Washington Post cartoonist quits after paper rejects sketch of Bezos bowing to Trump; Associated Press (AP) via Washington Post, January 4, 2025

 Todd Richmond | AP via Washington Post; Washington Post cartoonist quits after paper rejects sketch of Bezos bowing to Trump

[Kip Currier: Note that this story posted at 8:08 PM EST January 4, 2025 on the Washington Post website is written by an Associated Press (AP) reporter, not a Washington Post reporter. I have not yet located an article or OpEd piece written by a Washington Post staff person that addresses the Ann Telnaes editorial cartoon controversy, other than the Substack article by Ann Telnaes explaining her resignation.

• When and how will the Washington Post cover this story, and even more importantly, the implications for free presses, access to information, free expression, and democracy?
• Where are the Washington Post OpEd pieces about these issues by internal commentators like Eugene Robinson, Jennifer Rubin, Eric Wemple, etc.?
• Will there be no coverage by the newspaper itself that killed Ann Telnaes' draft cartoon?

The Washington Post's tagline "Democracy Dies in Darkness" is fast becoming an ironic commentary on its own ethical lapses in timely and fulsome reporting, transparency, accountability, and journalistic integrity.]

[Excerpt]

"A cartoonist has decided to quit her job at the Washington Post after an editor rejected her sketch of the newspaper’s owner and other media executives bowing before President-elect Donald Trump.

Ann Telnaes posted a message Friday on the online platform Substack saying that she drew a cartoon showing a group of media executives bowing before Trump while offering him bags of money, including Post owner and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

Telnaes wrote that the cartoon was intended to criticize “billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump.” Several executives, Bezos among them, have been spotted at Trump’s Florida club Mar-a-Lago. She accused them of having lucrative government contracts and working to eliminate regulations."

A Pulitzer winner quits 'Washington Post' after a cartoon on Bezos is killed; NPR, January 4, 2025

David Folkenflik, NPR; A Pulitzer winner quits 'Washington Post' after a cartoon on Bezos is killed

[Kip Currier: Every day, U.S. oligarchs like Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos and Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong feel more emboldened to cravenly censor criticism of themselves and impede freedom of expression and access to information.

Thank you, Ann Telnaes, for speaking truth to power with your satirical artistry and standing up for the importance of free and independent presses with your principled resignation decision. As the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist underscored in explaining her resignation, "Democracy can't function without a free press".

The evidence is now even more clear than one year or a decade ago: Consolidation of ownership of print journalism and broadcast media by a few billionaires and corporate conglomerates chills the ability to dissent and provide access to diverse perspectives. 

The diagnosis and ramifications are also clear: Having a handful of oligarchs control America's newspapers is antithetical to well-informed citizenries and healthy democracies. (See here for a prescient 2017 article by veteran journalist and free speech/free press advocate Bill Moyers.)

Potential remedies? It's absolutely imperative that free speech-supporting Americans develop and nurture alternative ways to promote access to information and freedom of expression, as is increasingly being done on substack accounts (see examples here, and here, and here) and via podcasts.

In the longer term, collaborative trusts (see here, for example) that can purchase newspapers and share ownership among more than one individual offer some potential ways to challenge oligarch newspaper monopolies.]

[Excerpt]

"A Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist for the Washington Post has resigned after its editorial page editor rejected a cartoon she created to mock media and tech titans abasing themselves before President-elect Donald Trump.

Among the corporate chiefs depicted by Ann Telnaes was Amazon founder and Post owner Jeff Bezos. The episode follows Bezos' decision in October to block publication of a planned endorsement of Vice President Harris over Trump in the waning days of last year's presidential elections.

The inspiration for Telnaes' latest proposed cartoon was the trek by top tech chief executives including Bezos to Trump's Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, as well as the seven-figure contributions several promised to make toward his inauguration. She submitted a sketch before Christmas. It was never published."

Wicked and the Importance of the Public Domain; Reason, January 1, 2025

JOE LANCASTER , Reason; Wicked and the Importance of the Public Domain

"But at the moment there is perhaps no better testament to the importance of the public domain than Wicked."

Florida Sports Blog Hit With Copyright Case; Law360, January 3, 2025

 Andrew Karen, Law360; Florida Sports Blog Hit With Copyright Case

"A Boca Raton, Florida-based sports blog is facing a copyright case from a New York photographer after including an image in a post about the history of the Sports Illustrated brand..."

U.S. Copyright Office to Begin Issuing Further AI Guidance in January 2025; The National Law Review, January 2, 2025

 John Hines of The Sedona Conference  , The National Law Review; U.S. Copyright Office to Begin Issuing Further AI Guidance in January 2025

"Parts 2 and 3, which have not yet been released, will be of heightened interest to content creators and to individuals and businesses involved in developing and deploying AI technologies. Ultimate regulatory and legislative determinations could materially recalibrate the scope of ownership and protection afforded to works of authorship, and the stakes are extremely high...

Part 2 of the report, which the Copyright Office expects to publish “after the New Year Holiday,” will address the copyrightability of AI-generated works, and more specifically, how the nature and degree of such use affects copyrightability and registrability. Current law is clear that to be copyrightable, a work must be created by a human. E.g., Thaler v. Perlmutter, 678 F.Supp. 140 (D.DC 2023), on appeal. However assistive tools are used in virtually all creation, from pencils to cameras to photo-editing software programs. In the context of registrability, the Copyright Office offered the following distinction in its March 2023 guidance: “[W]hether the ‘work’ is basically one of human authorship, with the computer [or other device] merely being an assisting instrument, or whether the traditional elements of authorship in the work (literary, artistic, or musical expression or elements of selection, arrangement, etc.) were actually conceived and executed not by man but by a machine.” In Part 2, the Copyright Office will have an additional opportunity to explore these and related issues – this time with the advantage of the many comments offered through the Notice of Inquiry process.

Part 3 of the report, which the Copyright Office anticipates releasing “in the first quarter of 2025,” will focus on issues associated with training data. AI models, depending on their size and scope, may train on millions of documents—many of which are copyrighted or copyrightable— acquired from the Internet or through acquisition of various robust databases. Users of “trained” AI technologies will typically input written prompts to generate written content or images, depending on the model (Sora is now available to generate video). The output is essentially a prediction based on a correlation of values in the model (extracted from the training data) and values that are derived from the user prompts.

Numerous lawsuits, perhaps most notably the case that The New York Times filed against Microsoft and OpenAI, have alleged that the use of data to train AI models constitutes copyright infringement. In many cases there may be little question of copying in the course of uploading data to train the models. Among a variety of issues, a core common issue will be whether the use of the data for training purposes is fair use. Content creators, of course, point to the fact that they have built their livelihoods and/or businesses around their creations and that they should be compensated for what is a violation of their exclusive rights."

POPEYE, ‘THE SKELETON DANCE,’ AND ‘SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN’ ENTER THE PUBLIC DOMAIN; Rolling Stone, January 1, 2025

DANIEL KREPS, Rolling Stone ; POPEYE, ‘THE SKELETON DANCE,’ AND ‘SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN’ ENTER THE PUBLIC DOMAIN

"The first iteration of Popeye the Sailor, literary classics by Dashiell Hammett and William Faulkner, Alfred Hitchcock’s first sound film, and songs like “Singin’ in the Rain” and “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” are among the copyrighted works that will enter the public domain on Jan. 1.

 

As the calendar turns on New Year’s Day, thousands of copyrighted works across literature, film, and music from 1929 become open to fair use. This year’s slate also includes the French comic icon Tintin, Disney’s still-iconic The Skeleton Dance short (38 million views on YouTube!), Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, and the first English translation of All Quiet on the Western Front (the original German text became public domain last year).

Jennifer Jenkins, the director of Duke Law School’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, documents each year’s Public Domain Day highlights on the center’s website.

 

“For copyrighted culture, the public domain arrives only after a long wait,” Jenkins wrote of the 2025 entrants. “Works from 1929 were first set to go into the public domain after a 56-year term in 1985, but a term extension pushed that date to 2005. They were then supposed to go into the public domain in 2005 after being copyrighted for 75 years. But before this could happen, Congress hit another 20-year pause button and extended their copyright term to 95 years. Now the wait is over.” (For sound recordings, the copyright term is 100 years.) 

Public Domain Day in 2024 was highlighted by the arrival of Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse, as the first iteration of those characters — as featured in the 1928 short Steamboat Willie — became free to use."