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

PDF | Walled Culture - the Book

ePub | Walled Culture - the Book

mobi | Walled Culture - the Book

Paperback & More info

How AI could bring about the mass adoption of open access in mathematics – and beyond
Numerous posts on Walled Culture have lamented the continuing failure to realise all the benefits from open access. Even when there is a move to open access, it is frequently to gold open access, which requires a payment from institutions when one of their academics publishes a paper with a journal. On …
How copyright is being abused to censor Albania’s Flamingo Revolution
For the last couple of years, the copyright world has been grappling with the latest generation of AI, as numerous posts on Walled Culture attest. That’s hardly surprising, since AI is currently delivering the greatest challenge to the foundations of copyright since the arrival of the computer, which was discussed at length …
US government argues that fair use applies to OpenAI’s training of LLMs in key copyright case
Historically, legislation and court decisions have always lagged behind technological change. But the gap between the two is even starker in the world of generative AI. The large language model (LLM) that kicked things off, ChatGPT, was only released in November 2022; the pace of development since then has been dizzying. Meanwhile, …
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 …

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

7 October 202630 September 2026

How AI could bring about the mass adoption of open access in mathematics – and beyond

by Glyn Moody

23 September 202623 September 2026

How copyright is being abused to censor Albania’s Flamingo Revolution

by Glyn Moody

9 September 20268 September 2026

US government argues that fair use applies to OpenAI’s training of LLMs in key copyright case

by Glyn Moody

8 July 20267 July 2026

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

by Glyn Moody

CHECK OUT ALL BLOG POSTS

Why the snippet tax of the EU Copyright Directive is pointless and doomed to fail

The EU Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market contains two spectacularly bad ideas. One is the upload filter of Article 17, which will wreak havoc not just on creativity in the EU, but also on freedom of speech…

by Glyn Moody

Beyond the Bricks/Knowledge

15 October 20258 October 2025

Good news: laws to tackle AI deepfakes are coming. Bad news: they are based on copyright

A key theme of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) is that copyright, born in an analogue age of scarcity, works poorly in today’s digital world of abundance. One manifestation of that is how lawmakers struggle to adapt…

by Glyn Moody

Audiovisual/Beyond the Bricks/Knowledge/Libraries/Media/Thoughts

21 September 202314 September 2023

Unique collection of old TV culture put at risk by a heavy-handed copyright takedown system

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 programmes. These are important cultural artefacts, but…

by Glyn Moody

Beyond the Bricks/Knowledge/Libraries/Thoughts

18 April 202317 April 2023

What Professor Litman’s classic open access book “Digital Copyright” teaches us

The central theme of Walled Culture the blog and the book (free digital versions available for download) is how copyright is a bad fit for the digital world. That has become increasingly evident over the last twenty years, as more…

by Glyn Moody

All Trending Articles