An anonymous reader shared this report from Fortune The large language models (LLMs) that have captivated the world are not a path to human-level intelligence, two AI experts asserted in separate remarks at Davos. Demis Hassabis, the Nobel Prize-winning CEO of Google DeepMind, and the executive who leads the development of Google's Gemini models, said today's AI systems, as impressive as they are, are "nowhere near" human-level artificial general intelligence, or AGI. [Though the artilcle notes that later Hassabis predicted there was a 50% chance AGI might be achieved within the decade.] Yann LeCun — an AI pioneer who won a Turing Award, computer science's most prestigious prize, for his work on neural networks — went further, saying that the LLMs that underpin all of the leading AI models will never be able to achieve humanlike intelligence and that a completely different approach is needed... ["The reason ... LLMs have been so successful is because language is easy," LeCun said later.]

Their views differ starkly from the position asserted by top executives of Google's leading AI rivals, OpenAI and Anthropic, who assert that their AI models are about to rival human intelligence. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, told an audience at Davos that AI models would replace the work of all software developers within a year and would reach "Nobel-level" scientific research in multiple fields within two years. He said 50% of white-collar jobs would disappear within five years. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (who was not at Davos this year) has said we are already beginning to slip past human-level AGI toward "superintelligence," or AI that would be smarter than all humans combined...

The debate over AGI may be somewhat academic for many business leaders. The more pressing question, says Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar, is whether companies can capture the enormous value that AI already offers. According to Cognizant research released ahead of Davos, current AI technology could unlock approximately $4.5 trillion in U.S. labor productivity — if businesses can implement it effectively.

Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from the Guardian: The financial campaigner James Daley has launched a 1.5 billion pound (approximately $1.5 billion) class action lawsuit against Apple over its mobile phone wallet, claiming the U.S. tech company blocked competition and charged hidden fees that ultimately harmed 50 million UK consumers. The lawsuit takes aim at Apple Pay, which they say has been the only contactless payment service available for iPhone users in Britain over the past decade.

Daley, who is the founder of the advocacy group Fairer Finance, claims this situation amounted to anti-competitive behavior and allowed Apple to charge hidden fees, ultimately pushing up costs for banks that passed charges on to consumers, regardless of whether they owned an iPhone. It is the first UK legal challenge to the company's conduct in relation to Apple Pay, and takes place months after regulators like the Competition and Markets Authority and the Payments Systems Regulator began scrutinising the tech industry's digital wallet services. The case has been filed with the Competition Appeal Tribunal, which will now decide whether the class action case can move forward.

[...] Daley's lawsuit alleges that Apple refused to give other app developers and outside businesses access to the contactless payment technology on its iPhones, which meant it could charge banks and card issuers fees on Apple Pay transactions that his lawyers say "are not in line with industry practice." The lawsuit notes that similar fees are not charged on equivalent payments on Android devices, which are built by Google. It says that the additional costs were borne by UK consumers, having been passed on through charges on a range of personal banking products ranging from current accounts, credit cards, to savings and mortgages. The lawsuit says that about 98% of consumers are exposed to banks that listed cards on Apple Pay, meaning the vast majority of the UK population may have been affected.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A niche retirement plan favored by freelancers is quickly becoming a hot Wall Street sales pitch, as more and more Americans look for ways to shelter a bigger chunk of their paychecks from taxes. Known as solo 401(k)s, they allow the self-employed to contribute $72,000 a year into tax-advantaged retirement accounts. That's nearly three times the maximum for typical salaried workers in the US.

While they've existed for decades serving a workforce that often struggled to earn enough to max out those contributions, wealth planners like JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Betterment are now racing to tap into burgeoning demand from a newer, and wealthier cohort: Post-pandemic contractors and self-employed DIY savers looking to shelter more income, grow assets tax-deferred or tax-free, all with the click of a button.

The pitch is simple: Because of a quirk in the tax code, self-employed workers effectively contribute twice to their 401(k)s -- once as an employee on their own behalf and then again as a business owner making matching contributions. The platforms take care of the paperwork and clients get institutional-level tax planning and investment flexibility. More than three-quarters of America's record 36 million small businesses now have just a single employee, the owner. Cerulli Associates projects that total 401(k) plans in the U.S. will surpass 1 million by 2030, and the fastest growth is expected in sub-$5 million "micro" accounts.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Korea Herald: South Korea will begin enforcing its Artificial Intelligence Act on Thursday, becoming the first country to formally establish safety requirements for high-performance, or so-called frontier, AI systems -- a move that sets the country apart in the global regulatory landscape. According to the Ministry of Science and ICT, the new law is designed primarily to foster growth in the domestic AI sector, while also introducing baseline safeguards to address potential risks posed by increasingly powerful AI technologies. Officials described the inclusion of legal safety obligations for frontier AI as a world-first legislative step.

The act lays the groundwork for a national-level AI policy framework. It establishes a central decision-making body -- the Presidential Council on National Artificial Intelligence Strategy -- and creates a legal foundation for an AI Safety Institute that will oversee safety and trust-related assessments. The law also outlines wide-ranging support measures, including research and development, data infrastructure, talent training, startup assistance, and help with overseas expansion.

To reduce the initial burden on businesses, the government plans to implement a grace period of at least one year. During this time, it will not carry out fact-finding investigations or impose administrative sanctions. Instead, the focus will be on consultations and education. A dedicated AI Act support desk will help companies determine whether their systems fall within the law's scope and how to respond accordingly. Officials noted that the grace period may be extended depending on how international standards and market conditions evolve. The law applies to three areas only: high-impact AI, safety obligations for high-performance AI and transparency requirements for generative AI.

Enforcement under the Korean law is intentionally light. It does not impose criminal penalties. Instead, it prioritizes corrective orders for noncompliance, with fines -- capped at 30 million won ($20,300) -- issued only if those orders are ignored. This, the government says, reflects a compliance-oriented approach rather than a punitive one. Transparency obligations for generative AI largely align with those in the EU, but Korea applies them more narrowly. Content that could be mistaken for real, such as deepfake images, video or audio, must clearly disclose its AI-generated origin. For other types of AI-generated content, invisible labeling via metadata is allowed. Personal or noncommercial use of generative AI is excluded from regulation. "This is not about boasting that we are the first in the world," said Kim Kyeong-man, deputy minister of the office of artificial intelligence policy at the ICT ministry. "We're approaching this from the most basic level of global consensus."

Korea's approach differs from the EU by defining "high-performance AI" using technical thresholds like cumulative training compute, rather than regulating based on how AI is used. As a result, Korea believes no current models meet the bar for regulation, while the EU is phasing in broader, use-based AI rules over several years.

Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach on Thursday tried to ease worries that AI is destroying software business models. From a report: "It's an overblown narrative, and it's not true," he told CNBC's "Squawk Box" from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, calling AI a tailwind and "absolutely not a headwind" for the company.

Software stocks have sold off in recent months on concerns that new AI tools will upend the sector and displace longstanding and recurring businesses that once fueled big profits. Workday shares lost 17% last year and have sunk another 15% since the start of 2026.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Meta's Oversight Board is tackling a case focused on Meta's ability to permanently disable user accounts. Permanent bans are a drastic action, locking people out of their profiles, memories, friend connections, and, in the case of creators and businesses, their ability to market and communicate with fans and customers. This is the first time in the organization's five-year history as an oversight body that permanent account bans have been a subject of the Oversight Board's focus, the organization notes.

The case being reviewed isn't exactly one of an everyday user. Instead, the case involves a high-profile Instagram user who repeatedly violated Meta's Community Standards by posting visual threats of violence against a female journalist, anti-gay slurs against politicians, content depicting a sex act, allegations of misconduct against minorities, and more. The account had not accumulated enough strikes to be automatically disabled, but Meta made the decision to permanently ban the account. The Board's materials didn't name the account in question, but its recommendations could impact others who post content that targets public figures with abuse, harassment, and threats, as well as users who have their accounts permanently banned without receiving transparent explanations.

Meta referred this specific case to the Board, which included five posts made in the year before the account was permanently disabled. The Board says it's looking for input about several key issues: how permanent bans can be processed fairly, the effectiveness of its current tools to protect public figures and journalists from repeated abuse and threats of violence, the challenges of identifying off-platform content, whether punitive measures effectively shape online behaviors, and best practices for transparent reporting on account enforcement decisions. [...] Whether the Oversight Board has any real sway to address issues on Meta's platform continues to be debated, of course. [...] After the Oversight Board issues its policy recommendations to Meta, the company has 60 days to respond. The Board is also soliciting public comments on this topic. The report notes that Meta's Oversight Board is able to overturn individual moderation decisions and offer recommendations, but largely sidelined from major policy shifts driven by Mark Zuckerberg.

Rackspace's new pricing for its email hosting services is "devastating," according to a partner that has been using Rackspace as its email provider since 1999. From a report: In recent weeks, Rackspace updated its email hosting pricing. Its standard plan is now $10 per mailbox per month. Businesses can also pay for the Rackspace Email Plus add-on for an extra $2/mailbox/month (for "file storage, mobile sync, Office-compatible apps, and messaging"), and the Archiving add-on for an extra $6/mailbox/month (for unlimited storage).

As recently as November 2025, Rackspace charged $3/mailbox/month for its Standard plan, and an extra $1/mailbox/month for the Email Plus add-on, and an additional $3/mailbox/month for the Archival add-on, according to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Rackspace's reseller partners have been especially vocal about the impacts of the new pricing.

In a blog post on Thursday, web hosting service provider and Rackspace reseller Laughing Squid said Rackspace is "increasing our email pricing by an astronomical 706 percent, with only a month-and-a half's notice." Laughing Squid founder Scott Beale told Ars Technica that he received the "devastating" news via email on Wednesday. The last time Rackspace increased Laughing Squid's email prices was by 55 percent in 2019, he said.

AI still can't produce code as well as most junior programmers he's worked with, David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails and co-founder of 37 Signals, said on a recent podcast [video link], which is why he continues to write most of his code by hand. Hansson compared AI's current coding capabilities to "a flickering light bulb" -- total darkness punctuated by moments of clarity before going pitch black again.

At his company, humans wrote 95% of the code for Fizzy, 37 Signals' Kanban-inspired organization product, he said. The team experimented with AI-powered features, but those ended up on the cutting room floor. "I'm not feeling that we're falling behind at 37 Signals in terms of our ability to produce, in terms of our ability to launch things or improve the products," Hansson said.

Hansson said he remains skeptical of claims that businesses can fire half their programmers and still move faster. Despite his measured skepticism, Hansson said he marvels at the scale of bets the U.S. economy is placing on AI reaching AGI. "The entire American economy right now is one big bet that that's going to happen," he said.

After more than 13 years leading Lucasfilm, Kathleen Kennedy is stepping down. "When George Lucas asked me to take over Lucasfilm upon his retirement, I couldn't have imagined what lay ahead," said Kennedy. "It has been a true privilege to spend more than a decade working alongside the extraordinary talent at Lucasfilm." The Associated Press reports: The Walt Disney Co. announced Thursday that it will now turn to Dave Filoni to steer "Star Wars," as president and chief creative officer, into its sixth decade and beyond. Filoni, who served as the chief commercial officer of Lucasfilm, will inherit the mantle of one of the movies marquee franchises, alongside Lynwen Brennan, president and general manager of Lucasfilm's businesses, who will serve as co-president.

Kennedy, Lucas' handpicked successor, had presided over the ever-expanding science-fiction world of "Star Wars" since Disney acquired it in 2012. In announcing Thursday's news, Bob Iger, chief executive officer of the Walt Disney Co. called her "a visionary filmmaker." Kennedy oversaw a highly lucrative but often contentious period in "Star Wars" history that yielded a blockbuster trilogy and acclaimed streaming spinoffs such as "The Mandalorian" and "Andor," yet found increasing frustration from longtime fans.

Under Kennedy's stewardship, Lucasfilm amassed more than $5.6 billion in box office and helped establish Disney+ as a streaming destination -- achievements that easily validated the $4.05 billion Disney plunked down for the company. But Kennedy also struggled to deliver the big-screen magic that Lucas captured in the original trilogy from the late 1970s and early 1980s, and her relationship with "Star Wars" loyalists became a saga of its own.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos once told an audience that he views local PC hardware the same way he views a 100-year-old electric generator he saw in a brewery museum -- as a relic of a pre-grid era, destined to be replaced by centralized utilities that users simply rent rather than own. The anecdote, shared at a talk a few years ago, positioned Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure as the inevitable successors to the desktop tower. Bezos argued that users would eventually abandon local computing for cloud-based solutions, much as businesses once abandoned on-site power generation for the electrical grid.

Current market dynamics have made that prediction feel more plausible. DRAM prices have become increasingly untenable for consumers, and companies like Dell and ASUS have signaled price increases across their PC ranges. Micron has shut down its consumer DRAM operations entirely, prioritizing AI datacenter demand instead. SSD storage is expected to face similar constraints. Cloud gaming services from Amazon Luna, NVIDIA GeForce Now and Xbox are seeing steady growth.

Microsoft previously developed a consumer version of its business-grade Windows 365 cloud PC product, though the company deprioritized it -- the economics didn't work when cheap laptops remained available. That calculus could shift. Xbox Game Pass's 1440p cloud gaming runs $30 monthly and NVIDIA recently imposed a 100-hour cap on its cloud platform. The infrastructure remains expensive to operate, but rising local hardware costs may eventually close that gap.

After spending years pushing digital payments to combat tax evasion and money laundering, European Union ministers decided in December to ban businesses from refusing cash. The reversal comes as 12% of European businesses flatly refused cash in 2024, up from 4% three years earlier.

Over one in three cinemas in the Netherlands no longer accept notes and coins. Cash usage across the euro area dropped from 79% of in-person transactions in 2016 to just 52% in 2024. Sweden leads the digital shift where 90% of purchases now happen digitally and cash represents under 1% of GDP compared to 22% in Japan.

The policy change stems from concerns about financial inclusion for elderly and poor populations who struggle with digital systems. Resilience worries also drove the decision after Spaniards facing nationwide power cuts last spring found themselves unable to buy food. European officials worry about dependence on American payment giants Visa and MasterCard. The EU now recommends citizens store enough cash to survive a week without electricity or internet access.

Electric vehicles are more likely to be fixed at the roadside than petrol or diesel cars despite public fears to the contrary, according to new breakdown data from the AA. From a report: New research from Autotrader and the AA, carried out in December among more than 2,000 consumers, found 44% of respondents are concerned about the risk of breakdowns or roadside repairs when considering switching to an EV. Concern was highest among drivers aged 75 and over, with 56% saying they were worried.

The North East recorded the highest level of concern at 52%, while women were slightly more likely to express reservations than men - 46% versus 41%. Even so, AA call-out data indicates EVs are more likely to be successfully repaired at the roadside than a 12-volt battery in a petrol or diesel car.

Separately, industry data continues to indicate growing readiness to service electric cars. A recent Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) survey of aftermarket businesses found 81.2% of UK workshops are already equipped to work on EVs, according to the campaign partners.

JPMorgan Chase's chief financial officer Jeremy Barnum pushed back hard on Tuesday against President Donald Trump's proposed 10% cap on credit card interest rates, calling the measure "very bad for consumers" and "very bad for the economy" during a call with reporters.

The proposed one-year cap, which Trump has said he wants implemented starting January 20, sent banking stocks tumbling last week and prompted financial groups to mount a defense. Barnum said JPMorgan would have to "change the business significantly and cut back" if the cap takes effect, adding that he believes the policy would produce "the exact opposite consequence to what the administration wants."

Wall Street analysts remain skeptical the proposal will survive, noting that only Congress can enact such a measure. The average credit card interest rate in November stood at 20.97%, according to Federal Reserve data. Financial industry groups have countered that a 10% cap would result in millions of American households and small businesses losing access to credit entirely. A banking industry body called the potential impact "devastating."

Ubisoft announced Wednesday it will close its studio in Halifax, Nova Scotia — two weeks after 74% of its staff voted to unionize.

This means laying off the 71 people at the studio, reports the gaming news site Aftermath: [Communications Workers of America's Canadian affiliate, CWA Canada] said in a statement to Aftermath the union will "pursue every legal recourse to ensure that the rights of these workers are respected and not infringed in any way." The union said in a news release that it's illegal in Canada for companies to close businesses because of unionization. That's not necessarily what happened here, according to the news release, but the union is "demanding information from Ubisoft about the reason for the sudden decision to close."

"We will be looking for Ubisoft to show us that this had nothing to do with the employees joining a union," former Ubisoft Halifax programmer and bargaining committee member Jon Huffman said in a statement. "The workers, their families, the people of Nova Scotia, and all of us who love video games made in Canada, deserve nothing less...."

Before joining Ubisoft, the studio was best known for its work on the Rocksmith franchise; under Ubisoft, it focused squarely on mobile games.

Ubisoft Halifax was quickly removed from the Ubisoft website on Wednesday...

Bloomberg reports on Amazon listings "automatically generated by an experimental AI tool" for stores that don't sell on Amazon.

Bloomberg notes that the listings "didn't always correspond to the correct product", leaving the stores to handle the complaints from angry customers: Between the Christmas and New Year holidays, small shop owners and artisans who had found their products listed on Amazon took to social media to compare notes and warn their peers... In interviews, six small shop owners said they found themselves unwittingly selling their products on Amazon's digital marketplace. Some, especially those who deliberately avoided Amazon, said they should have been asked for their consent. Others said it was ironic that Amazon was scouring the web for products with AI tools despite suing Perplexity AI Inc.for using similar technology to buy products on Amazon... Some retailers say the listings displayed the wrong product image or mistakenly showed wholesale pricing. Users of Shopify Inc.'s e-commerce tools said the system flagged Amazon's automated purchases as potentially fraudulent...

In a statement, Amazon spokesperson Maxine Tagay said sellers are free to opt out. Two Amazon initiatives — Shop Direct, which links out to make purchases on other retailers' sites, and Buy For Me, which duplicates listings and handles purchases without leaving Amazon — "are programs we're testing that help customers discover brands and products not currently sold in Amazon's store, while helping businessesâreach new customers and drive incremental sales," she said in an emailed statement. "We have received positive feedback on these programs." Tagay didn't say why the sellers were enrolled without notifying them. She added that the Buy For Me selection features more than 500,000 items, up from about 65,000 at launch in April.
The article includes quotes from the owners of affected businesses.

• A one-person company complained that "If suddenly there were 100 orders, I couldn't necessarily manage. When someone takes your proprietary, copyrighted works, I should be asked about that. This is my business. It's not their business."

• One business owner said "I just don't want my products on there... It's like if Airbnb showed up and tried to put your house on the market without your permission."

• One business owner complained "When things started to go wrong, there was no system set up by Amazon to resolve it. It's just 'We set this up for you, you should be grateful, you fix it.'" One Amazon representative even suggested they try opening a $39-a-month Amazon seller account.

The promise of AI-powered workplace tools that sort emails, take meeting notes, and file expense reports is finally delivering meaningful productivity gains -- one software startup reported a 20% boost around mid-2025 -- but companies are discovering an unexpected tradeoff: employees are burning out from the relentless pace of high-level cognitive work.

Roger Kirkness, CEO of 14-person software startup Convictional, noticed that after AI took the scut work off his team's plates, their days became consumed by intensive thinking, and they were mentally exhausted and unproductive by Friday. The company transitioned to a four-day workweek; the same amount of work gets done, Kirkness says.

The underlying problem, according to Boston College economist and sociologist Juliet Schor, is that businesses tend to simply reallocate the time AI saves. Workers who once mentally downshifted for tasks like data entry are now expected to maintain intense focus through longer stretches of data analysis. "If you just make people work at a high-intensity pace with no breaks, you risk crowding out creativity," Schor says.

Vietnam will begin enforcing new online advertising rules in February 2026 that ban forced video ads longer than five seconds and must allow users to close ads with just one tap. "Furthermore, platforms must provide clear icons and instructions for users to report advertisements that violate the law, and allow them to opt out, turn off, or stop viewing inappropriate ads," reports a local news outlet (translated to English). "These reports must be received and processed promptly, and the results communicated to users as required." From the report: In cases where the entity posting the infringing advertisement cannot be identified or where specialized laws do not have specific regulations, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism is the focal agency to receive notifications and send requests to block or remove the advertisement to organizations and businesses providing online advertising services in Vietnam.

Advertisers, advertising service providers, and advertising transmission and distribution units are responsible for blocking and removing infringing advertisements within 24 hours of receiving a request from the competent authority. For advertisements that infringe on national security, the blocking and removal must be carried out immediately, no later than 24 hours.

In case of non-compliance, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, in coordination with the Ministry of Public Security, will apply technical measures to block infringing advertisements and services and handle the matter according to the law. Telecommunications companies and Internet service providers must also implement technical measures to block access to infringing advertisements within 24 hours of receiving a request.

HP this week announced the EliteBoard G1a at CES 2026, a Windows computer built into a full-size 93-key desktop keyboard that the company is marketing to businesses where employees use hot desks and need a portable computing environment they can carry between workstations.

The device connects to a USB-C monitor for both video output and power delivery over a single cable, and HP includes a USB-to-HDMI adapter for displays that lack USB-C input. Inside runs an AMD Ryzen AI 5 or 7 processor paired with AMD Radeon 800 integrated graphics and an NPU capable of up to 50 TOPS, qualifying it as a Copilot+ PC by Microsoft's standards.

The device can be configured with up to 64GB of DDR5 RAM and 2TB of SSD storage. The keyboard weighs between 1.49 and 1.69 pounds depending on configuration and measures 14.1 by 4.7 by 0.7 inches, lighter than most laptops but longer and thicker than some. An optional 32Wh battery offers up to 3.5 hours of unplugged use. The EliteBoard G1a ships in March.

Longtime reader joshuark shares a report: As spotted by Bluesky user DodgerFanLA, going to Office.com now greets you with the following helpful explainer: "The Microsoft 365 Copilot app (formerly Office) lets you create, share, and collaborate all in one place with your favorite apps now including Copilot.*"

Never has an asterisk been more relevant to me than following the words "your favorite apps now including Copilot."

About a decade ago, hardware company Corsair attempted to pivot from its classic logo -- a subtle trio of ship sails -- to a newer, edgier look, a pair of crossed swords that gave off regrettable '2000s tribal tattoo' energy. The rebrand didn't last long: after a fierce outcry from people who correctly thought the new logo sucked, Corsair swapped to a refreshed take on the sail logo, which it's been using ever since. Corsair was established in 1994, and made about $1.4 billion last year -- which I bring up because today Microsoft, a slightly bigger company, has slipped on its own rebranding banana peel. The company is seemingly all but ditching the Office name -- which it introduced four years before Corsair existed, and which drove more than $30 billion in revenue just last quarter -- with a catchy new name: "Microsoft 365 Copilot app."

The company had already downplayed the Office name, despite it being perhaps the most universally recognized software in existence, by renaming its cloud version of Word, Powerpoint, etc. Office 365 in 2010, then Microsoft 365 in 2017. Now when you want to open up a Word document, you can get to them by launching the Microsoft 365 Copilot app. Intuitive!

Should Microsoft just go ahead and rebrand Windows, the only piece of its arsenal more famous than Office, as Copilot, too? I do actually think we're not far off from that happening. Facebook rebranded itself "Meta" when it thought the metaverse would be the next big thing, so it seems just as plausible that Microsoft could name the next version of Windows something like "Windows with Copilot" or just "Windows AI."

Copilot is the app for launching the other apps, but it's also a chatbot inside the apps. Any questions? Correction: Office hasn't been renamed to "Microsoft 365 Copilot app." The Verge adds: The confusion comes from Microsoft's own Office.com domain, which for the past year has acted as a way to push businesses and consumers to use the Microsoft 365 Copilot app. This app is a hub app that provides access to Copilot, as well as all the Office apps. Microsoft used to call this app simply Office, before the company rebranded Office to Microsoft 365 in 2022.

If you visit Office.com you'll see a big welcome to the Microsoft 365 Copilot app, and a note from Microsoft that would confuse anyone not following the company's confusing branding: "The Microsoft 365 Copilot app (formerly Office)..." That mention of "formerly Office" is Microsoft referring to the very old Office app that launched in 2019 as a way to try and convince people to use online versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Until a year ago it used to be called the Microsoft 365 app. Microsoft then announced it was rebranding its Microsoft 365 app in November 2024 to a Copilot one, which I and everyone else were very confused at. The new app icon and name -- Microsoft 365 Copilot -- then rolled out on January 15th last year to Windows, iOS, and Android users.

Here it is — Betty Boop's first appearance, which became public domain on Thursday. It's a 60-second song halfway through a longer cartoon about a restaurant titled Dizzy Dishes. (The first scene makes it clear this is a restaurant of anthropomorphized animals — which explains why the as-yet-unnamed character has floppy dog ears...)

So Fleischer Studios has now warned that claiming Betty Boop is public domain "is actually not true." Very often, different versions of a character that have been developed later can independently enjoy copyright protection. Also, names and depictions of a character very frequently will remain separately protected by trademark and other laws, regardless of whether the copyright has expired.
But is that really true? Fleischer Studios went out of business in 1946, notes Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik: By then it had sold the rights to its cartoons and the Betty Boop character. A new Fleischer Studios was formed in the 1970s by Fleischer descendants, including Max's grandson Mark Fleischer, and set about repurchasing the rights that had been sold. Whether it reacquired the rights to Betty Boop is up for discussion... According to a federal appeals court ruling in 2011, the answer is no. Having navigated its way through the three or four copyright transfers that followed the original rights sale, the appeals court concluded that the original Fleischer studios sold the rights to Betty Boop and the related cartoons to Paramount in 1941 but couldn't verify that the rights to the character had been sold in an unbroken chain placing them with the new studio. The "chain of title" was broken, the appellate judges found — but they didn't say who ended up with Betty Boop.
And last month Cory Doctorow pointed out that "while the Fleischer studio (where Betty Boop was created) renewed the copyright on Dizzy Dishes, there were many other shorts that entered the public domain years ago." That means that all the aspects of Betty Boop that were developed for Dizzy Dishes are about to enter the public domain. But also, all the aspects of Betty Boop from those non-renewed shorts are already in the public domain. But some of the remaining aspects of Betty Boop's character design — those developed in subsequent shorts that were also renewed — are also in the public domain, because they aren't copyrightable in the first place, because they're "generic," or "trivial," constitute "minuscule variations," or be so standard or indispensable as to be a "scène à faire...." But we're not done yet! Just because some later aspects of the Betty Boop character design are still in copyright, it doesn't follow that you aren't allowed to use them! U.S. Copyright law has a broad set "limitations and exceptions," including fair use.
So while Fleischer Studios insists Betty Boop "will continue to enjoy copyright and trademark protection for years to come," Doctorow has some thoughts on that trademark: Even the Supreme Court has (repeatedly) upheld the principle that trademark can't be used as a backdoor to extend copyright.

That's important, because the current Betty Boop license-holders have been sending out baseless legal threats claiming that their trademarks over Betty Boop mean that she's not going into the public domain. They're not the only ones, either! This is a routine, petty scam perpetrated by marketing companies that have scooped up the (usually confused and difficult-to-verify) title to cultural icons and then gone into business extracting rent from people and businesses who want to make new works with them.
"Trademarks only prevent you from using character names and depictions in a way that misleads consumers into thinking your work is produced or sponsored by the rightsholder," Duke University clarified in their January 1st explanation of Public Domain Day 2026 — "for example, by putting them on unlicensed merchandise. They do not prevent you from using them in a new creative work clearly unaffiliated with the rights owners..."

"Regardless of who owns the later versions of the character, the original Betty Boop character from 1930 is in the public domain." This is another reason why copyright expiration is so important: It brings clarity... Under US copyright law, anyone is free to use characters as they appeared in public domain works. If those characters recur in later works that are still under copyright, the rights only extend to the newly added material in those works, not the underlying material from the public domain works — that content remains freely available. Second, with newer versions of characters, copyright only extends to those new features that qualify for such protection...

Dozens of post-1930 Betty Boop cartoons, including Ker-Choo (1932) and Poor Cinderella (1934), did not have renewals. The newly added material in these animations is also in the public domain... To sum up the copyright story so far: in 2026, the underlying Betty Boop character goes into the public domain. She is joined there by the attributes, plot lines, and dialogue that were first introduced in those later cartoons without renewed copyrights, as well as the uncopyrightable attributes of her later instantiations...

Certainly, there would be a risk of consumer confusion if you use Betty Boop as a brand identifier on the kind of merchandise Fleischer sells — jewelry, back packs, water bottles, dolls. Trademark law does protect Fleischer against that risk. Contrast these uses with simply putting the Boop character in a new artistic work. This is exactly what copyright expiration is intended to allow. Were trademark law to prevent this, then trademark rights would be leveraged to obtain the effective equivalent of a perpetual copyright — precisely what the Supreme Court said we cannot do...

If courts have delineated the line between copyright and trademark, why is there so little clarity in this area? Sadly, companies sometimes claim to have more expansive rights than they actually do, capitalizing on fear, uncertainty, and doubt to collect royalties and licensing fees to which they are not legally entitled.