Fast Company

Learn more about the Schrödinger’s Cat of the public domain: We may never know what’s in the box.

The headlines on Tuesday and Wednesday blared, “Happy Birthday found to be in the public domain.” Unfortunately and confusingly, they were incorrect. A judge’s ruling in a suit filed two years against the ostensible current rights holders for the lyrics to that song, Warner-Chappell Music, didn’t decide that. Instead, the judge found that Warner-Chappell lacked valid rights to the lyrics, whether or not they remained under copyright protection, even as it collected fees to the tune of $2 million a year.

Read Full Story

The show was born from short film Random Stop, about the killing of a sheriff. Are viewers ready for such visceral storytelling?

Last summer, filmmaker Ben Arfmann put viewers into the driver’s seat of a routine traffic stop that went horribly wrong in Random Stop. A short film with an intimately fixed point of view, it told the story of the murder of Georgia sheriff’s deputy Kyle Dinkheller by “disturbed Vietnam veteran” Andrew Howard Brannan. A Staff Pick on Vimeo, the short caught the attention of producers at the History Channel, who contacted Arfmann about developing an original fixed point-of-view series.

Read Full Story

We have met the pizza rat, and he is us.

The internet was captivated yesterday by a video of a rat, headed home to Queens for some trashbags & chill with bae, trying to carry a whole slice of pizza onto the L train platform. Only fourteen seconds long, the video is nonetheless a masterpiece; a titanic struggle between the great American archetypes “vermin” and “unhealthy food”; a roller coaster of optimism, loss, defeat, and new hope, played out against a backdrop of authentic New York filth. It ends on an ambiguous note, the rat eyeing the pizza with… longing? Determination? Despair? It is impossible to say. Either way, the struggle itself is enough to fill a person’s heart. One must imagine pizza rat happy.

Read Full Story

After Transparent swept the Emmys, Amazon is offering a Prime discount.

Amazon is using its original show Transparent‘s sweep at the Emmys to offer sharply discounted Amazon Prime memberships. On September 25, Prime memberships will cost only $67. This is one-third off the normal $99 subscription fee for the service.

Read Full Story

The move comes after former CMO Beth Comstock was recently bumped up to vice chair.

GE just named Linda Boff its new chief marketing officer.

Read Full Story

More than 75% of Instagram’s users come from outside the United States.

Instagram just released its latest user numbers, and there’s big news for the global market: 75% of users of the Facebook-owned social network come from outside the United States. According to the company, more than half of the last 100 million users to sign up for the service come from Europe and Asia. Instagram added that Brazil, Japan, and Indonesia are among the countries that added the most users to the service.

Read Full Story

Popular crowdsourcing platform Quirky is cutting its losses and giving up ownership of Wink.

Quirky, the popular crowdsourced invention platform, is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and selling Wink, its subsidiary specializing in connected home products. According to a Wink blog post, the electronics manufacturing firm Flextronics is likely its new corporate parent. Although Wink did not disclose any numbers, Flextronics is allegedly offering $15 million to acquire the company.

Read Full Story

Everyone wants to learn online, but startups are trying to figure out how to get users to pay the bills.

A few years ago, MOOCs—massive open online courses—were all the rage. Publications, Fast Company among them, wrote about new startups like Coursera, EdX, and Udacity that offered the promise of free learning and professional development to anyone in the world who wanted them. However, in 2015, many of these companies and their compatriots in the edutech space as a whole discovered an unfortunate truth: It’s damn hard to make money from MOOCs.

Read Full Story

As Empire, Fox’s high-octane smash, returns for its second season, creator and executive producer Lee Daniels explains why the show resonates with viewers and what’s happening below the surface.

Fast Company: Empire‘s first-season finale in March was the highest-rated for a new series in the past 10 years. How do you approach writing a show that has connected with so many people?

Read Full Story

Looking for a raise? No surprise that people in tech jobs saw their salaries increase this year, but so did baristas, cooks, and cashiers.

Even though the annual review has come under attack for its inability to affect positive change, the yearly sit-down is often accompanied by a salary increase at most companies, if the employee merits a pay bump.

Read Full Story