"Winnie the Pooh" and "The Sun Also Rises" are going public.
A.A. Milne's beloved children's book and Ernest Hemingway's classic novel, along with films starring Buster Keaton and Greta Garbo are among the works from 1926 whose copyrights will expire Saturday, putting them in the public domain as the calendar flips to 2022.
Poetry collections "The Weary Blues" by Langston Hughes and "Enough Rope" by Dorothy Parker will also turn 95 and enter the public domain under U.S. law.
The silent films "Battling Butler" starring and directed by Buster Keaton, "The Temptress" starring Greta Garbo, "The Son of the Sheik" starring Rudolph Valentino, and "For Heaven's Sake" starring Harold Lloyd are also becoming public property.
And under 2018 legislation by Congress, sound recordings from the earliest area of electronic audio will become available.
Copyright experts at Duke University estimate that some 400,000 sound recordings from before 1923 will become available for public use, including music from Ethel Waters, Mamie Smith, Enrico Caruso and Fanny Brice.
Once a work enters the public domain it can legally be shared, performed, reused, repurposed or sampled without permission or cost.
The long U.S. copyright period adopted in recent decades has meant that many works that would now become available have long since been lost, because they were not profitable to maintain by the legal owners, but couldn't be used by others.
"The fact that works from 1926 are legally available does not mean they are actually available," Jennifer Jenkins, director of Duke's Center for the Study of the Public Domain, said in a post celebrating Saturday's "Public Domain Day." "After 95 years, many of these works are already lost or literally disintegrating (as with old films and recordings), evidence of what long copyright terms do to the conservation of cultural artifacts."
Amazon’s $4 billion partnership with AI startup Anthropic gets UK competition clearance
Britain's competition watchdog said Friday that it's clearing Amazon's partnership with artificial intelligence company Anthropic because the $4 billion deal didn't qualify for further scrutiny.
The Competition and Markets Authority approval comes after it started looking into the deal, part of wider global scrutiny for the wave of investment from Big Tech companies into leading startups working on generative AI technology.
The watchdog found that San Francisco-based Anthropic's revenue and its combined market share with Amazon in Britain were not big enough to require an in-depth investigation under the country's merger rules.
"We welcome the UK's Competition and Markets Authority decision acknowledging its lack of jurisdiction regarding this collaboration," Amazon said in a statement. "By investing in Anthropic, we're helping to spur entry and competition in generative AI."
Under the deal, Anthropic is using Amazon Web Services as its primary cloud provider and Amazon's custom chips to build, train and deploy its AI models.
The British regulator has previously cleared Microsoft's partnership with French startup Mistral AI as well as its hiring of key staff from another startup, Inflection AI.
The watchdog is still scrutinizing a partnership between Anthropic and Google. Anthropic was founded in 2021 by siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, who previously worked at ChatGPT maker OpenAI. The company has focused heavily on increasing the safety and reliability of AI models.
The AI deals are also facing scrutiny across the Atlantic, where the Federal Trade Commission is looking into whether they're helping tech giants gain an unfair advantage in the booming market for AI services.
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