YouSaid · the spoken record

Dana Rao

lines on the record: 120
first: 2024-01-09
most recent: 2024-01-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“That are coming out are not really the fair use argument, and we definitely think that one to two years from now or three years from now, if it goes people appealing things to the Supreme Court, you could see fair use come out and say, hey, you are allowed to scrape through it. possible and then you may look”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The good news about what we did is so we look at the fair use cases and we say we definitely see the fair use argument on a technical level. We understand the science of AI and we understand what you're copying, what you're not copying and understand the transformative use that would happen have to happen. You're not really taking an image and you're not really moving it to the output. The output of the model is not really a copy of anything it was trained on. If it is, that was a bug. It's not supposed to be. It's supposed to be creating new work. And it's just learning from a computer science perspective data about the images, not the images themselves. It doesn't even understand what the images are. And you know that because as an example, it always gets text wrong. Generatively, I always get text wrong because there's no idea it's words. There's no actual cognitive understanding in these generative models. They're not intelligent. So it thinks these words are just symbols. So always, you know, you're always going to get this misspelling issue. So these things.”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, I agree. What goes out exactly up in the air? Fundamental questions. Absolutely. And then when you look at it again, as I was mentioning, around the world, you're going to get different answers, right? You may win in the United States, but you may lose in Europe. And then what does that mean, right? Yeah. And the EU AI Act, not passed, but was passed in the first stage. More details to come, but even in there they said that you have to obey the EU copyright directive. And not totally clear what that means for AI, but could easily mean that you're going to have to obey the copyright law and not strain off the web in Europe, but it could be easily an interpretation. So my only point is winning a fair use case in the United States may not even help you somewhere else.”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think there's a couple of things that are being litigated here that we should unpack. One is What can you train on? And then can you get a copyright on the output so that the input and the output are separate questions?”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Get sued for an IP issue because of how we trained it. So it's good for us, but it's also good for the customers because if you get an indemnification for someone who has a model that still has IP issues, You may be able to get someone to indemnify you, and they will, but you're still getting it sued. That's not fun, right? And so it's still a competitive advantage, we believe, to have trained it this way and then being able to offer it to enterprises with the full indemnification that you mentioned because not only did they feel good that we're standing behind it, but they also know because of the way we trained it, there's less likely to be a risk.”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know what was cool about this whole process was it's so important to the company. This is why I talk a lot about executive focus. We had a weekly meeting with our legal team that I was in from February through probably a month ago, where it was me, the copyright lawyer, the product lawyer, the sales lawyer, the privacy lawyer, all of us met every week because we were just trying to figure out the law was going to be and how to navigate it and what are we going to do about oh we had our AI ethics person there. What are we going to do about training? How are we going to deal with bias? What are we going to do about indemnification? So all of these issues came up naturally because once we realized we were training it this way, then the next question was, well, when we go to enterprises, what are we going to protect? And are we going to stand behind it? And the answer for us was, of course, we're going to stand behind it. We know how it was trained. So we're willing to give an indemnification. What's good about our indemnification is it's very little risk you're going to.”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In June, Adobe offered to cover the legal bills if anybody gets sued for copyright infringement if they use Firefly. I'm assuming a question of that amount of liability. It's fine, you can do it, or is that more? I think the risk is manageable.”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“isn't trained on unsafe content because all of that has been either not in the database at all in the beginning because of the way we trained it or we can use content moderation to address it before it even gets into Firefly. So enterprises have been very interested in using the AW Firefly version of text image generation because of that choice we made. So it's kind of cool to be able to do what we think is the right thing and also do the right thing for the bottom line.”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Going to the web. That was the challenge. And so we have, you know, decades of image science expertise plus decades of AI expertise. And they worked really hard to understand how to construct the model Adobe Firefly that could be competitive with all the people out there who just had access to more data than they did because they were just training off the web. And we feel really good about where our first model was, which we launched in March, but we were even more excited about the second version of the model, which we launched at Adobe Max a month or so ago. And we feel that one is better than our competitors and yet still adheres to those copyright principles. Now, the good news about the choice we made on copyright is that it respects our creative customers who are concerned about this. And enterprise customers were very excited to know that they were going to be able to use an image generative model that doesn't have IP issues, doesn't have brandish issues.”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A computer science challenge because for AI to work you need data. And for AI to work well, you need a lot of data. So the more data you have, the more accurate your AI will be. And the more it will have all the different kinds of styles you want, whether it be cinematic or natural or graphic or illustrative. So if you're doing text image, so you need a variety of data in addition. And the more data you have, the less bias your AI will be. So the breadth of the data will help reduce the bias in the out, but a smaller sample set will naturally have more bias because it's trained and learned from smaller things. So you need data. You need access to data. And that's the tension. So we had to go to our AI research team and say, can we build a competitive model without”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We think that the law itself will evolve as generative AI evolves. And so we understand that. And there's a lot of litigation going on. As you know, class action lawsuits being brought against the LLM providers for copyright issues saying you can't train off the web. So we see all of that. And we know the law is going to be different in Europe and it's going to be different in Japan, it's going to be different in China. So it's not even going to be one law that you're going to be able to rely on to say, I have a green light to train my model any way I want to. So understanding all that and knowing that our creators themselves have these concerns, we decided to train Firefly on our own Adobe Stock content and other licensed work from the right solders to build our model.”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In this way. You said earlier, you realize you had to start thinking about it differently, not just from protecting IP perspective, but as foundational questions about the law. Where have you arrived?”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, Adobe's built itself on organic innovation and inorganic innovation. We've done both and we've grown to be successful and we have 30,000 employees and they have salaries and benefits and they contribute to the world and we have technology yet millions of people build careers off the technology that we provide. And I would say Adobe's been net good to the world and the economy and we would not be where we are without the ability to do inorganic acquisitions. And so we really need to make sure as governments that we're having the ability to strike the balance between ensuring competition is preserved and innovation is preserved through antitrust laws and ensuring that companies can continue to innovate both organically and inorganically.”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so when you think about the, if you're doing an MA, if you think about the acquisitions you're going to do, you have to be really thoughtful about the likelihood that there will be an enforcement action. And also you have to really think through this future competition question that they're using as a new doctrine in antitrust law. It hasn't been the law in the United States. And it's still not the law in the United States, but you have to think about it as you go forward because you're going to be in it, as you saw for us up to 18 months. maybe longer, right? I mean, I believe in Microsoft Activision, the FTC appealing their loss. And so that's still going on. So you really have to think about your decision. And I would say the government should also be thinking about the consequence of that type of enforcement because M&A is, I think, and I think most of us think is good for the economy. It's good for innovation. It's good for jobs.”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think that you have to understand that the regulators are going to be aggressive. They are interested in tech that they don't mind bringing a case and losing it. They've listed that publicly. That's not an issue for them.”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we've seen Lena Khan and the FTC in this country really go after some things not as successfully as Europeans. We've seen the Europeans go after some things, extract some concessions. Literally in the last week, Epic won the antitrust case against Google. Google settled a case against Google settled its case with the state AGs. There is just a lot more enforcement activity happening around the world in many different ways. Has that changed your perception of how you should do deals, how you should think about deals, how you should evaluate them in that pre-commit stage?”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We tried to explain to him that the focus of the company is so important and the figures are very clear about what their focus is, figment design and its fig jam, which is the whiteboarding tool. And then they want to build a developer extension that allows you to generate code out of your product design. So very focused on what their path forward is. And we have our own path, right? Adobe Express and Adobe Firefly and DX, this new product we're calling Adobe Generator of Studio. That's where we want to spend our time. And so every moment where we are choosing what we're going to do, we're going to spend our time on the key priorities we have. Like for me today, today I said to myself, I really want to make sure people understand AI and copyright I think that's helpful.”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An option that they were considering for a way to resolve our situation. And we saw that and we continue to believe that the merits of the case, as for all the things I had said before, we think the facts were on our side. But again, we stared ahead the next three months. And I think one of the most important things maybe we didn't succeed in talking to the government about the governments about, but I know you know, is focus is really important at a company. There's only so many things you can do well. If you try to do everything, you'll fail at everything. And we say that because in the argument that the government was making was essentially saying to us Amphigma, you guys can do everything. So we assume you will do everything. And therefore, Adobe, you're going to go do this and Figma, we believe you can do that. And whatever. Figma's going to build Photoshop or whatever 800 people, but then they're going to somehow imagine.”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On December 18th, the CMA published what we refer to as a remedies notice, and that would be our response to them saying, hey, here's what we would do from a remedies perspective. And that's public, again. And we said based on the way they were constructing this future competition theory, like what would we do? And what would they do? We didn't really see any kind of remedy that would address it. The way they've constructed the argument, there's not a remedy that would make sense to address the issues that they're raising because they're raising future issues, future competition. So the only way to solve a future competition issue that someone might do something is to not do the deal. That's essentially what they were telling us. So it did not appear in our case. Remedies was...”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Should we be spending our time given what we see as a fairly consistent position being taken by the regulators on their version of the facts of the case?”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so we know fairly well what the arguments they are that they're making, and we understand what evidence we've been providing. And we've seen what has been persuasive and what has not been persuasive. And then we get to sit there and say, well, do we think that it's worth just to continue to fight this? Because we could keep going. We could keep going forever on this. And both of us looked at it and said, it's not worth it. We're both very successful companies. We both have extremely exciting opportunities ahead of us. That's why we wanted to acquire Figma. We're very excited about them and their opportunity, but they have a lot of opportunity for themselves. We obviously have Adobe Express and Adobe Firefly and our digital marketing business and all those other opportunities in front of us. And so you just ask the question, you know,”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Investigatory phase, and then phase two is more of an analytical phase. So as soon as you go into phase two, which we went into in July, June, and July with both the UK and the European Commission, they have a schedule that's prescribed by statute by when they're going to come through and have a decision. And in our case, the decisions were February 5th, February 25th. That's when they would be officially deciding. And all along the way, there's a set of hearings you would have, and then they would give you findings, and then you would combat the findings, and then they would give you more findings, but they're all public, right? They tell you exactly where they're thinking. They tell you what their concerns are. See, from that perspective, I appreciate the transparency because you know exactly where they are and you know what's working, what's not working in terms of the arguments you're making. And you get to make your arguments.”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The way that works in Europe is quite different than the United States. So the United States, the Department of Justice, who's investigating the case for us, they have their own timeline. They bring a case when they want, but there's no statutory requirement that they do anything by any time, right? In Europe, it's quite different. In Europe, as soon as you go into what they refer to as phase two, so phase one is a”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the way for this audience I don't know how many antitrust geeks you have in your audience, but the way that every day.”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we have been fighting I would like to say that my team of lawyers. But you didn't get to that official. We're doing the.”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cases are defined by economics and they're defined by customers. In our case, when you look at the economic data, you don't see any overlap between Figma and Adobe's customers, which was powerful. We saw positive customer sentiment, really no competitor or customer complaints about the deal that used to also be a key fact. So we felt good about the basic facts. But this future competition argument that was Secret that really focus on those two things. And so as a business, we got together with Figma and just said, looking at the road ahead and the timing and the tenor of the conversations we're having, this is probably a good time to stop.”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then obviously we decided to go forward based on those facts. The last, you know, whatever it's been, we started announce it September 22, so 14 months or so. We've had a lot of interaction with the regulators and they've been very focused on the newer doctrines of antitrust law that say that future competition is a critical part of the antitrust analysis. So that's the potential that we could go back in to product design even though we had exited it. And then the potential that Figma could go into our space. And that's what they were really focused on in the regulatory process. So that's what we've been talking about for the last 18 months is how do we prove what's the evidence we can show and we have a lot of great evidence. I would actually argue our evidence got stronger over the last year, our economic evidence. So typically antitrust.”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By the end of it, I think today there's less than five or less people working on it just to get rid of bugs and address security issues. So we looked at that and we really pressure tested, you know, is this something that we felt like could stop us? Like, no, this product doesn't exist. It has no share in Figmus leader and we're out and it's been dead. So we felt good about being able to move into the interactive product design space because we had exited the product design space with a failed XD and we think that's appropriate for businesses to try organically fail organically and then say, well, let me look at it inorganically. And we think it's a healthy way for businesses to conduct their business. So that was the pre-commit stage, really pressure testing that whole question.”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I see a great example. I hadn't thought about it within my frameworks explicitly, but it's perfect, actually. We spent a lot of time, as you would imagine, before making decisions to go forward, thinking through the competition issues and what those would be and understanding to extent everyone understands the details of this. We had a product called Adobe XD that was a product design tool that we had started five to seven years ago. Obviously, we were well aware of that. And Figma was the leader in that space. And we tried and failed with our tool. It was only making $15 million of standalone revenue. We hadn't invested it actually at the executive team level. I didn't even know it was still alive at the time. We don't even talk about it. It was just sort of dead to us, but it was on maintenance mode and we were just serving out some enterprise customers who had already contracted for it. So we just left it alone.”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so for me, the commit stage is really important. At a big company, you can spend a lot of time in analysis paralysis. You can just spend a lot of time just sitting there saying, well, I need to hear more. I need to hear more. And everyone has a vote and they have a vote forever. And so that commit stage, really important. But as long as you had a good pre-commit stage and everyone felt like they had their opportunity to share their view, I find that commit stage goes better. And then the revisit stage is really important for me. And I don't do that. quickly so for me it's like a year later two years later how did it go right is this still the right decision did it work out i i really believe in postmortems and reevaluating things we have so many priorities as a company it's really important to lick over the ones that didn't work and not just keep doing them because of inertia so having an active process where you go back and look at a decision you made and say did that work out and and is it still good should we double down”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's the commit stage though. And what's important about that is we're all in on whatever that was because we heard a lot of things. We thought about a lot of the factors and we're all in. I'm not interested in reopening that decision. A month later, two months later, and someone's saying, well, I still think maybe we should go back. And are you sure? I'm like, no, we decided. We're all in. We've committed because you need to move forward, right? You have to just move any direction any direction is better than no direction. Even if it's the wrong direction, you're going to learn something that this was the wrong decision. And then you can say revisit stage, well, that didn't work out at all. Let's go do something else. But the worst thing you can do is nothing.”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're just gathering all that information. Then we think about it and then we say, okay, after all of that, we're going to go in this direction. Now that direction may not make everybody happy, right? And frankly, for sure will not make everybody happy because I'm picking a side. I'm deciding. And I think deciding is important.”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I have important decisions that come to me, I have someone's asked me the other day how I resist decision fatigue because what you do at the point where I'm at is you make a lot of decisions every day. Every meeting is basically a decision, right? Because that's why you're there. Otherwise, people don't know why you're there. And I find it energizing because what I feel like I'm able to do is move things along, getting to a result. So I'd like the part of being able to help people understand all the factors and then let's move on. And so I have a system I made up where I call it pre-commit, commit, and revisit. It's my decision making framework. The pre-commit stage is I'm wide open. Like I want to hear everything from everybody, all the stakeholders, all the points of view. I want all the feedback. Maybe I have a thesis on what I think the right answer is, but I'm just listening.”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Back, and it's time to talk about decision making and Figma with Adobe Stana Row. So here's the decoder question. You already foreshadowed it. You've been through a lot. The industry's change. You've got some core values. You have a very important role to play in the product process and the decision process of the company.”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have with our creative customers and the connection we have with our enterprise customers to say is there another way we can achieve this goal that respects these potential issues and still delivers the value to the customers. But we are an innovative company and we're not going to be a company that says we're going to ship something that nobody wants but is safe. We know that's the easiest path to irrelevance. And so that's never been a goal by itself is to just optimize for safety. We have to also make sure we're delivering product value and that balance is really important. So the hard part is can you do both? And that's what's fun about Adobe is we try to do both. We're up for the task of seeing if it's possible to both lead on innovation and do it the right way. And that's what's been fun.”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that Adobe has a certain set of values as a company that are independent of the moment. And that's one of the benefits of having been around for 40 years and seeing all the changes you talk about. And we have two amazing founders, Chuck Geshki and John Warnock. John just passed away a couple of months ago, but both legends in the valley, but both had this opportunity to know both of them just really strong ethics. So when we think about like when we look at Firefly or generative models and said, how are we going to train it? You know, we could train it off the web. We go scrape the web and build that model or we could try to be more thoughtful about how we train that model given the potential copyright issues and the fact that we have creative customers who are concerned about people training on their content without their permission. For us, that's a compelling reason. The connection we have.”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, let me ask about that in kind of a broader way. You were an engineer, you were a lawyer, now you're a tech executive, you oversee the cybersecurity organization, you were at Microsoft, you were at Adobe. The industry has changed a lot, right? And the classic view of the tech industry, the classic view towards the law has been we're going to push the boundaries, we're going to ask for forgiveness. I'll use one example that we're very familiar to everyone. Google Books. We're going to scan all the books. We're going to get in trouble, and then we're going to come to some settlement. And then everyone's happy because Google Books exists. It worked. The plan worked. YouTube picked it on Google. YouTube worked in that exact way. We pushed the boundary of copyright law. Now that there's YouTube, everyone's happy and everyone's making money. That is different now. It feels different, right? Like that move, especially from larger tech companies, maybe not going so well, maybe not as condoned, maybe less exciting even in a way. Has that changed how you think about these decisions and how you think about evaluating the risks?”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sit in with the business and help them understand maybe the thing they're doing isn't the thing that we should be doing or maybe there's another way. He's always open to that. I would say that my job is very easy because he has the most integrity of almost any business person I've ever worked with Which is great because it radiates out throughout the organization so they know if things get escalated, Shiny is always going to be on the side of we're going to do the right thing. And so very few people even bother to escalate things up to Shantanu because they already know what the answer is going to be. And that makes my life a lot easier. It makes my legal team's life a lot easier being able to partner with somebody who cares so much about integrity.”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No worms. Everybody was trying to do the right thing. But to your earlier question, I have Sean Noona Ryan's our CEO. And so I always have the ability to talk to him about, you know, hey, we need to go.”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Photoshop plan for $10 a month and you'll have the latest, greatest technology and you want any viruses. So you won't be able to do that. But you have to be really thoughtful about the law everywhere in the world because that kind of communication direct to the customer in some places can be prohibited because they don't want you communicating that you don't have that direct relationship. So we had to spend a lot of time. I think the business had the right spirit, right? Let's go out there and communicate with people. They may be using pirated software. They may not even know and they're exposing themselves to these security vulnerabilities, even though they have the right spirit. There are some really clear restrictions about how you can go out and communicate with people who you may not have a direct contractual relationship with. And so we have to say no to some of the ways they wanted to do that. So that is a clean generic version of the ways.”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That they may be using pirated software. Because there's a lot, as you know, a lot of pirated Adobe software out there, and a lot of people get it on eBay and install it. And it's unfortunate because that typically is old software. It's not up to date from a security perspective. It's virus ridden. But people are saying, oh, it's cheap, but I'm stalling it. So we want to be able to notify people and say, hey, you may be using a priority software. You know, why don't you go log into Adobe.com and get, you know, the...”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Without any details, of course, because I said no to this. But yeah, when we, so I also managed the anti-piracy team, the fraud team that's in the engineering team that helps us address piracy and fraud. We talk a lot about the way we can reach out to customers to allow them to know.”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'm proud to be part of our legal team because they really embraced that business focus. And I'd say that the business team really enjoys partnering with us, or at least I think they do.”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Isn't the right way under the law? We're not going to say you can. We're going to say here's another way, right? What's another way to do it? And that's our job as in House Legal. Find another way to help them achieve that goal. The client doesn't understand the law, so they're not going to be able to brainstorm, but you can and understand that and understand that. However, there are times where you just say no, right? And that is also our job. And we're the only people in the company who have that sort of final no, as you say, where we can just say, look, that. Goes against the spirit of the law, it goes against the letter of the law. We can't do this. And that is definitely our job”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My legal team was seen as someone who is there to help the business find answers to problems as opposed to being the so-called Department of No, which is how a lot of people view legal. So we created Which is our slogan and illegal. And then there's an asterisk. And it says because we're a legal team. And it says except when it's a definite no. And that's the balance, right? And so here, you know, we're here to help the company find ways to deliver great products, deliver value, make money. That's why we're here. We're here on the Adobe team. We're here to make that happen. And so if the way you want to do it.”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, first, I want to make sure I can show you my mug, which I drink from every day, so it wasn't, can you see this? Yeah. Yeah, very good. So we have a slogan when I became general counsel, one of the things I wanted to make sure is that.”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Legal and cybersecurity, the two functions of a company that can say no, that may be the most often they can say no. You can't do that. That's illegal. You can't do that. It'll create a security risk. You can't do that. Margaret Vestager will call me up and yell at me. How do you manage that? Do you report directly to CO? Do you get to sit in all the decisions? Where do you enter the chain in both of those roles? Well, first.”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of course, she does sure how she's amazing. She's been at Adwe 20 years. Yeah. Let me name check her. So I would say classic. It's very, most companies have. Every company has all of those functions. Sometimes people consolidate them under one person or two people, but I have those mostly just reporting direct to me. I find that better for me as a style.”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Classic, I would say we have an employment legal team, we have a privacy team, we have a corporate team that does securities and M&A, we have a sales legal team, we have an international legal team, we have an intellectual property litigation team that's combined into one team. They do both IP and the litigation. And then we have a legal operations team. So we have a pretty clean, I'm sure I'm going to forget somebody, compliance. We have a chief compliance officer, of course. So important. And so we're in the E.”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was like, this no one's ever going to care about this again. And here we are. And here we are, these are so sought after. And we have one, J. Scott Evans is our director of copyright, so we're lucky to have him because you really need somebody who understands technology and copyright. And that's rarer to find in the copyright field than in other legal fields because the copyright's typically been, as you know, focused on entertainment and maybe the really soft IP areas. So finding someone who can understand how generative AI works and also is an expert in copyright. They're very rare and work their weight in gold at this point.”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT