I mean, I think this is, it comes around to like, I've been saying this in class a lot. It comes around to like,
00:32:16
Speaker
Yeah, maybe the answer is it depends, right? It's like, yeah, okay, you make a compelling enough argument and then, yeah, sure, that would be copyrightable and it is copyright infringement, okay. And why, the underlying why is going to be back-solved from the result that is wanted, basically, right? In that situation where that literal thing happened, you write this really compelling thing that gets filed and it gets taken and makes a gazillion dollars, yeah, you'll probably be able to get some sort of copyright infringement claim against the person that did it.
00:32:43
Speaker
Why? Because whatever argument they'll come up with, uh, the judge will come up with to, to decide that that's how it should be. Well, if we, if man, but it might be just that, uh, but it might be just that categorical, which is, you know, it's not copyrightable. The second you put it on the, the second you file it, which is what I had said earlier, but maybe I'm coming down off that we're, we're, we're shopping positions here. Right. When you were working up in policy, okay. When you file something, it's a limited license. Yeah.
00:33:12
Speaker
Uh, okay. And then, you know, lawyers are like, uh, what is it? Is it, is it absolute immunity? No. The litigation privilege where you can't be sued for things that you, that you say in the course of litigation. Yeah. That's like the defense to defamation.
00:33:31
Speaker
Yeah, because you can say like you cannot be sued. If you say something mean about the other side in the court filing, you can't be sued. You can be sanctioned in that court, but you can't then be sued for definition. Well, just about like a criminal proceeding where you say that the defendant did the thing, but then they're found not guilty, right? And the first thing they do is like, and you in a public court said that I was the murderer.
00:33:56
Speaker
Well, then that's, you know, prosecutors get absolute immunity too. Yeah. Uh, yeah. So we're, so whose side are we on with this Winston and strong then? We think that the little, the little booty. Well, that was the original. That's the whole reason we're talking about this. Yeah. If he like, uh,
00:34:15
Speaker
Yeah, I think that I don't have a problem with litigators stealing from in with the same situation, taking motions or briefs and copying them in the same situation, though it'd be nice to give some credit, I guess. Yeah.
00:34:32
Speaker
It pains me to be in favor of the big 850 lawyer, Winston and Strawn, but I think I am. I haven't looked at the actual motions, the actual filings here, but I think about I've been involved occasionally in a couple of cases where I'm defending somebody from a debt collection or something like that.
00:34:54
Speaker
And those summary judgment motions, heck yeah, I would copy and paste something from one of these firms because these are not creative. They are rote repetition of these same particular things over and over. And if they do it well, of course I want to copy that filing, which is different than copying an opinion.
00:35:17
Speaker
But, of course, I want to copy that. I don't know what they actually took care of. I have reason to suspect that it is considerably more special than what I was just describing in a debt collection summary judgment filing or something like that. I think it was actually really complicated. I don't think it was this article, but I remember reading an article and being like, oh, that sounds really heavy duty.
00:35:45
Speaker
the legwork they did to figure this thing out. Yeah, and they were patent infringement cases, it looks like. Yeah. And so I was like, oh, that's much more serious than you stole this two-page summary judgment motion, which is like a name and date swap for every other time this has happened. Yeah. Right. And I mean, maybe that's the sort of final net that can catch the most egregious examples. I think it was you, Jake, that said it before.
00:36:15
Speaker
So then that lawyer might get slapped on the wrist for overbilling or for malpractice because this doesn't actually convey what needs to be conveyed in these particular facts, right? Like you copying and pasting is malpractice. This is not the same situation.
00:36:31
Speaker
This is a very complicated situation. And the odds that there are some other huge blocks of paragraphs of text out there, even with a million monkeys and a million typewriters, the odds that there's something out there that is one to one useful are pretty slim. And so there's another whole way for you to be sanctioned by the court for doing it, right?
00:36:48
Speaker
That is definitely true. Yeah. I think I'm down on the side of if you are filing it with the court, you shouldn't have any reasonable expectation that you hold a copyright to that. That is, no, you might still hold the copyright to it. I think there's an implied license given by the filing. Yeah.
00:37:09
Speaker
Yeah, I applied well implied license to other people in my other chill lawyers only cool lawyers can come yeah my stuff Yeah, no bozos allowed Yeah, I also I think like isn't there room for shame to just be enough like this is an embarrassing story Like this is not you don't want to be the Winston strong, right? So maybe you wear that on your badge You're like we're so efficient for our client
00:37:34
Speaker
We spent five hours on this complaint when they spent like five hundred hours. We saved you thousands and thousands of dollars. But isn't that a little bit like a hospital saying you should come have surgery done here because we don't pay our surgeons. Like we have them do it and then we just never pay them like cheap. Yeah. Yeah. I guess it's I mean, it's more like no, it's more like all these
00:37:59
Speaker
It's more like all these media companies bragging about how they use AI. It's like to some people that sounds awful. Like the readers, probably it sounds awful. But if your audience is shareholders, which I guess clients are like a mix of both, then maybe you hear something really good because the clients don't want the good quality, but they also don't want to have to pay for it. So, you know. Right. Okay.
00:38:28
Speaker
All right, so we're doing a live agenda thing here. I think we have time for probably one more smaller story. Did you guys have anything that was particularly interesting? You know Jake does. Legal? Does it have to be legal? No, I don't actually want to talk.
00:38:44
Speaker
It's just so funny how much chess stuff there was laid on me. Tell me about the chess drama. I want to know the chess drama. I'll just give you the two minute version of everything that happened. And earlier in the month, Hikaru Nakamura, one of the best American players of chess, was accused of cheating by an old grandmaster just because of how good he was. And the old grandmaster of Vladimir Kramnik, very popular, very well known.
00:39:09
Speaker
would not shut up about it and kept posting about it on his chess.com blog until he got banned from chess.com. And so this is such low, such low level drama, but he just would not. He would not stop talking about it. Just accusing him of cheating. Yeah. Over and over again. Because he was saying that his results were interesting. It's very interesting. But also he was like, yeah, he's cheating.
00:39:35
Speaker
And it does not sound actually think he's cheating. That does not sound nearly as exciting or interesting as the stuff, Bluetooth device in your butt and cheating that was going on. Yeah. Oh yeah. Well that, that was fake. That was a joke.
00:39:50
Speaker
that wasn't real no so well the the cheating implication was real in that case but the whole thing about the the way that he was cheating that was right in the news was made a joke made up on i think it was at the anarchy chest subreddit
00:40:08
Speaker
And then people started thinking that it was a real accusation. I started thinking it was real. Yeah, I thought it was real. Yeah. What's anarchy chess? There's no rules. There's no hierarchy. All the pieces move. It's the joke chess subreddit. Oh, OK. Yeah, there's no real anarchy chess game. OK, it's the joker jokes. I want to play that chess. That sounds fun.
00:40:32
Speaker
Yeah. And then Daniel Dubov, Jan Napomnichi, two very popular, best chess players in the world, agreed to the results of a match ahead of time that they were going to draw a match and then did it and got forfeited. And this is in one of the big tournaments, FIDE Grand Prix. Why would they do that?
00:40:55
Speaker
They did that because they wanted to take a break. They wanted a break from thinking. So instead of playing a four hour game, they played like five dancing night moves and then agreed to a draw. This seems like a big scandal. And this was a big scandal partially because other people have done this almost this exact same thing and did not get forfeited their match. We're not punished at all.
00:41:16
Speaker
Do they copyright the moves they did? Can you copyright chess moves? That's actually really clear. And because of that, anytime there's a tournament, every single chess site will have coverage of it because you can just watch a board that you make up.
00:41:35
Speaker
And the difference like to license the chess tournament is to actually license the video of the people playing in the hall. Gotcha. Just like licensing a baseball game or something. But the that little fake version you can do. OK, yeah, it's like when you go on ESPN and watch the score, like watch the visual baseball thing. Right. Anyway.
00:41:59
Speaker
I'll, man, it's just so silly everything happened. You have a couple of things in the notes here and one of the things that I, the thing that sticks out to me probably because you misspelled it and put it at, put two words in as one word, dress code. Kazarian dress code. I want to know what that's about. Tell me what that's about because I'm assuming and probably I'm appropriately dressed in my feminist sweatshirt here that it's just a sweatshirt that literally says feminist on it.
00:42:29
Speaker
I'm suspecting that this is a sexist attack on somebody, but tell me. Set me right, James. Arguably. Let's see. Annamiah Kazarian. I don't know whether I'm saying her name right or whether or not I got her first name right. I think her name is Annamiah Kazarian. We should have guessed that anything involving a dress code was going to be something coming down on a woman. That should have been, yeah. I mean, I think history is pretty clear about that.
00:42:51
Speaker
Yeah. So she was at the same... Wait, is it the Fide World Cup? The same thing where the match fixing happened. Right.
00:43:05
Speaker
She was playing in that. She's, I believe, an international master, and she's a chess streamer. She got handed a note in her third round saying, or I think it was the third round, saying, your shoes are out of dress code. You need to change them immediately, or you're going to get fined. And then if you don't change them, you're going to get kicked out of the tournament. Her shoes were very fancy.
00:43:34
Speaker
like kind of Skechers looking shoes, but they were like designer, Skechers looking shoes. Skechers are pretty ugly. So you're going to have to convince me here. Oh, I mean, these are these are like stylish looking sneakers. Yeah. With like, what's the like the part of them? Yeah, I'm looking at them right now. I pulled them up here. They look like they've said that that Burberry sort of plaid checked pattern on part of it and.
00:44:01
Speaker
Yeah. Like it's stylistically interesting. I probably wouldn't wear them, but also they're probably not made for me. Yeah. So like not formal, but not super inappropriate. Not like, well, and you know, maybe if they were consistent on like, you know, you need like dress shoes for this, then it would be one thing. But other like there were guys walking around in sneakers and hoodies, like it was not a formal,
00:44:27
Speaker
Like they were not three-piece suits and wingtips and they were not enforcing this a lot of these Controversies seem to be about like the fact that feed a the you know that FIFA of chess Just doesn't enforce things equally at all
00:44:44
Speaker
And so she was, she was given this fine and also told that she would get kicked out of the tournament. And she was like, I literally don't have any other shoes. And also I can't leave because my next round is about to start. So I guess I'm just going to get fined and maybe forfeit it. She did actually get fined. It looks like I don't know if they eventually reversed it, but they give, they issued her a 100 Euro fine.
00:45:06
Speaker
Uh, and, uh, said that if you do it again, then you may, uh, not be included in the pairings for the next round. So you might get bopped out of the tournament. It sounds like, well, I think maybe it's been on this podcast. Maybe it's been in other, uh, non-podcasted conversations, but like, I think there's a pretty stark history of sexism in chess. Uh, Jake, I think that you probably
00:45:31
Speaker
Yeah going on about that right and so like history doesn't change very quickly especially when it's in a hyper male dominated field like chess is and all this information comes from me watching the Netflix show with a woman who's good at chess and
00:45:49
Speaker
And what- Queen's Gambit. Queen's Gambit. That's the one. Yeah. And then listening to you talk about chest, Jake, because you're my chest exposure. Yeah. I'm the chest guy. Yeah. But it is not surprising based on what I've been told about the chest
00:46:06
Speaker
world that this would be a pretty sexist thing. And hey, what do you know? Turns out it's sexist. And Amaya, I guess that's probably, how you say it? Miss Kazarian. She makes it very clear to them that they're not sports shoes. Nope, they are Burberry sneakers also. Hey, look at you. Good job. Look at me recognizing things. All right. I don't know how to feel about this.
00:46:34
Speaker
Uh, so in any event, I think this is really stupid. This makes me mad and I want to go pick it a chess tournament. I don't know where to find one though. Like, look, you find us chess is a mess. Feed a is a mess. Everybody's a mess. And like, not just, not just on sexism issues, which it like, the thing about sexism is in chess is yes, it's so male dominant dominated. They don't want it to be. They, most people don't want it to be. Some people are like, yeah,
00:47:01
Speaker
Like we don't care. Right. Stop making, you know, it's.
00:47:06
Speaker
like a lot of different like sports slash competition things in the world, where like not, but chess is especially bad in that their female player, female competition sphere is so underdeveloped because there were so few women in chess for so long. Now there are some, but it's still way, like even amongst young people, it's like 90-10, whereas before it was like 98-2.
00:47:35
Speaker
in terms of percentage. And things like this reinforce that. I'm obviously right because why would you want to get involved in this? As if you're a potential female chess player. The other thing I think is that I've thought about this in other contexts. I think the concept of selective enforcement is a very difficult thing for people to self-assess. I guess what I'm trying to say is I'm not defending anybody here by any means. But I imagine the person that
00:48:02
Speaker
made the claim, the initial claim, whatever it said, something wrong with your shoes, probably does not view themselves as being sexist. They are, the way they would defend themselves, I'm assuming, again, I don't know. Maybe this is a monster. I mean, they're a monster anyway. I would do the same thing if it were a man wearing these shoes. Yes, exactly. But I have just not, they have not noticed that they don't bother checking the shoes of anyone else. You've been staring at this person. The arbiter was actually a woman in this case. My friend, you have discovered the world of employment litigation. Yeah.
00:48:28
Speaker
What's that, sorry? You have discovered the world of employment discrimination. Exactly. It's very difficult to convince that person that, no, no, I understand what you're saying that you're reading me the rule over and over again. What I'm saying to you is that you never even checked the rule until this person showed up. And then all of a sudden you became very interested.
00:48:44
Speaker
I'm not saying the person didn't maybe violate the letter of the law or the rule, it's that so did everybody else and you've never even bothered to look at that. And I think that is like the last, maybe not the last, but it's one of the last bastions of sexism, of racism, of phobias of all sorts, right?
00:49:00
Speaker
people can hide behind feeling like they're not bad people. They don't they don't think that there should be no women in chess. They don't think that women should be held to different standards than men in chess by any means. It's just that they don't notice that they're only looking at they're only going over with a fine tooth comb. You know, in this case, women chess players, not male chess players or whatever. Yeah, I think anyway.
00:49:21
Speaker
So even if the powers that be were totally neutral and not sexist at all, everything was cool, all the arbiters, all the amateur people that actually run these tournaments, because that's one of the things about chess tournaments is that they're often run by amateurs because it's not like a spectator sport where people are getting paid to do this, at least not very often.
00:49:46
Speaker
is that just the players themselves, like if you're a woman going to these tournaments because of how male dominated it is, it's like really screwed up. Like you've had, so Lula Roberts, who's like a chess streamer played in Iceland and she, and she beat a guy at chess and he got so mad, he knocked over all the pieces and stormed off and then later found her at a bar and put her in like a headlock.
00:50:14
Speaker
So that was like one of the most famous incidents. There's another famous chess streamer, I can't remember, oh, Anna Kramling, who's one of the most famous chess streamers out there. And she's like in her 20s or something. She talked about how when she was a teenager, and she's I think a WIM,
00:50:38
Speaker
Um, when she was a teenager, uh, like she would go to tournaments and the guys would like, like more often than not come onto her, even when she was like 15, 16, older guys would come onto her at the chess tournament after like every game.
00:50:55
Speaker
And it's just like, that's the environment they're playing in. I can't imagine why it's 90-10. Why wouldn't it be blocking to that sort of... So even with powers that were totally supportive and all that, it would just be a rough situation.
00:51:11
Speaker
the players themselves are maybe most of the problem. And so obviously, if they're willing to act like that, they are not clamoring for a change in enforcement for rules to be amended or changed or enforced more equally or anything like that.
00:51:27
Speaker
No, no. I'm sure they're not. A lot of drama in chess. I had no idea. There is. Yeah, it is weird. I thought once the Soviet Union collapsed, all the chess drama was over. Wasn't that a big deal? Russians still love chess.
00:51:45
Speaker
Now India is going to dominate soon. Everything manufacturing. Okay. You guys want to move on to, I mean, we're at 51 minutes. What do you think? Are we in recommendationville? I think we're in recommendationville. That sounds good to me. I don't have any follow ups other than the joke follow up about, um, uh, you know, Sam Altman. I would have sworn that was a coordinated attack on me. It was not a coordinated attack.
00:52:12
Speaker
It really, I mean, so he came back and just to like put a cap on the follow up, there is no real follow up, right? He came back and then it all kind of just died down. Yeah. Nevermind. They're going to have a new board eventually with nine people instead of five. And they have a mini board choosing the new board right now.
00:52:29
Speaker
Yeah. But I mean, there was all that talk of like, this could be the end. Like open AI and GPT-4 was the pinnacle of AI. They're the leader by a million miles. Microsoft is partnering with them, all that kind of stuff. This could be the end of them. This could be it. This could be the biggest disaster in the history of tech news stories, whatever. And then they reinstated them and it was just, OK, never mind. Well, the story of the fallout is far from written.
00:52:56
Speaker
I mean, we don't know what it's going to look like in a year or two, five, 10. Because they had a pretty galloping head start in front of everybody else such that Google was rushing to catch up, Apple might be hurrying to catch up. Nobody had anything that was close to this product yet.
00:53:18
Speaker
And like what sort of inertia did they lose? How much catching up are people going to do? How much distrust is such that partners no longer look to them, but instead we're going to look to somebody else. So that story is yet to be told, the ultimate effects of it. But like the immediate corporate effects of, oh, yep, Sam's back. All right. It might actually be the opposite where like people are suddenly
00:53:42
Speaker
like the the open AI team seems to be like energized or seem to be energized when Sam came back. And also Microsoft seems to be more in control of open AI, even if they don't still don't have a board seat. And I think that that all that hubbub around Microsoft because you is now looking into whether or not there needs to be antitrust examination of Microsoft's deal with open AI, even though they don't own
00:54:10
Speaker
even though they don't control the nonprofit and they don't own a majority of the of the for profit entity. I think that's I mean, the whole world is going to have to head in that direction at some point, because you saw the sort of exertion they have or the power they leverage, they have over open AI without having technically a seat at the table. Right. So that can't continue to be the loophole. Right. Well, we'll just build you to where you're literally using our servers, you're operating using like our our script in our factory. And yes, technically, we don't have an actual say, but
00:54:40
Speaker
I don't know how you're going to keep doing this when you've built this whole thing on the Azure servers and stuff. You know what I mean? And if you get out of line, we'll just hire your entire team. We'll hire your entire team, and we have the servers that have all the data. Like, they're literally already in our data centers. Right? So it just came over. And you take all the potential copyright infringement issues with OpenAI. But I agree with your point, Jake. I think that
00:55:07
Speaker
The scuttlebutt seems to be that Altman was opposed to, you know, pedal to the metal, profitability, just accelerate this whole thing. He was, I'm sorry, he was for that. He was the profit guy. Yeah, he was the profit guy. Other members were less inclined to do that. He was ousted.
00:55:23
Speaker
and furtherance of like, let's pump the brakes a little bit. And then his return is, I would imagine he's now unassailable. He is now going to fire me again. Yeah. You saw what happened. Yeah. You can't fire him. No, unless he does something terrible. Yeah.
00:55:41
Speaker
Okay. What's the saying? You come after the king, you best not miss. Yeah. Classic choir. That's what they're doing with, we should have talked about Trump. You talked about, did we open with that or was that before we were recording, Jake? I was ready to go hot topic here and kind of swap in. Legal take, what do you guys think about the Colorado case that's been granted certiorari to go up to the United States Supreme Court?
00:56:11
Speaker
because I think that one's really interesting. Ordinarily, I would say the Supreme Court tends to be pretty favorable to Trump. By the way, we totally just decided that we were going to move on to recommendations and I hijacked it. No, it's fine. I will. I started feeling despair of, oh, well, the Supreme Court is totally going to intervene and say that Colorado doesn't have the say over its ballot. You can't exclude
00:56:37
Speaker
a major party nominee from the ballot because your state statute says you can't. But with all the stuff that the United States Supreme Court has been doing about decisions about voting being delegated to the states, being things that are within the state legislatures,
00:56:57
Speaker
boundaries of authority. In that situation, I think that there's a pretty decent shot that this Supreme Court is going to come down and say, well, the state says you can't be on the ballot. They're the ones who are in charge of holding their elections, and it's not even a real election. It's a primary election, which is like this goofy public-private partnership. I think there's a pretty solid chance that they come down and say states get to decide how elections are run.
00:57:22
Speaker
Well, I think part of that is also because Colorado is not really in play. Right. So it's a pretty low stakes. Yeah. That man was in Maine, the other state where he's off. Have Michigan try the same thing and wonder if they don't come around, if they still think states rights are so important. It's definitely.
00:57:39
Speaker
something where I'd like them to decide now the 14th Amendment thing because I don't want this to be a big deal in the middle of July or August when people are starting to vote in early voting and absentee voting. Do you think there's any way they do that though? They take that up?
00:58:02
Speaker
I think they should. I think they got it eventually. It's a, it's a question. Um, it's part and parcel with the Colorado case where like, I think they have to weigh in on that in the Colorado case, unless they just punt it and say like, uh, we granted certiorari to say that we're not going to intervene in this and States control their elections, which I don't think that they're going to do. Uh, but I don't know. I'm, I'm talking out of both sides of my mouth here. Uh, but I think that, do y'all remember?
00:58:30
Speaker
I don't remember my con law too that well when it comes to, there were white primary cases where basically black people were excluded from the ballot because political parties were deciding their candidates through whites only primaries, which were considered private.
00:58:52
Speaker
Like Nixon v. Herndon, I think, was one of them, right? That seems to me. Maybe. No, maybe. I don't know. I'm going to be misconstruing things. I just remember them being referred to as the white primary cases, and eventually, basically, you couldn't have a racially exclusionary party primary, if I remember correctly. Yeah, but the Supreme Court doesn't care about precedent. So what do you do with that? You need to Google white primaries. Yeah, it's Nixon v. Condon. Yeah.
00:59:18
Speaker
In any event, I'm interested to see what they do and I'm also interested to see the timeline on which they handle it because they're picking up case granting certiorari on these cases but typically the big deluge of decisions that we see would come out in June
00:59:33
Speaker
of the following year, which is like there's that week long, two week long, multi week long span where the majority of the Supreme Court decisions get handed down and so everybody's getting their hot news out during that time period.
00:59:49
Speaker
if they hold off on deciding this until that point, then the primaries are over and we'd be going into the conventions pretty soon after that. I think most of the conventions are in July, June or July. I think that's right. We basically, by the time a decision could theoretically come down in June,
01:00:12
Speaker
the primaries are over, we're heading towards the convention. Are you going to announce right before the convention that the guy who was the winner of the majority of the primaries and is the nominee can't run? Because they take up the insurrection thing. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, I mean. And you know what? If anything in the entire world is going to get me to watch the Republican National Convention, it's going to be that. That would be fun.
01:00:41
Speaker
It's true. And he might be in jail during that time. It's like, yeah. I mean, these trials are coming up and they're not getting delayed. We've talked about this before. Like, does anyone on this podcast think that he ever sees the inside of a cell worst case? I think there's a very good chance that he does. Really? I think Mar-a-Lago house are like worst case scenario. He's stuck sitting in one of these. He gets convicted on one of these four cases.
01:01:08
Speaker
He's moving to Moscow. Like, yeah, maybe that's it. How does that functionally work though? Like, how do you put a former president with a security social security, with a secret service, with social security checks, with a secret service detail in prison? Like what, what do you, what does that mean? You're going to build another wing and just have them hanging out like Al Capone. We'll find out. Wingback chairs. I mean, is there more, there are two, are there two federal or three federal cases? Is there any state case other than the Georgia case?
01:01:36
Speaker
I don't remember. I haven't been following it that closely, that part of it, but I don't think as a practical matter, there's very high likelihood. I think that there's a decent likelihood of a conviction, but actual incarcerated in a federal or state prison, I don't know. I think we come up with something special for them. I don't know how the federal system works.
01:02:05
Speaker
But my experience in the state system is once you're convicted and your and your sentence is looking like a custodial sentence, you will be sentenced to prison. Then they take you into custody immediately pending sentencing. Yeah. So if they want to send him to Terre Haute, if they want to send him to Terre Haute, I imagine that that would basically make that would be the best thing to happen to Terre Haute tourism in a very, very, very long time.
01:02:35
Speaker
There's a federal penitentiary. There will be, there will be festivals held outside of the prison. Oh yeah. Hot mess. Yeah. That'd be, I'll tell you what I'd like it to happen just to see what happens. You know what I mean?
01:02:49
Speaker
Yeah, I just you're saying that the festival is outside. I thought the other day about remember when he got COVID that was a wild night, right? Like watching when the helicopter landed and then he would remember when he took the tour around with the limo and he did the little hand out the window waving like, uh, uh, Elliott, the ET, they would be that all the time. It would be that all the time from the prison. And he got up those steps and was like gasping for air.
01:03:12
Speaker
Whoever, I still say, whoever stopped him from doing the thing where he came out of the hospital and he wanted to tear his shirt open and have a Superman shirt on underneath should be charged and tried and convicted and sent to prison. Like no one should have interfered with that. That's the real insurrection right there. Exactly. Yes. January 6th was nothing compared to stopping him from doing that. Oh, mercy. Oh my gosh.
01:03:33
Speaker
All right, fellas, make some recommendations. Oh, no, no, no. There have been no cancel-worthy topics here. Certainly not. Listener is a die-hard MAGA, and they've tuned out long ago. Absolutely, yeah.
01:03:48
Speaker
All right. Andrew, you go first. Sure. I have a very simple one. Uh, I recently renewed my audible subscription and found that they have a lot of great courses plus, uh, content on there now that is just like, you don't have to use your credit. You just have access to it. If you have an audible subscription, tons of them are great. The one I recommend is a Bach and the Baroque period. Very good. They have little interstitials of actual music and then talk about
01:04:10
Speaker
why it's significant, why it's interesting. But generally speaking, great courses, all really interesting, good things to listen to on commutes and such, when especially now heading into 2024, where a lot of podcasts are going to be, if you listen to like current events, podcasts, news podcasts, save in this podcast, there's gonna be a lot of talk about Trump, you're gonna get sick of it, you're gonna want to listen to something else. This is a great thing. It's hundreds of years old. There's nothing modern about it.
01:04:37
Speaker
I don't listen to news podcasts unless it's now I've given them up to. Yeah. Uh, unless it's like pop culture news, only the least serious stuff for me. I get enough serious stuff by, uh, by accident. I'm still subscribed to the daily, but, uh, day after day, I look at the episode, look at the topic and I'm good. Yeah. I get enough of a bummer. Yeah. All right. That's my recommendation. Great courses. Who has a, who has more, who has a better one?
01:05:06
Speaker
The Boy in the Heron. The Boy in the Heron, the movie, the Miyazaki movie. I don't know if he, what's y'all's experience with the Miyazaki movies? Have y'all watched them? Nothing. Zero? Zero. Zero? Zero. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Well then, I am told that I should watch, you know, my whatever Totoro and like Princess Mononoke and
01:05:31
Speaker
My My Neighbor Totoro is the best. My Neighbor Totoro is the best kids movie. Like my kid has watched it a hundred times and I could watch it a hundred more. It's so like it's perfect. Jake, in Kanto. No. You're putting it up against in Kanto. You can get sick of those. You can get sick of those songs. My Neighbor Totoro is just like pure childhood. OK.
01:06:01
Speaker
There's a spirited away. It's like the one that's safe for us one. It's safe for children, right? Yes. My neighbor Totoro is safe for safe for small kids, too. It's not scary at all. OK. OK. My kid watched it when he's like one of his favorite movies since he was like three or four. Yeah. But the boy in the herons just came out. So this is like advanced Miyazaki, though.
01:06:24
Speaker
It's like you need to know what you're getting into, which is this man does not follow the rules of making movies. There were many times in this movie where I was like, are they going to try to explain what's going on? And he was like, no. No, the main character is not going to be like, oh my gosh, I can't believe this is happening to me. The main character is just going to take it and is not going to complain. He's just going to understand what's happening and go.
01:06:52
Speaker
And it doesn't demand that you understand what's happening at all. It just it just asks that you bathe in what's going on. It's like this movie was is it's about a boy who's in. Well, it's this is a mature movie. It's not a kids movie.
01:07:09
Speaker
a boy whose mother dies on World War II firebombing and he moves up out of Tokyo with his dad to meet his new mom, his original mom's sister. So the dad's marrying his aunt.
01:07:31
Speaker
OK, and he's moving moving into a house with her. It's got a very old rate about this. It's got a very Old Testament Kinsman Redeemer vibe. Yeah, it does. And is this firebombing a United States ostensibly? Oh, you never see the United States or it's you know, it's it's all portrayed from the eyes of a child, which is all of a sudden everything's on fire and your mom is in a burning building. America. Not great. Not great.
01:07:59
Speaker
But then he gets to this house and this Heron this starts harassing him and he's like go to hell away and then a bunch of magical stuff happens magic magic magic magic magic and then at the end I was like blubbering from being from the emotions of it
01:08:16
Speaker
Um, I wouldn't recommend it as your first Miyazaki movie though. Okay. That was my question. Is it, is it like, is there a soft prerequisite that you have seen some other Miyazaki movie before? I would say so just so that you understand, like there were so many points in this movie where I was like, I don't really know what's going on, but I'm okay with it.
01:08:34
Speaker
and like if you expect a normal movie cadence out of this you might it might feel weird to you but Miyazaki doesn't work in normal movie cadences and that's one of the reasons why I loved it which is
01:08:46
Speaker
which is it would so disposed of the ordinary chores you have to do when you're doing a movie. So much dialogue in movies these days I feel like is kind of predictable. It's like exposition. Even if it's good, it is like, oh, well, they have to say this now. They have to talk about this now. When you go through the magic portal, you have to talk about how you just went through the magic portal. Where am I? Oh, what's this place?
01:09:16
Speaker
It's like this movie does none of that. It's like, oh, you go through the magic portal and then you're just like, OK. And then the main character silently tries to calculate what what to do with these with these birds that are harassing him. My favorite of what you're describing is I don't know if you remember this. It's I think everybody here is a Star Wars head. So you probably will remember it. I think the first spoken dialogue in Return of the Jedi is C-3PO saying, look, it's Han Solo and he's still frozen in carbonite. And it's the most like
01:09:46
Speaker
Just so you remember. Yeah, just so you know what that that thing is that Java has hung on the wall in case you're just wondering why everybody's upset about the art. Yeah. When we last saw our heroes. Yeah, exactly. It's basically it's it's the most because George Lucas can't write dialogue. Right. So what you're saying is it's the antithesis of that. Right. It is not that it is. It is so little dialogue and like such it packs such emotion into this little amount of dialogue. If you're willing to go along with them.
01:10:16
Speaker
And it's streamed like how do you how do you watch it? It's in theaters. Oh Sorry But all the Miyazaki movies are on max so great if you want to watch it if you want to watch what if you want to dive straight into the If you want to dive straight into like the one that most people consider like the best one or whatever You'd probably want to watch spirited away
01:10:37
Speaker
Spirited away or totally down. Yeah. Spirited away is like it's a book for a book, a movie for more young adults, but also adults like it. So I heard I heard more apologizing for your recommendation than actual recommending in that recommendation. Oh, yeah. No, no. If you've never watched the Miyazaki Miyazaki movie, watch Spirited Away. OK, speaking of Miyazaki movie, watch The Boy and the Heron.
01:11:03
Speaker
Speaking of apologizing for your recommendations, I'm going to apologize to those people who are observing dry January with making a beverage recommendation. Our household beverage for years has been the Peach Mule. I'm going to tell you some secrets about the Peach Mule and extol to you its virtue. It is Peach Vodka. Most specifically, the best that I have found is Deep Eddie's Peach Vodka. I don't like the name Deep Eddie's, but whatever.
01:11:32
Speaker
and it's from Texas, from Austin, and all the trendy stuff seems to be from Austin, Texas these days. Deep Eddies is included in that. So Deep Eddies, Peach Vodka, you can either use
01:11:43
Speaker
All of, you can use that exclusively for your alcohol content, or you can mix it half and half with Captain Morgan, which I tend to do. Uh, gives it a nice extra spice, ginger beer and a lime. Uh, this is a delightful, delicious beverage at all times of year, but especially, uh, during the spring and summer, but it is the Ramsland family signature beverage. When we entertain guests, that is our, Oh, do you want something? Oh yeah. What do you pick? Well, we like this.
01:12:14
Speaker
Universal hit everybody who's tried it has loved it strong record. Okay, so that's very good peach mule. I love a mule Love you go. Yeah You didn't I love you Jake Good night everybody. Thank you everyone for listening