Happy Friday! This week, a famous mouse entered the public domain. But first…
📡ON OUR RADAR
As emojis increasingly proliferate Slack channels, kickstart securities fraud investigations, and find their way into courtrooms (more than 200 alone in 2023!), they’ve secured a spot in the history books as one of the most consistent, yet contentious forms of modern communication. Next time you send an emoji, remember it’s not just friends dissecting them anymore, it could be your bosses, shareholders, and the SEC, too.
On Tuesday, Harvard President Claudine Gay announced her resignation. Gay first came under scrutiny for her statements at the congressional hearing on antisemitism on college campuses. Most recently, the Washington Free Beacon filed a complaint with Harvard, alleging that Gay had plagiarized nearly 50 times across her published work.
In today’s attention economy, brands across industries are leaning on strategic partnerships to maximize eyeballs. This week, Peloton announced it’s partnering with TikTok to produce fitness classes geared toward folks with and without fitness equipment. In the sports media arena, two New York-media entities — YES Network (broadcaster of Yankees and Nets games) and MSG Networks (broadcaster of Knicks, Rangers, Devils, and Islanders games) — just launched a joint venture. While the development mostly impacts the New York sports scene, it’ll likely lead to an all-in-one direct-to-consumer offering for sports fans everywhere.
💡ON OUR MINDS: Copyrights and Wrongs
Seasons change and years begin anew, but questions of free use, public domain, and copyright law are timeless, as seen by this week’s headlines.
Over the holidays, The New York Times became the first major media entity to sue Microsoft and OpenAI over their use of copyrighted material in training their language model. The suit bookended a momentous year for MSFT-backed OpenAI, which saw its share price rise 55% since ChatGPT’s initial release in November 2022.
The New York Times joins popular creatives, including Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin, in seeking damages for copyright infringement and what Martin and seventeen other authors called “systematic theft on a mass scale.”
While it’s unsurprising that generative AI’s contentious dependency on the work of human creatives has brought us to an inevitable legal crossroads, attention now turns to whether the outcome of these suits could generate headwinds against the technology’s meteoric rise.
It’s another example of creators, companies, and collaborators wondering what exists within and beyond the public domain in 2024 – especially as classic characters like Disney’s Mickey Mouse and Tigger officially entered the public domain this week, allowing the public (and brands) to take greater creative liberties with the once untouchable cultural relics.
https://twitter.com/duolingo/status/1742653315035602972?s=20
🥊QUICK HITS:
In case you missed these reads.
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Mayra Flores, former Texas Congresswoman, has ushered in the first political scandal of 2024, monikered GRUBGATE.
Thanks for reading,
HL
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