🌐️ Public Domain

Minding The Mouse

Mickey Mouse has a new title: resident of the public domain.

OK, yes, it's a bit more complicated than that, but let's begin with the basics: On January 1, the clock ran out on Disney's copyright protections for its 1928 cartoon Steamboat Willie. That short film marked the very first appearance of Mickey Mouse, and thus, as the ball dropped over Times Square, so did the entertainment goliath's claims over the mouse. That's everything, right? Well, as The Verge explains, the Steamboat Willie version of Mickey is now fair use, but it "doesn’t include significant design changes made in later works, like Sorcerer’s Apprentice Mickey from Fantasia in 1940." Moreover, Disney still holds a trademark on Mickey, so it's still not lawful to use him in a bid to falsely represent merchandise or content as Disney.

And Disney is notorious for its legal crusade to keep Mickey—and much else in the magic kingdom—under tight copyright protections. "Disney pushed for the law that extended the copyright term to 95 years, which became referred to derisively as the 'Mickey Mouse Protection Act,'" explains Jennifer Jenkins, Director of the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain. "This extension has been criticized by scholars as being economically regressive and having a devastating effect on our ability to digitize, archive, and gain access to our cultural heritage. It locked up not just famous works, but a vast swath of our culture, including material that is commercially unavailable." As Jenkins adds, the irony is that Disney has also massively benefited from works in the public domain as classic fairytales are the bedrock of so many of DIsney's blockbusters from Frozen to Snow White to Lion King.

With the copyright expired, movies and video games and other content containing Mickey Mouse is already making its way into the world. A horror film called Mickey's Mouse Trap, in which a killer dressed in a Mickey Mouse mask goes on a rampage, released its trailer on January 1. As did a trailer for a first-person shooter video game called Mouse that stars, you guessed it, a certain white-gloved mouse.

Clash of the Superheroes

Since acquiring Marvel Entertainment for $4 billion in 2009, Disney has gone to great lengths to protect its new IP. Well, "new". As the New York Times notes, in 2021, Disney filed a slew of lawsuits aiming into invalidate copyright termination notices tied to Marvel characters like Iron Man, Spiderman, Blade, Captain Marvel, and Thor. The notices were served by IP lawyer Marc Toberoff representing five clients who were artists and writers involved in creating these 1960s-era Marvel characters. "The reclamation attempts stem from a provision of copyright law that, under certain conditions, allows authors or their heirs to regain ownership of a product after a given number of years," continues the Times. "Such efforts turn on whether authors worked as hired hands or produced the material on their own and then sold it to publishers. The Copyright Revision Act of 1976, which opened the door to termination attempts, bans termination for people who delivered work at the “instance and expense” of an employer." Of course, Disney claims these termination notices are bogus as all the artists were hired hands for Marvel, and thus blocked from such claims. Last month, Disney settled with one of the artists' estates for an undisclosed amount.

THE VERDICT:

After nearly a century of keeping its entire kingdom under legal lock-and-key, Disney is finally seeing one of its foundational pieces of IP enter the public domain. Will it be a doomsday scenario for the studio, or more of a non-event? And how will this reshape Disney’s copyright fights that have put a chokehold on creators for decades?

🤖 Artificial intelligence

M&A and AI

Want to have cutting-edge, proprietary AI systems but don't want to put in all that work to build it? Do the next best thing: buy it. And that mentality just might drive a renewed M&A boom in 2024, according to insurance services firm Willis Towers Watson.

"Although dealmakers have expressed reservations about AI, companies are increasingly directing their attention and resources toward AI-based businesses," the report says. “Deal success, however, will also depend on the buyer’s ability to build a culture that supports innovation with AI and its power to enhance the employee experience.”

It's an enticing claim, given that M&A activity has suffered since setting a record in 2021 with over $4.6 trillion in annual deal value. Activity fell 32% in 2022, then another 41% in 2023, as rising interest rates and a shifting economy froze deals, concludes WilmerHale in their latest findings on M&As.

But AI is turning it all around. "The average enterprise that we're talking to is seeing 15-20 potential use cases [for AI] within their company, and that's why we think it's going to be 8-10% of budgets", Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities told CNBC this week.

And as law firms pick up more M&A work, firms themselves are combining. Numbers crunched by Fairfax Associates showed that 48 such mergers were completed in 2023—an increase from the previous year. "It's not that [law] firms are running out of options," Kent Zimmermann, of the consulting firm Zeughauser Group, told Reuters. "It's that firms need to make their way into the world of the possible, weigh their options and pick the ones that will produce the most value."

The Era of Layoffs

2023 was a year of layoffs in the legal world—especially in Silicon Valley, where a sharp decrease in start-up activity and IPOs led to firms trimming staff. Marcie Borgal Shunk, a law firm consultant, told Law.com that layoffs may just be part of business as usual now: “I’ve seen more than one firm expand head count to support a reactive stance, then pull back once a more strategic approach is deployed, including technology, outsourcing and a proactive approach to growing the business; or, to use layoffs as a tool to modernize operations."  But when the site polled associates and other staff about cuts, reasoning was placed between two other factors: "Of those who answered 'yes,' 40% said the reason given for the layoffs was that their firms had overhired during the pandemic and were now over capacity as demand slowed. But in open-ended responses, several respondents were skeptical of that notion. 'Firm is saying we have too much headcount, but we all know this is to ensure partner comp remains unaffected,' one respondent said."

THE VERDICT:

It seems AI is already fueling a huge stock market rally, and gearing up to revolutionize most areas of the economy. Sure, we might only be in the first inning of things, but it seems clear that for firms trying to catch up, mergers and acquisitions may be the fastest, easiest, and cheapest way to do so. Of course, that will fuel plenty of law firms for years to come.