Walled Culture – A Journey Behind the Copyright Bricks

How copyright’s ownership obsession has turned magazine contracts into intellectual extractivism
The indispensable Cory Doctorow, who was the first person to speak with Walled Culture as part of its interview series, has yet another great post that encapsulates a particular aspect of copyright madness: the obsession with ownership. Drawing on his own long experience in writing for magazines, he explains: There was the …
Running up that hill: Kate Bush shows the best way to make lots of money in pop music
Anyone who watches the Netflix sci-fi drama “Stranger Things” probably also knows about Kate Bush’s song “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)“, originally released in 1985. It was always a great song, but now it’s a massively popular great song thanks to the series, as Music Business Worldwide explains: Last …
Top Harvard lawyers don’t think making and sharing unauthorised digital copies is theft
TorrentFreak has a report about a piece of research – sadly behind a paywall – by Malgorzata Ciesielska and Dariusz Jemielniak, that looks at copyright from an unusual angle. It is based on in-depth interviews with 50 lawyers participating in Harvard’s Master of Laws (LL.M.) programme: Harvard’s LL.M. students include lawyers working …
A million-pound musical coda to Ed Sheeran’s recent copyright case victory
Walled Culture has written a couple of times about lawsuits alleging copyright infringement by Ed Sheeran. Most recently, it noted the good news that a UK judge ruled that Sheeran did not copy ideas from from another song in one of his biggest hits. There’s now what might be called a coda …
Amazon’s doubly amazing achievement in becoming the backbone of Hollywood
Back in March, Walled Culture reported on Amazon’s acquisition of MGM, and how it was a logical move for the company given that it is seeking to establish itself as one of the main video streaming companies, alongside Netflix and Disney. But in the background, Amazon has achieved something even more remarkable, …
If they could, publishers would abolish libraries; here’s what they are doing instead
It is often said that if public libraries did not exist, modern publishers would never allow them to be set up, on the grounds that “clearly” every book loaned out was a sale lost. Fortunately, at the time that public libraries were created in various countries, publishers took a more enlightened view. …
What exactly is plagiarism? 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: Find somebody else’s TikTok that inspires you and then literally copy it. You don’t …
How “merit-based monetisation” works for game streaming, where copyright fails
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 games for entertainment. The best-known example of this phenomenon is Twitch, now owned by Amazon. …
Enjoy digital ownership and public libraries while you can: they may disappear soon…
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: Amazon owned Audible ceased selling individual audiobooks through their Android app from Google Play a couple of weeks ago. This …
For all the wrong reasons, two great copyright taboos have been broken
The Authors Alliance blog has an interesting post about Disney’s relationship with the duration of copyright in the US. This manifested itself most famously with the US Copyright Term Extension Act, passed in 1998. As the New York Times explained in 2002: The 1998 extension was a result of intense lobbying by …
Concordance: how Discord has become the latest hot platform for creators to engage with true fans
Walled Culture has just written about the new Scriber platform, which is designed to make it easier for artists to keep their fans close and happy. But the increasing desire to engage with people who love what an artist is doing, and not just drop products on them from on high, is …
How can you save a dying language when copyright lets somebody own its key learning materials?
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. Walled Culture has already written about how that’s a bad fit for writing music, and the NBC News site has a fascinating story about how the same …
UK copyright madness is back: ten years in prison for downloading and sharing a single song
One of the problems with the copyright industry lobbying for new laws is that governments often have no problem with passing them, no matter how one-sided and disproportionate their features may be. That’s despite other voices warning of the negative consequences that will flow from doing so. It seems that subservience to …
The true fans idea is not just about wishy-washy, feel-good charity: it’s a business too
Walled Culture has 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 approach: get the people who really love an artist’s work to support it directly, and …
Good news: Taiwan creates a new fair use of copyright material; bad news: it’s tiny
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, they then try to convince other countries to adopt the same bad ideas, …
Creators everywhere are struggling, copyright is failing them: time to find something better
The Guardian has an interesting feature looking at how Australian artists from working-class backgrounds face greater obstacles to succeeding than those from other social classes do. It contains some useful statistics about how much creators in that country earn: In 2017, in the last major study done on the issue, the Australia …

Recent Podcasts/Vlogs

Experience & thoughts from people on the ground

30 June 20221 July 2022

Interview | Jean-Sébastien Caux: Rethinking Academic Publishing, Open Access & SciPost

Jean-Sébastien Caux is Professor in theoretical condensed matter physics at the University of Amsterdam. A Canadian citizen, he obtained his PhD in Oxford, was postdoctoral Fellow in All Souls, and moved to the Netherlands in 2003. Besides his research activities, he is actively involved in the reform of scientific publishing. He is the founder, implementer and current chairman of open access publication portal SciPost. Jean-Sébastien reflects on the current state of play of the scientific publishing landscape and copyright’s role. He talks about the open access movement and the major hurdles or speed bumps ahead. Jean-Sébastien unravels how his personal frustrations led to the creation of SciPost and discusses the effort’s long term sustainability. He makes a plea to change the institutional mindset and move towards Diamond Open Access. Jean-Sébastien calls for academic rebellion and gives a word of warning about the next can of worms: publishers’ surveillance operations. Finally, he concludes by encouraging his fellow academics to educate themselves about copyright and the academic publishing machine. Do you prefer watching our passionate interviewees talking about the 21st-century walls blocking access to culture? Then check out the vlog …

2 June 202224 June 2022

Interview | Catherine Stihler: Creative Commons, the EU Copyright Directive, and Civil Society’s Role

5 May 20225 May 2022

Interview | Marc Rees: À la Française, de l’Hadopi par la copie privée, jusqu’aux algorithmes de l’Article 17

31 March 202231 March 2022

Interview | Katharine Trendacosta: The US DMCA, Upload Filters, SOPA-PIPA, Fanfiction, & Platform Competition

CHECK OUT ALL PODCASTS/VLOGS

Latest Thoughts

Findings Behind the Bricks

5 July 20224 July 2022

How copyright’s ownership obsession has turned magazine contracts into intellectual extractivism

by Glyn Moody

30 June 202227 June 2022

Running up that hill: Kate Bush shows the best way to make lots of money in pop music

by Glyn Moody

29 June 202227 June 2022

Top Harvard lawyers don’t think making and sharing unauthorised digital copies is theft

by Glyn Moody

28 June 202227 June 2022

A million-pound musical coda to Ed Sheeran’s recent copyright case victory

by Glyn Moody

CHECK OUT ALL BLOG POSTS

How backdated articles abuse the DMCA’s takedown system to remove legitimate news items

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…

by Glyn Moody

Beyond the Bricks/Knowledge/Libraries/Thoughts

11 January 202225 January 2022

Remembering Aaron Swartz, who died on this day, a victim of the copyright system

On this day in 2013, Aaron Swartz died by his own hand, at the age of 26. His short but full life as a hacker and activist is summed up well on Wikipedia – one of the many projects he…

by Glyn Moody

Audiovisual/Music

19 May 202218 May 2022

A fan’s unique recordings of the Beatles won’t be available online, because of “copyright issues”

There’s a story in the Mail on Sunday that underlines why it is important for people to make copies. It concerns the re-surfacing of rare recordings of the Beatles: In the summer of 1963, the BBC began a radio series…

by Glyn Moody

Beyond the Bricks/Guest Posts/Knowledge/Libraries

10 December 202110 December 2021

Guest post | #ebooksos crisis: price gouging publishers

Despite only 10% of university reading list items being available in ebook format, “everything is available in E-format” is a sentence librarians hear often. In the so-called digital age, you cannot blame people for making this assumption. However, ebooks have…

by Yohanna Anderson

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Our Contributors

Gwen Franck

Communications expert specialised in open-access questions. After working for OpenAIRE, EIFL, and Creative Commons, now currently at the EGI Foundation and working as a freelancer