Walled Culture – A Journey Behind the Copyright Bricks

Another Milestone on our Journey: the Walled Culture Book is out. Learn more about it here or download the free ebook

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Cinema as a community experience opens the door for low-cost films funded by fans
Walled Culture the book (digital versions available free) is about the incompatibility of the traditional copyright system with the digital world, and its failure to reward creators fairly. That raises the question of what might replace it, and the book’s last chapter offers one solution in the form of true fans. These …
Why the spread of powerful local AI models makes copyright enforcement even harder
The central theme of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) is the growing incompatibility between traditional copyright law and the digital, online world. The culmination of that process was the EU Copyright Directive, passed in 2019. The Directive was supposed to be transposed into local laws by 2021, but a …
Spain’s Net blocks have a flimsy legal basis, and lack both oversight and accountability
A few weeks ago, Walled Culture wrote about Hadopi, France’s infamous copyright enforcement mechanism. The so-called “graduated response” – aka “three strikes and you are out” – has been around for over 15 years now, has cost French taxpayers a fortune, and has never achieved any of its aims. As the Walled …
Why Google’s new AI-saturated search page will be a disaster
Google didn’t invent full-text search of the Internet – that honour belongs to early pioneers such as WebCrawler, Lycos and AltaVista. But for the last 25 years or so, Google has been synonymous with online searching, providing the quickest and most effective way to find things online (although its results may be …
Hadopi, perhaps the world’s worst copyright law, is moribund but not quite dead (yet)
One of the best demonstrations that an obsession with protecting copyright’s intellectual monopoly drives politicians insane is the French law known as Hadopi, an acronym for ‘Haute Autorité pour la diffusion des oeuvres et la protection des droits sur internet’ (High Authority for the Dissemination of Works and the Protection of Rights …
Welcome to the future, where AI agents hunt down alleged online copyright infringement
As readers of this blog have doubtless noticed, the latest hot tech – and investment – area involves “agentic AI”, where AI systems are allowed to operative autonomously on allocated tasks. There’s no doubt there are some exciting possibilities here, as well as some troubling issues concerning lack of control. It’s a …
The world’s leading cancer charity to stop funding open access publishing because of hybrid journals
As numerous posts on this blog have emphasised, the underlying idea of open access (OA) – allowing anyone to read and share published academic research for free – is great in principle, but in practice has failed in important ways. That’s because traditional academic publishers have subverted the open access model to …
Why genAI means the end of copyright for software and the re-invention of open source
Most of the discussions about the impact of the latest generative AI systems on copyright have centred on text, images and video. That’s no surprise, since writers, artists and film-makers feel very strongly about their creations, and members of the public can relate easily to the issues that AI raises for this …
Copyright industry intensifies efforts to undermine core Internet plumbing: VPNs
Last month Walled Culture wrote about an important case at the Court of Justice of the European Union, (CJEU), the EU’s top court, that could determine how VPNs can be used in that region. Clarification in this area is particularly important because VPNs are currently under attack in various ways. For example, …
Common Corpus, an open training set for AI, goes global – and so should support for it
As many of the AI stories on Walled Culture attest, one of the most contentious areas in the latest stage of AI development concerns the sourcing of training data. To create high-quality large language models (LLMs) massive quantities of training data are required. In the current genAI stampede, many companies are simply …
Copyright litigation over Anne Frank’s writings likely to impact the fate of VPNs in the EU
“The Diary of a Young Girl” is a Dutch language diary written by the young Jewish writer Anne Frank while she was in hiding for two years with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Although the diary and Anne Frank’s death in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp are well known, …
Wikipedia at 25 grapples with new challenges arising from generative AI
Wikipedia celebrated its 25th birthday this month. Given the centrality of Wikipedia to so much activity online, it is hard to remember (or to imagine, for those who are younger) a time without Wikipedia. The latest statistics are impressive: That’s testimony to the global nature of Wikipedia. But there’s something else, not …
Walled Culture the book, three years on
Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) was launched just over three years ago. A few weeks afterwards, I talked with journalist and editor Maria Bustillos about the book and its background, as part of the Internet Archive’s Book Talk series. That interview has just been added to the Future Knowledge …
How GenAI is taking true fans activity – and creativity – to the next level
Walled Culture has written a number of times about the true fans approach – the idea that creators can be supported directly and effectively by the people who love their work. As Walled Culture the book explains (available as a free ebook), one of the earliest and best expositions of the concept came …
The long road to Marrakesh: 40 years of copyright obstruction to human rights and social justice
One of the little-known but extremely telling episodes in the history of modern copyright, discussed in Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available), concerns the Marrakesh Treaty. A post on the Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) site from 2017 has a good summary of what the treaty is about, and why it …
Why “public AI”, built on open source software, is the way forward for the EU
A quarter of a century ago, I wrote a book called “Rebel Code”. It was the first – and is still the only – detailed history of the origins and rise of free software and open source, based on interviews with the gifted and generous hackers who took part. Back then, it …

Recent Podcasts/Vlogs

Experience & thoughts from people on the ground

27 September 20234 June 2025

Interview | Fred von Lohmann: Copyright Battles, the US DMCA and EU Copyright Directive, Filters, and Interfaces

In this final bonus Walled Culture podcast episode - recorded mid-2022 and kept under wraps as a special 1st anniversary episode, we welcome Fred von Lohmann, former Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Google copyright counsel. Our conversation starts with recalling how he got intrigued by copyright, crediting John Perry Barlow, and explaining how he was at the right juncture to become a tech enthusiast.
…

29 September 202219 February 2025

Interview | Glyn Moody: Walled Culture – A Journey Behind the Copyright Bricks

25 August 202219 February 2025

Interview | Mike Masnick: Techdirt, Supporting Creators, the SOPA/PIPA Battle, and NFTs

14 July 202219 February 2025

Interview | James Love: The Copyright Ratchet, International Treaties & Fighting for Access

CHECK OUT ALL PODCASTS/VLOGS

Latest Thoughts

Findings Behind the Bricks

8 July 20267 July 2026

Cinema as a community experience opens the door for low-cost films funded by fans

by Glyn Moody

24 June 202623 June 2026

Why the spread of powerful local AI models makes copyright enforcement even harder

by Glyn Moody

10 June 202610 June 2026

Spain’s Net blocks have a flimsy legal basis, and lack both oversight and accountability

by Glyn Moody

27 May 202626 May 2026

Why Google’s new AI-saturated search page will be a disaster

by Glyn Moody

CHECK OUT ALL BLOG POSTS

Mickey Mouse is public domain now, but the battle to prevent copyright term extensions is not 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…

by Glyn Moody

Beyond the Bricks/Knowledge/Thoughts

11 November 20215 November 2021

Is protecting copyright more important than saving lives during the Covid-19 pandemic?

Although the Covid-19 pandemic has wreaked terrible suffering across the world, we are fortunate that we already have several vaccines that have been shown to be highly-effective in reducing the number of deaths and hospitalisation rates. Discovering vaccines proved easier…

by Glyn Moody

Beyond the Bricks/Knowledge/Libraries

15 January 202528 January 2025

Publisher’s cost cutting, including the botched use of AI, pushes editors of top journal to resign

Walled Culture has noted previously the fabulous levels of profit that many academic publishers have achieved, largely through the abuse of copyright, as explained in Walled Culture the book (free digital versions). And yet those levels are apparently not enough…

by Glyn Moody

Beyond the Bricks/Knowledge/Thoughts

8 June 20227 June 2022

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…

by Glyn Moody

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