| Date | Title | Description |
| 31.10.2024 | The Crossroads of Knowledge: Antitrust and Innovation in Academic Publishing | The academic publishing landscape is a battleground. On one side, the open access movement fights for free knowledge. On the other, powerful publishers cling to their profit margins. This tug-of-war has persisted for over two decades. Yet, ... |
| 30.10.2024 | Where Open Access Has Failed To Reform Academic Publishing, Perhaps Antitrust Law Will Succeed | The open access movement has been trying for over 20 years to promote the widest access to knowledge. Sadly, as numerous Walled Culture posts have chronicled, what should be a matter of social justice has been subverted by clever and cynica... |
| 25.10.2024 | German Court: LAION’s Generative AI Training Dataset Is Legal Thanks To EU Copyright Exceptions | The copyright world is currently trying to assert its control over the new world of generative AI through a number of lawsuits, several of which have been discussed previously on Walled Culture. We now have our first decision in this area, ... |
| 24.10.2024 | Italy's Piracy Shield: A Misguided Attempt at Control | Italy's recent foray into anti-piracy legislation has become a cautionary tale. The "Piracy Shield" law, intended to combat digital theft, has instead ensnared innocent users in its web. In a misguided attempt to block piracy, Ita... |
| 23.10.2024 | Juicy Licensing Deals With AI Companies Show That Publishers Don’t Actually Care About Creators | One of the many interesting aspects of the current enthusiasm for generative AI is the way that it has electrified the formerly rather sleepy world of copyright. Where before publishers thought they had successfully locked down more or less... |
| 21.10.2024 | Italy’s ‘Piracy Shield’ Misfires, Blocks Google Drive In Anti-Piracy Blunder | In a stunning display of technological and regulatory ineptitude, Italy’s ‘Piracy Shield’ law has managed to block access to Google Drive, apparently confusing the popular cloud storage service with a hotbed of illegal activity. Bravo, Ital... |
| 01.10.2024 | Taylor Swift: Singer, Songwriter, Copyright Innovator | Taylor Swift is in the news, and not just because she has become the most decorated solo artist of all time. The fact that Taylor Swift has already been mentioned multiple times on Walled Culture underlines that she is also an important – i... |
| 30.09.2024 | The Copyright Directive’s Link Tax Has Been A Failure; Will Anyone Learn From This? | It seems so long ago that people were trying to stop the worst aspects of the EU Copyright Directive. It was quite a battle, as Chapter 6 of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) recounts in detail. The final legislation... |
| 27.09.2024 | The Battle for Digital Freedom: Copyright, Cheating, and Abortion Rights | In a world where technology evolves at lightning speed, laws often lag behind. This disconnect is glaring in two recent cases: one involving video game cheats and the other concerning abortion rights in Tennessee. Both highlight the struggl... |
| 26.09.2024 | Gates Foundation Shows That ‘Gold Open Access’ Was A Mistake, And ‘Diamond Open Access’ Is The Future | The Gates Foundation is one of the most influential funding bodies in the world. According to one ranking, it is the second largest charitable foundation, and as of 31 December 2023 had an endowment of around $75.2 billion. That makes a shi... |
| 25.09.2024 | Top EU Court’s Advisor Explains Why Video Game Cheats Are Not Copyright Infringement | One of the reasons that today’s copyright is such a bad fit for the modern digital world is that its roots lie deep in 18th-century law and analogue objects like books. This fact has created a kind of legislative drag that means copyright i... |
| 23.09.2024 | OCLC Says ‘What Is Known Must Be Shared,’ But Is Suing Anna’s Archive For Sharing Knowledge | Back in March, Walled Culture wrote about the terrible job that academic publishers are doing in terms of creating backups of the articles they publish. We also mentioned there two large-scale archives that are trying to help, Sci-Hub and A... |
| 01.08.2024 | First Mover Advantage Shows How Copyright Isn’t Necessary To Protect Innovative Creativity | One of the arguments sometimes made in defense of copyright is that without it, creators would be unable to compete with the hordes of copycats that would spring up as soon as their works became popular. Copyright is needed, supporters say,... |
| 30.07.2024 | Making Money By Understanding The Difference Between Analog & Digital | One of the central ideas of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) is that there is a fundamental difference between analog and digital, and that copyright fails to recognize that. Instead, it seeks to impose what is an i... |
| 29.07.2024 | Sharing Material Used To Be The Norm For Newspapers, And Should Be For LLMs | Even though parents insist that it is good and right to share things, the copyright world has succeeded in establishing the contrary as the norm. Now, sharing is deemed a bad, possibly illegal thing. But it was not always thus, as a fascina... |
| 24.07.2024 | A Rare Copyright Win For The Public; But A Small One, Only In Canada, And Possibly Temporary | It is extraordinary that within the copyright world it is accepted dogma that legal protections for this intellectual monopoly should always get stronger – creating a kind of copyright ratchet. One of the manifestations of this belief was t... |
| 12.06.2024 | Newspaper Drops Paywall, Moves To Reader Patronage, Generates 37% More Revenue | The problems and unfairness of the copyright system are so manifest that many would like to adopt alternative approaches. But that’s a big step, and one that undoubtedly requires a certain courage. Every example that shows how the move work... |
| 07.06.2024 | Top EU Court Says There’s No Right To Online Anonymity, Because Copyright Is More Important | A year ago, Walled Culture wrote about an extremely important case that was being considered by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the EU’s top court. The central question was whether the judges considered that copyright was... |
| 16.05.2024 | There Is No Good Reason To Just Let Unsupported Video Games Die | The Pirate Party has long played an important role in fighting the worst excesses of copyright in the EU. For example, when a major copyright update was being discussed, the Pirate Party MEP Felix Reda wrote an insightful and practical repo... |
| 14.05.2024 | Private Equity Is Using Copyright To Cannibalize The Past At The Expense Of The Future | Walled Culture has been warning about the financialization and securitization of music for two years now. Those obscure but important developments mean that the owners of copyrights are increasingly detached from the creative production pro... |
| 25.04.2024 | French Collection Society Wants A Tax On Generative AI, Payable To Collection Societies | Back in October last year, Walled Culture wrote about a proposed law in France that would see a tax imposed on AI companies, with the proceeds being paid to a collecting society. Now that the EU’s AI Act has been adopted, it is being invoke... |
| 22.04.2024 | More Open Access Training For Academics Would Lead To More Open Access | Open access publishing, which allows people to read academic papers without a subscription, seems such a good idea. It means that anyone, anywhere in the world, can read the latest research without needing to pay. Academic institutions can ... |
| 09.04.2024 | How Copyright May Destroy Our Access To The World’s Academic Knowledge | The shift from analogue to digital has had a massive impact on most aspects of life. One area where that shift has the potential for huge benefits is in the world of academic publishing. Academic papers are costly to publish and distribute ... |
| 05.04.2024 | Germany Still Locking Up Some Laws Behind Copyright | It is often said that “ignorance of the law is no defense.” But the corollary of this statement is that laws must be freely available so that people can find them, read them and obey them. Secret laws, or laws that are hard to access, under... |
| 02.04.2024 | Forgotten Books And How To Save Them | On the Neglected Books site, there is a fine meditation on rescuing forgotten writers and their works from oblivion, and why this is important. As its author Brad Bigelow explains:
His post mentions three questions that “reissue” publishers... |
| 29.03.2024 | Of True Fans And Superfans: The Rise Of An Alternative Business Model To Copyright | One of the commonest arguments from supporters of copyright is that creators need to be rewarded and that copyright is the only realistic way of doing that. The first statement may be true, but the second certainly isn’t. As Walled Culture ... |
| 19.03.2024 | Italy’s Piracy Shield Blocks Innocent Web Sites And Makes It Hard For Them To Appeal | Italy’s newly-installed Piracy Shield system, put in place by the country’s national telecoms regulator, Autorità per le Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni (Authority for Communications Guarantees, AGCOM), is already failing in significant ways. ... |
| 27.02.2024 | Italy’s ‘Piracy Shield’ Creating Real Problems As VPNs Start Turning Away Italian Users | Back in October, Walled Culture wrote about the grandly named “Piracy Shield”. This is Italy’s new Internet blocking system, which assumes people are guilty until innocent, and gives the copyright industry a disproportionate power to contro... |
| 26.02.2024 | A Swiftian Solution To Some Of Copyright’s Problems | Copyright is generally understood to be for the benefit of two groups of people: creators and their audience. Given that modern copyright often acts against the interests of the general public – forbidding even the most innocuous sharing of... |
| 22.02.2024 | UK Court Ruling Has Potential To Free Up The Public Domain; But Museums Might Still Block It | There’s a post on the Creative Commons blog with some important news about copyright (in the UK, at least):
The post points out that the case is potentially a “game-changer in the UK open culture landscape”:
This touches on a topic that Wal... |
| 20.02.2024 | How Allowing Copyright On AI-Generated Works Could Destroy Creative Industries | Generative AI continues to be the hot topic in the digital world – and beyond. A previous blog post noted that this has led to people finally asking the important question whether copyright is fit for the digital world. As far as AI is conc... |
| 16.02.2024 | Just Because Mickey Mouse Is In The Public Domain, It Doesn’t Mean The Battle To Prevent Copyright Term Extensions Is Over | The beginning of the year is a great time for the public domain, since it sees thousands of copyrighted works released from the intellectual monopoly that prevents their free creative use. Which works enter the public domain depends on the ... |
| 28.12.2023 | Generative AI Will Be A Huge Boon For The Public Domain, Unless Copyright Blocks It | A year ago, I noted that many of Walled Culture’s illustrations were being produced using generative AI. During that time, AI has developed rapidly. For example, in the field of images, OpenAI has introduced DALL-E 3 in ChatGPT: |
| 27.12.2023 | Another Reason Why Diamond Access Makes Sense: No Economic Barriers To Publishing Rebuttals | Walled Culture has written numerous posts about the promise and problems of open access. An important editorial in the journal Web Ecology raises an issue for open access that I’ve not seen mentioned before. It concerns the fraught issue of... |
| 26.12.2023 | How Copyright Hinders The Preservation Of Modern, Digital Culture | A recent Guardian interview with the British Library’s head of digital publications, Giulia Carla Rossi, reveals the problems caused by copyright for those tasked with preserving modern culture. In some respects, the British Library finds i... |
| 21.12.2023 | Money Talks In The World Of Copyright Legislation; And That’s A Big Problem For Ordinary Internet Users | Copyright has always been about money. That’s why the copyright industry fights so hard to strengthen legal protections, in order to boost its profits. However, getting detailed information about how much money is involved, and who receives... |
| 20.12.2023 | Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal: And Generative AI Does The Marketing For Both | The attacks on generative AI started out claiming that it was all about protecting the creators whose works were being “stolen” in some mysterious way by virtue of software analyzing them. In some cases, that high-minded stance has already ... |
| 19.12.2023 | The UK Government Should Not Let Copyright Stifle AI Innovation | As Walled Culture has often noted, the process of framing new copyright laws is tilted against the public in multiple ways. And on the rare occasions when a government makes some mild concession to anyone outside the copyright industry, the... |
| 18.12.2023 | How Copyright Exceptionalism In France Risks Undermining The EU Legal System | Back in May, Walled Culture wrote about an important case before the EU’s top court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). It involved the “High Authority for the dissemination of works and the protection of rights on the Inter... |
| 15.12.2023 | Newspaper Publishers’ Obsession With Link And Snippet Taxes Is Bad For Society — And Bad For Them | Traditional newspapers have been complaining about the rise of the digital world for decades. Their discontent derives from the fact that they failed to recognize opportunities early on, leaving the field open for a new generation of born-d... |
| 20.11.2023 | How The DMCA Is Being Weaponized Against E-Commerce Sites | The copyright system is flawed at many levels, as hundreds of posts on this blog make clear. One particular class of problems concern takedowns. The best known of the ‘notice and takedown’ systems, that of the US Digital Millennium Copyrigh... |
| 14.11.2023 | Copyright Leads To Internet Fragmentation | The EU Copyright Directive is arguably the most important recent legislation in the area of intellectual monopolies. It is also a failure, judged purely on its own terms as an initiative to modernize and unify copyright across the European ... |
| 13.11.2023 | ISPs Launch Legal Attack On Italy’s ‘Pirate Shield,’ Blocking Law | The copyright industry’s war on the Internet and its users has gone through various stages (full details and links to numerous references in Walled Culture the book, free digital versions available). |
| 26.10.2023 | EU Parliament Fails To Understand That The Right To Read Is The Right To Train | Walled Culture recently wrote about an unrealistic French legislative proposal that would require the listing of all the authors of material used for training generative AI systems. Unfortunately, the European Parliament has inserted a simi... |
| 25.10.2023 | NY Times Tried To Block The Internet Archive | The Intercept has an interesting article that reveals another reason why some newspaper publishers are not great fans of the site: |
| 24.10.2023 | New French AI Copyright Law Would Effectively Tax AI Companies, Enrich Collection Societies | This blog has written a number of times about the reaction of creators to generative AI. Legal academic and copyright expert Andres Guadamuz has spotted what may be the first attempt to draw up a new law to regulate generative AI. It comes ... |
| 17.10.2023 | Denmark Trying To Brainwash Schoolchildren With The Tired Old Lie That Copying Is Theft | One of the copyright world’s key weapons is a constant barrage of propaganda about the alleged benefits of this intellectual monopoly, and of the supposed horrors of its infringement. This is typically conducted through massive lobbying of ... |
| 13.10.2023 | Music Streaming Royalty Hacking Shows How Desperately The System Needs To Be Overhauled | There’s an interesting story on Wired about “functional music” – things like white noise and brown noise – which is widely available on music streaming platforms. These kind of streams are causing a problem that arises from the fact that th... |
| 11.10.2023 | EBook Pledge To Protect Libraries & Authors From Publishers’ Growing Abuse Of Copyright | There’s a whole chapter of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) devoted to the serious attack on libraries and their traditional functions that is being carried out by major publishers. The latter are using digital copy... |
| 06.10.2023 | Museum Collection Of Historical TV Culture At Risk Due To Copyright Takedowns | Although copyright is mainly thought of as concerning books, music and films, it applies to other kinds of creativity in a fixed form. That includes apparently trivial material such as early commercial television programs. These are importa... |
| 29.09.2023 | Publisher Wants $2,500 To Allow Academics To Post Their Own Manuscript To Their Own Repository | As a Walled Culture explained back in 2021, open access (OA) to published academic research comes in two main varieties. “Gold” open access papers are freely available to the public because the researchers’ institutions pay “article-process... |
| 04.08.2023 | Will Browsers Be Required By Law To Stop You From Visiting Infringing Sites? | Mozilla’s Open Policy & Advocacy blog has news about a worrying proposal from the French government: |
| 28.07.2023 | That Which Copyright Destroys, ‘Pirates’ Can Save | There’s an interesting post on TorrentFreak that concerns so-called “pirate” subtitles for films. It’s absurd that anyone could consider subtitles to be piracy in any way. They are a good example of how ordinary people can add value by gene... |
| 26.07.2023 | Legacy Copyright Industries Obsession With Infringement Is Pathological | As Walled Culture the book (free digital versions) details, for decades the copyright industry has lobbied consistently (and successfully) for more and harsher laws targeting alleged infringement. Against that background, it is hardly surpr... |
| 10.07.2023 | Germany’s New Copyright Exception For Pastiche Applied For First Time | Although overall the EU Copyright Directive is bad news for the digital world because of things like its need for the use of automated upload filters, it does contain a few glimmers of good sense. For example, it rectifies a failing of the ... |
| 07.07.2023 | Copyright As Harassment: The DMCA Attack On IPFS Gateways | The Internet is amazing, but it’s not perfect. There are many aspects that are unsatisfactory – its protocols are inefficient, and it is far from resilient. The InterPlanetary File System, created in 2014, aims to address some of these defi... |
| 06.07.2023 | Portugal’s Shameful Approach To Implementing The EU Copyright Directive | The depressing tale of how the European Union passed copyright’s worst new law, the EU Copyright Directive, occupies some 36 pages in Walled Culture the book (digital versions available free). The main legislation was finalized over four ye... |
| 05.07.2023 | Top EU Court Advisor Says Technical Standards, Like Laws, Should Not Be Locked Down By Copyright | One of the most pernicious ideas that copyright maximalism has spread is that preventing people from freely accessing creative material is not just a good thing to do, but should be the natural state of affairs. This has made questioning wh... |
| 28.06.2023 | Music Streaming Services Sell Musicians Access To Their Fans; SoundCloud Goes A Better Way | Back in January, Walled Culture wrote about an interesting initiative by the German online audio distribution platform and music sharing service SoundCloud, with its Fan-Powered Royalties (FPR) approach. At the time, we noted that it was a ... |
| 15.06.2023 | Open Access Makes Research More Widely Cited, Helping Spread Knowledge | Open access has been discussed many times here on Techdirt. There are several strands to its story. It’s about allowing the public to access research they have paid for through tax-funded grants, without needing to take out often expensive ... |
| 14.06.2023 | Music Label Demands Google Delist A Wikipedia Page With Info It Doesn’t Like | In Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) there’s a chapter about the widely-used “notice and takedown” system, and its many abuses. One indicator of how bad things are, and how they are still getting worse, is the number... |
| 12.06.2023 | Top EU Court To Consider If Copyright Is More Important Than Privacy | Back in November last year, Walled Culture reported on the shocking opinion by a top EU court advisor that copyright was more important than privacy. The case in question was brought by four French associations for the protection of rights ... |
| 05.05.2023 | Germany Wants To Include Copyright Infringement Under Its Planned ‘Digital Violence’ Law | The hyperbolic rhetoric that is a feature of the copyright industry, which tries absurdly to characterize making an additional digital copy as “theft”, can lead to some serious legislative harm. For example, Germany is currently aiming to b... |
| 10.04.2023 | Someone’s Trying To Copyright A Rhythm | One of the most pernicious effects of today’s copyright maximalism is the idea that every element of a creative work has to be owned by someone, and protected against “unauthorized” – that is, unpaid – use by other artists. That goes agains... |
| 17.03.2023 | Italy Decides That Leonardo da Vinci’s 500 Year Old Works Are Not In The Public Domain | Walled Culture is a big fan of the public domain. The amazing artistic uses that people are able to make of material only once it enters the public domain are an indication that copyright can act as an obstacle to wider creativity, rather t... |
| 15.03.2023 | Copyright Means You May Need Permission To Post Photos Of Your Own Home Online | One of the life’s certainties is that copyright maximalism will continue to encourage absurd rulings by complaisant courts. Here’s a rather spectacular case from Germany. It involves a “photo wallpaper”. For those of you who – like me – are... |
| 09.03.2023 | Copyright Has Been One Of Life’s Certainties: But Will It Always Be? | Copyright seems to be a fixture of our legal, economic and social systems. For 300 years, it has formed the backbone of the structures used to incentivize and remunerate creators. During that time, copyright has been extended repeatedly in ... |
| 06.03.2023 | When Given The Choice, Most Authors Reject Excessively Long Copyright Terms | Recently, Walled Culture mentioned the problem of orphan works. These are creations, typically books, that are still covered by copyright, but unavailable because the original publisher or distributor has gone out of business, or simply isn... |
| 02.03.2023 | Publishers Lobbied To ‘Axe The Reading Tax’ On Ebooks, Then Paid It To Themselves | One of the (many) villains in “Walled Culture” the book (free ebook versions) is the publishing industry, specifically in the context of the transition from analogue books to ebooks. What could have been one of the most important expansions... |
| 14.02.2023 | In A World Where AI Art Is Cheap And Easy To Generate, Do We Still Need Copyright? | To say that AI-generated art is controversial would be something of an understatement. The appearance last year of free tools like Stable Diffusion has not just thrown the world of art into turmoil, it has raised profound questions about th... |
| 20.12.2022 | Libraries Offer Music Streaming Services That Really Support Local Musicians | Music streaming services are great – for listeners, who gain access to huge quantities of music, even if they don’t end up owning any of it. But it’s hardly a secret that streaming services produce very little income for the musicians invol... |
| 19.12.2022 | Can AI Text Writers Help People Impacted By Copyright Law To Better Weigh In On Copyright? | One of the reasons that copyright is so unbalanced in favor of companies, especially Big Content, is that the process of bringing in new copyright laws is hard for ordinary members of the public to engage with. Typically, new laws come abou... |
| 02.12.2022 | Yes, Digital Books Do Wear Out; Stop Accepting Publishers Claims That They Don’t | There’s a great post by Brewster Kahle on the Internet Archive blog with the title “Digital Books wear out faster than Physical Books“. He makes an important point about the work involved in providing and preserving digital books: |
| 29.11.2022 | If Twitter Goes Down In Flames, What Happens To Its Huge And Historically Important Collection Of Tweets? | This blog has just written about the likely loss of a very particular kind of culture – K-pop live streams. Culture is culture, and a loss is a loss. But potentially we are facing the disappearance of a cultural resource that is indisputabl... |
| 28.11.2022 | The Czech Republic’s Proposed Version Of Upload Filters Has A Bad Idea That Could Become A Great One | A clear demonstration that the EU Copyright Directive is a badly-drafted law is the fact that it has still not been implemented in national legislation by all the EU Member States three years after it was passed, and over a year after the n... |
| 23.11.2022 | As Largest Archive Of K-Pop Live Streams Goes Offline, What Happens To All That Culture? | When people speak of culture, and preserving it, they usually mean the works of recognized artistic giants like Shakespeare, Leonardo Da Vinci, Charlie Chaplin, and Miles Davis. They rarely mean things like live streams of Korean pop music,... |
| 21.11.2022 | Canada Wants To Implement A Link Tax | One chapter of my Walled Culture book (free download available in various formats) looks at how the bad ideas embodied in the EU’s appalling Copyright Directive – the worst copyright law so far – are being taken up elsewhere. One I didn’t i... |
| 26.10.2022 | Unfortunately, Paying For The Public Domain Already Exists In Many Countries | A couple of weeks ago, we reported on a terrible idea in France: requiring companies to pay for the use of public domain material. As the post explained, this is a subversion of what it means for something to enter the public domain, and a ... |
| 19.10.2022 | Copyright Absurdity Rules Over Amazon’s ‘The Rings Of Power’ | J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” is one of the best-known and best-loved modern works of literature, not least thanks to Peter Jackson’s films based on the cycle. Given that popularity, it’s no surprise that there was interest in creati... |
| 12.10.2022 | Ed Sheeran Just Can’t Get Away From Ridiculous Copyright Lawsuits | We’ve written a bunch about how Ed Sheeran recognizes how batshit crazy current copyright law is. One of the most successful recording artists today, you’d think that maybe he’d be a copyright maximalist, and yet copyright just seems to kee... |
| 12.10.2022 | French Parliament Wants To Make People Pay A License Fee To Use Public Domain Works | The public domain is the natural state of creative material. It’s where creations end up once copyright’s monopoly has expired. Crucially, it is the quid pro quo for that monopoly. The deal is that the creator of a work is granted a governm... |
| 12.10.2022 | Techdirt Podcast Episode 333: Walled Culture | One of the oldest and most important topics on Techdirt is copyright, and the many problems with the law both here and abroad. One of the best voices on the subject, here and in many other publications, is Glyn Moody, who recently released ... |
| 27.09.2022 | Best Selling Organic Chemistry Textbook Goes Open Access After Professor Regains The Copyright | It’s well known that textbook prices are generally high. That’s in part because academic publishers effectively have a monopoly when it comes to standard texts. Very often, these are texts that students simply must have as part of their cou... |
| 20.09.2022 | Study Shows That Copyright Filters Harm Creators Rather Than Help Them | The EU Copyright Directive contains one of the worst ideas in modern copyright: what amounts to a requirement to filter uploads on major sites. Despite repeated explanations of why this would cause huge harm to both creators and members of ... |
| 09.09.2022 | 🚨🚨🚨Twitch Decides A Siren Sound Effect Is Covered By Copyright And Silences Stream | Alongside death and taxes, one of life’s great certainties is a constant flow of absurd copyright claims. Here’s one from the world of live videogame streaming on the popular Twitch platform, owned by Amazon. A group of Spanish-speaking str... |
| 30.08.2022 | Techdirt Podcast Episode 327: Walled Culture Interview | We’ve got a cross-post episode for you this week! Recently, Mike appeared on the Walled Culture podcast to discuss a wide range of topics including reflections on the SOPA/PIPA fight, ways to support creators, and the world of NFTs. You can... |
| 26.07.2022 | Why Meta’s Project To Translate Automatically Between 200 Languages Will Be Stymied By Copyright | Meta’s AI division has announced two exciting new projects in the field of machine translation: |
| 21.07.2022 | Facebook Is So Sure Its Erroneous Blocking Of Music Is Right, There’s No Option To Say It’s Wrong | It’s hardly a secret that upload filters don’t work well. Back in 2017, Felix Reda, then Shadow Rapporteur on the EU Copyright Directive in the European Parliament, put together a representative sample of the many different ways in which fi... |
| 05.07.2022 | What Exactly Is Plagiarism Online? And Does It Really Matter Anyway? | There’s a fascinating article by Rebecca Jennings on Vox which explores the vexed question of plagiarism. Its starting point is a post on TikTok, entitled “How to EASILY Produce Video Ideas for TikTok.” It gives the following advice: |
| 29.06.2022 | Enjoy Digital Ownership And Public Libraries While You Still Can | Michael E. Karpeles, Program Lead on OpenLibrary.org at the Internet Archive, spotted an interesting blog post by Michael Kozlowski, the editor-in-chief of Good e-Reader. It concerns Amazon and its audiobook division, Audible: |
| 27.06.2022 | Copyright Has Failed For Game Streaming, So Alternatives Have Emerged | An interesting development in the digital world has been the continuing rise of gaming as a hugely popular activity, and a hugely profitable industry. Flowing from that rise and popularity, there is yet another fascinating aspect: streaming... |
| 13.06.2022 | Copyright Being Used To Stifle Attempts To Preserve A Dying Language | One of deep-seated problems with copyright is that its supporters believe everything created should be “owned” by someone and protected from being “stolen” by others. We’ve already written about how that’s a bad fit for writing music, and N... |
| 10.06.2022 | Having True Fans Can Create A True Business | We have written several times about the “true fans” idea as an alternative approach to the traditional remuneration models employed by the copyright industry players, such as publishers, recording companies and film studios. It’s a simple a... |
| 08.06.2022 | Taiwan Creates A New Fair Use… But For Just A Narrow Sliver Of Works | Too often we assume that copyright is something that only concerns Western nations like the US and EU. But it’s important to remember that copyright has been exported all around the world. Moreover, when Western nations make copyright worse... |
| 01.06.2022 | Are ‘Fast Movies’ Really A Substitute For The Real Thing? Or Just Good Marketing? | There’s an interesting post on the TorrentFreak blog about “fast movies“: |
| 25.05.2022 | Fan’s Rare Recordings Of Lost Beatles’ Performances Can’t Be Heard, Because Copyright Ruins Everything | There’s a story in the Daily Mail that underlines why it is important for people to make copies. It concerns the re-surfacing of rare recordings of the Beatles: |
| 24.05.2022 | Copyright As Censorship: Abuse Of The DMCA To Try To Delete Online News Is Rampant | Online platforms often give access to digital material that is under copyright. If any of that content is infringing, then potentially the platform would be liable as well as the person who uploaded it. Online companies naturally want to be... |
| 13.05.2022 | The Internet Has Opened Up The Creator Economy To New Heights | One of the most dramatic differences between the traditional, analogue world of creation, and the modern, digital one, is the democratization that has taken place in this sphere. Until recently, writers, musicians, artists and filmmakers co... |
| 10.05.2022 | Applying (Artificial) Intelligence To The Copyright Directive’s Stupid Idea Of Upload Filters | Last week the European Union’s top court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), handed down its judgment on whether upload filters should be allowed as part of the EU Copyright Directive. The answer turned out to be a rather un... |
| 09.05.2022 | Copyright Industry Demands Finland’s Version Of Upload Filters Should Be More Unbalanced | Like other EU Member States, Finland is grappling with the problem of how to implement the EU Copyright Directive’s Article 17 (upload filters) in national legislation. A fascinating post by Samuli Melart in the Journal of Intellectual Prop... |
