Cultural digitisation for the many, or cultural depredation for the few: time to choose
A couple of weeks ago, the Guardian had a report on what it called the “growing market for cultural digitisation” carried out by museums and art galleries: Museums…
The film industry effectively solved the problem of unauthorised downloads; now it is “unsolving” it…
Copyright companies frequently invoke “piracy” when they demand new legislation or stronger enforcement of existing laws. Usually, they have a free hand to claim what they like about…
Can Nigeria lead the way in modernising outdated copyright laws through expanded exceptions?
When people talk and write about copyright, they generally mean US or EU laws. It’s true that most recent developments in the field – notably many bad ones…
Rights retention: one small step for academics, one giant leap for global access to knowledge
A few weeks ago, we wondered whether academic publishers might try to shut down the amazing General Index of scientific journals that Carl Malamud has created. There’s a…
Giant Penguin attack: why the US courts should block a publishing mega-merger
This blog has written recently about the disproportionate power wielded by YouTube in both the video streaming sector, and as part of the music industry. Sadly, that is…
Interview | Evan Greer & Lia Holland: Rethinking Copyright, Fighting Creative Monopolies, and Putting an End to Enforcement Excesses
Fight for the Future’s Director, Evan Greer, and Campaigns and Communications Director, Lia Holland, are both digital rights activists who have been active in the music industry. Based…
BookTok shows how fans can power sales; imagine what could be done without copyright anxiety
A little while back, the Guardian covered the rising literary power of BookTok – short videos on TikTok devoted to the pleasures and pains of reading. As well…
Adding DRM code to games is hardly fair play: it can slow them down and even stop them from loading
Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a strange thing. It is software code that is added to a product without providing any benefit to the user. It is designed…
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…
YouTube is “neck-and-neck with Netflix”, and bigger than the world’s entire recording industry
Everyone knows that Google (strictly speaking, the parent company, Alphabet) is a digital giant. But recent figures reveal that YouTube alone is also enormous, and in two markets:…
It’s time to end the anti-circumvention exemption circus
Copyright as we know it goes back to the Statute of Anne of 1710. A law that old is clearly going to struggle to cope with the enormous…
Squaring the music streaming circle: fair remuneration for artists, easy discoverability for users
Streaming dominates the recording music industry today, and everyone assumes that things won’t change for a while. But there are two opposing aspects of the current business models…
Interview | Dr. Eoin O‘Dell: The copyright creation myth, a permission-based society, and EU vs US copyright law
Dr. Eoin O’Dell, Associate Professor of Law at Trinity College Dublin (Dublin University), explains some copyright fundamentals: its origins and basic premises, the creation myth, the shift to…
Does copyright give companies the right to search your home and computer?
One reason why copyright has become so important in the digital age is that it applies to the software that many of us use routinely on our smartphones,…
Do 20 consecutive words deserve copyright protection?
One problem with copyright is that it lasts too long, as an earlier post on this blog explored. But there’s another issue: the fact that copyright protects even…