Morning Brew Daily - SCOTUS Takes on Music Piracy Showdown & NYC Casinos Get Lucky Break

Episode Date: December 2, 2025

Episode 726: Neal and Toby discuss a major supreme court case between top music labels and internet providers over who’s liable for copyright infringement. Then, the NY state gaming board approves 3 casino licenses in New York City. Plus, Airbus shares take a hit after multiple reports of new quality issues with their A320 aircrafts. Meanwhile, Toby dives into the trend of quarter zips that are making a comeback in men’s fashion. Finally, Shopify goes dark in, quite possibly, the worst time of all – Cyber Monday.  Check out https://www.linkedIn.com/mbd for more. Get your MBD live show tickets here! https://www.tinyurl.com/MBD-HOLIDAY  Subscribe to Morning Brew Daily for more of the news you need to start your day. Share the show with a friend, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.swap.fm/l/mbd-note⁠⁠⁠  Watch Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, New York City is getting three massive casinos. What could go wrong? Ben, Airbus has been flying circles around Boeing, but now it's the one with the plane problems. It's Tuesday, December 2nd. Let's ride.

It's December, and you've entered full hermit mode these dark and cold evenings, sweatpants on, candles lit, and your fourth sex in the city rewatch on the television. At the same time, though, You're looking for an excuse to get out of the house, and for that, we have got you covered. On Thursday night, we're hosting a holiday show to send off 2025 in true MBD style. That means learning interesting facts, trivia in games, and never before heard lore about me and Toby. If you live in the New York City area and don't have plans Thursday night, well, what are you waiting for? Also, and I cannot emphasize this point enough, this is not a morning show.

You do not have to get up at the crack of dawn for this. this is a little evening brew daily event, so you'll be able to have a drink and let loose. I also hear rumblings that our holiday show falls on the same day as some people's actual company holiday parties. And I think the choice is obvious. Only one will have the possibility of Neil Freiman crowd surfing, so choose wisely. And now we're in from our sponsor, LinkedIn ads. Toby, you're the best podcast co-host, I know. Oh, Neil, you're making me blush. I thought you were going to tell me I'm the best pickleball player you've. know. Well, you could get there someday, but do you know what else is the best? LinkedIn ads is when

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The world's top record labels, including Sony and Warner, have sued Cox Communications, the largest private broadband company in America, accusing it of not doing enough to stop illegal music piracy. The entertainment giants say that Cox barely lifts a finger to crack down on users ripping Beyonce songs over its systems, saying that failing to hold internet service providers accountable would, quote, spell disaster for the music community. Cox, on the other hand, is saying, whoa there, pals, you're trying to turn us into the internet police. We shouldn't be responsible for what people do using our services. To be liable, we would have to actively assist piracy, not just fail to stop it. Furthermore, what the record labels are asking could lead to internet access being taken away from people who have nothing to do with the illegal downloading. Cox uses the example of a hospital, a school, or a coffee shop.

If someone next to you at Starbucks is pirating music and Cox is forced to block the IP address of that place, then there's substantial collateral damage. During oral arguments yesterday, Justice Alito piggybacked on this, asking a lawyer representing the music companies, what is an ISP supposed to do with a university account that has, say, 70,000. users. But other judges seemed wary of letting ISPs totally off the hook to ignore copyright infringement by their users. What incentive would you have to do anything if you won? Justice Amy Coney-Barrant asked a lawyer for Cox. Meanwhile, Justice Sotomayor wasn't feeling either side's argument. She said, we are being put to two extremes here. The only thing we know here is that the pirated movie and TV and music industry is a very big one. In 2023, pirated movies and TV shows were downloaded

nearly 19 billion times music piracy sites saw more than 17 billion visits. So there is a massive economic toll that is being extracted here. That those visits alone cost the U.S. economy more than $29 billion because this is happening in the undercurrent of the Internet. I mean, everyone is aware of sites like BitTorren and then going back a few years, Limewire, these are these peer-to-peer file transfer platforms that have kind of been lurking around the edges of the Internet for a long time. time. It comes up every once in a while because whose fault is it? Is it the internet service

providers? Is it Cox's fault? And that is clearly what, you know, the entertainment industry feels here. So there is some precedent here in 2019. A jury sided with Sony. They said Cox needs to pay a billion dollars in damages. But obviously Cox can fire back and say like, hey, listen, we think of the children, think of the hospitals, think of the schools. Both arguments have merit for sure. So the music companies are saying that Cox barely does anything to strike this down within its systems. It says that Cox has a 13 strike policy for copyright infringers once it flagged. So you need to violate this 13 times or it needs to flag this to you 13 times and only on the 14th time. That's when you get booted off

their system. So they're accusing Cox of really not doing much at all once they are flagged. Between 2013 and 2014, the time period for this lawsuit. Cox has terminated 32 users for repeated copyright infringement. 32, that's what the companies are saying. And then they say Cox has no qualms about terminating nearly 620,000 subscribers for nonpayment during the same period. 32 versus 620,000. They're saying that Cox is not doing anything here and that they should be held liable.

There is some precedent when it comes to platform liability. Two years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that Twitter, which is now X, could not be held liable for aiding and abetting terrorist attacks just because ISIS was posting content on the platform itself. The court basically said that hosting does not equal helping. So that is something that goes in Cox's favor. And you are kind of seeing the battle lines being drawn here. Back in Cox is Google. It is X. It's actually the AL ACLU who say that internet service providers provide, you know, a right to a lot of people. Back in the music industry is the music industry and the motion picture industry. There actually is a very interesting wrinkle in all of this as well.

If you go back to the 70s and the 80s, Universal sued Sony, who is now suing Cox in this case, over the VCR saying that it would enable massive TV piracy. So it's a case of a new technology hitting the market and then these entertainment companies fearing that it is going to be used to pirate its material. In that case, the Supreme Court was very divided, but eventually ruled that selling the VCR wasn't contributory towards infringement. So there's almost some precedent from Sony itself saying that, hey, these platforms are not liable for the things that go on in them when it comes to piracy. Moving on, are you feeling lucky, Neil?

I hope so because New York is about to have three big casinos, a huge change for a city that has mostly banned them until now. The biggest one is backed by Mets owner Steve Cohen and the Hard Rock. They want to build an $8 billion casino in entertainment, mega complex right next to City Field in Queens. It wouldn't just be gambling. They're planning a hotel, a big concert venue, and want to connect it to the new soccer stadium,

NYCFC is building nearby. The second project is in the Bronx, where Bally's wants to spend $4 billion to erect a gambling and mecca beside the golf course they already own. The third is an expansion of the Resorts World Casino near JFK and Queens, which currently only has slot machines. Importantly, none of these casinos will actually be in Manhattan. and pie in the sky proposals for times square slots or a gambling stop on top of

Sax Fifth Avenue flagship location were scrapped after local groups pushed back hard. It mirrors the tug of war around these properties too. Supporters say that the new casinos will create a lot of jobs and bring in billions in tax money, which the state and certain workers unions love to hear. But plenty of people in the neighborhoods themselves are worried about the traffic and the crime the developments might bring and remain skeptical of the so-called economic benefits they promise. Neil, right now the closest full casinos New Yorkers have are in Atlantic City or Philly. The drive back from those with no money in your pockets really stinks.

But now the subway back from the Bronx or Queens with no money in your pocket also stinks, but a little bit less. The new New York City phrase just dropped, hey, I'm gambling here. No, this has the potential to be transformative. You mentioned how many billions of dollars are being poured into these projects. It's not just a casino, it's hotels, it's nightlife, it's entertainment. so it could surely change the way that people think about these outer boroughs, Queens, the Bronx, things like that. And you know, another entity that's really excited about all this money being poured in and all the tax revenue that could be generated is the MTA. The New York City Subway System

and the most talked about subway system in the world expects to get close to $2 billion through $2029 for its operating budget just from casino licensing fees. They're excited about various projects that they could upgrade. Specifically, the Mets will. its point station. If you've ever gone to a New York Mets game, a New York Mets game, or if you've ever been to the U.S. Open, you get off at this station, and it's pretty rinkinck. It is barely compliant with the ADA. There is no elevator. 1.9 million people pass through this station on a seven every single year. It doesn't have an elevator. I repeat. So they're expecting to spend some of this $2 billion, this huge cash windfall from these casinos to

upgrade some stations and do all these things that they that they've wanted to do. for so long because of potential all these tax revenues coming. And Steve Cohen has been at this for years, lobbying with local leaders. He wants to get the development rights around City Field. He wants it to become this year-round anchor instead of fans coming in for just 81 baseball games per year, and then leaving immediately after. So the name of the game here is stadium-adjacent commercialization. He wants to create, you know, this mecca out there, including just making the subway station

a little bit nicer. So yeah, casino, hotel, concert venue, integrated connection to another sports stadium nearby. That is the vision for this as well. The winner here is just New York State. As you mentioned, just $500 million in licensing fees alone for each one of these casinos, not to mention the eventual tax revenue. But then you can easily fire back if you are a person who lives in one of these boroughs. They say, what you're doing is bringing traffic to my area.

What you're doing is maybe stealing business from local businesses in my area. So yes, you can tout the tax benefits. You can tout the fact that a lot of workers will work on these projects, which are tangible things. But also, it's never that fun if your local business when a giant casino pops up in your backyard. No, we went through this in my hometown of Springfield, Massachusetts. MGM wanted to come in with a casino. There was a huge battle. And now many years later, there is a casino in downtown.

MGM is looking to sell it. It has not lived up to its potential or all of its projections. and of course Springfield, Massachusetts is a very different market than New York City. New York City is the biggest market for anything. So this is a huge potential market for these casino companies. But I've seen it happen in my own backyard where a casino comes in, pledging all of these huge economic benefits. And it just doesn't never, sometimes it doesn't live up to them. Wherever you go, it seems like they're putting up shop in your backyard.

So wherever you move next, Neil, just let me know so I can maybe avoid the casino coming there. Okay, Airbus is looking more bus than. air these days after a one-two punch of quality issues grounded planes and sent its stock plunging as much as 10% yesterday. The problems for the world's largest plane makers started on Friday when it flagged a software glitch on its popular A320 aircraft right at the peak of Thanksgiving travel. In October, an A320 operated by JetBlue was traveling from Cancun back to Newark, so the people on board were already depressed when the jet suddenly lost altitude before stabilizing, causing 15 passenger injuries and forcing the plane to make an emergent.

stopover at Tampa. Regulators required that about half of the A320 family planes in service be grounded, roughly 6,000 of them until they received a software update disrupting travel plans from Texas to Australia last weekend. But just as that problem was getting under control Monday morning, another one emerged. Reuters reported that Airbus found an industrial quality issue on the fuselage panels of, you guessed it, several dozen A320 family aircraft. A spokesperson said Airbus is taking a conservative approach and is inspecting all aircraft potentially impacted, knowing that only a portion of them will need further action to be taken. They added that the issue has been identified and contained.

Toby, it seems like neither of these issues are super concerning on their own, but as Boeing knows well, there's no margin for error when you make airplanes. And one of the weird characters in this saga is actually just the sun itself because that software glitch that you mentioned was found to be caused by intense solar radiation That is something that's been picking up recently, not to get too deep into what's been going on with the sun of late, but solar radiation, huge headache for aviation because it just messes with all your sensitive equipment. But back in September, researchers shared that the sun could be entering an unexpected active stage. The sun has been having an uptick in solar activity since 2008. Usually there's an 11-year solar cycle where activity kind of ebbs and flows.

right now we are in this weird upswing and all the things that, you know, aviation experts like to say, stink for their aircrafts where there's more radiation bursts, there's more plasma bubbles, there's more solar flares going on. So yes, this is an issue that affected airbus. But in general, the aviation industry has been kind of keeping an eye on what the sun's been doing because it's been causing a lot of headaches. Now, the software update wasn't massively disruptive, especially in the United States. If you were flying home, you're probably more disrupting. by snow in the Midwest and O'Hare had a lot of, had a lot of cancellations and delays due to snow rather than this A320 problem.

But around the world, it was a big issue. And I even just look at Pope Leo's plane. He flies an A320 Neo charter from ITA Airways. And he was in Istanbul looking to fly to Lebanon on Sunday. And they had to fly a technician and to do this update on his plane over in Turkey before he flew. So it impacted a lot of places and also just normal people, not the Pope in Colombia. Avianca Airlines in Colombia, 70% of that fleet is A320s, and they canceled new bookings through December 8th. That's a full week from now.

So it definitely disrupted a lot of travel plans. This update mostly required just a two to three hour update. So a lot of airlines just did this when the overnight or when their plane was just parked for a few hours. So not massively disrupted. But then this second part of the one two punch comes in yesterday morning. there is a problem with the fuselage on A320s in development. And if you've never heard of the A320 before, you've definitely flown on one because this is the best selling plane in aviation history.

It just surpassed the 737 earlier in October. So this is a big problem for Airbus because it has very aggressive delivery deadlines. It needs to meet. It just leapfrogged Boeing to become the biggest plane maker in the world. It wants to deliver 820 aircraft for this year. It needs 160 jets to be delivered in December. that is more than it's ever done. So this is a very aggressive road nap,

and this fuselage problem is not helping. It's brutal. It just got its nose in front of Boeing. We had all these headlines about new best-selling aircraft, and then boom, Sun says, take this, and then something goes on with the fuselage as well. So tough breaks, but them's a break in the aviation industry. All right, we're going to take a quick break

and come back with Toby's trends. Kayak gets my flight, hotel, and rental car right, so I can tune out travel advice that's just plain wrong. Bro, Skycoin, way better than points. Never fly during a Scorpio full moon. Just tell the manager you'll sue. Instant room upgrade.

Stop taking bad travel advice. Start comparing hundreds of sites with kayak and get your trip right. Kayak, got that right. Scrolling on TikTok recently, you may have come across a dapper set of gentlemen who are ditching their Nike sweatshers for something more distinguished, something more refined, something timeless. Yes, the humble Q-Zip is the subject of today's edition of Toby's trends. Jason Giamfi is a 21-year-old from the Bronx who took to TikTok last month to declare a personal style overhaul.

He pulls on a Navy Q-Zip, smooths it out and says, I don't do that Nike tech stuff y'all little boys do. I'm elegant, I'm classy. You can take me somewhere. I look presentable. That video has 1.6 million likes. And he's not alone. Immediately other young men across the country started joining him and becoming so-called quarter-zip dudes.

That includes organizing meetups at malls on college campuses and sometimes just in random parking lots. T. Payne even got in on the action, posting himself in a snazzy top with a caption, 401k and a quarter zip. Now, it's not exactly a new thing for young people to signal a transition to adulthood with their dress. As the New York Times points out, as hippies in the 60s grew up, they ditched their long hair and fringe clothes. for yuppie power suits in the 80s. This is just the Gen Z version of that, ditching Nike tech fleeces for the business casual lure

of a square cut quarter zip. Neil, I have come across these videos on my feed, and I've got to say, I'm severely lacking in the QZIP department. Is it too late for me to become a QZip dude? I don't think so. The quarter zip is very versatile, so it's something you can easily grab

from Macy's or any department store for $20, and I think that is the point there. Fast Company says, if a LinkedIn connection was an item of clothing, it would be the quarter zip. It is a symbol of soft professionalism. And you could see this, these metaphors with LinkedIn and growing up all across social media in the comments to these videos. One commenter wrote, no more DMs, we on Outlook and Teams. Another wrote, we on LinkedIn, not Instagram. And there is data to back up the fact that more people are buying quarter zips. Retail data shows a 25% sales increase for quarter zips,

among 18 to 24-year-olds since the middle of last year. And then if you look on Google Trends, there's over a 2,000% increase in searches for a one-quarter zip pullover men's business casual over the past 12 months. This is a trend. It's a meme, but it's definitely leading to more people wearing quarterships.

And it's kind of a trend we've seen leaning towards respectable dress again. I mean, the thing that comes to my mind is the fact that Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said, let's all travel in suits over the holiday period. Let's bring back an era of respectability to air travel. So it does seem like there's just this undercurrent of, again, it's partly a joke, partly not a joke, to let's start dressing better again. A lot of people in these videos say like, hey, my frontal lobe is finally developing now. Again, it's not a new thing that you just start dressing a little bit better. Maybe it's a new

thing for you and me, hair and makeup kind of do a dirty on a daily basis. But you start dressing better as you get older and as you start to enter the workforce. So the fact that this is being embraced as a symbol of that, it makes a lot of sense. I literally own zero QZips though. You have one QZIP. I have a couple. Yeah.

Again, it's very versus how you could throw it over a button down. You can throw it over a T-shirt. You can just, it just makes you look, yeah, it makes you look like you belong in the professional world a little bit without getting all, you know,

suited up or uncomfortable. It's very comfortable. It's just a sweater with, you know, a quarter zip. I mean, that's what it is. But yeah, you should put some in your wardrobe, join the trend. There's going to become like a, there almost is becoming a Jeep wave for QZIP dudes where you see

someone else at the mall. You give them a little nod. You give them a little, I don't know, do your little zipper up and down. I wonder if there's some tension though between the half sips and the QZips. Maybe there's some turf wars that are breaking out there. So I don't know. If you got a QZip, let us know in our email. Let us know in the comments because I need up my game.

All right, let's mention to finish with our final headlines. The circular deals in the AI world. keep coming, and they don't stop coming. This time, OpenAI is taking an ownership stake in Thrive Holdings, an investment vehicle set up by Thrive Capital, one of Open AI's top investors. So yes, let's follow the arrows here. Thrive Capital gives Open AI money.

Then sets up Thrive Holdings with the goal of starting and acquiring companies that can benefit from AI in a sort of PE-style operating vehicle. And then Thrive, let's open the eye at the company. It already has an ownership stake in, take an ownership stake in its PE doppelganger. Needless to say, this deal has raised concerns about circular arrangements, which I can't imagine why Open AI taking a stake in an offshoot venture firm that already has a stake in open AI would set off any alarm bells.

Neil, I'll invest in your AI company if you invest in mine. Let's do it. No, just to spell it out, the reason, yes, we're following the money here, and people are warning of circular deals, especially when it comes to Open AI. But the problem with these circular deals is you don't know whether there's actual market traction for OpenAI services or that they're just creating artificial demand because they're investing in things that eventually will be customers for them. So when you are someone who's looking at whether the AI is the AI industry is a bubble or not, you don't know whether other outside customers absent Open AIs putting its thumb on the scale or in VIDIA for that matter, with these circular deals are actually leading to actual market value creation by OpenAI services.

So Open AI is going to be embedding engineers and other employees in Thrives portfolio companies, which are very unsexy companies like accounting firms, to try to tell them how to teach them how to use AI at their companies with the eventual hope that they will use Open AI services. But Open AI needs to generate hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue because they're on the hook for spending over a trillion dollars, and this is one way that they think they can drum up some business. Breaking, Shopify, and the timing could not have been worse. The e-commerce platform suffered an hours-long outage on the biggest e-commerce shopping

day of the year, Cyber Monday, impacting thousands of merchants who use its software to sell their goods. The peak of the outage happened at around 11 a.m. Eastern when about 4,000 users reported problems with Shopify's website. One family business in Montreal told the Wall Street Journal that while customers could still submit orders, their company couldn't accomplish key tasks like tracking inventory, answering customer service questions, or monitoring sales. Shopify seemed to recover by the mid-afternoon, but rough look for a platform that says it handles 10% of all U.S. e-commerce transactions.

Yeah, I think that was the biggest takeaway here is that Shopify is not a niche tool by any stretch of the imagination. It's not just for small business owners now. There are very big DDC names and also very big just company names in general, Reebok, Mattel, Barnes & Noble, Nestle, these all use Shopify. So when we talk about an outage on the biggest shopping day of the year for a company that handles 10% of all this plumbing, it is a major issue. I have a Shopify store. I was selling stuff and it was very frustrating.

Obviously, my volumes are not quite as large as someone like a Nestle, but it is just a headache when something goes down when you're in this sales period. So it looks like it peaked around 11 a.m. Eastern and kind of settled down from there. but rough timing for a company that this is their biggest day of the year as well. Now, don't get mad, but Oxford University Press has named rage bait as its word of the year, defeating aura farming and biohacking for the top prize. The phrase is defined as online content that is deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, and no one is immune to posting it.

Last month, Jennifer Lawrence made headlines when she admitted to creating an anonymous TikTok handle just so she could do hand-to-hand combat with people online. Toby, this makes at least three big dictionaries to release their words of the year so far. Dictionary.com chose six, seven. Cambridge Dictionary went with parisocial, and now Oxford opted for rage bait. Merriam Webster, the ball is in your court.

I mean, Oxford's word of the year last year was brain rot. Now it's rage bait. I mean, it is a tough and damning kind of cross-section of our society right now that these are the words that are defining the era that we in. and I can't push back against it. I mean, rage bait to me is always a little bit of a misnomer because that's just being online to me.

Why do we need to necessarily attach a definition to these things that happen? But the class of videos and the class of content that they say falls in rage bait is often these cooking videos where you add just milk to spaghetti or something like that. Actually,

that actually might work. But you add an ingredient that should not go in a recipe in a recipe video in order to elicit reactions in drum up. you know, engagement. But unfortunately, that's just how our algorithms work right now. You want people to comment. You want people to share it. Put something in your video that makes them do that. Oftentimes, it's rage-inducing.

So I think Oxford's got their finger on the pulse more so than, you know, dictionary.com being 6-7. Not a word. They're trying too hard. We're trying to appeal to the use too much. I think Oxford's got it going on. All right. That is all the time we have. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us. And have a wonderful Tuesday. If you want to get in touch, send a note to Morning Brewed Daily. at MorningBrew.com or DM us on Instagram at MB Daily Show. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our executive producer.

Raymond Lute is our producer. Our associate producers are Olivia Graham and Olivia Lake. Is hair and makeup my version of rage bait? Devin Emery is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show today, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow.