New Zealand is about to commit copyright theft – the real kind
When modern copyright was invented with the Statute of Anne in 1710, it consisted of a bargain. In return for a time-limited, government-enforced monopoly, creators agreed that their…
Why add to Ukraine’s problems with an unnecessary implementation of a bad EU copyright law?
It would be something of an understatement to say that Ukraine is facing serious problems currently. Against that background, this news from the IPKat blog is rather surprising:…
DRM on paper shows why anti-circumvention laws are copyright’s biggest blunder
Most people are familiar with the Dymo label printer in some form or another. Not an exciting product perhaps, but quite a useful one. The Electronic Frontier Foundation…
Podcast Highlights: Knocking Down Walls, Battles after SOPA, eLending, Excessive Terms & Unfit Rules
Check out this great compilation of key highlights from our Walled Culture podcast/vlog series, launched in September 2021. Our guests talk about knocking down the walls, the continuing…
Little mermaid, long copyright, big absurdity
Many people are familiar with The Little Mermaid statue, perched on a rock by the waterside in Copenhagen, Denmark. What is less well-known is the absurd copyright maximalism…
First financialisation, now securitisation: copyright music industry moves further away from artists
I’ve written a couple of times about a worrying new trend: music copyrights becoming completely divorced from the original creativity that lies behind them, thanks to the increasing…
Who knew? Diamond open access publishing is not rare at all, but actually very common
Back in December I was extolling the virtues of green open access, which involves academics self-archiving their work so that anyone can freely download it and read it.…
Auguste Rodin’s sculptures are in the public domain; 3D scans of them should be, too
Auguste Rodin is without doubt one of the greatest sculptors in history. Equally without doubt, his works are now in the public domain, since he died in 1917.…
Nintendo kills off an ad-free YouTube channel where fans could listen to its game music, because copyright
Walled Culture has just written about the way the boundaries between digital platforms and digital producers are becoming more fluid. Here’s another interesting melding of media: the GilvaSunner…
A bit is a bit is a bit: digital platforms begin to merge with digital producers
Last week Walled Culture wrote about Microsoft’s planned purchase of the video gaming company Activision. That’s been followed by some other news stories that may not involve such…
ResearchEquals: step-by-step academic publishing, where the default is openness and CC0
There are a number of problems with academic publishing, which open access has been trying to fix for over two decades. Back in 2020, a “Manifesto to Liberate…
Interview | Katherine Maher: The Monkey Selfie, Public Domain, Freedom of Panorama, the EU Copyright Directive, Remix Culture, & the 20th Century Black Hole
Katherine Maher, advocate for free and open societies, is the former CEO and Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. Her background is in the field of information and…
Beyond a game: Microsoft swallows up Activision, a further concentration of power in a few digital giants
This blog has written a couple times about YouTube‘s dominance in the video sector. Spotify may well create a similar leading position for itself in music streaming, while…
Analogue books go from strength to strength – helped, not hindered, by the digital world
Many of the worst ideas in recent copyright laws have been driven by some influential companies’ fear of the transition from analogue to digital. Whereas analogue formats –…