Mickey Mouse is Now Public Domain & NYT Sues Microsoft and OpenAI for Billions

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0:27Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, how an anthropomorphic Pop-Tart won college football season. And a certain beloved character is entering the public domain, so you can bet some childhoods are about to be corrupted. It's Tuesday, January 2nd. Let's ride.

0:49We are so back. Hope everyone had a relaxing holiday break and is excited as we are to kick off 2024. Something to note about this year. It is a leap year, so all those babies born on February 29th, 2020 can finally turn one. 2024 is also an exact calendar match to 1996. So if you've got your 96 calendar laying around, you can dig that one up and use it for this year. No problem. Toby, you've got a full 366 days this year to complete your New Year's resolutions. What do you got? So I have a secret fitness one I'm pursuing, but I'm not going to speak it out loud because I was doing some research.

1:28And when you say what your New Year's resolution is before actually even getting into the year at all, it gives you this little dopamine boost. So I'm going to keep it under wraps. Just know I got one cooking in the background. What about you? That is a total cop out, first of all. Well, Toby, we're breaking 85 in golf this year. Okay. And then I also want to visit Kansas because it is one of just two states I have left to hit. And I don't think I'm getting to Alaska. Kansas. I went two years ago. Okay. Topeka. It's a beautiful place. Before we jump into the show, we have a quick word from our new sponsor, Veeam.

2:01Veeam has a new idea for the new year, and it's called Radical Resilience. No, that doesn't mean bouncing back after getting rejected on New Year's by your crush. It means Veeam helps companies recover from things like ransomware attacks, natural disasters, or regular old human error. They offer both data protection and recovery options. So, you know, your apps and data are always protected and always available. So how did New Year's go for you now? I do not want to talk about it, but I do want you all to discover more at Veeam.com today. Does it ever feel like you're a marketing professional just speaking into the void?

2:38But with LinkedIn ads, you can know you're reaching the right decision makers, a network of 130 million of them. In fact, you can even target buyers by job title, industry, company, seniority, skills. and did I say job title? See how you can avoid the void and reach the right buyers with LinkedIn ads. Spend$250 on your first campaign and get a free$250 credit for the next one. Get started at linkedin.com slash campaign. Terms and conditions apply. After 95 years, Mickey Mouse has entered the public domain. For decades, Disney has kept a tight hold on the first depiction of the world's most popular mouse, which first appeared in the black and white cartoon Steamboat Willie.

3:16But as of the new year, Mickey and thousands of other copyrighted works published back in 1928 are now entering into the public domain. That means those characters or stories can be remade without permission from the original IP holder, which means I can finally make the Mickey Mouse Goes to Mars musical starring Elon Musk I've been sitting on for years. The public domain is sort of the final resting place for any copyrighted work. It is a compromise with artists and companies. Yes, you can own a character for a certain amount of time designated by law, but eventually you must give that character up to the public, both for historical preservation, but also so other people can build upon the ideas themselves.

3:56For instance, like making an adaptation of Cinderella or the Brothers Grimm Snow White as Disney has done itself. So the very first version of Mickey has finally made its way to the public, but it wasn't an easy path, Neil. No. So Disney is really the symbol of intellectual property protections because for the past few decades, they've been trying to keep Mickey Mouse under wraps, under their own domain for so long. In 1998, there was an act that extended the protection for intellectual property from 75 years to 95 years. It wasn't technically called the Mickey Mouse Protection Act, but that's what it was dubbed because of Disney's role in trying to make it happen.

4:37It's so ironic, too, because Disney has this complicated kind of love triangle with the public domain because they have profited immensely from the public domain. I already mentioned Cinderella, Snow White. I mean, Hamlet is our Lion King is a Hamlet reinterpretation. So it's this love triangle of Disney is trying to fight from their own characters entering the public domain. And yet they've also built upon the public domain themselves. It's kind of like an oil company running their rigs using solar power in a way. It's just like this kind of double-sided sword that they're playing with. We should mention that this version of Mickey is just the 1928 Steamboat Willie seven-minute animated film, which was path-breaking in its own right.

5:18It's very black and white, this movie. You watched it. Mickey Mouse is definitely not the colorful, gloved character that we know him today. And that is still under Disney's protection. So this is just the black and white version of Mickey being kind of a scoundrel. Yeah, it's definitely not a free-for-all either. You can't produce a work that kind of falsely represents itself as a Disney production. So my play, for instance, I can't make it seem like Disney put it on. And then you also Disney or Mickey Mouse is still a registered trademark of Disney. And so those other versions that you mentioned, the more colorful versions that we've come to know, that is still under ongoing protection.

5:57So it's not a free for all, but already we've seen things like video games, horror video games being developed that start this version of Mickey. So we saw it earlier this year with Winnie the Pooh entered the public domain and immediately a horror movie came out. So we're going to see some stuff that I said some weird stuff. Yeah. Corrupt your childhood. We might see some childhood corruption. So there's a lot of critics of this 95 year period because it is so long. And the critics say that it benefits huge companies like Disney that want to keep their, you know, their inventions under wraps.

6:28The point of copyright protections is to spur innovation and reward creativity. But when you take something like F. Scott Fitzgerald, right, he died in 1940. But the Great Gatsby didn't enter the public domain until 2021. So he wasn't really incentivized to write another Great Gatsby from 1940 to 2021 because that dude was in his grave. So there are a lot of critics saying we should really shorten this period. The reason why Disney was so adamant about extending it was because it wanted to pad its profits. It wanted to keep Mickey under wraps, which it's made$80 billion from the Mickey Mouse franchise.

7:02And honestly, the longevity of Mickey is crazy. I see kids watching Mickey Mouse today and I'm like, wow, bullish on Disney. Yeah, screw LeBron. Mickey Mouse is the true longevity king. So while we did not tape any live shows this past week, I'm here to report that, yes, business news still happened. Let's do a quick sprint through the biggest stories from the holiday break. The first is a dangerous legal challenge to open AI. The New York Times became the first major media company to sue the chat GPT maker and its backer, Microsoft, for illegally swiping its content to develop the chatbot. OpenAI has faced copyright lawsuits before from the likes of authors like George R.R.

7:40Martin. But the Times' suit is by far the most threatening one yet, and it could open OpenAI up to billions of dollars in damages. The reason this suit is different than the others and packs such a punch is the concept of memorization. The New York Times showed that ChatGPT didn't just allegedly steal its articles for training purposes. It also reproduced them verbatim through a series of prompts. You could get ChatGPT to spit out a New York Times article. It had consumed nearly word for word, which, of course, is a problem because the Times requires a subscription to read those articles. And you can make the point that ChatGPT could cost the New York Times a lot of money if it just reproduces paid content for free.

8:23So a long way to go here, but this represents the most consequential copyright battle we've seen between content creators and OpenAI. Yeah, if you look at some of the facts here, the New York Times reached out all the way back in April about this issue and tried to kind of get a deal done with OpenAI. But then OpenAI ended up not going to the negotiation table, and now it's resulted in this lawsuit. And then if you also look at the fact that OpenAI recently struck a licensing deal with Axel Springer, who owns Politico, Business Insider, etc. So it definitely sees the writing on the wall when it comes to these media companies.

8:57And I think it was playing this dangerous game where they thought they could maybe wriggle out of this New York Times agreement with maybe a fine or something like that. But it looks like the New York Times is pursuing an ongoing royalty thing, which would kind of upend OpenAI's business model a little bit. Next update, you guys remember the Apple Watch ban story? The US passed down a ban on Apple watch imports back in october because apple allegedly infringed on a blood oxygen sensor trademark from another company called massimo it was a big deal expected to go in effect right after the holiday season except the ban has now been lifted here's the order of events the international trade commission banned the watches in late october then the biden administration upheld that ban after christmas on the 26th but then on the 30th an appeals court instituted a pause allowing apple to resume sales temporarily.

9:49So that's where we're at, everyone. Banned, upheld, unbanned. Despite Apple being allowed to sell its watches again and denying the fact that they infringed on any copyright, they certainly are up against it on this one, Neil. This is definitely another case of this David versus Goliath, young, smaller tech company going up against the behemoths like Apple and Google. I mean, Massimo has spent$100 million on this battle, and that's because they don't just really, the thing is when you spend a hundred million dollars and you pour all of your weight behind this battle when you could probably figure out a settlement with apple is because you don't just want the the money you want to prove a point and i think the fact that they're so invested in this fight with apple shows that they don't want to be bullied by the big dogs anymore yeah definitely don't want to be bullied i mean massimo is smaller when it comes to apple but it still has been around the health care scene for a long time so it's not some kind of like green in the in the in the what's the what's the phrase green in the face young in the tooth something like that um yeah they're not they're not some gen z in the in the health care space uh like they they've had this technology for a while and they obviously don't want to go down without a fight and i do think that this temporary pause it's not necessarily a good thing it's a good thing because apple can sell its watches again but the appeals court is now weighing a longer halt on import in sales and And really, the Biden administration declining to veto that import ban was a bad, kind of, I don't want to say nail in the coffin, but a real big strike against what Apple is trying to do here.

11:23And separately, Apple is working on a software fix so that this would not happen in the future. But that is not affecting the current legal proceedings that is going on. Finally, the stock market wrapped up the trading year on Friday, and you would have had to try really, really hard to lose money investing in 2023. The S &P 500 gained nearly 25 % and the Dow jumped more than 13%. But the real MVP was the Nasdaq, which focuses on tech stocks. The Nasdaq had one of its strongest years in the past two decades, soaring more than 40 % and reversing its 33 % plunge from 2022. The strangest part about the market's epic year was no one saw it coming.

12:02Remember, when we started 2023, inflation was ripping, the Fed was still hiking interest rates, and economists were certain the U.S. economy was headed into a recession. But inflation has come down to near typical levels. The economy has stayed robust and companies still managed to rake in profits. On top of all that, the AI hype boosted the fortunes of the biggest tech companies known as the Magnificent Seven. So if you took Warren Buffett's advice and were greedy when others were fearful, you probably did pretty well last year. You probably did great. I think this is the perfect time to remember to not put stock in any predictions that come out around this season or this time of year because everyone whiffed last year like no one saw a 20 25 percent uh rally incoming so whatever you see i don't want to name any names but it rhymes with him namer jim kramer i name names but whatever you see people saying online or on on the television just take it with a grain of salt yeah i'm glad i for the because i was going to research a bunch of 2024 market predictions, but I'm happy you said that because I left it out of my research.

13:05Meanwhile, it wasn't just stocks though. Bitcoin had an incredible year. It rose 150%. And just this morning, it topped$45 ,000 to hit its highest level in nearly 21 months. And that came during a year in which SBF and CZ of Binance, maybe the two biggest names in crypto, were both found guilty of wrongdoing. So crypto also had a big year. And I think this all comes back to the Fed stopping its interest rate hikes midway through the year. And now economists are projecting that there's going to be several, if not six, interest rate cuts over the coming year. All right. Before we jump into our next story, we're going to take a quick break.

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14:47The new year means new laws. A slew of new laws at the federal, state, and local levels came into effect on January 1st. and Toby and I are going to highlight some of the ones that stuck out to us the most. The first is not great news for anyone looking to buy an electric car. As new eligibility requirements hit yesterday, the number of EV models to qualify for the$7 ,500 federal tax credit has plummeted from 43 to just 19, including the cheapest Tesla Model 3, the Volkswagen ID.4 and Ford's Mustang Mach-E. This all goes back to Biden's Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which aims to boost electric vehicle adoption while also spurring domestic manufacturing.

15:30And that means automakers that source too many battery materials from China and other geopolitical rivals will have to start procuring them from the homeland or other trade allies if they want to offer the tax credit. The government released even stricter guidelines last month that leads us to where we are today with fewer than 20 models qualifying for the full credit. So now automakers are racing to rejigger their supply chains to wean themselves off of Chinese materials. But it could take some time before they're in compliance. Yeah. I mean, EV tax credits is certainly one that impacts the normal everyday person.

16:03There is also a bunch of new laws passed around minimum wages, which also affects the everyday person. 22 states are raising their minimum wages at the start of the year. And around 40 cities and counties will do the same. This one's cool, too. For Alabamans, employees working more than 40 hours a week will no longer be taxed on overtime, essentially. So you're essentially exempting overtime pay for state taxes. This one is less cool. An executive order in Nebraska demanded that some state workers return to the office starting on Tuesday. I can't believe we're getting return to the office mandates still.

16:37But public employees unions have kind of pushed back against it. But those are some of the things going on in kind of the employment and labor sectors. It's going back to the minimum wage. So the federal minimum wage still stands at$7.25 an hour. And that's been the same way since July 2009. But states are just completely racing ahead. I mean, in New Jersey, New York, California, Washington, Connecticut, the minimum wage is at least$15 an hour, which has been the kind of the threshold, the benchmark that activists wanted to see. And they're just racing ahead. I mean, some are even greater than$16 an hour now.

17:11And some cities are even higher than that. I want to talk about my favorite new law that was passed, though. and that is telemarkers are finally getting targeted in New Jersey. So telemarketers now, within the first 30 seconds of a call, have to identify themselves, who they're representing, and what they're selling, as well as a phone number to reach their employer. And those who don't follow the rules in New Jersey can be charged with a disorderly person's affairs. This is the funniest part about it, though. Well, first of all, I want to say it's called the Seinfeld Law because of a Seinfeld episode.

17:43Do you know it? Well, I didn't see this particular episode. is actually the one I haven't seen, but the specific provision of this law that's called the Seinfeld one is you can't make unsolicited calls to customers between the overnight hours of 9 p.m. and 8 a.m. So we got some Seinfeld homework to do, but this law passed 38 to zero in the Senate and 74 to zero in the General Assembly. So it might be kind of the best example of this consensus in government that we've seen so far in 2023 and 2024. So telemarketers, man, they bring the people together. let's talk about the witch's brew of american capitalism that was the pop tart bowl for those off social media the pop tart bowl took over the long weekend bowl games at the end of the college football season are sponsored events and this year kelanova kellogg snack brand decided to splash out around two million bucks to attach their name to a bowl game featuring number 25 kansas state number 18 north carolina state but what grabbed the headlines was the ritualistic sacrifice of a life-size Pop-Tart mascot at the conclusion of the game.

18:48A human being dressed as a Pop-Tart was already making waves for playfully dancing, tapping the ref on the butt, but then the Pop-Tart man slowly descended into a gigantic toaster. And from that toaster, a real edible, still man-sized Pop-Tart emerged that the winning team then began to eat. From a business perspective, Apex Marketing Group calculated that Pop-Tart generated nearly$12.1 million in brand value from the stunt. Compare that to the$2 million price tag to sponsor the bowl. Not a bad return. Not a bad... I mean, there are 43 bowl games. There are so many bowl games sponsored by every type of company you can imagine.

19:25And this is when, you know, this is a marketer's dream to be able to stand out and have your brand be the face of the conversation online for a few days, managed to stand out of the pack from more than a multiple dozen bowl games. I mean, this is a dream come true for Pop-Tart. And I don't think they could have expected it. It's just one of those things like Barbenheimer or all these sort of viral marketing things that we've seen just take off online where you just have magic in a bottle and you just don't know that it's going to be what it is until the people kind of do their own thing with it.

19:57Because this was memed to death and people just really reacted very strongly to this edible Pop-Tart. And I think it's because it just really wanted to be eaten. Yeah, no, it was very funny because the Pop-Tart had a face on it, like this kind of cute, whimsical looking face. And then seeing that face slowly being eaten by Kansas State players created the memes in and of themselves. Pop-Tarts also kind of competed with the Cheez-Its Bowl, which the winning coaches were doused with a bucket of the Cheez-Its as well. And Kalanova obviously owns both Cheez-Its and Pop-Tart. And so there was kind of like this interesting juxtaposition of people were seeing like like the Cheez-It Bowl also had this man-sized Cheez-It mascot and saying, oh, you're not the Pop-Tart Bowl.

20:38So they ended up creating a dialogue with both the bowl games that they own. So I think Kelanova executives are sitting back and are very happy right now. And this Cheez-It, when it came onto the field, had a sign that said, I'm not edible. You got to love the continuity between the Kelanova brands. Meanwhile, while we're on the topic of college football, we should mention that Michigan beat Alabama last night in the Rose Bowl and Washington beat Texas both in great games, and they will face off next Monday in the college football championship. And that is a great segue to our week ahead. Let's preview the upcoming week.

21:13We'll hit the major events you need to know about as you crank through the backlog of emails that piled up over Christmas break. The first is the jobs report due Friday, which not only will give us the employment picture for December, but also for the entirety of 2023. Expectations are for 170 ,000 new jobs added last month, and the employment rate ticking up to 3.8 % from 3.7%. If those numbers hit, it would mean another really solid month of jobs growth to cap off a year in which 2.7 million new jobs were created in the U.S. economy, again, defying pretty much everyone's expectations. This is finally when we can declare the soft landing complete.

21:50If this jobs report comes in, I'm going to say it right now. I know I told you to not listen to any predictions or any declarations, but I'm declaring the soft landing complete if this jobs report comes in. Okay, then. Well, I will tell you this. If the unemployment rate stays below 4%, it would mark two straight years in which the unemployment rate has stayed below 4%. The last time that happened was the 1960s. So we are really living in a jobs boom right now. The next event to put on your calendar is on Tuesday when Tesla releases. That's today when Tesla releases its sales figures for last quarter.

22:25And the reason this is important is not because of Tesla, but because of another EV maker, China's BYD. BYD is becoming a giant in the industry. And if Tesla didn't sell more than 526 ,000 EVs last quarter, and it's not expected to, it would mean BYD is now the top dog globally for EV sales on a quarterly basis. Pretty impressive. Pretty impressive. It is interesting to see. BYD hasn't even cracked the U.S. market whatsoever. And I've been seeing some rumblings of them potentially eyeing the U.S. Obviously, it's a huge market to expand to. So if it's already the biggest and it hasn't even entered the biggest auto market in the world, then you can already tell that Tesla might be watching its back a little bit.

23:05Well, China vehicles have never sold in any significant or any number here in the U.S. So we'll see if their prowess in EVs helps them weasel into the market. Dry January kicked off this week, which is the annual pledge many take to lay off the booze for a whole month to kick off the year. It's good news for your gut, but more bad news for a beer industry that's getting more stale than the natty lights left over in your trunk from college. 2023 saw the lowest level of beer consumed in the U.S. in a generation as Americans shifted to other types of liquor or just going the increasingly popular non-alcoholic route altogether.

23:39I'm all in, Neil. Dry January is the truth. With January also probably objectively the worst month of the year. So I think doing dry January makes it better, makes you feel better about everything. All right. This weekend is the final regular season week of the NFL, week 18, which means lots of jockeying for playoff spots, home field advantage, and buys. The football season just flies by every year. May I interest anybody without football in their lives in potentially the English Premier League, the greatest league on earth, just trying to convert some football fans into some football fans. Liverpool top of the table.

24:09Finally, if football isn't your speed, both kinds, the Golden Globe Awards honoring the best of TV and movies from the past year are on Sunday night, giving us the highly anticipated Barbenheimer rematch from the summer. Barbie led the movie field with nine total nominations, while Oppenheimer was close behind with eight. On the TV side, the final season of Succession had the most nominations with nine, followed by The Bear and Only Murders in the Building with five. I'm so bad on the TV side. I haven't seen any of those series. I got to up my TV game. Well, there wasn't a lot of TV last year.

24:39Well, I didn't watch any of it either. So I got to maybe this is the year for TV for me. It's coming back after the strikes. OK, we're going to have to wrap it up there. Good luck readjusting to work today. As always, you can send your thoughts on the show or just say bonjour. Yes, I went to Paris at our email address. Morning Brew Daily at Morning Brew dot com. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our editor and producer. Samantha Veles and Raymond Liu are associate producers. Yuchenawa Ogu is our technical director. Billy Menino is on audio. We will do everything we can to keep hair and makeup out of the public domain.

25:11Devin Emery is our chief content officer, and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show today, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow.