Hello and welcome to the Verge cast, the flagship podcast of the Verge.com. There's only one of us right now, because watch which button is, there's seasons over, they're gonna start another one though, that's gonna be fun. But for now it's just us solo flagship of technology news. Still counts though.
It definitely still counts. I'm your friend Eli, how are you? Palmilla is here. Hello.
Need a bonus here? Hi, wow, Deeter. It's not gonna go on with Deeter. Wanna figure that out?
That's what this hour is gonna be. Anyway, this is a show, you might know, about technology news, some jokes, just three butts having a good time. We got some phones, talk about there's some S10 leaks. There's some real world congresses coming up.
There's some Sonos, rumors, some Netflix stuff going on. I got a whole Fortnite copyright thing I'm gonna talk about. But first, Better Worlds is the Verge is science fiction project. It's huge, massive, 11 stories, five podcasts, five videos.
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I implore you. You like it. Paul, have you been reading it? I've read the first one with the spaceship, but I wanna catch up.
We do it. I'm excited about it. I just wanna think about it. Okay, that's enough plugs.
I'm gonna be honest, it's been quite weak. Right. And quiet. Yeah.
But a lot of stuff going. We're in the like CES happened. And now, you know, most of that stuff isn't real, but some of it is potentially very exciting. And then everyone is taking a breath.
And then what world congress is gonna be starting up in basically a month from today. And so like that's starting to ramp up. The leaks are starting to ramp up. But in this zone, it's just a little bit quiet.
At least as far as like direct gadget news goes. And yeah, so it's fine. There's plenty of stuff happening for us to talk about, but not so much that it feels overwhelming. We can just sort of spread out and relax and talk about notches for as long as we want.
Can I tell you my favorite little bit of news? Yes. It's not even a news. It's just my favorite thing that happened this week.
The government, as you know, shut down. That's my favorite bit of news. No, that's not my favorite. It's generally horrible news.
But 800,000 federal employees aren't working. The FCC is shut down. But our friends at motherboard, who are great, that they wrote a story about location tracking, we talked about this week, but the cell carrier is selling your location data. And they wrote this follow up piece by this company called Zumigo, which had this presentation for why the rules should be even more relaxed.
And so they emailed the FCC. Motherboard reporters emailed the FCC's press line for comment. But nobody works at the FCC. So the person who just started emailing them back was a jeep pie.
He's the only person left in the building. It's like you email customer support at Apple, and you're just like, oh, my iPhone screen is broken. What do I do? And Tim Cook replies.
He's like, hey, what's up? Yeah, it's incredible. I laughed very much about it when I saw the tweet from other words. I don't see it.
OK. Peter. Yeah. There's exciting notch developments or anti-notch developments in the world today.
The S10 and S10 Plus are leaking all over the place. Yeah. And we should talk about this whole punch. We should talk about the double wide hole punch display that the S10 Plus has.
But first, can we all just celebrate the fact that Samsung is making flagship phones in 2019 with headphone jacks? People, like I tweeted out just the word headphone jacks, but linked to our story about the leaks. And people are like, excited. I'm going to buy an S10.
That's amazing. This might be the last one. There was a rumor that this is the last time Samsung's going to leave the headphone jack in the phone. Wasn't that the rumor the last time?
Yeah. But then I think Samsung sees the market demand. They're aware. They know what's up.
But look, phones are slowing down. The hand-braids cycle is slowing down. This phone will probably unself for three years. It's three more years of high-end headphone jack.
It makes me happy. Now, am I going to get a Samsung phone? Is the question you really ought to vote with your wallet? I need to have an iOS phone and an Android phone.
That's a thing in my life. It's also really nice to have a vanilla Android phone. But that's not Samsung. A Samsung phone is a good one.
It's not. It's a rocky road situation. All right. Let me make the case for why you should buy one of these Samsung phones.
We don't have a good case. We don't have never seen it. It's not even a reality. We haven't seen them.
But like, OK, make the case for why you should be hype about the Samsung phones. Imagine Deeter's wearing a red polo. And it approaches you in a Verizon store. All right.
God. All right. All right. Think the first.
Headphone jack. That's it. I think that we're going to look back at 2018. If you survey all of the notches on all of the phones in two years when we're beyond the era of the notch, the notch era, and you have to pick what was the doofiest, stupidest notch that was made on a phone, you could make the case that it was the Pixel 3 XL.
Oh, without question. Right? You know, you just want to make the case. There's a fact.
Well, there are some phones that like the double notch. And like the double notch is pretty out there. Anyway, this thing has an elegant looking front of the phone. It has a little bit of a bezel at the top of the bottom because they're not spending the extra however many tens of millions of dollars to the engineering to fold the screen underneath.
Or you spend all that money to fold the screen on the left and the right. So it is relatively proportional. It has these little hole punch notches, which, again, I think that just a full cutout proper notch would be just as fine. Like you don't actually gain anything by having that extra screen there.
But aesthetically, I think it looks good. You no longer have to deal with the fingerprint sensor on the back that's super hard to reach. Instead, it's the right there under the screen. And if you, you know, maybe they'll do the opposite.
I respect it, but I don't think there's room in those notches for that. So that's gone. So it's just a very simple unlock process. And you get to try out one UI, which is Samsung's latest attempt to make a clean version of its software.
You get to get to that's in your phone. Yeah, I know. I think I'm interested in seeing what one UI is like. I really am.
I miss out on the beta, but shifting everything down. And you know what? I'm not even mad about the cryptocurrency wallet. I was prepared to go on a full rant about how dare they.
And you know, I don't care. Fine. Like it's a thing that people want around the world. And Neelive, for you in particular, you are the man who use Slack every day for our internal chat.
And we have to use it all day. And most of us do the same thing and customize the way Slack looks and feels to match our preferences. So we don't have garish ugly colors. But you have said that you like to leave Slack at the defaults because you want to experience what most people experience.
I leave almost everything at the default. So if you leave everything at the default, and you want to experience the most people experience, you have to for your job buy a Samsung phone. I understand what you're saying. Now, to be fair, their defaults that I change all the time.
For example, I think you all know how I feel about motion speaking, which is the default is the most thing. Change that one. I do change the color tuning on phones because they're super crazy. But I'm talking about your general, mucky muck settings and people are like, you can just change that.
And most people don't. I think that's important. How things behave, you got to leave it to the phone. But I always have to have an Android phone.
I've never had a Samsung phone every one time. Maybe this is the one. Maybe this one UI is going to convince me. I mean, you don't have a Pixel 3, right?
I do. I have the little guy. I mean, you just imagine a world where one UI is so good that people start switching in droves. They're like, psh, Samsung, whatever.
But then they try the one UI and they're like, oh, this is what I always wanted a phone to be like. And Samsung cracked it. People are finally like, yes, I want this dog with shoe. I want Clippy to be on the phone.
No, I was talking at Dan C for ages ago. And I think we're at the point with phone UIs where the value of experimenting actively cuts against their ability to capture customers, right? So Dan, his wife's phone had broken and he gave her some Android phone and it was like two different and she didn't like it, right? But you give the phone that has like just aggressively cloned the iPhone UI and people will like make the transition.
And I've noticed this several times too, because I have some friends who switched to Android phones. And Samsung aggressively cloning how the iPhone looked and felt like captured customers for Samsung. So we sit and we're like, we want to see all this competition. We want to see all these crazy ideas, all these new paradigms and then real people.
Real iPhone phone. Right. And then real, give me a windowing system and a stylus. And then real people out there in the world are just kind of like, I know how to use a phone.
I prefer this other phone to be similar to that. And I think that cognitive switching cost is real high. So everything is converging. Like I would be very surprised if Apple swipe gesture ideas.
Don't just become the default everywhere in like the next two or three years. But at the same time, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take. You know, the one UI, every time you swipe up, it just screams one at you. Instead of the bleep bloop noises that Samsung used to.
Look, I'm surprisingly hype about whole punch displays. I'm super, we saw some more foldable display concepts. Oh yeah, Johnny's got a really good one. Johnny's is really good.
There was a motor or a patent drawing of a new razor that might have a foldable display that leaked this week. Oh man, that patent drawing is like, it will never be that good. But anyway, yeah, that patent drawing is, I don't know if you can file for like an aspirational patent. It's very aspirational.
But we're like entering an era of extreme hardware innovation because the display technologies have like taken another leap. That's usually when you see it. So the display's getting thinner. You can bend them and curve them.
You can punch holes in them. I am super down for all of that. And I think we're gonna, I think we're gonna look back on the notch era as being just like an aberration before we did more interesting than you screen. So like the notch moment is very much, this is the most you can do with this category of screen.
And then we're gonna like move on and see all the foldy stuff, all the stuff where the sensors are integrated directly into the screen or under it. I mean, that, Johnny, I like I'm a sucker, you know, like I love extremely futuristic prototype demo things. But I looked at that and I was like, this is the closest to CGI in my life that I've seen on a phone forever. Right?
It literally looks like they're folding, just like a floating image. Yeah, the first time I saw that video, I thought it was on CGI mockup. If you haven't seen it, two sides of it fold in. Like tech runs nailed it, they said it's a triptych.
So like two of the sides fold under and behind the thing. So that's what gives you the phone shape instead of just folding in half, which for some reason just adding an extra fold makes it more impressive for, I don't know. But you know, they actually managed to make Android responsive and work with that little thing. So good on them.
I'm actually a little bit surprised. Like I wanna know more about what Google is doing to support folding displays by default because they said they're gonna do it, but it's like what exactly does all that entail? Because I highly doubt that the prototypes you see so far are using all just, you know, some custom thing that these different companies made. Yeah, but if you're Xiaomi, you don't convince it, right?
Like you've forked Android, you're in China, you're like, screw you Google. Like have you heard of Mi Mix? That's our operating system. It has nothing to do with you.
My guess is that folding phones are just as well supported by Android as tablets are. Ooh, in a sense, it's conceptually the same. You have have, you need apps that can adapt to different screen sizes and ratios. Yeah, but do you- And so people who build apps with using the modern toolkits of that Google provides, and don't do anything custom or interesting with their app, can support tablets and probably support folding phones just fine.
My guess. That's my guess. My sense of the folding screen, obviously it's happening, Android, you know, that platform has a standard name. So my sense of what it's good for is consuming content.
Right, I don't know that I've never sat down in a coffee shop with my phone and looked at Twitter and I'm like, man, I wish this was bigger. Right, like that's not it. But I think I'm gonna unfold this and like look at a bigger picture or watch a video full screen. It's that stuff and that doesn't really, as long as the video players write in like content views scale, I don't know that this is the thing that makes people want to use Microsoft Word on Android phone.
Right, right. Yeah, mostly for view. I mean, I can imagine, especially with this Jami phone, like you're scrolling through YouTube, you find a good video and so you unfold it, watch it and like automatically goes to full screen. You watch the whole video and then when you're done watching the video, you've tucked the sides back in and now you start scrolling through YouTube, looking for your next fix, you know?
Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's pretty seamless experience. I just history suggests that the word seamless should not be applied to this experience yet. Yeah.
I'm pretty sure it'll be weird, but in the best way. In a way that just like, you know, processor improvements will fix it in two generations. Like it'll be like that. Think about how much hand work is involved when you've got a phone in portrait and you know you want to go full screen and so you've tapped the full screen and then it like, it turns and now the operating system starts turning like 90 degrees at a time trying to find which way is down with gravity so you shake the phone so it gets the landscape just right because you're on Android and it's not as perfect as it is on iOS.
I will say iOS is real janky with rotation lately. Oh really? Yeah. Gravity's messed up.
That's probably true. Look, the government shut down. No one's getting the gravitational signals they need from the government network of gravitrons. Is that how that works?
Can I just say that the rumor about LG, by the way, is not a folding screen. It's that they'll just have a second screen that you can plug in. Yeah, you just like carry it around and plug it in. I love this idea.
I'm just like, you just have another like thing sitting in your bag and just click it in or like you can maybe unclick it and like stick it in a little pocket behind the phone. Yeah. That's great. You like get all the benefits and then if you just want the skinny little phone, let the weird bend on it.
You need to throw, you leave the second screen behind. Well, one, I don't think you get articulated the benefits. This is only for like real estate people. We're like, let me show you some specs.
You plug in the other screen, you're like, scrolling your phone, you're like, shoot a picture. I've been trying to figure out what you would use this for. And it's definitely for the kind of people who give PowerPoint presentations and Starbucks. I mean, you use it like all this, in theory, all the stuff that you do on an iPad, you could do on your phone.
There are lots of people that still want the iPad mini and like a dual screen or folding screen device, like is essentially an iPad mini, but it folds up. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, I'm into it. Like I said, people who are listening to show know like I'm usually very much like, what is it good for?
And this is the one place where I'm like, I don't care. I just want a folding phone. Like it's a headphone jack. Can't have it all, Peter.
And then the Honor View 20 is out. It's got 48 megapixel camera, which makes me happy. I mean, well, and that camera is like, Sam Bifurght really a good piece. Like that camera's actually not bullshit.
Like it's actually, they're managed to have real benefits. And there have been very, very few smartphones with super high megapixel counts that haven't actually just been objectively worse than like a standard 8 or 12 megapixel camera. And this one manages to be as good and in some cases better and that's rare. So that's why I'm excited about that phone.
Yeah. I mean, I just, we're just in this period where a bunch of threads that have been brewing for some time are starting to land in shipping devices. Like the, there's a Vivo Apex, it'll be an NWC where the entire display is a fingerprint sensor. Like, come on.
Like that's super cool. It's a prototype and who knows. And then we've seen enough Vivo weirdness to know that they just like having ideas just for us to look at them. Like the thing, the camera pops up.
Like that's fine. But I just, where, I think this NWC which is coming up sort of mid February is gonna be full of extremely weird phone designs that sort of make last year seem like an aberration. Yeah. Can I throw a curve ball that's on our topic list?
Yeah. Have you been keeping up with Fuchsia? Google's Skunk Works OS project? More from like the programming language side.
Why was it? Well, okay. So two things have happened since we last checked in. One, the UI that everybody has seen for Fuchsia has basically been yanked and put into private repositories.
It was called Armadillo. So you no longer can like track and watch how they're thinking about what the user interface looks like publicly anymore. Or at least not easily. So that's one.
And then this week Google hired this Apple veteran named Bill Stevenson who worked on a lot of Mac OS releases. And what's interesting there is two things. Well, I'll say there's three things that are interesting there. But I'm only going to say one is on the verge of gas because I'm saving the other two.
But when Bill Stevenson posted about it, he said, I'm excited to share that this February, I'll be joining Google. Here's the important part. To help bring a new operating system called Fuchsia to market. To market?
To market. Which is the first time, to my knowledge, Google finally just up and admitted, yes, we're doing this is a thing. And there have been lots of other little developments. So we've seen some pretty clear indications that they have been developing versions of Fuchsia that can run on things like smart clocks and smart displays.
So even like that Lenovo smart clock, we think that that could run Fuchsia. And I've got a couple other conjectures and thoughts and ideas. But they're like too sketchy for me to put my name behind, even on the verge of gas, where I'll say anything. So I think that Fuchsia is going to be an exciting thing to watch 2018.
I don't think anything's going to actually get released this year. But I do think that we're going to start to see more stuff become secretive. So if you haven't poked around, if you're able to look at GitHub and understand even a little bit of code, now's the time to do it. Because I think they're going to start pulling more stuff back as they get ready to turn it into something real.
What is it going to turn into now? See, that's where I think I know. But I don't want to say it. I think it's Google's everything operating system.
If it can run Android applications, it can run on really lightweight devices. It's Google's Darwin at the kernel. Instead of having its own special variant of Unix as its main kernel for all its operating systems, Google will have Fuchsia and whatever the actual kernel Fuchsia is. And then it can toy around with making more user-facing operating system stuff.
They could ship an Android phone that would have Fuchsia stuff as the innards of it. But it still works and operates just like your current Android phone. Or they could go crazy and replace all the UI with Flutter and stuff. They have a lot of flexibility.
But I do think they want to get away from Linux. Or at least have my original thing was that they wanted to have a very viable replacement for Linux if something goes bad with Linux. But now it seems like they're investing enough in it that they are fairly confident that they can pull it off. If you're listening to this and you're in your car, I'm just going to tell you, Deeter is completely stone-faced right now.
You're getting nothing from this man. Like Paul was just saying, every word you can think of, Deeter's like, uh-huh. Go ahead, Deeter. You're going to say something.
I was going to say, I remember once when I was trying to understand Docker. And I couldn't figure it out. And then Paul finally explained it to me. And then I went, oh, oh, yeah, it makes sense.
It's really obvious. And that's really smart. And that's the way that software in the cloud should work. And I feel like there's a not precisely analogous move that they're doing with a consumer or a device operating system, the Docker.
But it's sort of analogous. And they're like, oh, yeah, everything should be. The internal parts of software on a computer should communicate that way. So Paul says it's like the everything operating system.
I feel like they're building a kernel and they're building a system that instead of having a bunch of virtual machines or something, I'm going to report stuff that it's flexible enough that it can run absolutely flutter, absolutely with the Android SDK. And there's even code that's swift. Let's see if we can figure out how to get Swift to run on this thing. They've got Swift in there.
They've got a lot of Rust code. One way to think of it, the invention, it's not like they came up with this concept. But what makes future different than a typical operating system is that it has what's called a microkernel. And so the idea is that most of the drivers, most of the functionality of the operating system, is not in the kernel.
Whereas Linux is more of what's called like a monolith. It's big. And when you write a driver for hardware, you want your hardware to be able to work with Linux. You have to write code that interfaces directly with the kernel.
So you basically have to contribute to Linux to make your hardware work with Linux. Whereas with a microkernel, the kernel is much more self-contained. And so therefore, it's much more portable. And a lot of the drivers can be much more sandbox, much more like basically apps.
And therefore, a lot more portable. And so you end up with a lot more modular of an operating system and a lot more portable of an operating system. People were thinking about this even back in the 90s. The thought was that maybe it's not as fast.
But they're pretty sure that they can make it fast. Yeah. It's funny that we've come this far with Google and its OS. They're going to make their next OS.
Android isn't that old. But the idea that they're going to completely re-architect a new OS from the ground up is actually kind of remarkable. And especially microkernel, they're hiring people to bring it to market. Well, it's also remarkable because they just spent quite a while mucking around with some of the core primitives of what Chrome OS is.
Chrome OS is now basically half Chrome, half Android bits. And there's some stuff that they're debating whether or not they should be in virtual machines or blah, blah, blah. But there's the way they're messing with Chrome. And at the same time, they're developing this thing on the side.
And so then the big question is, what are you going to do? You get a bet on all Android or on Chrome OS? And why do you have both? And it's so confusing.
In two years, we're going to be having the same argument about Chrome OS slash Android hybrid and Fuchsia. And then people are going to be like, no, no, you don't understand Fuchsia's for this, this, this, and this. And Chrome OS is for that, that, and that. And then Android is that other thing.
And so I don't think they're going to kill off any of the stuff right away. And so I'm not going to be a one-for-one replacement, which means we're going to have a whole lot of confusion about what is for what thing. In the same way that, why is there both a cast platform for smart speakers and Android things platform? Google, just as a company, is not worried about having a single unified thing that runs everything.
And Apple basically has everything as iOS. And Google sort of doesn't care. And in some ways, that's a little bit more honest. Because to say that everything running iOS is rough.
It's the touch bar on my MacBook Pro. It's like some variant of watchOS apparently. It almost becomes meaningless terms when you talk about what are the operating systems that run these little gadgets. I do wait until they launch the app store for the touch bar with subscription pricing.
And that is their next great services play on the Mac. I mean, come on. That's what's coming. You can feel it in your heart.
If you want to tell me that everything I just below-viated about Fuchsia was wrong, I actually want you to tell me. And my email address is daterattheverge.com. It just talks to me. I really do want someone that gets it a little bit more than I do.
And 9-5 Mac is doing the series called Fuchsia Fridays. And they've been doing really good work. But in general, I feel like we're getting to a point where it's no longer like random skunk work projects. I think they're bringing the market and we can actually start defining what it is.
You know, here's the two things I will just very broadly listen to you talk. One, it feels like Chrome OS is going to end up the odd one out. Because it's the most broken right now, even though it's just not the thing they're trying to make it become is not good. I don't know what to say about that.
I love the Chrome OS laptops I have, but only when they're doing the very narrow task of browsing the web. Everything else Google wants Chrome OS to do is like a mess. So like if their intention is to extend on to the desktop, it seems like Chrome OS is the one that they should more immediately replace. The second thing I'll say is the attitude you're describing at Google where they just kind of don't care is the thing that scares me the most about buying Google hardware, right?
Where it's like they don't really care. They're not invested in it. They're not going to keep it up. They're not going to maintain it.
I have this home hub and I'm just like, is this product going to last? Like are they going to care? Are they're going to release a home hub too? Or is it just going to sort of like disappear into the ether?
Like so many other Google things disappear into the ether. And that to me is they got to solve that problem. I think more people perceive that with Google than that company wants to admit. Yeah, it is my biggest problem with Google other than the fact that they spy on everybody else.
Everybody else. Another way to put it is that I feel like way Google thinks about products, like instead of aggressively dogfooding things, like instead of telling us, pull employees, look, we built this one thing, you better use it. Google has more of like a vibe of like, hey, we built this thing. You're not using it.
Oh, should we make a different thing? So then you will use it. You know, like that's kind of like more of their attitude about it. Like they want their employees to be using their things, their components to build the new things.
And when their employees choose not to, Google thinks, well, maybe we need to make a different thing. So their employees will want to use that. Everything seems like Google is like the whole vibe of the company is a college campus. And it just often feels like they come together on project teams and the core ends and they move on.
So everyone took the class when they built the Google Wi-Fi. And then I got one and then I passed the science fair. Does anyone work on the Google Wi-Fi anymore? It's just deeply unclear to me.
They made some lasting memories. That's the best vacation ever. It's like they're all the robotics there. Remember that time when I worked on a Wi-Fi product?
It's like, that product exists. Like lots of people have that. They made all these promises about AI doing band steering. Like, is there an AI researcher at Google who's still thinking about channel allocation on the Google Wi-Fi?
Or they just like hand it over to the cloud monster? That's the cloud monster. I don't know how Google works. That's all I'm saying is I'm sure there's lots of people at Google who work on all of these products.
But the company's outward communication about that process gets lost in this flood of new things that are half built. Or it gets lost in the flood of not having anything built, AKA the Google messaging story and the death of Hangouts. Yeah. What's going on there?
Do you know the only one who understands? So Hangouts is turning into Hangouts Chat. So enterprise users that use Hangouts are getting converted to Hangouts Chat, which is like a Slack alike. And also Hangouts Meet, which is, I don't know, a Skype alike, I guess, relatively soon.
And then concurrently, Google once again is like, well, we're consumers and regular people. We're going to transition you to. And some will have it October, probably. We'll see.
I don't know. It's probably going to. We value you. You're great.
But we're going to switch over to the chat once we figure it out. In the meanwhile, a recommendation for what you should do if you want to talk to somebody is, well, eventually we'll roll out RCS. But that's not really on computers that well. So I don't know, man.
You can figure it out. There's lots of other companies, I guess. It's cool. We're cool.
Everything's cool. By the way, Hangouts Chat is coming, I guess. But it's not really for consumers. But if you want to use it, sure, I guess.
They maintain Hangouts just so they don't have to use Slack. I mean, that's what's happening here. They use it internally. So in other big companies, Twitter uses Hangouts, where all this video calls.
So it just seems like, OK, we need this product. We have it. We can keep sort of developing it. The interns will fix it up every couple months.
They got to do something. And then we don't have to pay Slack. We don't have to use microsines. It feels like it exists as a consumer product just because Google needs it to exist.
Or I'm sorry, it's an enterprise product. Just because Google needs it to exist for its own enterprise. Yeah. It's just very much my sense of it.
So when does RCS come out, either? My best answer to what is going on is that rambling in sufficient non-committal thing I just gave you. And I could give you that again if you want. Or we can move on to things that aren't awful and terrible.
That's it. RCS is going to come out when it comes out, carry by carrier, phone by phone. The rollout there has been not quite bungled, but it's certainly not being handled well. There's still a lot of confusion out there.
And what they should do is, like, 18T now supports RCS to your profile. Done. And instead, it's like, this one carrier has this one phone that lets you talk to other one carriers that have that other one phone sort of. So there.
It's like like MMS back in the day. Yeah. It's like MMS. It's exactly like that.
I sort of get it not to defend our nation's wireless carriers. It's not something I usually do. But I can't break message. I can't just roll it out without some small scale deployment to make sure it works, right?
That's what I'm assuming is going on. But in the meantime, it's just like, well, whatever. And also, I kind of am happy that the RCS rollout is happening slowly and haphazardly. It's a much better story outside the US, to be clear.
It's actually quietly just happening in a bunch of countries. But it being messy, it just means that Android users are forced to make a decision now to switch to Signal or Wire or WhatsApp or whatever. So I don't know. I can't.
I get the feeling the true RCS rollout comes when the 5G phones hit, right? Like that could be. That's like a good time to break everybody's habits. And be like, your 5G phone now has better multimedia texting.
That's part of 5G. You can feel how there's this consumer benefit that you can tie into this intangible network change. Yeah. We'll see.
That seems obvious. OK. Let's take a break. Let's read some ads.
I kind of want to talk about the Google and Oracle Law Studio in Supreme Court. Oh my god. I'm just basically going to ramble about the Fortnite Law situation until someone makes me stop. Hey, I'm Matt Bichal, comedian, writer, and floating head.
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Oracle. Oracle. Oracle. I think you might find this interesting.
So Android, once upon a time, was built with the same API calls as Java, and there was a deep relationship between Android and Java. Still built Android apps with Java. Still do. They were built with API calls that worked the exact same way as the Java API calls, but they were not the same API calls if you believe Google.
They just worked and smelled exactly the same and they happened to share similar names, or a lot of local names in some cases. Java was developed by a company called Sun Microsystems. You might remember Sun Microsystems for its famous CEO, Eric Schmidt, who was once the CEO of Google, began the chairman of Google. So Google, he's like, hey, this thing I made Java, maybe?
And they're like, yes. And so they used a lot of Java or a lot of Java-ish things to build Android. Sun Microsystems, purchased by Oracle. Oracle CEO Larry Elson, notably famous for being Steve Jobs' best friend.
This fact. Oracle now owns Java. They sue Google. This is years ago now.
Sue Google for infringing the various copyrights in Java and various patents in Java. We covered this lawsuit ages ago. We went to the trials crazy town. We went to the first trial.
We went to the first trial. And this is the case that went in. So the specific copyrights infringement is the API called names, the words that were used, the structure of the APIs in Java were replicated in Android, even though the underlying code was not the same. This is the infringement at risk.
The judge, who we've actually profiled, Sarah John Profiled, Judge Alsette for us, is the judge who codes, basically said this is nonsense in the Ninth Circuit. That got overturned. Then they went to a jury. The jury said this is an infringement.
That got overturned. Today, Google announced they're asking the Supreme Court of the United States to rule whether the structure of API calls can be copyrighted and protected, because they say this threatens the future of all software development if a company at Google cannot build a compatible operating system by using the structure names of APIs. So can a small thing that's a piece of a larger thing, can that smaller thing be copyrighted? Yeah.
I mean, a larger thing could probably be copyrighted. Well, get the small thing. Yeah, I mean, this is the theme of this section of the rich right, just having laid out what I've laid out, and knowing what you know. What do you think?
I never understood this at all. I never understood. OK, OK, if you want to use an operating, like a programming language to build an operating system, then you use all the functionality of that programming language. And if it happens to be that, so like if I took, I don't know, some imaginary program, well, if you take the programming language swift, which has been explicitly open source, but it doesn't work on all platforms, right?
Or it might be partially ported to another platform, right? Swift has a lot of functionality, but not all of its functionality works on all platforms. So let's say I'm going to do it. I'm going to bring Swift to Fuchsia, right?
And it's going to run on Fuchsia on ARM, and it's going to make your fridge talk. I could write some ARM code to support the Swift functions, right? You know, I could write that backing code so that now I can use more of Swift so that I can make my talking fridge really responsive and great. But that's just like how you port software to different platforms.
If Java was not available for making software, I feel like Oracle should have said, this is not for making software. It's just a thing that you look at. This is just code that you can read a book that we published about Java, but you're not supposed to make software with Java. It doesn't make any sense.
Paul, I can simplify this for you. Have you ever heard of Bicroom Yoga, which is the hot yoga? The yoga you do in a hot room? Yeah, OK.
I've heard about Yoga. In 2015, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Bicroom Yoga isn't copyrightable because it is an idea rather than an expression. OK, so you are really poking at me. It relates.
It sort of relates. This whole section is just me trolling me like killing me. The thing is, I'm going to get it wrong, and the copyright lawyers are going to yell at me. OK.
I'm going to try to remember what I learned ages ago. So the Idea Expression Economy is foundational to the notion of copyright law. So for something to be copyrighted, the right that you're getting is the right to copy it. In order to copy it, it needs to be fixed.
And a tangible, if you have an idea for a song, you're just saying that loud. You don't get to copyright. You record it. Now you get to copyright.
Right? It's tangible fixed expression. The idea doesn't count. So the Bicroom Yoga people, if they wrote a manual, for how to do that manual can be copyrighted, which is doing it is not.
So that's a whole thing. With Google and Oracle, the main thing is that Oracle did write down the structure sequence and organization of the Java API. So how it structured the sequence of those elements, the organization of it, and Google is saying, yes, in order to use Java for our operating system, we had to reuse that structure. But none of the technical implementation of the API is the same as yours.
So you write a app in Java and you call some API. Android is doing something totally different. It's like, you call the API, you say, return this data. In a way that Java is some implements it, does something to return the data.
The way Android does it to something different. But all that's really happening is you're pushing the API. You're saying, give me this thing that I want. Literally Oracle is saying to use the structure sequence organization of the Java APIs.
That's copyright infringement. And Google is saying, well, no, this is how people know how to code. So if we don't, then everybody knows that you use Java when people write an app for the Android file and Java is open source. So this is like, this is the debate.
It's not so much idea and expression. That's the other thing. Yeah. Why is this copyright to the patent?
So there was a whole set of patent claims, and they were tossed out. The heart of this is structure sequence in organization of the API in copyright. It's actually been to the Supreme Court once, and it was denied, and now it's going again. Because the Supreme Court denied to review the case.
It denied cert. There's a long history of, you have to copy the structure sequence layout, whatever, of a machine if you want to be compatible with it. So when you made IBM compatible operating system, you had to make it like, this is actually one reason why a lot of people can't forgive Microsoft, is that Microsoft has been extorting companies that have used Linux for decades over the fact that Linux implements the FAT file system, right? FAT.
Right. The dumbest, simplest file system of all time that's been around for 30 or 40 years, Microsoft has a patent on it. And so Microsoft extorts money out of companies for using Linux because they have a patent on FAT. I mean, this is why we should abolish patents to copyright.
Oh. Thank you. Bro, what's up? The FAT patents are one expired, so that's fine.
Yeah, but it's still hard to forgive Microsoft for being such an asshole about it. Yeah, fair. I mean, I disagree with you on that. But we can move on to the next thing.
Yeah. Because the next thing is about the expansion of the copyrights in digital spaces, which troubles me every time. So I've been thinking about this a lot. I'm tweeting about it a lot.
I should write it down, but I'm talking about podcasts. So there's all these people suing Epic. There's not four cases, I think, about the dancing emotes in Fortnite, right? We've done some good coverage on it.
I think Nick wrote a great piece. He talked to a lawyer who had been a professional dancer, like the single best analyst that you can find for such a thing, right? Like the copyrights lawyer who's been actually is a dancer. And there's great coverage out there.
I don't think anybody has really thought through the public policy implications. So here are the facts. So you've got, too, Millie, the rapper, you've got the guy to the Carlton dance, you've got the floss kid. They're all represented by the same law firm.
They're all suing Epic, because Epic lifted their dances into these emotes that is actually kind of complicated by them. You have to buy them fast. They come back. You can maybe buy them individually.
But basically, they say, you're selling our dance, and we deserve a cut of that, right? That is a lot. So then you have a lot of people saying, well, that's true. They made this thing.
They put this culture out in the world. Fortnite is selling it. Like a version of it. They're making tons of money on Fortnite, just printing money with Fortnite.
It only makes sense that they should have to pay these people to make these dances. You can't just boost stuff out of internet culture, and then resell it somewhere else. It's only fair. And I think that fairness argument is very powerful for people, given the scale of the Fortnite success.
What I think is extremely dangerous, and so Paul, I don't think we should abolish copyright, basically because I was a copyright lawyer and he's right here to me. Every time you expand the realm of copyrightable subject matter, you run into insane side effects that we see over and over again. So this issue has never really been litigated before, because quite frankly, there's not a lot of money in dancing, which is a real thing. But Fortnite has a lot of money.
So there's a lot of firms out there. So you can copyright a work of choreography. So the single ladies dance that Beyonce doesn't in that video. If you just do that whole thing again and sell it for lots of money, Beyonce and choreographers can sue you for lifting her choreography.
If you want to put on a Broadway show at your high school theater, you can buy the choreography to the Broadway version in a book where choreography is written down and you can redo it. You can buy these rights to choreography. So a long piece of choreography is a copyrightable thing, especially if you write it down, if you've not been a video of it, expression. It is not clear whether a sequence of dance moves is copyrightable.
The copyright office, not the law, the copyright office says no. The law says that when you look at just the guidance of the copyright office, they're like, no, their example is the hustle is not copyrightable, because that's just a common dance move. But that's not the law. That's just the copyright office is going.
So these cases are going to create precedent for the quantum of dancing that is protectable under copyright law. And that quantum of that unit of dancing is not yet. We don't know where the threshold is between what is not protected because it's just the hustle. Everybody can do the hustle.
Or it's this larger piece of choreography. And what about simultaneous dance invention? Do you have people rushing to put an SD card of a video of them doing a new dance move and then mail to themselves to the trick with copyright so that you have a time stamp of when you invented a dance. So now you can sue everybody, whoever does that dance move.
Yeah. OK, so that's actually the answer for it. You can fairly say the Carlton Dance guy. He's pressed first.