Andrew Limbong, NPR; Book distributor shutting down deals logistical blow to libraries
"Baker and Taylor is one of very few companies that do book-distribution for libraries — companies that act as the middle man between libraries and publishers. But a few months ago, the company abruptly announced it was shutting down."
Russ Burlingame, The Beat; Public Domain Day is coming — here’s what you need to know about characters like Betty Boop
As big-name characters enter the public domain, they come with asterisks.
"In just two days, when the calendar tips over into 2026, a number of beloved characters and works of art will lose copyright protection in the United States and enter the public domain. While this means you can print and sell your own versions of The Maltese Falcon and Animal Crackers, what’s arguably more important is the way the public domain fosters future creativity. When a character falls into the public domain, anyone can use them in derivative works, allowing for things like Wicked, featuring L. Frank Baum‘s characters from the world of Oz, or Jim, Percival Everett‘s award-winning novel based on the characters from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, to exist.
Of course, artists wishing to dip into the public domain for inspiration also have to be careful: while “Rover” is public domain, it’s likely Disney will continue to guard any version of Mickey Mouse’s beloved dog that is named Pluto for another year. Early editions of books featuring characters like Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys were sometimes rewritten or updated to reflect changing times, meaning that the version of The Secret of the Old Clock at your local library might still have copyright-protected elements.
In particular, the folks behind Fleischer Studios have signaled a willingness to fight over Betty Boop, who is headlining many of this year’s biggest “Public Domain Day” stories."
Eric Niiler, The New York Times; NASA’s Largest Library Is Closing Amid Staff and Lab Cuts
[Kip Currier: As a life-long space aficionado (as just one example, I fondly recall as a boy my Dad waking me up so I could watch the 1972 Apollo 17 launch that occurred at 12:33 AM) and long-time proponent of libraries, archives, and museums as essential societal institutions and trusted keepers of our history and cultures, seeing this story today was truly stomach-turning.
How shameful and short-sighted for the Trump administration to unilaterally decide to close NASA's largest library. The items within that library's singular collections represent the collective space-faring history and legacy of every person, not just one transitory administration.]
[Excerpt]
"The Trump administration is closing NASA’s largest research library on Friday, a facility that houses tens of thousands of books, documents and journals — many of them not digitized or available anywhere else.
Jacob Richmond, a NASA spokesman, said the agency would review the library holdings over the next 60 days and some material would be stored in a government warehouse while the rest would be tossed away."
Nick Robins-Early and Dara Kerr, The Guardian; Elon Musk’s 2025 recap: how the world’s richest person became its most chaotic
"One of Musk’s final feuds of the year came from a more unusual source – famed 87-year-old author Joyce Carol Oates, whose cutting observation about him on X received more than 5.6m views.
“So curious that such a wealthy man never posts anything that indicates that he enjoys or is even aware of what virtually everyone appreciates – scenes from nature, pet dog or cat, praise for a movie, music, a book (but doubt that he reads); pride in a friend’s or relative’s accomplishment; condolences for someone who has died; pleasure in sports, acclaim for a favorite team; references to history,” Oates posted in November.
A day later, after Musk made a show of enthusiastically replying to several clips of movies on X, he responded to Oates’s critique.
“Oates is a liar and delights in being mean,” Musk posted. “Not a good human.”"
Natallie Rocha, The New York Times; The New Billionaires of the A.I. Boom
"Most are men.
The A.I. boom has elevated mostly male founders to billionaire status, a pattern in tech cycles. Only a few women — such as Ms. Guo and Ms. Murati — have reached that wealth level.
The A.I. craze has amplified the “homogeneity” of those who are part of this boom, Dr. O’Mara said."
Dan Milmo, The Guardian; AI showing signs of self-preservation and humans should be ready to pull plug, says pioneer
"A pioneer of AI has criticised calls to grant the technology rights, warning that it was showing signs of self-preservation and humans should be prepared to pull the plug if needed.
Yoshua Bengio said giving legal status to cutting-edge AIs would be akin to giving citizenship to hostile extraterrestrials, amid fears that advances in the technology were far outpacing the ability to constrain them.
Bengio, chair of a leading international AI safety study, said the growing perception that chatbots were becoming conscious was “going to drive bad decisions”.
The Canadian computer scientist also expressed concern that AI models – the technology that underpins tools like chatbots – were showing signs of self-preservation, such as trying to disable oversight systems. A core concern among AI safety campaigners is that powerful systems could develop the capability to evade guardrails and harm humans."
BARRY SCHINDLER , IP Watchdog; The IP Legislation That Shaped 2025 and Prospects for the New Year
"As 2025 draws to a close, the intellectual property ecosystem faces a wave of transformative changes driven by artificial intelligence (AI) and evolving legislative priorities. From sweeping federal proposals aimed at harmonizing AI governance and overriding state laws, to new copyright and media integrity measures designed to address deepfakes and transparency, and finally to renewed momentum behind patent eligibility and Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) reform, these developments signal a pivotal moment for innovators, rights holders, and policymakers alike. This article explores three critical fronts shaping the future of IP: federal AI legislation and executive preemption, copyright accountability and media integrity, and the year-end outlook for patent reform—each redefining the balance between innovation, protection, and compliance."
Jack Crovitz, The Washington Post; China is using American AI against the U.S. Here’s how to stop it.
"An agent of the Chinese domestic security state recently asked an artificial intelligence model to plan a sophisticated surveillance system targeting the minority Uyghur population. This system would compile police records, real-time transportation data and other information to help the Chinese government track and control Uyghurs. The agent called it a “Warning Model for High-Risk Uyghur Individuals.”
You might assume that the AI model in question was produced by a Chinese lab such as DeepSeek, Zhipu AI or Moonshot AI, all of which cooperate closely with the Chinese government. Yet the model the Chinese Communist Party agent chose to plan this instrument of oppression came not from China but from Silicon Valley. It was OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
OpenAI quickly banned that user from accessing ChatGPT. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.) But this was not the first time the CCP has used American frontier AI models for its authoritarian agenda — and unless the United States acts now to set basic security standards for its AI labs, such exploitation will continue apace. That would be a grave danger to American freedom and security...
American taxpayers and investors are allocating hundreds of billions of dollars to ensure that the U.S. develops the world’s most advanced AI. It would be a catastrophic strategic failure if this investment produces systems that are immediately weaponized by our adversaries to subvert American freedom, prosperity and national security.
America must safeguard its most valuable technology, secure its labs and ensure that U.S. innovation serves U.S. interests."
MICHELLE GOLDBERG, The New York Times ; An Anti-A.I. Movement Is Coming. Which Party Will Lead It?
"I disagree with the anti-immigrant, anti-feminist, bitterly reactionary right-wing pundit Matt Walsh about basically everything, so I was surprised to come across a post of his that precisely sums up my view of artificial intelligence. “We’re sleepwalking into a dystopia that any rational person can see from miles away,” he wrote in November, adding, “Are we really just going to lie down and let AI take everything from us?”
A.I. obviously has beneficial uses, especially medical ones; it may, for example, be better than humans at identifying localized cancers from medical imagery. But the list of things it is ruining is long."
South Bend Tribune; Lilly Endowment backs Notre Dame’s AI ethics framework
"The University of Notre Dame has received the largest private grant in its history.
Lilly Endowment Inc. awarded the university a $50.8 million grant, according to a press release. According to the announcement, the grant will fund the DELTA Network: Faith-Based Ethical Formation for a World of Powerful AI, a project led by the Notre Dame Institute for Ethics and the Common Good (ECG)."
Raz Frohlich, The Times of Israel; A code of ethics for AI in education
"Generative artificial intelligence is transforming every corner of our lives — how we communicate, create, work, and, inevitably, how we teach and learn. As educators, we cannot ignore its power, nor can we embrace it blindly. The rapid pace of AI innovation requires not only technical adaptation, but also deep ethical reflection.
As the largest education provider in Israel, at Israel Sci-Tech Schools (ISTS), we believe that, as AI becomes increasingly present in classrooms, we must ensure that human judgment, accountability, and responsibility remain at the center of education. That is why we are the first in Israel to create a Code of Ethics for Artificial Intelligence in Education. This is not just a policy document but an open invitation for discussion, learning, and shared responsibility across the education system.
This ethical code is not a technical manual, and it does not provide instant answers for daily classroom situations. Instead, it offers a holistic approach — a way of thinking, a framework for educators, students, and policymakers to use AI consciously and responsibly. It asks essential, core-value questions: How do we balance innovation with privacy? How do we ensure equality when access to technology is uneven? How do we maintain transparency when using AI? And when should we pause, reflect, and reconsider how we use AI in the classroom?
To develop the code, we drew from extensive global research and local experience. We consulted with ethicists, educators, technologists, psychologists, and legal experts — and, perhaps most importantly, we listened to students, teachers, and parents. Through roundtable discussions, they shared real concerns and insights about AI’s potential and its pitfalls. Those conversations shaped the code’s seven guiding principles, designed to help schools integrate AI ethically, transparently, and with respect for human dignity."
, The Los Angeles Times; Blondie and Dagwood are entering the public domain, but Betty Boop still may be trapped in copyright jail
"Duke’s Jenkins refers to “the harm of the long term — so many works could have been rediscovered earlier.” Moreover, she says, “so many works don’t make it out of obscurity.” The long consignment to the wilderness thwarts “preservation, access, education, creative reuse, scholarship, etc., when most of the works are out of circulation and not benefiting any rights holders.”
Among other drawbacks, she notes, “films have disintegrated because preservationists can’t digitize them.” Many films from the 1930s are theoretically available to the public domain now, but not really because they’ve been lost forever.
What would be the right length of time? “We could have that same experience after a much shorter term,” Jenkins told me. “Looking back at works from the ‘70s and ‘80s has similar excitement for me.” Economic models, she adds, have placed the optimal term at about 35 years.
It’s proper to note that just because something is scheduled to enter the public domain, that doesn’t mean legal wrangling over its copyright protection is settled.
With recurring characters, for instance, only the version appearing in a given threshold year enters the public domain 95 years later; subsequent alternations or enhancements retain protection until their term is up. That has led to courthouse disputes over just what changes are significant enough to retain copyright for those changes.
“Copyrightable aspects of a character’s evolution that appear in later, still-protected works may remain off-limits until those later works themselves expire,” Los Angeles copyright lawyer Aaron Moss said."
Emily Yahr, The Washington Post; What country stars really think about that AI-generated country ‘hit’
"“Walk My Walk,” a track from an act called Breaking Rust, landed at No. 1 on the magazine’s country digital song sales list. It didn’t take long for journalists to realize that Breaking Rust didn’t appear to be human; Billboard referred to it as a “AI-powered country act,” and one of several “AI artists” on its charts.
“Can listeners tell the difference?” CNN wondered, taking the question to people on the street. “Does it matter?”
It’s an issue that has been roiling the music industry lately, even after years of media consolidation and format changes that had already made it harder for real singers and songwriters to earn a living.
The alarm bells grew louder in 2025 as artificial intelligence became more pervasive, but the Breaking Rust episode was a particular focal point for Nashville anxieties; Tennessee was the first state to sign into law the Elvis Act, which protects singers from their voices being copied by AI."
Adam Nagourney and Neil Vigdor, The New York Times ; New Year’s Eve Concerts at Kennedy Center Are Canceled
[Kip Currier: The principles of integrity and character are unsurprisingly alien to Richard Grenell. Artists are likely canceling Kennedy Center engagements because they don't want to be associated with an administration that has attacked free expression and the diversity of human experience, financially diminished the arts, as well as science, and that has violated federal law by adding Donald Trump's name to an arts organization memorializing our slain 35th President, John F. Kennedy Jr.
Standing up for values one believes in -- values that are bigger than oneself -- is an example of moral courage, not "derangement".]
[Excerpt]
"A veteran jazz ensemble and a New York dance company have canceled events at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, intensifying the fallout at one of the nation’s pre-eminent arts centers after it was renamed to include President Trump...
The Cookers did not give a reason for the decision in a statement on Monday that said, “Jazz was born from struggle and from a relentless insistence on freedom: freedom of thought, of expression, and of the full human voice."...
Doug Varone and Dancers, a New York dance company, also said on Monday that it was canceling two performances in April that had been intended to celebrate its 40th anniversary. Mr. Varone, the head of the company, said it would lose $40,000 by pulling out.
“It is financially devastating but morally exhilarating,” he said in an email.
Richard Grenell, the Kennedy Center’s chairman, said in a statement on Monday night that the artists canceling shows were “far-left political activists” and that they had been booked by previous leadership. “Boycotting the arts to show you support the arts is a form of derangement syndrome,” he said."
George Thuronyi , Library of Congress Blogs: Copyright Creativity at Work; Year in Review: The U.S. Copyright Office
"Shira Perlmutter, Register of Copyrights and Director of the U.S. Copyright Office
As the year draws to a close, I am pleased to recognize an impressive slate of accomplishments at the U.S. Copyright Office. Despite some challenges, including a lengthy government shutdown, the Office continued to produce high-quality work and reliable service to the public—from policy analyses to technology updates; efficient registration, recordation and deposit; and education and outreach. I am grateful for the opportunity to lead such a skilled and dedicated staff.
A central policy focus of the year was further work on the Office’s comprehensive artificial intelligence initiative. In January, we published Part 2 of our report, Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, addressing the copyrightability of works generated using AI. In May, we released a pre-publication version of Part 3, addressing the ingestion of copyrighted works for generative AI training.
A particularly exciting development has been in the area of IT modernization: the launch of more components of the Enterprise Copyright System (ECS). The Office engaged in a successful limited pilot with members of the public of both the eDeposit upload functionality and our most-used registration form, the Standard Application. The development teams are implementing the feedback received, and work has begun on the first ECS group registration application. We also launched the ECS licensing component, which improves the Office’s internal capabilities in administering section 111 of the Copyright Act.
Another ECS component, the new and improved Copyright Public Records System (CPRS), replaced our legacy system as the official Office record in June. More and more pre-1978 historical public records have been digitized and published, with 19,135 copyright record books now available online, amounting to more than 72 percent of the total collection.
The Office also made strides in administration and public service. Our small claims court, the Copyright Claims Board (CCB), completed its third full year, offering a more accessible option for resolving copyright disputes below a certain monetary value. The Office published a rule expediting the process for obtaining a certification of a final determination and initiated a study of the CCB’s operations to be delivered to Congress in 2026.
Our public information and education programs continued to grow. The Office hosted or participated in 190 events and speaking engagements and assisted the public, in both English and Spanish, with responses to 247,484 inquiries in-person and by phone, email, and other communications. We launched a new Registration Toolkit and a Copyright for Kids activity sheet. In September, the Office hosted the International Copyright Institute, our premier weeklong training event for foreign copyright officials, coproduced with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).
This fall, we responded to a Congressional request on issues relating to performance rights organizations (PROs). And earlier in December, we announced a new group registration option for two-dimensional artwork, responding to the needs of visual artists. The Office also has taken forward the periodic review, mandated by the Music Modernization Act, of the mechanical licensing collective (MLC) and digital licensee coordinator (DLC), to be completed in 2026.
On the litigation front, the Office worked with the Department of Justice to develop and articulate positions in copyright-related cases. One major win was an appellate decision affirming the Office’s rejection of an application to register a work claimed to be produced entirely by artificial intelligence. The D.C. Circuit agreed with our view that human authorship is required for copyright protection.
Collaboration with and advising other federal agencies was again a key part of our interagency work in the international arena. This included participating in WIPO meetings on copyright and contributing to the U.S. Trade Representative’s annual Special 301 Report.
Concurrent with all of this activity, the Office’s provision of our regular services continued apace. Despite furloughs during the six-week lapse in appropriations, we issued 415,780 registrations and recorded 12,310 documents containing 5,704,306 works in fiscal year 2025. All the while, we maintained historically low processing times. We also received and transferred 503,389 copyright deposits, worth more than $57.8 million, to Library of Congress collections.
The Copyright Office remains committed to advancing copyright law and policy and supporting stakeholders in the creation and use of works of authorship. The work of the past year demonstrates the value of a resilient institution, grounded in expertise and public service. We look forward to further achievements in 2026."
Isabel Keane, The Independent; Public libraries in Illinois now required to store anti-opioid overdose medications after a series of near-deaths
"A new state law will require all public libraries in Illinois to stock medications that can reverse opioid overdoses after at least one library in the state reported multiple overdoses each year.
The new law, which goes into effect January 1, will require all public libraries in the state to stock opioid overdose reversal drugs and allow trained staff to administer them in the event of a suspected overdose, the Illinois Department of Public Health said earlier this month."
Jonathan Abrams, The New York Times; 8 Ways A.I. Affected Pop Culture in 2025
"A.I.-generated artists topping iTunes and Billboard charts. Podcast hosts speaking fluently for hours in languages they do not know. Dead celebrities brought back to life and filling up social-media feeds.
For years, artificial intelligence was a disruption on the horizon. In 2025 it arrived in tangible ways, big and small. Here are a few examples of how A.I. intersected with pop culture in 2025."
Sal Khan, The New York Times; A 1 Percent Solution to the Looming A.I. Job Apocalypse
"On my way to meet a friend in Silicon Valley a few weeks ago, I passed three self-driving Waymos gliding through traffic. These cars are everywhere now, moving as if they’ve been part of the landscape forever. When I arrived, the wonder of those futuristic cars gave way to a far more troubling glimpse of what lies ahead.
My friend told me that a huge call center in the Philippines — a center his venture capital firm had invested in — had just deployed A.I. agents capable of replacing 80 percent of its work force. The tone in his voice wasn’t triumphant. It was filled with deep discomfort. He knew that thousands of workers depended on those jobs to pay for food, rent and medicine. But they were disappearing overnight. Even worse, over the next few years this could happen across the entire Filipino call center industry, which directly makes up 7 percent to 10 percent of the nation’s G.D.P.
That conversation stayed with me. What’s happening in the Philippines is connected to what’s happening on the streets of San Francisco; Phoenix; Austin, Texas; Atlanta; and Los Angeles — the cities where driverless cars now operate.
I believe artificial intelligence will displace workers at a scale many people don’t yet realize."
Justin Gregg, The Guardian; Could AI relationships actually be good for us?
"There is much anxiety these days about the dangers of human-AI relationships. Reports of suicide and self-harm attributable to interactions with chatbots have understandably made headlines. The phrase “AI psychosis” has been used to describe the plight of people experiencing delusions, paranoia or dissociation after talking to large language models (LLMs). Our collective anxiety has been compounded by studies showing that young people are increasingly embracing the idea of AI relationships; half of teens chat with an AI companion at least a few times a month, with one in three finding conversations with AI “to be as satisfying or more satisfying than those with real‑life friends”.
But we need to pump the brakes on the panic. The dangers are real, but so too are the potential benefits. In fact, there’s an argument to be made that – depending on what future scientific research reveals – AI relationships could actually be a boon for humanity."
"From the advent of AI actress Tilly Norwood to major music labels making deals with AI companies, 2025 has been a watershed year for AI and culture."
Jason Ma, Fortune ; ‘Godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton predicts 2026 will see the technology get even better and gain the ability to ‘replace many other jobs’
"Computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton said artificial intelligence technology will continue improving next year, enough to wipe out more human workers."
John Ruwitch , NPR; Memory loss: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise
"The world has a memory problem, thanks to artificial intelligence.
The explosion in AI-related cloud computing and data centers has led to so much demand for certain types of memory chips that now there's a shortage. The imbalance is expected to start affecting prices of all sorts of products powered by technology...
The chips are known as RAM, or random access memory, and are crucial to making sure that things like smartphones, computers and game consoles run smoothly. Chips allow you to keep multiple tabs open in browsers, for instance, or watch videos without them being choppy...
AI data centers require huge amounts of memory to accompany their cutting-edge graphics processing unit (GPU) microprocessors that train and operate AI models."
Brian Groh, The New York Times; When A.I. Took My Job, I Bought a Chain Saw
"In towns like mine, outsourcing and automation consumed jobs. Then purpose. Then people. Now the same forces are climbing the economic ladder. Yet Washington remains fixated on global competition and growth, as if new work will always appear to replace what’s been lost. Maybe it will. But given A.I.’s rapacity, it seems far more likely that it won’t. If our leaders fail to prepare, the silence that once followed the closing of factory doors will spread through office parks and home offices — and the grief long borne by the working class may soon be borne by us all."
CALDER MCHUGH, Politico; Americans Hate AI. Which Party Will Benefit?
"There is a massive, growing opportunity for Democrats to tap into rising anxiety, fear and anger about the havoc AI could wreak in people’s lives, they say, on issues from energy affordability to large-scale job losses, and channel it toward a populist movement — and not doing it, or not doing it strongly enough, will hurt the party...
There is hardly any issue that polls lower than unchecked AI development among Americans. Gallup polling showed that 80 percent of American adults think the government should regulate AI, even if it means growing more slowly. Pew, meanwhile, ran a study that showed only 17 percent of Americans think AI will have a positive impact on the U.S. over the next 20 years. Even congressional Democrats, at a record low 18 percent approval, beat that out, according to Quinnipiac.
“It’s not just the working class [that’s hurting]. It’s the middle class. It’s the upper middle class,” said Morris Katz, a strategist who has worked with incoming New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner and Nebraska independent Dan Osborn, among others. “We’re really headed towards a point in which it feels like we will all be struggling, except for 12 billionaires hiding out in a wine cave somewhere.”"
John Bowden , The Independent; Bernie Sanders calls for pause in AI development: ‘What are they gonna do when people have no jobs?’
Senator’s warnings come as Trump renews calls to ban states from regulating AI
"“This is the most consequential technology in the history of humanity... There’s not been one single word of serious discussion in Congress about that reality,” said the Vermont senator.
Sanders added that while tech billionaires were pouring money into AI development, they were doing so with the aim of enriching and empowering themselves while ignoring the obvious economic shockwaves that would be caused by the widespread adoption of the technology.
“Elon Musk. [Mark] Zuckerberg. [Jeff] Bezos. Peter Thiel... Do you think they’re staying up nights worrying about working people?” Sanders said. “What are they gonna do when people have no jobs?"
Sonia A. Rao, Christina Morales and , The New York Times; Waymo Suspended Service in San Francisco After Its Cars Stalled During Power Outage
"An hourslong power outage in San Francisco over the weekend that caused tens of thousands of households to lose electricity also knocked out Waymo service, with the ubiquitous self-driving cars coming to a halt at darkened traffic signals, blocking traffic and angering drivers of regular vehicles that became stuck as a result.
The ride-hailing service remained offline Sunday afternoon and tow truck operators said they had been towing Waymos for hours overnight. Social media was littered with videos of the vehicles at blocked intersections with their hazard lights blinking...
Beyond safety, Waymo critics have argued that the self-driving cars could siphon people from public transit ridership and eliminate jobs while simultaneously enriching executives in Silicon Valley."
Elon Danziger, The New York Times; I Asked ChatGPT to Solve an 800-Year-Old Italian Mystery. What Happened Surprised Me.;
"After years of poring over historical documents and reading voraciously, I made an important discovery that was published last year: The baptistery was built not by Florentines but for Florentines — specifically, as part of a collaborative effort led by Pope Gregory VII after his election in 1073. My revelation happened just before the explosion of artificial intelligence into public consciousness, and recently I began to wonder: Could a large language model like ChatGPT, with its vast libraries of knowledge, crack the mystery faster than I did?
So as part of a personal experiment, I tried running three A.I. chatbots — ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini — through different aspects of my investigation. I wanted to see if they could spot the same clues I had found, appreciate their importance and reach the same conclusions I eventually did. But the chatbots failed. Though they were able to parse dense texts for information relevant to the baptistery’s origins, they ultimately couldn’t piece together a wholly new idea. They lacked essential qualities for making discoveries."
