Month: January 2018

Enlarge / The copyright for the first Mickey Mouse film, Steamboat Willie, is scheduled to expire in 2024, though Disney would still hold a trademark for the Mickey Mouse brand. One guaranteed result: lots of work for lawyers. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

On January 1, 2019, every book, film, and song published in 1923 will fall out of copyright protection—something that hasn't happened in 40 years. At least, that's what will happen if Congress doesn't retrospectively change copyright law to prevent it—as Congress has done two previous times.

Until the 1970s, copyright terms only lasted for 56 years. But Congress retroactively extended the term of older works to 75 years in 1976. Then on October 27, 1998—just weeks before works from 1923 were scheduled to fall into the public domain—President Bill Clinton signed legislation retroactively extending the term of older works to 95 years, locking up works published in 1923 or later for another 20 years.

Will Congress do the same thing again this year? To find out, we talked to groups on both sides of the nation's copyright debate—to digital rights advocates at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge, and to industry groups like the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America. To our surprise, there seemed to be universal agreement that another copyright extension was unlikely to be on the agenda this year.

Enlarge / We've enjoyed Age of Empires so much, we'd probably play this version, too.

Not much about Age of Empires isn't epic.

Over the last 20 years, these epoch-spanning games have starred more than 50 historical civilizations, sales have surpassed more than 20 million units, and a core fanbase of hundreds of thousands has put hours upon hours into playing one series entry or another on a weekly basis. Age of Empires is one of the most influential strategy games of all time. And far from fading into obscurity, as history is wont to do, Empires is now squarely back in the (games-playing) public consciousness.

With a new Age game in development and a "definitive edition" reboot of the original just around the corner—and given our recent foray into the evolution of the entire real-time strategy genre—we thought it'd be interesting to dig into the history of this RTS series. After all, RTS games like Age have introduced millions of impressionable youths to the delights of... well, history.

Garmin

Garmin's Vivoactive 3 provided a solid alternative to the Fitbit Ionic and the Apple Watch last year, but it lacked one big feature: onboard music storage. At CES, Garmin announced its first wearable with space to save music you could listen to without your smartphone present: the $450 Forerunner 645 Music.

The Forerunner 645 Music has 3.5GB of storage that can hold approximately 500 songs, which is more than the Fitbit Ionic's 300 song limit. The 645 Music can pair with Bluetooth earbuds and also supports music transferred from a computer or a music streaming service. According to Garmin, paid subscribers of iHeartRadio's streaming service can download saved playlists to the Forerunner 645 Music (Garmin plans on supporting other music streaming services in the future, but iHeartRadio is the first).