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

“It's been small. And, you know, in February, we were really thinking about fundamental copyright questions with generative AI. And I suddenly said, you know what, copyright is a sexy legal career now. I haven't been able to say that for a while, but it's, yeah. I lasted two years.”
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's a good assessment that historically intellectual property, it was always important to us in the sense that we wanted to protect our innovations. We got a record number of patents filed and issued last year, which is great, but we've never been a company that has tried to sue people on our intellectual property just because we think they're copying us. We've always believed that we're going to win in the marketplace if we innovate. And that's going to be the number one way we respond to competition is innovation. If somebody steals a trade secret or employee leaves their trade secret, it's very nice to have the copyrights. It's very nice to have the patents to stop that person from stealing our intellectual property. And that's typically how we think about intellectual property is stopping misappropriation as opposed to just out there infringement. It hasn't been something that Adobe's ever had to focus on. In the age of generative AI, it's been funny because we've had a copyright team, of course.”
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 would not have expected Adobe in years past to need a giant IP group in its legal department, right? There's obviously need to protect your software. You need to go get patents. All that stuff happens. But all this is now happening in a world of generative AI. And it feels like having a big IP practice, a copyright practice within your company is going to become more and more important. Do you see something like that growing inside your division?”
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 whole org is 700, so it's about 50-50 between legal slash public policy and then security. So security is about 350 and legal is probably about 325, depending on.”
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 get to speak the lingo with the engineers, and obviously I'm a lawyer, so I get to speak the lingo with my legal team, and I can bring some harmony together. But we have a fantastic chief security officer who's very practical and business-minded, and he understands the balance between what we can do and what we need to do in a very positive way, I would say, a business-focused way. So I feel good about the balance that gets struck even before it comes to me. Adobe is a company with integrity. I would say we have 30,000 people and our salespeople have just as much integrity as the engineers. And so they're not typically the ones who are overselling. They have a long-term value relationship with our customers, and they don't want to sell them something that we can't actually deliver on. So I made a joke about the escalation point very rarely does anything actually have to come all the way up to me to get resolved.”
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 still have the tension in the sense that with the security engineers have a certain perspective on how to develop and protect our products. And then as you note, they. Sales team and the commercial lawyers are out there in the day to day trying to make sure we can sell our products and generate revenue. So there's always that tension. What's nice about it being under me is I'm an escalation point. And I was an electrical engineer undergrad.”
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. Do you see the two parts of your role? They seem very, very connected to me in a way that they're not connected to other companies. But Adobe has a lot of customers. It puts a lot of data in a lot of places. You need to sign contracts with your customers and your vendors to say, here's how the data is going to be used. And then you need to do the work to actually protect the data. In other places, those structures are different. And sometimes intention, right? The things people want to sell, the contracts they want to sign are at the bleeding edge and then the security organization might say no. In your organization, they're obviously together. They're under you. Do you feel that tension? How do you resolve 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
“Cloud based services model. And we also use a lot more public cloud services. So we had to think a lot about the public cloud configuration and how we work with Amazon, how we work with Azure and set up those services to ensure that the data we're providing is the right data and can't be exploited. So that's important. And then within our own networks, you know, because we have employee data, we have customer data, spending a lot more time there on endpoint detection, response and other technologies allow us to see what's going on in the network, see if something's happening, and then stop it before it spreads. As you know, in the cybersecurity world, there's no such thing as being immune to an attack. All you can do is, you know, do the best you can in terms of reasonable security measures to understand what's going on and stop the spread before it happens.”
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, there were. I mean, that's hardly a secret. So, all I was saying was even in the desktop world, or as we were transitioning to the web, security was always paramount in understanding how to minimize security issues. Acrobat is a great example of a place where we dedicated security resources to making sure there's a sandbox essentially around Acrobat. So even if someone finds an exploitable vulnerability, there's really nothing they can do with it because of the sandbox. So the way we architect Acrobat. And that's really had a dramatic decrease in the amount of ability of people to exploit things. So that's been great. But as you say, we moved from that to now almost an entirely”
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, absolutely. I mean, we had the, as you mentioned, the desktop era. And there was a lot of, as you may remember, issues with Flash.”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ask you just a very reductive question about that. Cybersecurity cloud services, that comes along with Adobe really moving into being a cloud company, right? The Adobe of 10, 15 years ago sells software that people run locally on PCs and Macs. The Adobe of today sells software that you can access in real meaningful ways on the cloud. At the Code Conference, we demoed Photoshop on the web for people for the first time. That's a big change, right? That Adobe now lives in the cloud. Is that meaningfully changed your view of the cybersecurity organization, the trust organization?”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Took that on a couple years ago when I took on the cybersecurity organization. So I have the cybersecurity engineering organization in addition to legal and public policy. And then together we think about us as helping Adobe establish that value of trust in a digital world with that relationship with customers. It's a intangible world we live in. And the thing that the currency you have is the trust that people place in you. And that's how you build your products and it's how you comply with the law. Do you understand the law? Can you shape the law, which is always fun part of the job? And so building all that together into that trust value is one of the reasons we've moved on and called that a trust organization, which is also very cool.”
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 help the company navigate where the world is going, which is really, it's the coolest job because Adobe's right there, as you mentioned, 40-year-old company, been there every step of the digital revolution, whether it's desktop publishing or web video with Flash or digital marketing with when we bought Omniture, Acrobat and Electronic Documents, image editing with Photoshop. It's been amazing. And then last March, we launched our foundation model Firefly, which has helped people do text to image generation. So every step along the way, we're breaking new ground with new innovation, new technology. And on the legal side, that means you're thinking about problems and no one has thought about before because the technology is doing things that no one's ever done before. It's great. So I love that part of my job. I actually have the second title of being a chief trust officer at Adobe.”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is a lot to talk about with the General Counsel of Adobe. Today there's all of the AI and copyright conversation that I love having and then just as we were getting ready to speak this week, Adobe and Figma called off the deal to combine companies because of regulatory pressure, particularly from the EU. So I do want to talk about that, but it's decoder, so we got to start with the decoder stuff. People know Adobe really well. Almost anybody working with computers in any way is aware of Adobe. What does the general counsel of Adobe do all 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
“In OpenAI for copyright infringement, but the legal quagmire the AI industry finds itself in is much bigger than just one lawsuit. And the issues are really the same across all of the pending copyright lawsuits. It really feels like the entire AI industry is just one bad copyright outcome away from an existential crisis. And it was really interesting to talk to Dana about all that. Okay, Dana Rao, Adobe's General Counsel and Chief Trust Officer. Here we go. In or out. You're the general counsel and chief trust officer at Adobe. Welcome to Decoder.”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Output of the AI systems. That's a simple question, but it contains a lot of gray area. For example, what does it mean to copy an artist's style using AI? Something that no law in the books really protects. Adobe is pretty invested in that idea, and Dana helped the company draft an anti-impersonation bill it presented to Congress. Then, of course, there's the issue of AI being used to deceive people, especially during this current election year. That's an interesting problem for the companies that make AI tools should they restrict what their users can do with them. Adobe is at the center of that debate with something he calls the content authenticity initiative, and I am proud to say Decoder is a sort of podcast where a viral deepfake of the Pope dripped out in a puffer jacket is described as a catalyzing event in tech policy. Dana has a lot of ideas on how metadata can help people know what they're looking at is actually real. Adobe Infigma called off their deal, which means we spoke before the New York Times, announced it was suing Microsoft.”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Opened up on how the decision to call things off was made, why Adobe wanted to acquire Figma in the first place, and how the deal falling apart really influenced his thinking on industry consolidation in the future. Then we got into the weeds on AI and copyright, a story that I think is going to unfold in unpredictable ways for at least the next year, if not more. Like every company, Adobe is figuring out what the boundaries of copyright law and fair use look like in the age of AI, just like the creatives that rely on its products. But at the same time, it's also making huge investments in and shipping generative AI tools like the Firefly Image Generator inside of huge mainstream software products like Photoshop and Illustrator. I talked to Dana about how Adobe is walking that tightrope and how he's thinking about the general relationship between AI and copyright as Adobe trains its models and ships the tools to its users. You'll hear Dana frame this in a way that's easy to understand. What data can AI companies train on? And then what are we allowed to do with 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
“Adobe's customers have passionate feelings about both the company and those tools. If you're interested in how creativity happens, you're kind of necessarily interested in what Adobe's up to. I bring all that up because it is fascinating to consider how Dana's job is Adobe's top lawyer is really at the center of the company's future. That's for two reasons. First, more philosophically, the copyright issues with generative AI are so unknown and unfolding so fast that they will necessarily shape what kind of products Adobe can even make in the future and what people can make with those products. Second, a little more practically, the company just tried and failed to buy the popular Upstart Design Company Figma, a potentially $20 billion deal that was shut down over antitrust concerns in the European Union. So Dana and I had a lot to talk about. As it happens, we spoke just one day after Adobe Infigma announced the end of the deal. And he really”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Patel, editor in chief of the Verge. And Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking to Dana Rao, who is General Counsel and Chief Trust Officer at Adobe. That's the company that makes Photoshop, Illustrator, and other key creative software. Now, if you're a longtime decoder listener, you know that I have always been fascinated with Adobe, which I think the tech press largely undercovers. After all, this is a company that makes some of the most important tools that exist across design, video, photography, and more.”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 or $12 month plan required, $15 per month equivalent taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only greater than 50 GBR is busy. C terms.”
2024-01-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT