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The New York Times Company v. Microsoft Corporation Court Filing December 27, 2023 is part of . You can jump to any part in this filing . This is part 1 of 27. HackerNoon’s Legal PDF Series here Plaintiff The New York Times Company (“The Times”), by its attorneys Susman Godfrey LLP and Rothwell, Figg, Ernst & Manbeck, P.C., for its complaint against Defendants Microsoft Corporation (“Microsoft”) and OpenAI, Inc., OpenAI LP, OpenAI GP LLC, OpenAI LLC, OpenAI OpCo LLC, OpenAI Global LLC, OAI Corporation, LLC, OpenAI Holdings, LLC, (collectively “OpenAI” and, with Microsoft, “Defendants”), alleges as follows: I. NATURE OF THE ACTION 1. Independent journalism is vital to our democracy. It is also increasingly rare and valuable. For more than 170 years, The Times has given the world deeply reported, expert, independent journalism. Times journalists go where the story is, often at great risk and cost, to inform the public about important and pressing issues. They bear witness to conflict and disasters, provide accountability for the use of power, and illuminate truths that would otherwise go unseen. Their essential work is made possible through the efforts of a large and expensive organization that provides legal, security, and operational support, as well as editors who ensure their journalism meets the highest standards of accuracy and fairness. This work has always been important. But within a damaged information ecosystem that is awash in unreliable content, The Times’s journalism provides a service that has grown even more valuable to the public by supplying trustworthy information, news analysis, and commentary. 2. Defendants’ unlawful use of The Times’s work to create artificial intelligence products that compete with it threatens The Times’s ability to provide that service. Defendants’ generative artificial intelligence (“GenAI”) tools rely on large-language models (“LLMs”) that were built by copying and using millions of The Times’s copyrighted news articles, in-depth investigations, opinion pieces, reviews, how-to guides, and more. While Defendants engaged in widescale copying from many sources, they gave Times content particular emphasis when building their LLMs—revealing a preference that recognizes the value of those works. Through Microsoft’s Bing Chat (recently rebranded as “Copilot”) and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Defendants seek to free-ride on The Times’s massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment. 3. The Constitution and the Copyright Act recognize the critical importance of giving creators exclusive rights over their works. Since our nation’s founding, strong copyright protection has empowered those who gather and report news to secure the fruits of their labor and investment. Copyright law protects The Times’s expressive, original journalism, including, but not limited to, its millions of articles that have registered copyrights. 4. Defendants have refused to recognize this protection. Powered by LLMs containing copies of Times content, Defendants’ GenAI tools can generate output that recites Times content verbatim, closely summarizes it, and mimics its expressive style, as demonstrated by scores of examples. See Exhibit J. These tools also wrongly attribute false information to The Times. 5. Defendants also use Microsoft’s Bing search index, which copies and categorizes The Times’s online content, to generate responses that contain verbatim excerpts and detailed summaries of Times articles that are significantly longer and more detailed than those returned by traditional search engines. By providing Times content without The Times’s permission or authorization, Defendants’ tools undermine and damage The Times’s relationship with its readers and deprive The Times of subscription, licensing, advertising, and affiliate revenue. 6. Using the valuable intellectual property of others in these ways without paying for it has been extremely lucrative for Defendants. Microsoft’s deployment of Times-trained LLMs throughout its product line helped boost its market capitalization by a trillion dollars in the past year alone. And OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT has driven its valuation to as high as $90 billion. Defendants’ GenAI business interests are deeply intertwined, with Microsoft recently highlighting that its use of OpenAI’s “best-in-class frontier models” has generated customers—including “leading AI startups”—for Microsoft’s Azure AI product.[1] 7. The Times objected after it discovered that Defendants were using Times content without permission to develop their models and tools. For months, The Times has attempted to reach a negotiated agreement with Defendants, in accordance with its history of working productively with large technology platforms to permit the use of its content in new digital products (including the news products developed by Google, Meta, and Apple). The Times’s goal during these negotiations was to ensure it received fair value for the use of its content, facilitate the continuation of a healthy news ecosystem, and help develop GenAI technology in a responsible way that benefits society and supports a well-informed public. 8. These negotiations have not led to a resolution. Publicly, Defendants insist that their conduct is protected as “fair use” because their unlicensed use of copyrighted content to train GenAI models serves a new “transformative” purpose. But there is nothing “transformative” about using The Times’s content without payment to create products that substitute for The Times and steal audiences away from it. Because the outputs of Defendants’GenAI models compete with and closely mimic the inputs used to train them, copying Times works for that purpose is not fair use. 9. The law does not permit the kind of systematic and competitive infringement that Defendants have committed. This action seeks to hold them responsible for the billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages that they owe for the unlawful copying and use of The Times’s uniquely valuable works. Continue Reading . Here [1] Microsoft Fiscal Year 2024 First Quarter Earnings Conference Call, MICROSOFT INVESTOR RELATIONS (Oct. 24, 2023), https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/events/FY-2024/earnings-fy-2024-q1.aspx. About HackerNoon Legal PDF Series: We bring you the most important technical and insightful public domain court case filings. This court case 1:23-cv-11195 retrieved on December 29, 2023, from is part of the public domain. The court-created documents are works of the federal government, and under copyright law, are automatically placed in the public domain and may be shared without legal restriction. nycto-assets.nytimes.com

The Times v. Microsoft/OpenAI: Unlawful Use of The Times’s Work to Create AI Products (1)

দ্য টাইমস বনাম মাইক্রোসফ্ট/ওপেনএআই: এআই পণ্য তৈরি করতে টাইমসের কাজের বেআইনি ব্যবহার (1)

The Times vs. Microsoft/OpenAI: Unrechtmäßige Nutzung der Arbeit der Times zur Entwicklung von KI-Produkten (1)

The Times contra Microsoft/OpenAI: uso ilegal del trabajo del Times para crear productos de IA (1)

The Times contre Microsoft/OpenAI : Utilisation illégale des travaux du Times pour créer des produits d’IA (1)

द टाइम्स बनाम माइक्रोसॉफ्ट/ओपनएआई: एआई उत्पाद बनाने के लिए द टाइम्स के काम का गैरकानूनी उपयोग (1)

The Times 対 Microsoft/OpenAI: AI 製品を作成するための The Times の著作物の違法使用 (1)

The Times 대 Microsoft/OpenAI: AI 제품 제작을 위한 The Times의 작업 불법 사용(1)

The Times v. Microsoft/OpenAI: Uso ilegal do trabalho do The Times para criar produtos de IA (1)

The Times против Microsoft/OpenAI: незаконное использование работ The Times для создания продуктов искусственного интеллекта (1)

The Times - Microsoft/OpenAI: The Times'ın Çalışmalarının Yapay Zeka Ürünleri Oluşturmak İçin Yasa Dışı Kullanımı (1)

The Times kiện Microsoft/OpenAI: Sử dụng trái phép tác phẩm của The Times để tạo ra các sản phẩm AI (1)

《泰晤士报》诉微软/OpenAI：非法使用《泰晤士报》的作品来创建人工智能产品 (1)

If the Web 3/DAO space had a doctrine, it could easily be that most of the global problems humanity faces today are products of coordination failure. In the 2018-2019 Ethereum bear market, introduced the idea of “ ”, the “final boss of humanity”. Something which humans have struggled with for centuries and need to overcome to ensure the long-term survival of our species. MolochDAO Moloch [1] The Moloch meme never gained much popularity or attention outside of crypto Twitter or a few echo chambers. However, I do think the idea is brilliant as it concretizes the rather abstract problems and the Web 3 movement strives to solve. DAOs Who Is Moloch? The Moloch character is adapted from an essay “ ” where the blogger reflects on the character Moloch from an Allen Ginsberg poem called “ ”. Meditations on Moloch Scott Alexander Howl If we go much further back to the in ancient times, Moloch was the God of child sacrifice. Canaanite religion Practitioners of the religion believed that sacrificing a child to Moloch in times of war would increase the odds of their tribe’s victory. [2] Image of Moloch In Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl”, the opening line is: “ ,” I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix At the beginning of Part II, “Moloch” is introduced as the answer to the question: “ What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? Moloch!” It may not seem obvious how Moloch, the God of child sacrifice, could destroy the best minds of Ginsberg’s generation by madness or eat their brains and imagination. Scott Alexander explains in “Meditations on Moloch”: “ ” The implicit question is – if everyone hates the current system, who perpetuates it? And Ginsberg answers: “Moloch”. It’s powerful not because it’s correct – nobody literally thinks an ancient Carthaginian demon causes everything – but because thinking of the system as an agent throws into relief the degree to which the system isn’t an agent. Simply put, Moloch is the image of coordination failure. The answer to the question of why a failing system, is failing. The Problem of Coordination Failure The problem of coordination failure in a nutshell can be explained like this: In a game where every player follows the rule, one player can gain an advantage by bending the rules in their favor. This changes the nature of the game. Eventually, the other players have no choice but to bend the rules in the same fashion to catch up with the cheating player. One example of this dynamic playing out in a real-world scenario is the freeriding problem. If one of your friends is paying for a Netflix subscription and offers you to use his account for free, you are inclined to take his offer, rather than paying for a subscription yourself. You are acting out of rational self-interest, but also cheating Netflix for a subscription fee. They could have used your subscription fee to improve the quality of their services to your benefit as a user. If enough people decided to freeride, Netflix would eventually go out of business. From a god’s eye view, Netflix would be a better streaming service if every user paid for a subscription. But looking from within the system, users can gain an advantage in the form of saved expenses by freeriding. As a side note, Netflix is coming out with in early 2023. a new account-sharing policy Or take a possible coordination failure on another Web 2 application, Twitter. Twitter would be a better place to hang out if everyone acted civilized and only made valuable contributions to the network. However, the algorithm seems to be designed in such a way that you can gain more followers by shit-posting, trolling, and spam-posting meaning less stuff at least five times a day than you can from trying to initiate balanced and thoughtful conversation. By mindlessly tweeting stuff or deliberately trying to provoke, a user can gain a slight advantage over honest users in the form of more reach and exposure. Over time, a new norm in the system is established, as more and more users are incentivized to act this way. Scott Alexander gives a number of good examples of coordination failures in “Meditations on Moloch” (he calls them ). multipolar traps I will summarize one of them here, , which is about water pollution. It plays out as follows: The fish farming story 1) A thousand companies each own a fish farm in a lake. Each farm earns a profit of $1000/month. 2) Each farm produces waste that pollutes the water and causes a loss of productivity of $1/month for every company. Therefore, none of the fish farms are making any money. 3) Someone invents a new complex filtering system that removes waste products. It costs $300/month to operate. All fish farms voluntarily install it, so the pollution ends. Each fish farm is now making a profit of $700/month and the water is clean. 4) One farmer, Steve, decides to skip the filtering system to earn more money. He now earns $999/month, while all the other fish farms earn $699/month. 5) When the other fish farms see how profitable Steve is, some of them decide to unplug their filters too. Once four hundred farms disconnect their filters, Steve is earning only $600/month – less than if everyone had kept their filters on. The noble, filter-using fish farms, are only earning $300/month. 6) Now, no one is happy. The water is still polluted and everyone earns less without the filtering systems. To increase productivity and revenue, while keeping the water clean, everyone decides to sign a voluntary pact to use filters. 7) One person, Mike, refuses to sign the pact. Now everybody is back to using filters, except for Mike. Mike earns $999/month, and everybody else earns $699/month. As time goes by, other fish farms contemplate disconnecting their filters too for a $300 extra profit. The fish farming story reminds me of the green energy transition. For companies in the developing part of the world, fossil fuel-based energy may be cheaper than renewable energy. For the sake of the climate, everyone can make a pact to use only clean energy from wind, solar, hydro, and other renewable energy sources. However, if the gas and coal companies earn more, capital will inevitably keep on flowing in their direction. The coordination failure problem probably has a role to play in any major issue humanity faces. All jobholders in developed countries could make a pledge to donate a certain percentage of their salary to a good cause like feeding starving children in Africa or building sustainable energy solutions in poor, vulnerable countries. However, as we have learned, once a large enough group of people decides to keep their donations for themselves, the system as a whole is not working. Laws and regulations can incentivize people and companies to "do right" by threatening with fines and time in prison. The media and social media mobs also have the power to nudge people’s behavior in a desired direction with the threat of public shaming. But let’s face it, many areas of tech and the science of climate change are extremely complex. Neither governments, elected politicians, media companies, and even less, regular people, possess the knowledge or impact to fully protect common interests against powerful private actors such as large technology and finance companies. The people who act out of rational self-interest are not necessarily evil. And the people who fail to keep the system as a whole secure are not necessarily incompetent. The systems are just broken. Fixing Coordination Failure A coordination failure occurs whenever an individual can gain an advantage by acting against the common good of his group. We can protect the interest of society against criminals by putting them in prison. And we can protect the interest of a social group by isolating a member who displays inappropriate behavior. Comparably, it is much harder to regulate the behavior of a large digital business company. And as soon as problems move across and between land borders, outside the scope of any single government’s jurisdiction, countries are forced to cooperate on finding solutions, and Moloch roams freely. I hate to sound like a Bitcoin maximalist. But the reason why Bitcoin keeps running year after year is because of sound game theory. Participants in the Bitcoin network gain more from contributing to the system than from trying to cheat it. If they should succeed in cheating the system, the value of Bitcoin would collapse, and so would the value of their holdings. So, cheating, if possible, would harm themselves. I also hate to sound like a living commercial for Web 3 – I am not trying to sell anything to anyone. The only purpose I have for writing this is to convey knowledge. The world needs better mechanisms for coordination and realigning incentive structures so bad actors cannot successfully make profits in a system by undermining its rules. Transparency, immutability, decentralization, and accountability are important ingredients to create more robust, game theoretically sound systems which we need to tackle the complex problems of the present and the future. Sign up to my Substack to receive free, monthly posts of this kind. Would love to have you in the loop! here Ameen Soleimani et al. (2019), The Moloch DAO - Beating the Tragedy of the Commons using Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. [1] Ibid. [2] Also published here

The Invisible Enemy of Coordination Failure

El enemigo invisible de la falta de coordinación

L'ennemi invisible de l'échec de la coordination

समन्वय विफलता का अदृश्य शत्रु

コーディネーション障害の見えない敵

O inimigo invisível da falha de coordenação

Kẻ thù vô hình của sự thất bại trong phối hợp

协调失败的隐形敌人

Take a moment to think about these questions: Why do we cherish a freebie? Why are we thrilled when we complete our first 10k run? Why are some people keen on answering questions and spending hours writing articles on Wikipedia and Quora for free? Why are you even reading this article? What makes you tick? People do things for a reason. If we look deeper within ourselves and the world around us, we realize that we are all motivated by a myriad of drivers. These drives are what motivate us to act and commit to specific activities. Gamification The first thing that comes to our mind when we think about gamification is leaderboards, points, badges & levels. But the core idea of gamification goes beyond just adding these game elements to a product. It is designing human motivation into a system and placing the customer at the forefront of the design to make the overall synergy with the application, website, or product more seamless. According to Yu-kai Chou, one of the earliest pioneers of gamification, true gamification is when we tap into our core human drives that motivate us towards various decisions and activities. He then drilled down on these different motivations, which led to creating the groundbreaking gamification design framework: Octalysis, an octagon-shaped model bearing eight core drivers. Octalysis Framework Octalysis Framework The is a human-centric gamification design framework to help decipher all the motivational Core Drives that can be used to understand how to engineer and design for motivation within a particular setting and transform activities into meaningful and enriching experiences. Octalysis Framework Chou’s starting premise from within the Octalysis Framework was to maximize the motivation for desired behavioral outcomes through the use of 8 Core Drives (Meaning, Accomplishment, Empowerment, Ownership, Scarcity, Unpredictability, Avoidance). Let’s take a closer look. The 8 Core Drivers Every action we do stems from one or more of these core drivers. Without the presence of at least one of them, we will not be motivated or driven to act. Core Drive 1: Epic Meaning and Calling People like to feel that the work they are doing matters This core drive guides us to seek a higher purpose or meaning beyond our personal goals. It is the drive where the users are motivated as they feel like they are the chosen ones and are participating in something greater than themselves. Contributing for the good of others can be a great motivator. For Example : Wikipedia Stack Overflow The reason why people commit hours contributing to the above platforms is because of this Core Drive 1, where the users embark on the epic journey of making the world a better place by documenting and spreading knowledge. Free Rice Free Rice is a trivia-based website, supports the United Nations World Food Program by raising money to help 10 million people in the world have a meal, and they even made money off advertising while doing it. They did this by creating small challenges for their users. Upon successfully completing a challenge Free Rice donates 10 grains of rice to people in need, playing off a Core Drive concept called “humanity hero.” This is a powerful drive used by big businesses and leaders worldwide, asking you to put ‘the greater good’ above yourself. Apple Think about Apple. They don’t talk about their specs. They talk about “Changing the World,” and you were “The chosen one to make a difference.” Core Drive 2: Development and Accomplishment This drive is internal, as we all are driven to take on challenges to meet our desired goals. The crux here lies in the dimension of challenges since any reward is meaningless without feeling an actual accomplishment. There needs to be an effort, a hurdle that needs to be crossed. It should leave one with a sense of accomplishment as it is what pushes us to work harder to keep developing our skills and see ourselves progress. But not all progressions are intriguing and satisfactory. That’s why Yu-kai Chou underlines the importance of feeling proud of the new status. If there’s no interest in leveling up whatsoever, there won’t be any motivation either. What’s more fulfilling than looking back at the progress you’ve made? Many game elements aim at this core when showing the user their progress. We can find progress bars, badges, status symbols, and leaderboards among these tools. , many eCommerce sites these days make use of progress bars. When a consumer fills out payment details to purchase a product online, a progress bar indicates how far they are from finishing the process. It’s not by chance that this has become a staple for most sites to will their users onto the finish line, i.e., the purchase. For example Apps like such game mechanics as progress bars, badges, etc., to motivate their users to achieve their goals. Duolingo, Goodreads, and Fitbit use LinkedIn In the early days of LinkedIn, users rarely completed their profiles due to poor visual feedback of the progress made (insufficient Core Drive 2). That’s when LinkedIn introduced a profile progress bar, which helped increase the profile completion ratio by a staggering 60%. LinkedIn Progress Bar Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity and Feedback Creation is beauty, all forms of it. We all have it. People need avenues to express themselves, and creativity is one of them. This core drive lets users use their creativity, view their results, get feedback and make adjustments. Here the user is engaged in a creative process where they try different combinations and strategies to get to a particular result. It can be as simple as making a playlist on Spotify or shooting a rainbow and posting it on Instagram. And the instant feedback that the users receive shows them the result of their work so that they can adjust their strategy if needed. Minecraft Minecraft is a classic example of Core Drive 3 because users are given the ability to express creativity by using simple building blocks (with thousands of combinations) to craft complex structures, can immediately taste the result of their choices, and make adjustments as they go. Core Drive 4: Ownership and Possession Everyone likes to own certain things, be it in the real world or in the digital world. The feeling of possessing something rare or expensive makes for a great motivator. In this Core Drive 4, users are motivated because they feel like they own or control something. This makes users want to increase, improve, protect, and even obtain more. It’s why we want to accumulate wealth or collect virtual coins. This Core Drive also provides emotional comfort and instills a sense of well-being and belonging to a society and cultural environment. Pokémon Go Pokémon Go focuses heavily on a Core Drive 4 concept called “ .” Each Pokémon captured is added to a collection and gives users a sense of ownership. Once players catch a few Pokémon, they are motivated to catch all of them, and the hunt continues. collection set Core Drive 5: Social Influence & Relatedness If used properly, it can be one of the most potent and long-lasting tools for motivating people. This core drive taps into all the social elements that motivate people: mentorship, social acceptance, social feedback, companionship, competition, and even envy. Has it ever happened to you that you bought something you didn’t need but just because it reminded you of your childhood? That’s relatedness which refers to the human need and tendency to nostalgia and emotional associations. Saregama — Caravaan One of the reasons why the Saregama Caravaan is so popular is Nostalgia. In an age of high tech Alexas, while everyone was busy adding more ways to listen to songs, Saregama Caravaan carved a niche for itself by looking the other way- back at a simpler age, an older time. Amazon People trust what they can relate to. Appealing to an emotional connection with other users builds a sense of trust and lowers the threshold to buy something. On Amazon, you must have come across the following statement while looking for products: “Customers who bought this item also bought…”. In fact, approximately 60% of Amazon’s revenue comes from the recommendations section. Leaderboards in fitness apps are another interesting example of social influence, as people check out their progress, compare and compete with others. Core Drive 6: Scarcity and Impatience If you can’t have it, you want it. We have all been there. It’s an innate desire of humans. And the sixth Core Drive addresses just that – the longing for something, simply because it is scarce, exclusive, or immediately unattainable. And because it is so difficult to obtain, its perceived value increases immensely. Even leading brands like have successfully used scarcity as a significant lever to influence choice. OnePlus Urgency has been greatly leveraged in eCommerce. You must have often come across sales promise bargains on eCommerce sites like Myntra, Nykaa, Amazon, etc., that are only available for a limited period like “70% OFF. Today ONLY!”. The impulse to push that button is immense. The existence of the sale is scarce, and people are motivated to act with a sense of urgency. Core Drive 7: Unpredictability and Curiosity We, humans, are hard-wired to seek thrill in uncertainty. We’re driven by the chase. We have no foolproof way of predicting the future, yet we’re always thinking about what will happen next. Unpredictability entails constant engagement as one does not know what will happen next, and our brain’s reward center lights up when we encounter such sensations. Unpredictability is a powerful force in motivating people to keep pressing on until they have clarified the unknown. This explains our love for surprises and our desire to seek new experiences. The virtual scratch cards on Google Play are a great example as we mischievously scratch them, knowing quite well that there’s not going to be much in there. Example: Gpay Virtual cards TV/Web Series A good web series will add a cliffhanger at the end of every episode to create a sense of anticipation for the next, which appeals to the audience’s curiosity and desire to clarify the unknown. Core Drive 8: Loss and Avoidance Humans are risk-averse by nature, and this core drive is our natural aversion to losing things we have worked hard to obtain. Avoidance and loss motivate through the fear of losing something or having an undesirable event occur. We can go to any lengths to minimize potential loss or risks wherever and whenever possible. According to psychology, we are more likely to act based on avoiding loss rather than making gains. Hence the fear of losing 1000 Rs is greater than the opportunity to gain Rs.1000. There’s nothing as powerful as offering an incentive upfront and then threatening to take it away. For example : uses streaks to encourage users to build a daily habit of using their app by giving you more XP if you maintain a streak. Learners or app users have to achieve their daily goals to save and improve their streak. Duolingo Duolingo Gamification – Streaks Miss one day and the streak is reset to zero. More recently, this option was replaced with one free ‘Streak Repair’ per month for premium members and a ‘ ‘ item that can be bought in the in-app shop with Gems. The urge to protect the daily streak motivates the users to put a small amount of effort every day to preserve their streaks. Streak Freeze Another classic example of this is the Marketing campaigns that often target our Core Drive 8 with tactics like, “If you don’t sign up/purchase now, you’ll lose this chance forever.” Black Friday Black Friday is an excellent example of how limited opportunity can motivate people to act with an extreme sense of urgency. Every year in the United States, products are priced a lot cheaper on the Friday after Thanksgiving, and people flock to stores to avoid losing out on sweet deals. Final Thoughts Gamification, or as Yu-Kai Chou calls it, human-focused design, is not about badges or leaderboards. It’s about human core drives, the most profound concept in gamification. And the Octalysis Framework tries to understand these nucleus motivations and uses them to drive behaviors. The more we understand the psychology behind our core drives, the better we will become at designing gamified systems and developing consistently good user experiences. First published here.

Decipher Your Mind: Gamification, the Octalysis Framework, and the Psychology of Motivation 

Mumpreneur Survival Guide: The Essentials

In a future driven by shared autonomous vehicles, transportation becomes a utility. The name of the game is efficiency — you pay for what you use, and how you use it. No car ownership, no car insurance, no maintenance, no gas, no driveways or garages… you pay for a ride from A to B, and when you get out, you’ve washed your hands of the investment. But all those things have a cost, so it must mean someone else is coughing up the dough, right? In the case of present-day rideshare services (known as Transportation Network Companies, or TNCs) like Uber and Lyft, the fixed costs of fuel and car maintenance and driver fees are baked into your fare without calling out the fees specifically. There are base fares, booking fees, per minute and per mile rates. , TNCs throttle their pricing models in a rather opaque manner. With the exception of Surge pricing It’s assumed you like it that way. Knowing what portion of your fare goes into the driver’s pocket or towards fuel expenses is unnecessary info, and part of the convenience with on-demand transportation is the fact that it’s some other schmuck’s job to figure all that out. Fair enough. But imagine an entire transit grid running through on-demand, shared resources. Then imagine that the entities managing it may include federal and local governments, car makers, telco and media conglomerates, Google, Amazon, etc. A mere tweak of your fare could be covering the tax for a new bridge, or rewarding you for buying a product during the trip, or . Such are ideas we usually draft up as legislature, enforce through police, or educate the public on; you’d want to have an idea of where your money goes in those instances, correct? contributing to donations for the ACLU Let’s find out. At any given moment, the future transportation grid will have dozens of opportunities to charge (or reward) your choices based on how they affect the efficiency of the grid and the pockets of the companies who manage it — the latter traditionally being disinterested in showing any transparency. Maybe the moving picture above is more than you care to swallow when thinking about your transportation costs, but . I believe you should have information, and more importantly, have the obligation to think critically about it. I’m a transparency kinda guy Ready to use your imagination? Base Rate Hey look, we’ve started with something that is actually happening today! . Why do you think they might do that? Massachusetts is considering a bill to charge driverless cars by the mile Are they equating autonomous cars with electric cars, since the latter obviously don’t contribute to the Gas Tax — a very appropriate tax to discuss in this article, since it was so poorly thought out that its funding is inversely proportional to driving more efficient cars? Autonomous cars will likely be powered by alternative fuels like electricity, but there’s no reason they can’t be gas-powered. So, that’s a strange bill to write. Perhaps they have another agenda behind the bill… one that grants them access to consumer data. Bill or no bill, the Base Rate has a lot of potential to influence how traffic moves. In all likelihood, some hybrid of per-mile and per-minute (as TNCs currently utilize) seems the best way to go, but consider that a per-mile only rate might dissuade stakeholders from urban development, while a rate tied to per-minute operation would dissuade the development of high-speed roads and urban sprawl. Empty Trip Since we’re talking about urban density and sprawl, we should definitely talk about Empty Trips. Known also as a Zero Occupant Trip, this is a major cost incurred by shared transit services like taxis and TNCs: you request a ride out to East Bumblefudge, where there isn’t going to be anyone waiting to hail that ride back to civilization. Effectively, you’re creating two trips, but only paying for one. That’s why taxi drivers often refuse to take you out to the boondocks. They’ll have a long, expensive trip back before they can find a new fare. Obviously, there are smarter ways to solve this problem than simply refusing to pick you up. But deciding who pays for the empty trip could be the most significant factor in urban development since… well, maybe ever. If the (that’s you) is on the hook for empty trips, making a home in the remote suburbs might be a tough go, with most of your rides looking like the graphic above, and costing an extra 50% or more to cover the inefficiency. Maybe that means more ride-sharing and mass transit for you. User On the other hand, perhaps the TNC covers your empty trips. The fight over which companies will own the grid (and consumer’s information, and their attention) is bound to yield “freebies” to users in the same way Gmail is a freebie: they’ll gladly cover the cost of your inefficiency as long as they get something in return — the authority to show you ads, or download your in-car conversations, or force you to use their messaging service while riding… who knows what those crazy kids in the Valley will think up. Companies could replace sports teams as the local religion, with all the residents of rural Detroit owing their low-cost transportation allegiance to Ford, while the outskirts of Austin are filled with Google loyalists. Or, it could be that your local government subsidizes empty trips as a means of combating high rent downtown, or enlarging the city’s footprint to attract real estate developers. Maybe the housing developers themselves would provide subsidies. In either case, the growth of suburbia would be heavily promoted… at least, until those parties change their minds. Lastly and perhaps most interestingly, you might find yourself in a situation where your empty trip fee is magically relieved by Walmart or a local pizza shop. Unbeknownst to you, there was an auction running on the empty trip, and every business operating a shipping service in the vicinity of your drop-off point had an automated bid posted to the auction in hopes of grabbing a low-cost delivery driver to take their package to its next destination. Pizza saves the day, yet again. Ride Share Ride sharing! I can already hear that collective sigh from everyone who doesn’t live in San Francisco. Like it or lump it, turning personal vehicles into mass transit tools is in transportation efficiency. And, if you do indeed “lump it”, then this article is for you. a huge part of the revolution Remember, what we’re talking about here is the efficiency of the grid’s operation — but that doesn’t have to mean everyone live as efficiently as possible. It just means inefficiency will cost you. Hate the idea of sharing your trip? Your user profile could demand that rideshares be disabled, which would in turn penalize you with a higher fare. Passengers more amenable to ridesharing could enable the option and save money with every mile, even if no one’s in the car. Take it further? Why not. If you’re willing to share a ride with a pet, or a bunch of packages, or a group of kids going to school, you save even more during your trip. The less privacy and space you need, the less you pay. It’s one of several examples where the meek shall inherit the wealth, while the status symbols of affluence become less aspirational and more despicable. Congestion Who causes traffic congestion? Grab a mirror and take the hint. Your very existence on the roadways, let alone your behavior, contributes to congestion… and congestion is the nemesis of efficiency. Like ride sharing, a congestion fee is a useful way to educate users on how their choices impact society at large. Many of the decisions drivers make today could be thrown into this bucket (hence the appearance of a multiplier in the graphic.) Should you want to ride in the fast lane, the grid could clear other cars out of the way and charge you per second for the inconvenience — and in turn, reward the other cars’ passengers for the inconvenience you caused them. Perhaps it’s even more costly for you to stop all vehicles at an intersection so that your car can make a split-second u-turn based on new directions you provided. It all depends on how much you’re willing to pay for your needs to be prioritized. Hell, in a future of autonomous transportation, we don’t need dedicated lanes on the road. You could select a route that takes you upstream against all other traffic, if it turns out that’s the fastest way for you to get to Point B. It’d be a crippling fee to do so, but you could do it. All this assumes that you’re the one paying congestion fees, but that’s only one side of the coin. Do you really want to be on the road at 6:12pm on a Tuesday? No, you do it because your job tells you to. And in a world where traffic costs can be attributed to quantifiable , it wouldn’t take much to have your government penalizing the company for requiring standard 9–6 hours. The possibility of having fees levied against businesses for causing congestion could make for very interesting decisions around remote work, parking, operating hours, and even hiring practices. microfee levels Multimode Incentive When autonomous vehicles hit their stride, the service operating on the grid will transcend the means. Cars, pods, shuttles, buses, trains, bikes, scooters, maybe even drones… they’re all components of the service model. The right tool for the job, if you will. So, it follows that getting people out of cars — and into mass transit or zero-emissions transit — would be a major priority. Present-day incentives to push people towards mixed mode transportation are pretty ham-handed, but that will change with the introduction of real-time pricing. Should you require a car from door-to-door, you’ll pay a full-fat fare — perhaps even see a penalty for straining the system. However, if you’re willing to bike to a rideshare point or train, the grid will know, and could reward such behavior with a lower rate once you do hop on the train. Being open to re-routes and delays for the sake of the greater good nets you even more savings. What makes this functionality so valuable is the ability to validate a market for alternative transit without having to front infrastructure investment. In America, that’s huge because, well… we really hate mass transit. Rather than on a transit project campaigning for funding, developing the infrastructure, and marketing it to viability, a multimode incentive could gauge public interest before the project even begins. Offer a fare discount to walk, bike, or share rides along the routes where your project is planned, and the turnout will tell the tale. Rinse and repeat. spend decades If you want to know whether a transit project in America is feasible, you don’t set up focus groups — you see what it takes to get people to actually step out of their cars. Route Management Great, so we’ve got a million ways to slice your transit costs based on efficiency. But who’s doing the slicing? Tech companies, corporations, governments, and investors all want a piece of this multi-trillion dollar market, and most for reasons more valuable than mere profit. Of course, there’s an inherent distrust in allowing one company to hold total control over the grid; on the other hand, information access suffers as the management splinters, which decreases the quantity and quality of insights. What we really need to see is something rarely witnessed in modern society: fully transparent, altruistic collaboration among stakeholders. This isn’t a battle — and if it is, it’s a battle we’re all fighting against inefficiency. Hold yourself and others accountable to choices that yield transparency, and the transportation revolution will thrive. Don’t settle for the status quo… it has no imagination.

HIGH SOCIETY FREERIDE COMPANY

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Since 2003

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HIGH SOCIETY FREERIDE COMPANY

highsocietyfreeride.com

11-50 employees

Since 2003

COMPANY RANKING

HIGH SOCIETY FREERIDE COMPANY

EVERGREEN INDEX #5388

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