Business
Column: A Faulkner classic and Popeye enter the public domain while copyright only gets more confusing
Last year, it was Mickey Mouse. This year, Popeye the Sailor joins Mickey as a new entrant to the public domain — that is, shedding his core copyright protections on Jan. 1.
He’s merely the most familiar cultural artifact to enter the public domain on Wednesday. But as Jennifer Jenkins, co-director of Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain notes in her indispensable annual roster of newly public works (posted this year with co-director James Boyle), Popeye’s initial appearance in print is among thousands of culturally and artistically significant works to become copyright-free. That means they become available for anyone to copy, share and expand upon without paying their creators for rights.
This year’s treasure trove includes literary works originally published in 1929, meaning their 95-year copyrights expire on New Year’s Day. They include William Faulkner’s novel “The Sound and the Fury,” in which he began to perfect his literary style and his gloss on racial and social stratification in his native Mississippi; Ernest Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms”; and Virginia Woolf’s essay “A Room of One’s Own.”
Community theaters can screen the films. Youth orchestras can perform the music publicly, without paying licensing fees. Online repositories … can make works fully available online. This helps enable both access to and preservation of cultural materials that might otherwise be lost to history.
— Jennifer Jenkins, Duke University, on the value of the public domain
There are also Dashiell Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon,” originally published as a serial in Black Mask magazine, and John Steinbeck’s first novel, “Cup of Gold.”
Among films, the haul includes the Marx Brothers’ first movie, “The Cocoanuts,” which was based on a George S. Kaufman Broadway musical and betrays its stagebound genesis in almost every scene; Alfred Hitchcock’s first sound film, “Blackmail,” and an early film adaptation of Edna Ferber’s “Show Boat” — a 1929 version of Ferber’s novel, not the musical version, which was filmed in 1936 and, more familiarly, in 1951.
Interpretations of copyright law haven’t been as divergent as they’ve become over the last year or two. The reason is AI, or at least the development of AI bots “trained” on copyrighted written, musical and artistic works. Numerous lawsuits brought by creators are making their way through the federal courts.
AI developers generally claim that their feeding copyrighted works into their bots’ databases falls within the “fair use” exception to copyright protection. The fair use doctrine, as the U.S. Copyright Office puts is, allows the use of “limited portions of a work including quotes, for purposes such as commentary, criticism, news reporting, and scholarly reports.”
Whether a particular use qualifies “is notoriously fact-specific,” Jenkins told me. “So it’s hard to shoot a straight arrow through all the cases,” in part because the judgment of whether a use is exempt from copyright depends on whether creators can show that the use caused harm to the market for their works.
“It’s a wild patchwork of cases,” Jenkins says, “but the central issue to all is the same, namely is it fair use to train your AI model on copyrighted content, but the specifics vary. Often I have something resembling a prediction of how fair use cases are going to come out, but really cannot predict which way these cases are going to go. It’s a moving target in copyright land.”
This isn’t the first time that technological change has roiled the copyright landscape. One precedent is the Google Books case, in which authors and publishers sued Google to block its effort to create a searchable database of written works by digitizing copyrighted works along with works in the public domain.
The ultimate settlement allows Google to digitize books for the database, but to display only limited “snippets” of copyright-protected works to users — enough to enable users to search for specific words or phrases, but not to access significant portions of the works.
Also entering the public domain this week, as Jenkins observes, are about a dozen Mickey Mouse films, including one in which he speaks his first words (“Hot dogs! Hot dogs!”) and wears his iconic white gloves. That depiction of Mickey is now copyright-free; the ur-Mickey depicted in the Walt Disney short “Steamboat Willie” entered the public domain on Jan. 1, 2024, but later depictions such as the white gloves were still subject to copyright restrictions based on when they first appeared on film.
Popeye first appeared as a peripheral character in January 1929 in E.C. Segar’s “Thimble Theatre” comic strip. He garnered such instant popularity that Segar eventually refashioned the strip around him. Some story elements, such as the role of spinach as a source of his superhuman strength, became part of his persona over subsequent years.
Popeye also gives us a window into how a character’s entry into the public domain doesn’t require subsequent exploitations to adhere to his or her original conception.
Los Angeles copyright attorney Aaron Moss observes in his own curtain-raising post about public domain day 2025 that several Popeye-inspired horror films, “including ‘Popeye the Slayer Man,’ set in an abandoned spinach cannery, and ‘Shiver Me Timbers,’ featuring a meteor that ‘transforms Popeye into an unstoppable killing machine,’” have already been announced.
Similarly, er, disrespectful treatments of Mickey Mouse and Winnie-the-Pooh (a member of the public domain class of 2022) have been produced or announced.
The copyright rules for music are particularly convoluted. “Fats” Waller songs including “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue” are entering the public domain, which should help to augment Waller’s reputation as a jazz and Broadway innovator. So too are George Gershwin’s “An American in Paris” and the popular standards “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” (lyrics by Alfred Dubin, music by Joseph Burke), “Happy Days Are Here Again” (lyrics by Jack Yellen, music by Milton Ager) and “What Is This Thing Called Love?” by Cole Porter.
But as Jenkins notes, only the compositions — what appears on the sheet music — and not any particular recordings are entering the public domain. So the version of “Tiptoe” recorded by Tiny Tim, which made that artist a popular star in 1968, is still under copyright.
“Singin’ in the Rain,” which most people associate with the 1952 film musical of that name, is entering the public domain.
Fans of the Gene Kelly/Debbie Reynolds film may be unaware that it was conceived by Arthur Freed, then the head of MGM’s musical feature unit, as a vehicle to exploit the back catalog of songs he and composer Nacio Herb Brown had written in the 1920s and 1930s; of the 16 full-length and excerpted songs in the movie, all but two were original products of their collaboration or had words by Freed or music by Brown. “Moses Supposes” was written by others for the movie and “Make ‘Em Laugh,” by Freed and Brown, was acknowledged by Stanley Donen, who co-directed the firm with Kelly, to be a transparent rip-off of Cole Porter’s “Be a Clown.”
(My favorite backstage nugget about the movie’s production involves the physical torment that Reynolds, not a trained dancer, suffered at the hands of the perfectionist Kelly, which left her with bloodied feet after filming the “Good Morning” number. A close scrutiny of the scene reveals Reynolds continually glancing at the ground to make sure she was hitting her marks as she tried to keep in step with Kelly and co-star Donald O’Connor; anyway, no one can claim it doesn’t work perfectly.)
Sound recordings from 1924 are entering the public domain thanks to the 2018 Music Modernization Act. They include Gershwin’s recording of “Rhapsody in Blue” and Al Jolson’s recording of “California Here I Come.” But regular sound recordings made in 1929 are granted 100-year copyrights, so they won’t be available until 2030.
Another exception covers music made to accompany movies, which receive the same copyright terms as the films. Accordingly, Jenkins notes, the recorded version of “Singin’ in the Rain” heard in the film “The Hollywood Revue of 1929” goes royalty-free on Jan.1, but not the version sung by Kelly in the 1952 movie.
The annual flow of copyrighted works into the public domain underscores how the progressive lengthening of copyright protection is counter to the public interest—indeed, to the interests of creative artists. The initial U.S. copyright act, passed in 1790, provided for a term of 28 years including a 14-year renewal. In 1909, that was extended to 56 years including a 28-year renewal.
In 1976, the term was changed to the creator’s life plus 50 years. In 1998, Congress passed the Copyright Term Extension Act, which is known as the Sonny Bono Act after its chief promoter on Capitol Hill. That law extended the basic term to life plus 70 years; works for hire (in which a third party owns the rights to a creative work), pseudonymous and anonymous works were protected for 95 years from first publication or 120 years from creation, whichever is shorter.
Along the way, Congress extended copyright protection from written works to movies, recordings, performances and ultimately to almost all works, both published and unpublished.
Once a work enters the public domain, Jenkins observes, “community theaters can screen the films. Youth orchestras can perform the music publicly, without paying licensing fees. Online repositories such as the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, Google Books and the New York Public Library can make works fully available online. This helps enable both access to and preservation of cultural materials that might otherwise be lost to history.”
Indeed, as Jenkins and others have documented, overly long copyright terms often keep older works out of the mainstream. “Films have disintegrated because preservationists can’t digitize them,” Jenkins has written. “The works of historians and journalists are incomplete. Artists find their cultural heritage off-limits.”
The countervailing benefits are minimal. The artistic lobby — specifically corporate owners of copyrighted content — maintain that longer terms protect the income streams of content creators, producing an incentive to create. But the truth is that after the first few years of publication the commercial value of the vast majority of copyrighted works declines precipitously to almost nothing. The value that might arise from follow-on creations of public domain works remains locked away and the copyrighted works become forgotten.
The U.S. Space Force announced Friday it has awarded satellite contracts with a combined value of about $1.6 billion to Rocket Lab in Long Beach and to the Redondo Beach Space Park campus of Northrop Grumman.
The contracts by the Space Development Agency will fund the construction by each company of 18 satellites for a network in development that will provide warning of advanced threats such as hypersonic missiles.
Northrop Grumman has been awarded contracts for prior phases of the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, a planned network of missile defense and communications satellites in low Earth orbit.
The contract announced Friday is valued at $764 million, and the company is now set to deliver a total of 150 satellites for the network.
The $805-million contract awarded to Rocket Lab is its largest to date. It had previously been awarded a $515 million contract to deliver 18 communications satellites for the network.
Founded in 2006 in New Zealand, the company builds satellites and provides small-satellite launch services for commercial and government customers with its Electron rocket. It moved to Long Beach in 2020 from Huntington Beach and is developing a larger rocket.
“This is more than just a contract. It’s a resounding affirmation of our evolution from simply a trusted launch provider to a leading vertically integrated space prime contractor,” said Rocket Labs founder and chief executive Peter Beck in online remarks.
The company said it could eventually earn up to $1 billion due to the contract by supplying components to other builders of the satellite network.
Also awarded contracts announced Friday were a Lockheed Martin group in Sunnyvalle, Calif., and L3Harris Technologies of Fort Wayne, Ind. Those contracts for 36 satellites were valued at nearly $2 billion.
Gurpartap “GP” Sandhoo, acting director of the Space Development Agency, said the contracts awarded “will achieve near-continuous global coverage for missile warning and tracking” in addition to other capabilities.
Northrop Grumman said the missiles are being built to respond to the rise of hypersonic missiles, which maneuver in flight and require infrared tracking and speedy data transmission to protect U.S. troops.
Beck said that the contracts reflects Rocket Labs growth into an “industry disruptor” and growing space prime contractor.
Business
California-based company recalls thousands of cases of salad dressing over ‘foreign objects’
A California food manufacturer is recalling thousands of cases of salad dressing distributed to major retailers over potential contamination from “foreign objects.”
The company, Irvine-based Ventura Foods, recalled 3,556 cases of the dressing that could be contaminated by “black plastic planting material” in the granulated onion used, according to an alert issued by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Ventura Foods voluntarily initiated the recall of the product, which was sold at Costco, Publix and several other retailers across 27 states, according to the FDA.
None of the 42 locations where the product was sold were in California.
Ventura Foods said it issued the recall after one of its ingredient suppliers recalled a batch of onion granules that the company had used n some of its dressings.
“Upon receiving notice of the supplier’s recall, we acted with urgency to remove all potentially impacted product from the marketplace. This includes urging our customers, their distributors and retailers to review their inventory, segregate and stop the further sale and distribution of any products subject to the recall,” said company spokesperson Eniko Bolivar-Murphy in an emailed statement. “The safety of our products is and will always be our top priority.”
The FDA issued its initial recall alert in early November. Costco also alerted customers at that time, noting that customers could return the products to stores for a full refund. The affected products had sell-by dates between Oct. 17 and Nov. 9.
The company recalled the following types of salad dressing:
- Creamy Poblano Avocado Ranch Dressing and Dip
- Ventura Caesar Dressing
- Pepper Mill Regal Caesar Dressing
- Pepper Mill Creamy Caesar Dressing
- Caesar Dressing served at Costco Service Deli
- Caesar Dressing served at Costco Food Court
- Hidden Valley, Buttermilk Ranch
A Stanford software engineering degree used to be a golden ticket. Artificial intelligence has devalued it to bronze, recent graduates say.
The elite students are shocked by the lack of job offers as they finish studies at what is often ranked as the top university in America.
When they were freshmen, ChatGPT hadn’t yet been released upon the world. Today, AI can code better than most humans.
Top tech companies just don’t need as many fresh graduates.
“Stanford computer science graduates are struggling to find entry-level jobs” with the most prominent tech brands, said Jan Liphardt, associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford University. “I think that’s crazy.”
While the rapidly advancing coding capabilities of generative AI have made experienced engineers more productive, they have also hobbled the job prospects of early-career software engineers.
Stanford students describe a suddenly skewed job market, where just a small slice of graduates — those considered “cracked engineers” who already have thick resumes building products and doing research — are getting the few good jobs, leaving everyone else to fight for scraps.
“There’s definitely a very dreary mood on campus,” said a recent computer science graduate who asked not to be named so they could speak freely. “People [who are] job hunting are very stressed out, and it’s very hard for them to actually secure jobs.”
The shake-up is being felt across California colleges, including UC Berkeley, USC and others. The job search has been even tougher for those with less prestigious degrees.
Eylul Akgul graduated last year with a degree in computer science from Loyola Marymount University. She wasn’t getting offers, so she went home to Turkey and got some experience at a startup. In May, she returned to the U.S., and still, she was “ghosted” by hundreds of employers.
“The industry for programmers is getting very oversaturated,” Akgul said.
The engineers’ most significant competitor is getting stronger by the day. When ChatGPT launched in 2022, it could only code for 30 seconds at a time. Today’s AI agents can code for hours, and do basic programming faster with fewer mistakes.
Data suggests that even though AI startups like OpenAI and Anthropic are hiring many people, it is not offsetting the decline in hiring elsewhere. Employment for specific groups, such as early-career software developers between the ages of 22 and 25 has declined by nearly 20% from its peak in late 2022, according to a Stanford study.
It wasn’t just software engineers, but also customer service and accounting jobs that were highly exposed to competition from AI. The Stanford study estimated that entry-level hiring for AI-exposed jobs declined 13% relative to less-exposed jobs such as nursing.
In the Los Angeles region, another study estimated that close to 200,000 jobs are exposed. Around 40% of tasks done by call center workers, editors and personal finance experts could be automated and done by AI, according to an AI Exposure Index curated by resume builder MyPerfectResume.
Many tech startups and titans have not been shy about broadcasting that they are cutting back on hiring plans as AI allows them to do more programming with fewer people.
Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei said that 70% to 90% of the code for some products at his company is written by his company’s AI, called Claude. In May, he predicted that AI’s capabilities will increase until close to 50% of all entry-level white-collar jobs might be wiped out in five years.
A common sentiment from hiring managers is that where they previously needed ten engineers, they now only need “two skilled engineers and one of these LLM-based agents,” which can be just as productive, said Nenad Medvidović, a computer science professor at the University of Southern California.
“We don’t need the junior developers anymore,” said Amr Awadallah, CEO of Vectara, a Palo Alto-based AI startup. “The AI now can code better than the average junior developer that comes out of the best schools out there.”
To be sure, AI is still a long way from causing the extinction of software engineers. As AI handles structured, repetitive tasks, human engineers’ jobs are shifting toward oversight.
Today’s AIs are powerful but “jagged,” meaning they can excel at certain math problems yet still fail basic logic tests and aren’t consistent. One study found that AI tools made experienced developers 19% slower at work, as they spent more time reviewing code and fixing errors.
Students should focus on learning how to manage and check the work of AI as well as getting experience working with it, said John David N. Dionisio, a computer science professor at LMU.
Stanford students say they are arriving at the job market and finding a split in the road; capable AI engineers can find jobs, but basic, old-school computer science jobs are disappearing.
As they hit this surprise speed bump, some students are lowering their standards and joining companies they wouldn’t have considered before. Some are creating their own startups. A large group of frustrated grads are deciding to continue their studies to beef up their resumes and add more skills needed to compete with AI.
“If you look at the enrollment numbers in the past two years, they’ve skyrocketed for people wanting to do a fifth-year master’s,” the Stanford graduate said. “It’s a whole other year, a whole other cycle to do recruiting. I would say, half of my friends are still on campus doing their fifth-year master’s.”
After four months of searching, LMU graduate Akgul finally landed a technical lead job at a software consultancy in Los Angeles. At her new job, she uses AI coding tools, but she feels like she has to do the work of three developers.
Universities and students will have to rethink their curricula and majors to ensure that their four years of study prepare them for a world with AI.
“That’s been a dramatic reversal from three years ago, when all of my undergraduate mentees found great jobs at the companies around us,” Stanford’s Liphardt said. “That has changed.”
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