Interview | Glyn Moody: Walled Culture – A Journey Behind the Copyright Bricks
Glyn Moody has been writing about copyright, digital rights, and the Internet for 30 years. He is the editor of the Walled Culture project and author of Walled…
Walled Culture, the book, now freely available: what that means, and how you can help
Today is an important day for this blog: Walled Culture – the book – has launched. You can download free copies now in a variety of digital formats.…
Open access is taking over, but academic institutions are paying as much money as ever: what happened?
The good news is that open access publishing, which allows anyone to read academic papers without needing a subscription, is taking over. The bad news is that academic…
Best-selling organic chemistry textbook to be freely available, supported by enlightened patronage
It’s well known that textbook prices are generally high. That’s in part because academic publishers effectively have a monopoly when it comes to standard texts. Very often, there…
Ireland shows how to take the true fans idea to the next level, with a bold new arts funding programme
One of the recurring themes on this blog is the idea of true fans: hard-core supporters of an artist who are willing to send money directly to creators…
Imagine a world where amazing fanfic was the norm, not the exception: only copyright stands in the way
On the Pocket site, there’s a fascinating story about fanfic – fan fiction – which Wikipedia defines as “fictional writing written in an amateur capacity by fans, unauthorized…
Upload filters: unjustified blocks, unfair appeals process, and a system rigged in favour of Big Content
The EU Copyright Directive contains one of the worst ideas in modern copyright: what amounts to a requirement to filter uploads on major sites. Despite repeated explanations of…
Twitch mutes top videogame streamer because of claim he used someone’s copyright siren sound effect
Alongside death and taxes, one of life’s great certainties is a constant flow of absurd copyright claims. Here’s one from the world of live videogame streaming on the…
Educational publisher Pearson finds a way to make NFTs even worse
Back in April, Walled Culture noted that non-fungible tokens (NFTs) offer very little benefit for creators, despite the grand claims made for them. Since then, the once trendy…