Walled Culture – A Journey Behind the Copyright Bricks

Will publishers try to shut down the free General Index of 107 million scientific journal articles?

One of the exciting possibilities opened up by the digital world is that access to all human knowledge could be made freely available to everyone with an Internet connection. Sadly, most publishers prefer boosting their profits to helping humanity, and have done everything they can to make sure that this possibility is …
Billions of dollars pour into music copyright “assets”: how much will the creators ever see?

A few weeks ago, this blog reported on the spectacular 45 billion euro valuation of Universal Music Group (UMG) when it went public on Amsterdam’s Euronext exchange. It seems that was just a foretaste of a huge inflow of money to the music industry – and of a fundamental shift in the …
A good copyright ruling from a wise judge means you still don’t need to care what a CDN is or does

Many people are unaware of what a “Content Delivery Network” (CDN) is, or does, even though they probably make use of one hundreds of times a day. And that’s fine: a CDN is just part of the Internet’s plumbing. Typically, it is a global network of computers that “cache” – store copies …
An artist’s messy divorce shows why copyright shouldn’t be regarded as a kind of property

One of the key themes of Walled Culture is the tension between the 18th-century idea of copyright, and the 21st-century digital world where we spend an increasing proportion of our waking hours. That’s probably the most obvious issue, but there’s another aspect of copyright that is becoming problematic in modern life: the …
Technological progress + outdated copyright laws = huge swathes of our cinematic culture lost forever

Physical books can be bought, shared, and accessed in libraries quite easily. Films in a physical form, on the other hand, are hard to acquire, share or view in archives. Writing in the Guardian, the non-fiction filmmaker Charlie Shackleton says that 90% of archive collections consist of film prints that will never …
Copyright law discriminating against the blind finally struck down by court in South Africa

Most people would agree that those who are blind or visually impaired deserve all the help they can get. For example, the conversion of printed materials to accessible formats like Braille, large print, or Digitally Accessible Information System (DAISY) formats, ought to be easy. Who could possibly object? For years, many publishers …
Why copyright’s absurdly long term is no big friendly giant to creators and their public

As this blog noted last week, nowadays copyright in a work can easily last more than a century. A recent piece of news shows what that can mean in practice, and why it is so bad for creators and their public. It concerns the well-known children’s author Roald Dahl, who died in …
Longer copyright protection means fewer books are available, and they cost more

As we mentioned a couple of weeks ago, the standard copyright term of life plus 70 years makes no sense: a promise that they’ll be paid after their death is unlike to stimulate extra creativity from artists. Conscious of how weak this argument is as a justification for extremely long copyright, supporters …
Widespread copyright anxiety, leading to copyright chill, means something is deeply wrong

Thirty years ago, copyright law was boring. It was the province of specialised lawyers, and had very little direct impact on ordinary people’s lives. The Internet changed all that. Now, everyone online is affected by copyright, which comes into play whenever people create something in a fixed form, like a post, or …
ResearchGate: academic publishers forbid scientists from sharing their own papers, because “copyright”

ResearchGate is a social network for scientists, whose ideas seem pretty closely aligned with those of this blog: Our mission is to connect the world of science and make research open to all. The 20 million researchers in our community come from diverse sectors in over 190 countries, and use ResearchGate to …

Recent Podcasts/Vlogs

Experience & thoughts from people on the ground

21 October 202122 October 2021

Interview | Rebecca Giblin – Reversion Rights, Out-Of-Print Books And How To Fix Copyright

ARC Future Fellow and Associate Professor within the Melbourne Law School, an expert on e-lending, and co-author of "What if we could reimagine copyright?," Rebecca Giblin talks about the crucial but little-known area of reversion rights, how to rescue out-of-print books, and fixing some of the worst problems of copyright by making sure that creators are treated more fairly than they are currently. Do you prefer watching our passionate interviewees talking about the 21st-century walls blocking access to culture? Then check out the vlog …

7 October 20218 October 2021

Interview | Mirela Roncevic – Open Access, Open Science, Scholarly Monographs, E-Book Lending

23 September 20218 October 2021

Interview | Cory Doctorow – Part 2: New publishing models for creators, Amazon as a frenemy, and the Internet Archive court case

21 September 20218 October 2021

Interview | Cory Doctorow – Part 1: Newspapers, Big Tech, Link Tax, DRM and Right to Repair

CHECK OUT ALL PODCASTS/VLOGS

Latest Thoughts

Findings Behind the Bricks

21 October 202120 October 2021

Will publishers try to shut down the free General Index of 107 million scientific journal articles?

by Glyn Moody

20 October 202118 October 2021

Billions of dollars pour into music copyright “assets”: how much will the creators ever see?

by Glyn Moody

19 October 202115 October 2021

A good copyright ruling from a wise judge means you still don’t need to care what a CDN is or does

by Glyn Moody

14 October 202112 October 2021

An artist’s messy divorce shows why copyright shouldn’t be regarded as a kind of property

by Glyn Moody

CHECK OUT ALL BLOG POSTS

Until the recording industry’s monopoly power is broken, musicians may need to go independent

We’ve just written about the terrible deal that most musicians get from the increasingly-popular streaming of their music. A post on Boing Boing explores another aspect of the same problem: the fact that musicians aren’t generally paid according to how…

by Glyn Moody

Beyond the Bricks/Knowledge/Libraries

22 September 202122 September 2021

Breaking down the walls: UK government supporting open science and open research

It’s not just culture that suffers because of walls built by copyright: science, too, has a terrible problem in this regard. In some ways, that’s even worse, since copyright often prevents the free, frictionless flow of information in the form…

by Glyn Moody

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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