TRASHFUTURE - Against Enshitification feat. Cory Doctorow

Episode Date: April 12, 2023

This week, Riley, Hussein, and Alice speak with author, activist, and friend of the show Cory Doctorow about the ongoing lawsuit against the Internet Archive—a campaign by the mega-conglomerate publishers of America which all hate free digital book lending—and why public libraries are squarely in their money-squeezing targets. We also talk about some great developments in some of the dumbest crypto / lending fraud cases, where it seems the brightest minds of the 30 Under 30 list forgot that prosecutors can subpoena your emails. We hope you enjoy! Check out Cory’s new book (and DRM-free audiobook project) here: www.redteamblues.com If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *STREAM ALERT* Check out our Twitch stream, which airs 9-11 pm UK time every Monday and Thursday, at the following link: https://www.twitch.tv/trashfuturepodcast *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s upcoming live shows here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows and check out a recording of Milo’s special PINDOS available on YouTube here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRI7uwTPJtg *ROME ALERT* Milo and Phoebe have teamed up with friend of the show Patrick Wyman to finally put their classical education to good use and discuss every episode of season 1 of Rome. You can download the 12 episode series from Bandcamp here (1st episode is free): https://romepodcast.bandcamp.com/album/rome-season-1 Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello, everyone, and welcome to this, it's Thursday, free episode of TF. It's the free one. Recorded before Britain takes its well-deserved Easter break. It is Riley in studio with Hussein. It's up. And we are, of course, joined as ever by Alice in the frozen north of Glasgow. Hi, how's it going? It's a lovely day up here, actually, and I don't appreciate your insinuations about

my adoptive country's climate. And then we are also joined for, I think, the third or possibly fourth time by Corey Doctorow. Corey, how's it going? Hello, happy Passover and Ramadan-eyed. Yep, that is... Fast, fast, comfortable. Yeah, there's no other major religious holiday coming.

Anything like that. That's it. That's all of them. As my dad used to say every Passover, roses are red, violets are bluish. If it wasn't for Jesus, we'd all be Jewish. So true. So, so true. Are we bewearing the ids of Ramadan?

TF also has now joined, if not the Easter equivalent to the war on Christmas, which is the targeted surgical strike on Easter. The Special Military Operation against the Easter Bunny. Yeah, the Easter Bunny is a noted drug user in pervert. Court compromised to a permanent end, the Easter Bunny. So, we've got a really good show for you here today. We've got a little bit of news. We're going to be talking also about one of the, I think, possibly under-discussed advances

of the in-shitification of the internet, which is the closure of the internet archive, or the attempted closure of the internet archive by a number of publishers, which is, of course, very terrible. And that's one of the reasons, in addition to him being a lovely guy we like to talk to, we brought Corey on today. However, before we go on to all of that, I would also like to, this was sort of alerted, so sent to me via Twitter, ShotSpotter, a company we've talked about before, which, if you recall, it basically is, no, it doesn't work.

It's a kind of racialized panic inducement that sort of used- Well, you know what it is, it's gunshot dousing, because the idea is that you would install one of these very expensive towers, and then it would tell you when someone was letting it bark, and in what direction, and give you a bearing and a distance, and it just didn't work. I think it's more properly understood as a pretense generation system for when you absolutely positively want to go and make someone turn out their pockets and throw them on the ground and search their car.

Well, the stock price of ShotSpotter is down 22% on the election of Brandon Johnson in Chicago, to which I can only say it is adding to the long and storied history of guys called Brandon getting elected and causing tech company valuations to plummet. So let's go, Brandon. That's right, we're all going, Brandon, we've got Brandon Mania, what's he going to crash next? It's a summer of Brandon. That's right.

I do have one piece of sad news, if I may, to interrupt with the news, which is that our boy, our special boy, a hero and an inspiration to many of us here, Silvio Berlusconi, not doing well, so prayers up for the Italian prime minister who really gave us permission to be weird and who gave us a lot of encouragement when we were starting out. Yeah, who it just invented the most popular TV show on Italy, which is just like Girls in Bikini is called like, you know, Tutti Frutti or whatever. Yeah, did unspeakable crimes, yeah, just very sad to see, so prayers up for our boy. I think I speak for all of us when I say a very sad Bunga Bunga.

Although interestingly, I think that Berlusconi may be astral projecting to Scotland in the last couple of days. Yes, Scotland, the S&P, and I'm stealing this joke, but the S&P want very badly for Scotland to be in the EU, and what's more in the EU than the headquarters of your kind of like omnivalent liberal political party and the home of the previous head of government being raided by the cops for like a campaign finance beef? Nothing. We're basically Holland now.

The only thing that could make this more European is if Scotland hadn't explicitly Christian Democratic Party, all of whose MPs were being investigated for like stuff they did trust up in leather upstairs over a bar. That's the only way that Scotland could be more European than... I mean, surely austerity would make it more European as well. You have to make the Greeks angry. Oh yeah, yeah, well, it depends where you are in Europe, you core Europe or periphery Europe.

Right. Their politics, they're kind of right, I mean, look, core Europe and periphery Europe do tend to have similar kinds of scandals, but I think core European political scandals tend to be more like vice, and political and periphery European scandals tend to be more classic expropriation and graft, you know? Well, though, you say that. I'm not sure that's true. Yeah, bonga, bonga, dude.

Yeah. Police Scotland pulled up a fucking forensics tent outside of Nicholas Sturgeon's house and have been turning over the back garden with trowels. I mean, I should say this is, you know, all covered by the Consent of Course Act, which kind of limits the implications I'm allowed to make here, but I do think it's interesting that they are digging up Nicholas Sturgeon, well, more specifically her husband, Peter Murrell, who is like head of the SNP, and also it's controlled a lot of its purse strings for a long time.

They're digging up their back garden. They've been seen coming out of SNP headquarters with those little cameras, with the like, you know, that you feed down pipes and stuff. So this. Laparoscopic cameras. Yeah, yeah. So to me, this sort of activates what I like to keep in my brain is the buried cash lobe. And I don't have any evidence that that's the case.

I can't speculate as to who might have possibly buried cash for what reason or why or when or, you know, we depend entirely on the police to tell us these things, but I'm enjoying this very much. Here's the thing. Cash is natural. It comes from the earth. Okay. It's just a plan.

And everyone should have it. Listen, is it a crime to go into business as an enterprising small holder full of cash farmer? I don't think it is. So there's a few other fun things, though, that we have to discuss today. One of which is just, okay, you know how usually when you knock over the first domino in a sequence of dominoes, then the dominoes will just stop falling over at some point and some of the dominoes will be left standing?

What has happened, of course, here where, if you recall, the initial domino to fall over was three arrows capital as it collapsed that caused these knock-on effects that were other bits of the cryptocurrency world in as much as it was just like a kind of working model of an actual financial system built by trial and error through first principles to get people to trick people into putting worthless real money into it to get valuable the fake computer money, right? And if we recall, we talked about this with Molly White before as well, the real crisis of cryptocurrency is that most of the real money is now gone and has been used by the

people who were the best hucksters of the fake internet money to buy themselves, various gougas and bobbles. It's being concealed in pipes, buried in lawns, all of the things that responsible people like to do with their money. So there are a few dominoes left standing last week, and after the collapse of the sort of, I guess you could say, Western strategic polycule FTX. Yeah. I'm only in a tactical polycule, and it's a lot less pressure than a strategic polycule.

But you got to go to war college to get into the strategic polycule. Yeah, I don't want to promote that high. You know, I want to stay close to the troops, still get this sort of like operational tempo of, yeah, yeah, yeah. The West Point Polyamory Institute. So what happened is Binance looks like it's going to be the next to at least wobble, not fall, as Cheng Peng Zao, the sort of mercurial head of the organization, has now got an Interpol red notice out for his arrest. 2023, the year of arresting your haters.

I cannot stress enough, Trump, Peter Murrow, this guy, it's the year of like people, yeah, people who don't normally get arrested, getting arrested. And although we may not be able to draw any like, you know, criminal justice conclusions from any of this, thus far, it's the year of the cop, and I'm here for it. Yeah, it's a lot of fun to see a lot of these sort of rich and powerful assholes get perp-walked, essentially. Yeah, more of that, more of that. Like people, sort of like, whenever this came up about Trump, people were like,

oh, next you'll want like, political prosecutions of Democrats. I'm like, yes, fine, you are already going to do that, so whatever. But like, you're threatening me with like, leading Bill Clinton out of a building in handcuffs. Oh, no, don't, please, stop. So Riley, you've omitted the most salient fact about CZ, which is that he's a Canadian. What? That's true, yeah. Yeah, we, to quote Wednesday Adams, we're like serial killers, we're everywhere,

and we look just like everyone else. Yeah, we're at the height of finance, we're everywhere in Hollywood. Canadians are all over the place. Yeah, for sure. So basically, what happened with Zhao is that the CFTC has alleged in a civil complaint that much of Binance's reporting trading volume and volume of profitability have come from the extensive solicitation of and access to U.S. customers, because they were not allowed to operate in the U.S.

This was like the rest of world cryptocurrency exchange. Yeah, the Eastern Strategic Polycule. And even if you remember, right, like FTX, right, they had to set up a separate subsidiary to operate in the U.S., but they were much, it was sort of easier for them. Anyway, so what has happened basically is that Binance created a whole bunch of corporate entities that allow them to operate in the Binance platform, but ultimately like to just keep bringing American customers in because- Yeah, they started up pan-nance, and you're like,

what's the difference between Binance and Pan-nance? And they're like, it's kind of complicated, let's not get into that. Functionally the same, don't worry about it. And you know, this is also, again, like the identities of people trading on the platform, a lot of sanctioned entities. And regardless of what you think of the like the sanctions that Binance is on people get around, right, we're seeing crypto once again as delivering something other than the Utopian use case that is often touted as.

Now, the thing about court filings, when they're made about tech people, is that they're often extremely funny. That's true. And so I have snipped some of the choicest morsels from the filing. Because in the legal system, we have this beautiful thing called discovery, where you have to turn over all of the shit that you've said and done. And people email things to each other, and people say things to each other. Oh, God, so much.

They do it so much on their official emails. They're saying, hey, shall we commit a crime today? Yeah, I mean, it's having the group chat called wire fraud, but times a million and everywhere you look, it's great. It's like having a Slack channel called premeditated murder, which we're planning here because we know it's a crime and we're doing it anyway. Yeah, Judge, look here. That Discord channel is unrelated.

That's actually like the cat pictures channel and that Discord. It's just called that because of a joke. Your honor. So, yes, look, I happened to write the clients we want to tip off that they're being investigated on the side of my cat. That's just what he likes to wear. It was a Halloween costume. He was going in costume as an incriminating email.

So this is from the filing. Another important benefit that Binance provided to his VIP customers is prompt notification of any law enforcement inquiry concerning to their account. According to an official company policy titled for management of requests for information and funds transfer, Binance instructed its team to notify a customer through all available means to inform them that their account is being frozen or unfrozen. Do not directly tell the user to run.

Just tell them that their account is being frozen and it was investigated by ex-lawzat. Is that verbatim? Do not directly tell the user to run. This is their chief compliance officer. He's got all kinds of crazy stuff. Tell this person we caught breaking the law that this account is burned and if they want back on the platform, they'll have to create another account. The fact that they just keep doing this in their official Slack channel is really fun to me.

It's great. The Crypto Critics Corner guys did a really good job on this this week. It's just the hits keep on coming. I'm feeling very gratified because my next novel is this book Red Team Blues, which is like an anti-finance, finance thriller about crypto heists. I was worried that maybe crypto wouldn't be a thing by the time the book came out at the end of this month. Now I'm like, oh my god, crypto is going to be even dumber by then. This is perfect.

That's like writing a tulip book in 1638. But the reason crypto is getting dumber is just that so many of its edifices are just slothing off and you're seeing the very strange rickety machinery inside. It's poor guys sending emails back and forth going like, okay, here's how we do crimes. Step one. It's just the remaining guys who are all on the same cycle and someone's cycling forwards and someone's cycling backwards. Generating free energy.

And they're giving each other high fives and little kisses because everything's going great. They're on one of those bars that you have to pedal around in tourist traps. I really love the idea of disclosing all your crimes on email because it's absolutely something I would do if I was in a position like that, only because I feel like it would be such an exciting thing that I wouldn't be able to shut up about it. I'd be a really bad criminal. Every time I read this stuff, I'm like, yeah, I do the same. You'd be so excited about your pro-money laundering, anti-money laundering policy.

If we were financial criminals and we were forced to disclose the contents of our group chat, your contributions to that group chat would be like, just went to the parking garage to get this hold all full of cash. And then five more texts about the quality and condition of the hold on being like, this is a really nice hold. Should I get one of these? Do I get to keep this? You have to bring it back to the guy?

Well, because it's also me, I would also talk about how I got injured somehow in a very silly way. But it's fine because they let me play as the drill or something. I threw out my back carrying sacks of cash into my car, but I didn't want to say anything in case it was going to cause a problem. Yeah, I didn't want to come off as being rude. I wasn't sure if he wanted the hold all back, so I just took all the bundles of cash out of it individually and put them on the passenger seat of my car and handed him the hold all back.

So if you listening want to know what it's like to begin a group chat with Hussain, this is remarkably similar to something that did actually happen a couple days ago. This is basically your experience of the dentist. Absolutely like clown shoe shit. They would set up the secret rendezvous and like all of us, like all five of us would come to the thing. They'd be like, no, no, no, we just needed like one of you. And we're like, no, okay, she had any questions or like comments.

Yeah, I mean, this is why the obvious fraud office would be created is to deal with whatever scam we would pull. Okay, all right, all right, back to back to back to the guys who are like five percent better at this than we are. So what I think is the funny one of the other funny things as well is like, they were explicitly talking about, no, we have to make it more like gambling. As they say, we've done some research on this right now. Most of the gamification trading are based on some complex derivative financial instruments. The reason why we did the futures battle is we wanted to lower the barrier of complex

financial products and increase the conversion and retention net rate. Usually, but there need to be, we need to be very careful. One number one, usually this kind of product looks like gambling, which may bring us in some compliance and reputation risk. So we need to make sure the product does not look like a gambling game. Yeah, it's putting the sign that says bank over the sign that says roulette wheel. Well, it's, it's, it's that depending on who's looking at you, you have a little lever and you can rotate that between bank and roulette wheel.

Binance also is aware that its compliance controls have been ineffective. Binance, CCO at the time, recognized in an October 2020 chat with another Binance compliance personnel that Binance's compliance environment had amounted to quote, email sending and no action. For media pickup, I guess you could say it's faux show. All of these guys are so fucking cringe. Like at least, okay, right. When Enron fell into this trap, right, it was, at least they were, you know,

doing things like, we just, you know, shafted a bunch of our consumers golf later, right? Like it was regular trading places, evil finance guys, shit. These guys just reddit the spreads. Okay. Okay. All right. This, no, this, the next one I'm going to read is worse than reddit. It's like Imgur. So Binance also intentionally tried to hide the scope of its compliance programs in effectiveness from its business partners.

For example, in around October 2020, Binance went and underwent a compliance audit to satisfy a request from a partner, but they purposely engaged a compliance auditor that would just do a half-assed individual sub-audit on geofencing and buy us more time. Again, you shouldn't write that down. Does anyone know any really bad auditors who won't catch our evil stuff? That's like most auditors. That's what they're for. So as part of the audit, the Binance employee held the title of money laundering reporting officer,

lamented that she quote, needed to write a fake annual MLRO report to Binance's board of directors, WTF. The reason it was fake is that Binance didn't have a board of directors. They claimed that they were subject to no jurisdiction because they were kind of everywhere. They were stochastic. Oh my God. Yeah. So the next is that here's where it gets very Imgur where it says, Lim, who's aware that Binance don't have a board of directors, as we say, nevertheless reassured her.

Yeah, it's fine. I can just get management to sign off the fake report, which is again a hilarious thing to say. Around the same time as the reference half-assed compliance audit in November 2020, the officer exclaimed to limit a chat the following all-cap sentence. ICANN has no confidence in our geofencing. I like that you can kind of carbon date when this compliance officer got on the internet. Yeah, for sure. And was still posting like this in 2020 at work.

Like if it works, don't fix it. They're just this ossified like permanently at the ICANN has cheeseburger level of the internet. So what that means though is that in 2033, there's going to be a huge trove of fraud like documents discovered in whatever is the granddaughter of cryptocurrency or whatever, where like one of the compliance officers is going to make a Tiger King reference. It's going to be like Drake shaking his head, real money laundering, reporting obligations, Drake nodding his head and pointing fake MLRO. And they gave these guys like how many billion dollars of like money,

you know, shooting around between the IRGC and Hamas and fucking... Imagine you're fucking Kasim Soleimani, right? And your bank is the ICANN has cheeseburger, guys. Yeah, that's so embarrassing. This is, I mean, to play the hits, there's a great old Saturday Night Live sketch from the dot-com bubble that is an ad for a bank where they're like, you know, we here at very serious bank, we didn't want to jump on every fad. So we stayed off the internet until we were sure that it was really here to stay.

And we're, we're, we've heard you loud and clear and we're finally on the internet. But of course, waiting has its consequences, which is why you will now find us at www.clownpenis.fart. That's right. And that's, that's, that's who we're, that's who that's like all these people are like, are now banking with, as you say, like the, the ret, the somehow more embarrassing Reddit This is, this is the thing about sanctions, right? It's the like, on the one hand, they cause like untold human misery. On the other hand, they force like serious people to bank with clownpenis.fart.

So it's impossible to say if they're bad or not. So here's, here's another one. This is actually regarding a transaction with a transaction with a sanctioned entity. Initially Binance officers, employees and agents have acknowledged that the Binance platform facilitated potentially legal activities. With regard to certain Binance customers, including those from Russia, limb acknowledged in a February 2020 chat quote, like, come on, they're on our platform for crime. Don't, don't use, walk, walk down the hall to someone's office and say that or like,

go to a restaurant, go to like, Jesus Christ, if you had just gone, hey, can we talk about this on like my non-work Skype thing? That's one more barrier for like someone to get through. Like you don't have to hand over all of that shit automatically. Yeah. Well, you know what? I actually think that it's sensible that they're, that they're using only work technology to talk about work stuff. Otherwise, your work is just going to creep into your personal life and your barriers between job and home. That's true. This is an excellent way of maintaining

work life. But I want to be a fly on the wall the moment when their lawyers told them that they had to disclose this. Like the moment when they sort of like went back in their own heads and tried to remember all of the things they had typed on a company email. Just control F for the word crime and you're like, oh boy. Oh no. Over little yellow tabs show up. You actually didn't set your status to invisible. It is like, it's still going. We can all, we can all see you like. Very, sort of your way is it's like a multi-year hot mic situation. Yes. Yeah. Basically. All right. So I want to move on though,

because I want to do a startup, which is going to take a little bit of a similar form to what we just talked about and then get into our core topic. There's a link in the notes for the startup. And I already have a sense of where this is going. Why is this a justice.gov link? Look, the secret theme of today's episode is reading court filing. The secret theme of this episode is it's the year of the cop. Like, yeah, it's just crime all the way down. All right. So the startup and now I suspect this is, it's been in the news a little bit. I suspect some of you may have heard of it. It's called Frank. And yes, the link underneath the name in the notes is a link to a justice.gov

website. What do you think it is, Corey, if you don't know already? Ugh, I'm drawing a blank. Set it up for me again. I'm trying. It's called Frank and he does crimes. Yeah. It's called Frank and the main thing you're reading from about it is a justice.gov website. Frank. Spell it, F-R-E-C-K. F-R-A-N-K. For the first time in the history of the Southern District of New York, the U.S. Attorney there has prosecuted a guy named Frank for financial crimes.

So what's his financial crime? His financial crime is... Alleged. Alleged that he created a shit coin that was actually the underlying asset that it derived from where beanie babies on eBay, but not any beanie babies, like the two that have retained their value. Like two retained their value? Yeah, I think there are like two that are not worth like zero. There are two that are worth like $7. Imagine being the beanie baby investor who's still got a valuable beanie baby. What a blessed life. I mean, a beanie baby that you could redeem for the hamburger that you used to get it for free

as a premium with, but still not zero, right? I can give you a hint here because I remember what this one is. If you think about... You know how TurboTax has this sort of monopoly on tax filings, right? Yeah. What are some other examples of you having to do paperwork with the feds that you could conceivably squat a startup on top of? Is this part of like SEC filings where they ran the forms for the SEC and then they front ran FCC disclosures by shorting companies making bad disclosures? Good idea. Copyright can't make it. That's our idea now. You said it on the show that means it's ours. We're going to be patenting that. Hussein, what do you think? Frank and Alice is right. It is a startup squatting on top of some kind of a federal government

financial process that people interact with. Think younger maybe than most SEC filings. Yeah, I'm joking because the immediate thing I was thinking about was actually nothing to do with bank frauds. It was to do with that British... You know that whole talk to Frank campaign? Oh, yeah. The drugs thing. Yeah. I was like, oh, it has... There is something to do with that, but obviously it's not. They would generate probably illegal filing. Yeah, a guy called Frank that you would talk to about having drugs. You'd be like, okay, well look, I have this scheme that you can be part of. Let me send you an email. Yeah, like criminally subordinating Frank from Frank.

Fuck, I don't know, man. I mean, my other guess is literally just like what if Clara, but for guys, but I don't even think so. Clarna, men only. Yeah, that's right. Clarna for the fellas. Clarna, but you can't buy freaking Bud Light with it. That's right, yeah. I'll tell you what it is. It is basically a turbo tax for student loan applications on the basis that in the United States, the vast majority of people qualify for federal or state aid that they don't claim because they don't know they can get it. It's basically a kind of automated Matthew Lesko for students.

And so here's an article from TechCrunch in 2018. Investors are pouring money into Frank, a turbo tax for student loan applications. Remember, this ends with a justice.gov file. Yeah, you can kind of, it has the same like narrative structure as pain and gain, right? We're at the beginning, you're like, oh, why are the cops after this guy? And then it's like, oh, we had a perfect foolproof scheme and then it ends with the cops. Yeah, I love that movie. So the company's technology automates much of the application process, the free application for federal student aid or FAFSA form that is the gateway

to getting the federal government to help pay for your college education. So crucially to note as well, this is barely a technology company. It isn't really. It's just a large, although that's up for debate, register of students who are applying for various kinds of aid. And so basically you sign up for it and then it gets all your data and then it can, you know, do stuff with your data. A nerd wallet study from 2016 indicated that students left $2.7 billion in free federal Pell grants on the table by not completing FAFSA information, which I suppose would have undermined some of Kamala Harris' plans. According to the CEO, Charlie Javis, her company has grown by around a factor of three this year.

Let me just click on this link here. Click on the link. People of the United States of America versus Charlie Javis Defendant, I say. Oops. Oopsie. Yeah. Conspiracies to commit wire and bank fraud. Wow. Yeah. So Frank is teaming up with colleges to offer discounted classes, matching his users with unfilled slots and classes that are ready to take place. We'll check back in with Frank in a quarter or two to see how the new product is helping or not. It's growth trajectory. If it does. Distance sirens outside. If so, Frank could raise a series B in the next few quarters. So if Frank keeps growing, there should be money available to it. So yeah, it came up in like the everything's

our bubble. I feel very much like Trump about this. I think that, you know, Trump is allowed to, there is no criminal sanction that can stop him from running for president or being elected president. I think Charlie Javis should do the same thing, the Eugene V. Deb's thing, but in startup and try and raise series B from jail. Oh, but I made a small error where I just said we say we'll check back in with Frank in a quarter or two. That's from 2020 when many of the events alleged in the court filings took place. They were like, this is a city on the grow. Meanwhile, at Frank HQ, it was just like, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. This is a really nice indictment. They've got graphs and everything. Oh, I really enjoyed reading it. It's I almost want to put

a link in the episode notes because it is fun to read. I do recommend it. Maybe that's just because I have like the weird brain process that makes it that makes that fun for me. It's been a while since I've read a statement of facts and this is a good one. They've got their own brochures on there, which is very fun. Oh, and the chat logs. They have their own Slack logs. No, not this again. But fuck's sake. I faked you all out. It's the startup and the new segment are the same segment. Fuck. Yeah. So what happened is J.P. Morgan bought this company, again, this form-filling out automation firm for $175 million at the height of the everything bubble.

Charlie Javis was, of course, very handsomely paid and the main thing they wanted to buy was just a way to acquire like a route to acquire all of those customers that Frank had already and then that that was going to be a new way that they could just like on board new customers in the bank. They could also learn about them, be able to analyze their behavior and so like the three things you do with big data sets and they had a lot of students. They had four and a half million students in their data banks or so everyone thought. It was actually closer to some tens of thousands, I believe. Now, J.P. Morgan claims they found out about the alleged fraud when and this is some just excellent chaotic fraud committing or alleged fraud committing because

it's just so poorly planned. It's like the opposite of the bank heist and inside job. For its part, this is from TechCrunch as well. J.P. Morgan claims it found out about the alleged fraud when it sent out marketing test emails to a list of Frank's customers provided by Frank and more than 70% of the emails bounced back. I do hate it when that happens. That's not my favorite part of this. Reading ahead, my favorite part of this is how they tried to get out of this and how they tried to artificially inflate the number of students that they had to J.P. Morgan because that leads us to a paragraph which involves the phrase, Javis claimed to engineer one that it was legal and stated,

we don't want to end up in orange jumpsuits. I'll take us through it. I'll take us through it. This is from the filings. Based on my review of records obtained from J.P. Morgan and my interview of Frank's director of engineering who's engineer one, I've learned that on or about August 1st of 2021, the same day that the executive sent Charlie Javis the defendant on email seeking additional information about Frank's user data, Javis turned to engineer number one who I must emphasize now. Frank has been bought. Engineer number one is an employee of J.P. Morgan now, right? To take the much smaller set of actual Frank data and then use create a larger synthetic data set of fake people. Going to GPC like being like generate

4.2 million students. I mean, when we say we generated them, did they literally just like feed them all into like a mad libs program and said, take some surnames, some first names, some loan amounts, some addresses. This guy lives at 1313 Mockingbird Lake and that guy lives at 11 every street. Make the new address 1313 every street. Is that the level of synthetic personhood that we're talking about or did they like create chatbots? No, the level of synthetic personhood of just basically, wow, a lot of people living on 123 Main Street seem to be using the Frank platform. This is what CZ did. He told his American customers, they advised American customers to list their country as unknown instead of U.S. so that when they ran reports to show how

many U.S. users, they could show they had no U.S. reports, no U.S. users, just millions and millions of users in an unknown country. Yeah, millions and millions of users who aren't quite sure where they are and are smelling toast. Well, they're in Shakespeare's undiscovered country. They're in heaven. So basically, after raising concerns about the legality of the request, wouldn't you know it, newly minted JPMorgan employee known as Engineer One in this transcript declined. I feel pretty bad for Engineer One here, I'll be honest. He keeps being like, I assume he, they keep being like, I really do not want to do anything illegal. And then Java sort of like texts him back on slack. It's fine. Just do it. Come on, be a friend. So,

Java's then calls Engineer One saying she really needed help to generate the synthetic data set. Specifically, she wanted him to use the smaller Frank data set and generate a larger set with the same properties of the original set. And this new engine, so this different engineer, the new engineer was not comfortable with the request, but responded that he would take a look at it. And then later said, as you quoted, Alice, I don't want to do anything illegal with Java's and a co-conspirator then claiming, don't worry, this is legal. We do not want to end up in orange jumpsuits. The engineer then proceeded to decline the request. The shirt that I'm wearing that says, I'm not committing any crimes, I promise,

is raising a lot of questions already answered by my shirt. So, after this engine, the second engineer declined the request, and while the first engineer was still on the video call, Javis and the co-conspirator spoke to each other about how else they could obtain data such as phone numbers from an external source. So, they also hot-miked. They were like, okay, we got to commit this crime somehow. With the guys who are like sort of like audibly rassing them out at this point, because they're so uncomfortable with this. I love, you know what that's funny thing is? Javis was on the same list of 30 under 30 as Sam Beckman Freed.

And what a beautiful cohort of scams we've had. And Caroline Ellison, actually, they were all on the same list. So, you know, the amazing thing about this synthetic person weas, is that this part's not hard, right? Like anyone, you know, like when they were attacking the FCC net neutrality docket and sending in fake comments, they literally just downloaded breach data from some, you know, carting website on the dark web that just has the names and addresses of like a million real people. And they just sent, you know, comments on their behalf to the FCC saying, we hate net neutrality. You could have just also had them be student borrowers. It's not that hard.

Well, these people don't have that kind of criminal instinct. Yeah, that's why they need to hire me as their crime consultant. Yeah, which you've now said, of course, on this very not public, not recorded. If we do that and I get done for contempt of court for the SNP thing, this could have a 200% arrest rate. Like that's way more than usual. Riley, you're not a cop, right? You'd have to tell me if you are. That's the law. That's right. That's podcasting law. No, but here is what I think is the funniest part of this entire saga, which is Charlie

Javis then decided that what she needed to do was contract an external data scientist and basically say she wanted to create some test data from a small subset of her dataset, right? So she said, oh, yeah, these 10,000 records. Can you please extrapolate this to what it would look like if we had four and a half million or so? I want to do that so I can then like test if there are pattern and any random patterns or not random rather. Yeah, looking for 4.2 million of my closest friends. Precisely. So the data scientist said, sure, what you've described sounds perfectly legal. Of course, I'm going to do that for you because they didn't know the specifics of why. And then gave Javis a detailed and itemized invoice, including things like generating

features, college major generation, generation of all features except for financials, zip code lookups, first names, last names, emails, phone numbers, looking into white pages, unique IDs, and so on and so on. And then Javis responded to that invoice by just saying, can you please send the invoice back with just one line item for data analysis? This is a really detailed invoice. It's got like hours in, hours out. It's impressive, makes my invoices look like shit. They remember their VAT number. These are terrible people to try and enlist in a crime, you know? Yeah, they're all too methodical. Yes. Yeah. So, okay, that's Frank, but I've been wanting to talk about that company for a while. There is one more detail about this, which is

when Javis responds to him going, hey, can you just send this back as like a one line invoice for $13,000, mind you? They reply, wow, thank you. Here is the new invoice and charge them $18,000 for a one line item. Yeah, it's so awesome. I love everybody involved here. Yeah. Yeah. This is, what I like about this, I think, is just like you've sold your company to JP Morgan. It has basically no users. They've explicitly said, we are buying the users. We don't care about your technology because it doesn't really exist. Do you think they're not going to, do you not have a plan ahead of time for what to do when they say, hey, this thing we just bought, can we look at it? But like, I love the $4,700 you may be asking me to commit a crime

surcharge. You know what it's like? You know the scam where some bloke sells you like a shrink wrap box with, you know, a Nintendo in it and it just turns out to have a brick in it? Yeah, a bag full of dirt with what Puto written on it. Yeah, sure. Right. But then he sells you an extended warranty and comes to your house to fix it. So, all right, we're moving on from Frank. There's some stories that just really get me and that certainly was one of them. So, now I want to talk a little bit now about the Internet Archive. So, Corey, you're a real intellectual property fan. So, what drew you to the Internet Archive and what is it? So, I need to start with a little benediction here. I am a special

advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I've worked with them for more than 20 years. We are of counsel to the Internet Archive. I am not speaking on behalf of EFF. None of the stuff that I'm saying is privileged. I'm going to stick to things that are public. I also know some things that aren't public. So, I'm not trying to be evasive, but there are some things that I can't say. Charlie Javas should have taken a lesson from you and just said that. None of this is crimes anyway. Sorry, please go ahead. I mean, in terms of how I got involved with the Internet Archive, I was living in San Francisco in the late 90s and I got invited to the launch of a thing called the Wayback Machine. And I met this guy, Brewster Kale, who had done some early search stuff. He'd

invented Waze, which was the first search tool. And he had been secretly crawling the Internet for years, basically since the web started. And every time he crawled the Internet, he just stored a copy and he didn't delete the old ones. And now he was ready to let all of us see any web page that he had ever captured an image of sort of forever and that he was going to keep doing it. He had a nonprofit, a 501c3, and that was the start of my connection with Brewster and with the Internet Archive. And I've worked with them on many issues and I've spoken at many of their events and been involved in many of their causes now for, it's been more than two decades. So, the Internet Archive that, you know, Google has this high-minded mission that's something

like organize all the world's information and make it usable or something. That's actually what the Internet Archive is doing only on a non-profit public spirited basis, where there's no inshidification kind of integrated into the process. They're never going to rug pull us. And so, the Internet Archive has a bunch of different programs. One of them is a book scanning program where they rely on a precedent in a case called HathiTrust that was set by a lawyer or rather a librarian called Bobby Glushko when he was at UMass Amherst. He's now at the University of Western Ontario, Riley, a fellow Canadian-ish. Everywhere, everywhere. And we look just like everyone else. Yeah. And so, Bobby was scanning the holdings of UMass Amherst and he was allowing

one copy to circulate in scanned form if the book was not also circulating in print form. So, they had one copy and students at UMass Amherst could access that copy either over the Internet or in person and only one student could access it at a time. They did that by using Adobe's PDFDRM, which I'm not a big fan of, but which it should be noted here the publishers say is a perfectly adequate way of ensuring that only one copy of a book is circulating. So, relying on that precedent, the Internet Archive created its own library and we sometimes think of libraries as being creatures of either local councils, cities, universities, maybe even elementary schools, but libraries started outside of those institutions and they remain outside of those institutions.

There are lots and lots of libraries, including ones run by professional associations for creators that you can use all over the world. I'm a member of the Royal Society. We have a library down on the strand. There's libraries all over the place. And so, the archive set up a library. You get a library card from them. They buy books. They scan them and one person at a time can check those books up. The reason all of this is so salient is that if you are a library and you want to circulate an electronic book, the way that the publishers approach this is they say, okay, we want to charge you significantly more for this e-book than you would pay for the print book. And the reason they argue that they're able to do that is they're not selling you the e-book. In fact, they say they

don't sell anyone an e-book. They say that no one in the world has ever bought an e-book from them. They have only licensed the e-book and that license prohibits resale and lending and all the other activities that would normally come with the acquisition of a book. You may have seen books that have these warnings on the inside cover that say this book is sold on the condition that it not be loaned or resold. Those are not enforceable. And in fact, in many places, publishers have been required to remove them because they were deceptive. You bought a book, you own the book. Loaning and giving away books is not only older than copyright, it's older than publishing, it's older than paper. It's arguably older than commerce. People were loaning scrolls made of

papyrus before we had any of the institutions we have now. And so we have historically made our copyright and our commercial law such that it acknowledged these traditional contours of book ownership. So the publishers argued that the act of selling the same words as a file, instead of as a codex between covers, creates a new legal regime that supersedes all of those other legal regimes. And that libraries therefore have to take whatever license terms are being offered to them, which in the case of e-books for libraries is that the books cost significantly more, sometimes as much as 10 or 15 times more. And they can only be circulated a certain number of times. So the books expire out of the library's collection after a couple of years or after a

couple of dozen circulations. And the publishers argue that this reflects the normal reality of a print book. I am a recovering library worker, I'm actually a visiting professor of library science at the University of North Carolina, but I was a page and a cataloger growing up. And I have repaired many books and put them back out to circulate that have circulated not a couple of dozen times, but hundreds of times. And that is not unusual. So this is just untrue. And the reason that this deal, this take it or leave it deal as possible is the publishers rely on the presumptive unlawfulness of scanning a book and making an e-book out of it the way the Internet Archive has. And so this has become an issue of enormous consequence to the publishers

who see in a world where their fortunes are being increasingly constrained by a single monopoly print and e-book seller, Amazon, that the customer with the deepest pockets that they can squeeze the most from is the public library's system. And so they are trying to make up for their losses. That's a really fucking dire sentence. Oh, it really is. And, you know, we can get into the kind of the weeds on the case. You know, one of the things about this case is that Hachette, which is the belligerent that led the case. There were four publishers involved, but Hachette was the publisher that led it. Hachette is like Little Brown, Orbit, a bunch of other publishers you've heard of. There are five major trade publishers left in the world through an orgy of acquisitions

and mergers that almost went down to four, except the U.S. blocked the merger Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. And if you want, we can even talk about how Amazon drove that consolidation. But like Brandon stopped them, right? Brandon stopped them. Yeah. Well, Lena Kahn stopped them. And thank goodness for Lena. One of the few sort of actually effective Democrats. Oh, well, Jonathan Cantor and, you know, her commissioners, Rebecca Slaughter, I mean, politics are personnel are policy. And while I am no Brandon fan, I still have to admit that the appointments on the antitrust side have been brilliant. They've been unprecedented. Nothing we've seen in our lifetime looks like this. It is a remarkable moment.

So Hachette told their experts, do not attempt to prepare any evidence to quantify our losses due to what's this program called controlled digital lending. And for some people, that's like they know that they haven't lost any money. My guess is it's because they don't know how their books perform because Amazon has all that data, right? That like the single largest factor in their books performance is one retailer that accounts for 40 to 60% of their print books and something like 95% of their ebooks that gives them almost no data on it. And that retailer is also a publisher that competes with them. It poachers their authors. It offers them or demands unsustainable discounts from them. It is able to cross market in ways that they can't. So they know,

you know, Amazon knows which Kindle original books sell with which Hachette books, but Hachette doesn't know which Hachette books sell with which Kindle original books. So Amazon can target Hachette readers, but Hachette can't target Amazon readers. So I think that, you know, like just like the the alcoholic dad who beats up his family because he can't control the people who are, you know, actually making his life miserable. You know, the publishers are in this circumstance that is that is a genuinely terrible circumstance. Like we should not ignore that. But the people they're taking it out on are writers, libraries, and people who work in publishing, as opposed to Amazon, because the you know, Amazon is too big to fight. And although whenever I sort of I think

about feeling bad for a publisher for a moment, I do remember the name of Aaron Swartz, and then I stopped feeling bad for any publisher ever. That was, I mean, that was scholarly publishers to be fair, right? Who are they're all largely trade publishers. So this is that they are two separate sectors, and they're not really intertwined anymore. They used to be a little Macmillan used on nature, but they sold it off. But I think you mentioned earlier, right? There's a lot of mention of the publishers here. And I keep I kept seeing this sort of persistent sort of talking point that, you know, a lot of this is to be fair, a lot of I saw this talking point repeated in very funny and enjoyable ways that, you know, a lot of this is down to, you know, like at the YA

literature, like consumers and writers and stuff. And look, these people are profoundly annoying online. But as with so many things, the real villain here is is this is the publisher. I can't be mad at Chuck Wendig for this exclusively. I mean, look, if you want to, you can, but it seems like I'm going to take that and I'm going to run with it. I just want to declare an interest that I am a New York Times bestselling YA author who's a friend of Chuck's. But but there we go. So the other thing is right. This case is being overseen. This is a little bit of a detour. But this case is also being overseen by a judge who's overseen some real fucking bangers in his day. He oversaw the trial of the one of the legal counsel counselors

of one of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He also oversaw one of my favorite frauds in history, which is the Raffaello Folieri fake Vatican fraud case where he basically defrauded Bill Clinton out of $50 million on behalf of a kind of fake pope. Sorry. Sorry. The hottest scams of the 11th century logging on here. What? When did this happen? When was there a fake pope? I missed this whole pope debacle. So wasn't so much of a phony pope. I want to take a minute to explain this because it's one of my favorite things that's ever happened. Okay. Okay. I can sense the tangent that's going to take up the rest of the episodes. So Cory, if you have any thoughts about the Internet archive because I'm laser focused in on fake pope right now. So Raffaello Folieri is,

he's still alive, an Italian like sort of businessman and man of all industries who I actually did meet once. Okay. Yeah. He used to, he was in the tabloids for dating Anne Hathaway. And then it transpired that he was behind this big deal where he claimed to be selling, he claimed to be selling unused church land and he's, he got like fucking Bill Clinton in on it. And he's, how did you meet this guy? I met him at a party once and he was taking bets on who it was when the pope had resigned and he was running around taking bets on who would be the new pope. He was very charismatic. And profoundly like church leading in his scams, it seems, like making book on like the College of Cardinals. That's, that's incredible. He was, he was doing

the 26 way parlay. All right. I think the first, the first one to speak is going to be Argentinian. The white smoke is going to go up afternoon, you know, that kind of thing. Yeah. It's a weird guy. There's a whole article in Vanity Fair about him. I suggest you check out where he's like, yeah, he, he basically leased the penthouse in Trump Tower because he like felt like, and there's in 2008, he felt like just being there made him feel powerful. And then he also leased, bought his parents an apartment like on the first floor or whatever. And after he like, all of his different like flim flams and scams regarding the Vatican kind of crumbled around him. He, the article in Vanity Fair talks about how, yeah, he went down to his parents' apartments

on the first floor where he quote, got a nosebleed from being so stressed. Oh, I hate when that happens. For sure. No, he's now, so he's now, I looked this up, he's now, yeah, he went to like jail for this and stuff. And Anne Hathaway did break up with him. The, the, the bag fumbled atrociously. He flew too close to the sun. Yeah. There's a guy who flew too close to the sun. No, he is now, I think like says he's in charge of like a natural gas importer in Italy. So, so sorry, he's the founder and chairman of a company called Strategic Metals. None of these guys can ever fail. Like the highs are so much higher and the lows are so much also

higher. Like, you date Anne Hathaway. Anne Hathaway breaks up with you. The saddest thing I can imagine happening to anyone. You go to jail for a bit and then you're just fine. You just bounce back. You're like in, in, in like, metals? Well, Strategic Metals, which is what you award a tactical polycule with. Yeah, you bounce back and then you sort of, you know, run around a social event trying to take bets on who's going to be Pope. Very fun life. Anyway, he also the same judge. Sorry, sorry. In the olden days, in the good old days, if you were trying to like do shit like this to the Catholic Church, this was a good way to end up like, you know, stretching your, your neck tie underneath Blackfriars Bridge. But this guy's just fine.

Like, yeah, the world has gotten soft, right? Remember when the fucking like propaganda duo would have like pulled out all of this guy's fingernails, but now, you know, Berlusconi's in hospital, prayers up again, and this guy's just fine. It just, you know, it's, the world's gone mad. It's too woke and soft now. That's what I was going to say. It's gone too woke. Yeah. So even next is going to be the woke Pope. Oh God, they're good. Well, people too should. Yeah, that's true. I was about to say. So he's also like, a couple of years ago, for some reason, a group of investors hired him to like buy 50% of like a Southern Italian series beef football club. Like, I don't understand why they keep people keep doing that. Is it a big

like kink thing? Do they like being scammed? You don't even know. I don't even know if there's, if there's any more scamming. It might have just been the Vatican. If you saw the Vatican scandal, it also, to be clear, he didn't actually scam the Vatican. It was other people saying he was selling church land. He used the Vatican's name to scam other people. Okay. Yeah, that still feels like it would be not looked on kindly. No. You know, I think his greatest mistake was not selling indulgences. You should have done that. Anyway, he also, this, this judge did a bunch of other, I've done a bunch of other interesting cases like the DNC suing Wiki links for disinformants and all this stuff. Well, so I got one for you. The judge who presided over the 2600 DCSS case

that made it illegal to describe how to break DRM is also the judge who put Stephen Donziger in house arrest for three years. And is now the judge hearing Sam Bankman Fried's case. I wonder which way that's gonna, gonna go oddly. This one open letter is back to, we're off Rafaela. We will, we will talk about him again. Okay. Don't worry, Alice. We, this is not the last time. Yeah, we can do a lot more. We better have. Yeah. Okay. Vaticanology. Yeah. Oh, yeah, we can do Vaticanology, a fake Vaticanology. So this is from an open letter that you and some of your colleagues wrote, which says that this isn't also just a one off thing. This is sort of a sustained all out war, more or less on libraries by the publishing industry. You're right.

A unanimously passed Maryland state law ensuring libraries pay reasonable fees for digital editions died after the AAP sued. And after a previous suit failed, several publishers are currently suing the Internet Archive Library in attempt to prohibit all libraries from lending out scanned copies of books they own. And so this is A, it's been happening and B, it's not just the Internet Archive, it is all controlled digital lending to like two court, all of it. Is that correct? That's right. I mean, that's, that's what's at stake here. Actually, you know, Hachette really over egged the pudding and the judge gave him what they asked for, which is kind of probably good in terms of an appeal, but pretty disturbing in terms of the outcome. So

one of the things that Hachette asked for, you know, in the U.S., the exceptions to copyright are codified through a doctrine called fair use, rather, which is part of the overall part. No, I was going to say fair dealing. But yes, it's fair dinkum. It's whatever you can get in your ute with your rue is fair dinkum. Canadians are just cold Australians, after all. That's right. And we're everywhere. And we're, and we look just like everybody else. So in the U.S., fair dealing and other limitations and exceptions codified the things that you're allowed to do without permission from a rights holder and codifies probably a strong word here because the doctrine is deliberately loosey-goosey. You know, that there are four factors set out in

the statute about what can be fair use, but they're the starting point, not the end point. So they, generally speaking, if you satisfy all four factors, you're presumptively a fair user, but even if you don't, you still might be a fair user. So those four factors are the nature and character of the work that you're using, whether or not you make a transformative use, whether your use is displacing the market for the work and how much of the work you're using. So those four factors are often thought of as all of fair use. They're just part of fair use. Like the most important fair use case of the last century was arguably the Betamax case over legalizing VCRs. And the VCR flunked all of those, right? It was like directly competing with these

play once tapes that the studios were offering. It made verbatim copies that were non-transformative of commercial works. It took 100% of them. Like all of the factors that flunked, but the judges were like, there's six million VCRs in America. We're not going to ban them. We'd look like idiots. Like this was back when the Supreme Court cared about looking like idiots. It's clearly not necessarily that anymore. But you know, fair use is like this expandable doctrine. So one of the things about fair use is whether you're a for-profit user and the Internet Archive is a non-profit user. They're 501c3. And Hachette argued that having a donate button on the web page, on the website, made them a for-profit entity.

Wait, by that logic, doesn't that make like Amnesty International the for-profit entity? That's exactly right. This is why it's kind of a mixed blessing, right? Because even if you don't care about this at all, you don't want a precedent that stands that says having a donate button makes you a for-profit entity. Like I can imagine that like Jerry Falwell's ministry would also not like that precedent to stand, right? I mean, how delightful is it that in like a kind of misguided sort of a quest against like the concept of libraries being able to lend out digital books, a group of the four remaining publishers accidentally destroy the biggest tax scam in America. So I don't think that would happen. I just think that the non-profit sector and churches and whatever,

they would probably not like it just on general principles because they would be worried that somewhere down the way it could be adverse to them. So that was one thing that was really disturbing in the ruling. The other thing that Hachette asked the judge to rule and that the judge basically agreed with them on, there's some nuance in it, but is that no use is fair if it competes with a licensed use? So you may remember if you've been on the internet for a while that about 15 years ago, the Associated Press was offering bloggers a license to quote AP articles. It was like a self-serve portal and you would select up to like 11 words and then you'd put down a credit card for like $15 and you would get a license from the AP to quote the AP

article. Now like fair dealing and fair use are pretty clear here that in almost every case, this would not require a license. This was just basically them saying, here's like an honor payments box for a thing that you don't need to put any money in. Will you put some money in it with a kind of air of menace around it being like, well, and maybe we'll see you in court if you don't. And what the court is saying here when they say that if there's a licensed use, it's not a fair use is that all that a rights holder has to do is offer to license something and then it ceases to be something you can do without their permission, even though the whole point of fair use is to define a constellation of permissionless uses that are either necessary because permission would be

too burdensome to get. So like think of creating a catalog where you would have to get permission from thousands and thousands of entities and that would make the catalog unsustainable or where permission is unlikely to be given. So you're making a critical use. There's another Supreme Court fair use case about a book called The Wind Done Gone that retells gone with the wind from the perspective of enslaved Africans written by a black woman. The Mitchell estate sued and she won because the whole point of these exceptions is to create these speech escape valves and these use escape valves from these exclusive rights over words and over creative expression that would otherwise hamstring a lot of traditional activities. And I think what's pretty clear

from what you're saying, that in sort of taking a sledgehammer to this problem, there are potentially sort of much wider ranging implications. But what are the other interesting things about this? And this is going to be probably one of the last things we talk about before we end the show is that the Internet Archive and the general movement against these kinds of you might say excessive DRM is being portrayed by the publishing industry itself as in bed with Amazon. That is to say, the Internet Archive is purported to be a kind of happy publicly acceptable face of things like Amazon that are crushing the publishing industry. I mean, this must boil the blood, I imagine. Yeah, I mean, again, they have identified a

genuine problem with monopoly in the tech sector, allowing them to squeeze their supply chain, including publishers and studios and labels, and especially the creative workers who feed those firms. But they're going after a soft target and they're saying that because the soft target is tech affiliated in the sense that it is an attempt to try and do the kinds of things that tech firms claim that they want to do, but do so on a non-profit, transparent, accessible public spirited way that is not grounded in extraction and profit and growth, but rather in universal access and equity. They're saying that if it has tech in the name, even if the reason it has tech in the name is because the full name of it is, we hate big tech,

let's do something better than you are perforce tech. And they are stampeding creators, unfortunately, and fewer than there used to be, but they're stampeding creators into this proposition. And I'll say one more thing that's I think pretty important here to understand about what's going on with the Internet Archive and digital lending, which is that after the Patriot Act was passed, the librarians were the first people to sound the alarm on how the sneak and peek warrants would allow the FBI and other security services to gag people who had information about you and then demand that information, permanently gag them from ever telling you they've been for it. In fact, there was a librarian at the time,

Jessamine, gosh, I just blanked her last name, Jessamine, who created a sign for her library that said the FBI has not been here this week. Watch for this sign to go away. And there was a lot of concern among librarians that their records were going to be the subject of drag net requests from law enforcement on these kind of fishing expeditions for terrorists and other actors that they were interested in investigating. And so what the Internet Archive did at that point was go as far down into its underlying operations as they could and rip out every form of logging. So the Internet Archive kept no logs at all of what you were getting and how you were using it and so on. And they had to infer how their users were using it. If you've ever found the Internet

Archive a little clunky to use, part of that is because like the way that they find out where the pain points are from users is by like getting emails or doing focus groups because they don't log any of your transactions. They don't log how you use it. And so when control digital lending popped up and other programs that the Archive has done that has made rights holders angry, the rights holder said these are being used as direct substitutes for the sale of books and it is costing us money. And the Internet Archive has been somewhat hamstrung in its ability to rebut that with a factual record because it deliberately prevented itself from creating that factual record so that it could never narc out its users. And so they at the start of

all this Mishiga started to re-instrument the service in very tentative ways that tried to anonymize data and so on. And the big picture here is that almost all of the checkouts from the Internet Archive's library are out of print books that are being checked out for 30 minutes or less. So it's basically people consulting PDFs to get a reference. That is not the substitute of use people worry about. The Internet Archive does things like they do have front-list titles because they partner with other libraries around the country. And so if they have my next book, they might have a scanned copy and that scanned copy might circulate among their library partners as well. That scanned copy will be one additional copy in circulation among say 12 libraries serving

hundreds of thousands if not millions of patrons. It will make no difference at all to the number of sales except in the most marginal attenuated way. And so a lot of the debate about the Internet Archive has turned on factual questions about the extent to which it harms creators. And for complex reasons, having to do with Amazon, with the national security letters defined in the Patriot Act and so on, that factual record is largely not there. But to the extent that it exists, it should be relatively reassuring to creators. And creators haven't gotten the message. They've been, they are I think legitimately alarmed about the falling incomes for creative labor. And they rely for better for worse on publishers to be their proxy for understanding

the contours of the industry, even though they're often adverse to those publishers. And they are being sold a bill of goods about what's going on with libraries more broadly and with the Internet Archive in specific. And I think that it is just an absolute travesty when we people who do creative labor are convinced to take up arms against our class allies in librarianship and the readers that they represent. I think that it's the mistake that musicians made in the Napster days. And I think we'd be just foolish beyond belief to repeat that mistake. So that's right. The Metallica, you are no longer welcome at the Internet Archive. Fire bad. I think that's a pretty good, excuse me, I think that's as good as place as any to end it. Corey, I want to thank you so much for

coming back and hanging out with us today. It's been delightful. Oh, it's been delightful for me too. Can I plug something? Plug away. So I don't allow any of my things to be sold with digital rights management. And that means that Audible won't carry any of my books because they have mandatory DRM. And so I have to make my own audio books. And I sell them everywhere that's not Audible, but that's like a bunch of great stores that no one ever uses, which means that not a lot of copies sell. And so I spend tens of thousands of dollars paying a studio and a great reader. I've had like Neil Gaiman and Amber Benson and lots other great readers. And then I generally lose money on them. So I started kickstarting them a couple of books ago. The current Kickstarter is

underway for Red Team Blues. If you go to redteamblues.com, you can pre-order the audiobook. That's where almost all of my sales for this audiobook will come from. I got it at the studio last week. We recorded it with Will Wheaton. It's incredible. You can download some samples. At the Kickstarter. And I hope you'll consider backing the audiobook. So do check that out. Also, TF is going on tour, tour, tour, in the north of England, England, England, a place we have never gone, even though we live here. We went to Australia before we went outside of England. On equal distribution of podcasts. So as an act of contrition, TF is doing the, we're sorry it took this long tour in several cities in the north.

We are not actually calling that that. Yeah, we're not actually calling it that. It just didn't meet the tour. So many tour, I think, is what we're calling it amongst ourselves. We might come up with a name for it. So if you want to feel like you're on the show, yeah, we'll come up with something. Well, you know what? We'll tell you here. We have three dates booked in, I believe, Birmingham, Leeds, and Manchester. That's right. We did have a date booked in Glasgow. But then it turns out we were going to be

sharing a venue with Joanna Cherry. Yeah, so now we're not. So I guess instead of saying, come to our show in Glasgow, I am instead going to ask a question. Do you know of a good venue in Glasgow? Yeah, doing the right thing sucks. But yeah, we were not happy doing it. So we are now looking for an alternative venue. We will keep you posted on this. Yeah. And if it's some guy's house, then, you know. Yeah, yeah. Come to my flat and we, you know, come to my like my flat in Glasgow,

and we can do the live show sort of like out of my windows to a crowd. How about this? How about this? Let's get up on the roof of. Yeah, exactly. Just do like one episode. You're not going to be in Manchester on May 31st by any chance. That's when my tour is going to bring me a couple of weeks earlier. A couple of weeks earlier, I'm afraid. That would have been really fun. That would have been nice. Unfortunately, no. So that's all happening.

Yeah, I can give you the dates if you want. Oh, yeah, the dates. Yeah, Birmingham May 14th, Leeds May 15th, Manchester May 16th, and then we were going to do Glasgow May 21st. We will still try and aim for that, but we'll let you know. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So also, don't forget, there is a Patreon. You can listen to more episodes of this show on it for $5 a month. There's a Twitch stream. If you go to slop.delivery,

it will take you to the Twitch stream. Yeah, where Mondays and Thursdays, some combination of me, Alice, Devin, and sometimes Milo will be talking about YouTube videos. We've been doing it for years and forgot to advertise it until recently. We're so good at this. Anyway, that's all the plugs done. Well, I'll say that I'm going to tour Red Team Blues, Canada, US, UK, and then I'll end in Berlin. If you go to RedTeamBloods.com, I'll have those tour dates up in a couple of days.

Okay. Now, that's all the plugs done. Yeah. Unless anyone has any, here we go by Jinseng. I have a plug. Yeah, I had a not good time at the dentist, but they did let me play with the drill. I'm really just running about high. She let me play with the dentist drill. It's genuinely the most fun I've had in a really long time. You can put that together. Yeah. So basically, my plug is, if you are at the dentist and they forget to add the numbing injection, and you just didn't say anything.

Number one, say something. Yeah. Please say something because it really, it really hurts. You marathon manned yourself. Like just the fact that you didn't say anything for 20 minutes after they forgot to numb you while drilling your tooth is. Is it safe? It's remarkable. I'm fine now. I wasn't fine before, but look. She did let me play with the little drill for a bit.

Not on me, just in general. And it makes a fun little buzzing noise, like a nice little buzzing noise. And I had a good time. So yeah, no plug on what I'm doing with my life. Just a little story from my daily life. Yeah. So maybe I'll do that when my plug is like, yeah, if you've got anything to plug, yeah, this is the time I got hurt again. Yeah. This gave the shape to that little joke we told much earlier in the show.

All right. All right. It's getting very long. So I'm going to end the show here. Thanks everybody for listening. And we'll see you on the bonus episode in a few days. Bye everyone. you