YouSaid · the spoken record

Tonya Evans

lines on the record: 74
first: 2022-02-22
most recent: 2022-02-22
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

“From Instagram, the actual post and then frame it within the context of an article, mostly happening in the entertainment world. And photographer said, I wanted it shared on social media, but not on your site. And they all got together to say that it was a pattern and a practice of infringement that was not sufficiently guarding against the type of rampant infringement that not just one or two or three, but almost every photographer was susceptible to. I think that type of class action suit could be really effective against these minting platforms. There's not one that we could speak about today, but there are enough concerns around OpenSea and too much being accessible without reproach. And so we might see cases like that come up in the not too distant future.”
2022-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can the law keep up with crypto? With professor Tonya Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a bit of a misunderstanding. But it happens quickly. People flip it. People grab the money and run and it's a little more difficult, at least on the front end to be able to hunt it down. And so I find that to be the bigger issue, or at least the issue you mentioned earlier with Web2, that's just, again, it's like, you know, on gas now, it's just going at a much faster burn rate and the consequences are big because of the money, at least the potential for money that's involved. And so those platforms are going to have to tighten up their game. Or what I also see, and this has happened kind of in a Web 2.0 space, photographers got together and filed a class action suit last year. I don't have the name of the case in front of me, but there are a lot of famous photographers who were concerned about the access that folks have to be able to reshare their, I think it's called like framing on a website and they could pull.”
2022-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can the law keep up with crypto? With professor Tonya Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Since the late 90s with digital technology, peer-to-peer technology, the internet to make these near perfect or perfect digital copies and sell them very quickly as well on the open seas of the world, yes, I said it. So there are several different types of minting platforms and sales platform environments. And each has its own approach to what is going to be offered for sale on their platform. And so I think that we're going to quickly start to see we have DMCA takedowns going on, but it takes a long time to do. And by that time, it's already sold. It may have sold this NFT that's connected to infringed upon art has sold a lot of different times. We have the problem of not readily being able to identify folks, although it's crypto and having a public wallet is pseudonymous. It's not anonymous. In the great majority of cases,”
2022-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can the law keep up with crypto? With professor Tonya Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's just a ton of speculation and it's pure greed and money because when you think of art for art's sake, there is a decided portion of the NFT space. Not flip like it's another token. We have a lot of speculators in the fungible token space, just meaning the Bitcoins and the Ethereums of the world. Fungibility, long story short, just means interchangeable. So if you use the example of a dollar or a Bitcoin or an ETH, it doesn't matter which one. We'll use physical cash because it's easier to make the analogy. It doesn't matter which dollar, even though they all have serial numbers on them because they have the same value. With a non-fungible token, they're unique and have the potential to have extraordinary value. We've seen some that go for $69 million. And everybody's swinging for the fences for that one. And it's so easy to do. Think of the state of the art, the state of the technology at this point makes it incredibly easy.”
2022-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can the law keep up with crypto? With professor Tonya Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Put that next to NFTs, right? Everyone knows about copyright law. You can make a strong case that it is the only operative law on the internet as most people experience it. And then in the NFT, it's just like the Wild West, right? People are copying one another's NFTs. There's copymenting where NFT project takes off and somebody immediately just takes all the files and recopies them. There's the generalized sort of willful ignorance of copyright law existing from some NFT projects to begin with. They are just using other people's trademarks and works to make NFTs, and then they get lawyers and they complain that they're being censored. This is like a real thing that it's nuts to me, but it's a real thing that happens. Why do you think that there is that willful ignorance of the underlying copyright law that”
2022-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can the law keep up with crypto? With professor Tonya Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Millennium Copyright Act. So, everyone who listens now, you will get the A for the day if you actually take nothing away from this interview. Please know what DMCA stands for.”
2022-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can the law keep up with crypto? With professor Tonya Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That connection makes it very, very real for people in ways that pure contract law or other types of regulatory or legal regimes, they don't come into contact. And by coming to contact, literally it's consequences. Can have all the advertising in the world. No one literally cares unless there are consequences. And there were significant consequences for the platforms. They wanted to take advantage of Safe Harbor. And so they were pushing that down to the consumer so that it wasn't just an awareness of it. And they tried kind of the nice way. But then you're going to get a notice. And after a few notices, you're not going to be able to access not only our product or our platform, but the interweb and that will get people's attention for sure. And that was before.”
2022-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can the law keep up with crypto? With professor Tonya Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, it took a long time to get there. Because obviously these platforms didn't want to do it because they felt it was bad for business and they don't want to be the copyright police. You know, we went through all of that with the six strikes or three strikes. But the advertising around DMCA, people may not even know what it stands for, but they know that acronym for sure because a lot of people were getting DMCA takedowns for all of the stuff they were sharing. That coupled with the facts that people aren't reading terms and conditions. So it's the ads and consequences.”
2022-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can the law keep up with crypto? With professor Tonya Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like this idea of some digital representation of some right or connection to something else. And the way that we talk about it commonly now is something creative or something collectible. And so we're just running up against it again with new technology and it presents some of the old questions that weren't adequately resolved there. And we just have it with another iteration of technology.”
2022-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can the law keep up with crypto? With professor Tonya Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whole lack of understanding between what it means to have fair use or public domain works when they are terms of art. You and I know their terms of art. They have a specific definition. But some people will think if it's on the internet, it must be free or if I can right click and save it, then I can use it. The advent of social media allows us to copy things, share things when you think of the 106 rights of being able to reproduce me, to copy, to distribute, to prepare adaptations, all of these adaptive works or what we would call derivative works or the ability to publicly display or perform. All of that is commonly done with social media. So the connection to ownership versus the ability to license and use, I think, is just not understood by most people. And then transfer that into the non-fungible token space where the token isn't the creativity, but it's connected to the creativity. Right.”
2022-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can the law keep up with crypto? With professor Tonya Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's unbelievable. We'll sue you for if you're 13 or 92 and everybody in between, which is a really terrible for the music industry. And that's a classic example of winning, I guess, the battle and certainly losing the war. And you saw other sectors within the industry kind of sitting on the sidelines to figure out, and you know, even if technically I am correct on the issues of law, it might be terrible for business for me to go and pursue it. You have other concerns, maybe perhaps as a matter of trademark where you have an affirmative duty to police your mark. You don't really have that affirmative duty on the copyright side. And there's a lot of acceptable levels of infringement for the purpose of engaging with consumers. And so we saw a lot of that play itself out in Web 2, but also the stage was set for the average person's understanding and relationship to copyrighted information.”
2022-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can the law keep up with crypto? With professor Tonya Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think we didn't do a good enough job. And by we, I'll think of big business and also all of the IP issues generally, copyright issues in particular, and you know them very well in the Web2 world where late 90s and peer-to-peer technologies, bringing all the copyright infringement to the yard. And it was a lot of the nomenclature around sharing. It was also all of the, I think, ridiculous suits coming from the music industry in particular and other industries.”
2022-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can the law keep up with crypto? With professor Tonya Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is when they come into contact with the existing regulatory structures. When an NFT product comes into contact with copyright law, something bad happens. When a DAO comes into contact with general partnership law, something bad happens. Why do you think there's a gap between where the entrepreneur Ability to sort of get over that hump and recognize this is a brick wall we're headed towards Need to innovate around it or get through it because over and over again, I see NFTs run into copyright law or DAOs run into partnership law.”
2022-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can the law keep up with crypto? With professor Tonya Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's bracket the financial regulation side of it for a minute because I think you make a good distinction between cryptocurrencies and crypto assets, right? Bitcoin and Ethereum and other stores of monetary value, and they need to be regulated like money. But when you say crypto assets, you're talking about inclusive of NFTs, inclusive of other crypto products, inclusive of DAOs, those to me are in an even wilder West. Right, you threaten the big banks, you threaten the United States federal, like the action's happening, right? The train's on its way. You threaten the sort of normative copyright system that we have in this country. Maybe nothing happens for a long time until you piss off Disney, right? There's no action there. And that to me seems like where I see NFTs and DAOs just stumble over and over again.”
2022-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can the law keep up with crypto? With professor Tonya Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Corporate structures, but more likely for entrepreneurs and the speed at which technology moves. It's moving at this meteoric pace now. I liken it almost to birth pangs where I getting closer and closer and closer to something really epic and really big. It's moving so fast. And so we don't really have time to sit around for two or three or ten years for maybe Congress to pass legislation or judges to render decisions. And that's just the speed of technology. And this is no exception because this is a technological innovation that is impacting and disrupting financial markets as well as virtually every other sector in some form or fashion. Blockchain and or crypto assets are having an impact and it's just moving really fast.”
2022-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can the law keep up with crypto? With professor Tonya Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Aha. Right? I read all these great cases and we think of like the Napster and the Groxers Kazad. Now I know now I know. But your point is well made, and I attributed more to startups and entrepreneurial endeavors where you move fast, you break shit, and then you figure it out after that. And the cost of doing business and the overhead certainly is not just for traditional.”
2022-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can the law keep up with crypto? With professor Tonya Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we're going to share this common code across all of these different computers, and then it will be impervious to tech, and it will be working outside of the traditional system. And that's the way some parts of the World Wide Web and the Internet and kind of web one, web two we're building as well. As you're talking about, you know, the impact of regulation and maybe the quote-unquote absence, the perception of the absence of regulatory environment, I don't actually buy into that totally. I know that if I have a crypto wallet and you have a crypto wallet, we can on a peer-to-peer basis exchange value in the same way we did with MP3 files, not me because I'm not an P-Lawyer. Believe in sharing. I don't know. That was a bad copy.”
2022-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can the law keep up with crypto? With professor Tonya Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's interesting because when I think about crypto life before companies, it really wasn't about companies. The whole point of it is decentralization and not having a centralized structure, a more formal structure to actually deliver quote unquote products. It's antithetical, really, to the origins and the original ethos and spirit of crypto, where it's like we may not know each other or trust each other. We don't trust government. We don't trust big business. We're going to trust the code.”
2022-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can the law keep up with crypto? With professor Tonya Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, and then the cost of compliance in a lawsuit against Viacom was worth it for the overwhelming profits they now generate for existing in the space. If you look at that, that is just a paradigmatic story of how internet companies get built. Think that's what the crypto companies are doing now in relation to the banks, they're just ignoring their regulatory environments and saying, we'll pay the price down the line, but it's worth it to get to where we need to go.”
2022-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can the law keep up with crypto? With professor Tonya Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But yeah, that's when you really know when it really hits the common ethos. When ad money is being spent to attract more folks not on the margins, you know, because crypto really is still a very small segment of the larger financial markets. It's the reason that even though the big banks and traditional finance, they've known about this technology for a long time, they were not forced to actually pay attention until now because now it's a customer service issue and they want to make sure that they maintain their market share, maintain their control over their customers, and make sure that if there's some new hot product that they want to be the one bridging the divide between folks who don't know about crypto and tech to actually stay with their financial products.”
2022-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can the law keep up with crypto? With professor Tonya Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are the early days the first blockchain is the Bitcoin blockchain that first launched in 2009? And so we are turning the corner, but it's still relatively early, but there are more folks than just technologists or cypherpunks or those who are either on the fringe of tech or the fringe of finance. We have more mainstream folks. That's the reason that millions of dollars were spent for crypto bowl, also known as the crypto ads during Super Bowl. And some really epic ones from Coinbase and FTX and crypto.com. I am not paid by any of them. I would like to be, but not paid by any of them to say that. But it was very interesting to see, right? That all of these things, please call me, please call me. I'm on Twitter.”
2022-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can the law keep up with crypto? With professor Tonya Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Business and technologists who are really creating the future today. So I started by focusing more on distributed ledger technology. It's a fancy way of describing blockchains and also working at the intersection of intellectual property generally, but copyright in particular in blockchain. There was a lot of open source projects and the fact that you have these public-facing digital records of transactions and balances, that was really interesting to me. And also I was starting to get some calls about folks who wanted to build on top of the layer one infrastructure of blockchains. They wanted to monetize it. And so I wanted to be conversant and understand the technology so I could best advise people, mostly entrepreneurs and startups in the space, but also to educate, again, the next wave of lawyers to really understand the intellectual property issues that we're going.”
2022-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can the law keep up with crypto? With professor Tonya Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was interesting back in 2017 is when I fell down the proverbial rabbit hole to try and figure out what the heck blockchain is and certainly how it related to crypto assets more broadly folks focus on the idea of cryptocurrencies but actually I use the broader term of cryptoassets. I was not at all convinced about magic leprechaun money that lived somewhere in the internet and I'm licensed in four states and if it had anything to do with illegal activity I wanted nothing to do with it because I'm going to hold on to my four licenses. But what I did realize because personally I am always an early adopter of technology even though I don't have a scientific background or a technical background per se. I thought it was important for me to at least figure out what it all is and what it means and what it means for the next wave of lawyers that has to really show up for”
2022-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can the law keep up with crypto? With professor Tonya Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have a lot to talk about. Like I said, that is a very rich intersection. There's a lot going on, a lot to understand. But I want to start with you. You are a lawyer. You're a professor. You have a long background teaching about IP law entertainment law. How did you end up teaching cryptocurrency and NFTs?”
2022-02-22 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can the law keep up with crypto? With professor Tonya Evans · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT