Journal

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.

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The film showcases the Clinton Global Initiative’s efforts in solar power, hearing aids, and girls’ education in Africa.

Two days ago, I found myself facing Bill Clinton, listening to the former U.S. president talk passionately about the work he and his foundation, the Clinton Global Initiative, have been doing in Africa.

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He’s probably going to want a beer.

Can you believe pizza rat, David Cameron‘s swine fever, and Martin Shkreli all happened in just one week? Future Tabs historians will surely point to September 21-25, 2015, as one of the greatest weeks of all time for tabs content. But were you paying attention? And more importantly, how bored are you this Friday afternoon? Take the quiz, and find out.

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Marketers, rejoice! Twitter is toying with a feature that will let you embed polls in tweets.

Twitter is testing out a new feature: allowing users to embed polls into tweets. Twitter employees and those with verified accounts—Twitter users marked with those fancy blue checkmarks—are now able to embed simple two-question polls into their messages. It appears to be still under development, and is currently only available to select users.

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Volkswagen’s emissions fraud has big repercussions for the auto industry.

Hot on the heels of the Environmental Protection Agency discovering that Volkswagen secretly installed software that gave falsified emissions data from cars, the EPA says it’s ramping up its checks. In a public statement, the EPA told media and automobile companies it is expanding testing of cars as a result of the Volkswagen case.

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Presidents Obama and Xi Jinping have agreed on common standards for cybertheft and economic espionage online.

The United States and China have moved a little bit closer to a joint understanding on cybersecurity, cyberwar, and the ongoing theft of proprietary trade secrets via hacking. In a meeting at the White House today, President Obama and Xi Jinping of China announced a “common understanding” to combat “cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property,” but left a lot of unspoken space about just what that common understanding actually is.

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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.

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