European Parliament sabotages the AI Act by failing to recognise that the right to read is the right to train
Walled Culture recently wrote about an unrealistic French legislative proposal that would require the listing of all the authors of material used for training generative AI systems. Unfortunately,…
The ratchet strikes again: US SMART Copyright Act is even worse than EU upload filters
The EU’s Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market is bad news for many reasons. For example, it shows how the copyright industry has succeeded in obtaining…
Google goes on the attack against the “weaponisation of copyright law”; that’s good – now do it routinely
A few weeks ago Walled Culture wrote about how it is possible to deploy the flawed copyright takedown system for anti-competitive purposes. In that case it was the…
Organisations call on UK government to safeguard AI innovation from being throttled by copyright
As Walled Culture has often noted, the process of framing new copyright laws is tilted against the public in multiple ways. And on the rare occasions when a…
Internet Archive: new copyright laws for generative AI would “further entrench” market leaders
The current excitement over artificial intelligence (AI), particularly generative AI, has now reached the stage where governments feel they need to do something about it in terms of…
Lawrence Lessig on copyright, generative AI and the right to train
Lawrence Lessig is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and one of the biggest names in the world of digital copyright. Walled Culture’s…
A welcome attempt to take down Piracy Shield, Italy’s pre-emptive and unfair Net block system
The copyright industry’s war on the Internet and its users has gone through various stages (full details and links to numerous references in Walled Culture the book, free…
Here’s another way that AI will reduce ad income for publishers – and what they can do about it
New ways in which the latest AI technology can be applied are popping up all the time. Here’s an interesting example discussed by Ben Werdmuller on his blog,…
New French copyright law for AI creations would just mean more money for collecting societies
This blog has written a number of times about the reaction of creators to generative AI. Legal academic and copyright expert Andres Guadamuz has spotted what may be…
Famous writers sue OpenAI for alleged copyright infringement, missing the point again
Last week, a group of prominent writers sued OpenAI, in what is just the latest in a growing number of lawsuits claiming that AI systems are infringing on…
Copyright’s legal stranglehold on creativity has made putting works into the public domain absurdly hard
Bill Willingham is a well-known writer and artist of comics, famous for his work on the series Elementals and Fables. He’s written a long and interesting post on…
Denmark’s new school course wants to brainwash children with the tired old lie that copying is theft
One of the copyright world’s key weapons is a constant barrage of propaganda about the alleged benefits of this intellectual monopoly, and of the supposed horrors of its…
The copyright world’s obsession with ownership will throttle AI innovation and boost today’s tech giants
Generative AI is still one of the hot topics in technology, even if the initial, rather breathless excitement has cooled down somewhat. It clearly represents an interesting new…
How to use today’s debate about AI to fix yesterday’s mistakes in copyright legislation
Copyright is starting to become a hot topic in the world of generative AI, as the usual culprits start demanding yet more protection for their intellectual monopolies. There’s…
Generative AI in Google search is great news for the true fans model, but what about publishers?
Most of the analysis of generative AI – things like Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT – has focused on how it will affect creators. But another important aspect is…
Librarians of the world unite: call for action on ebooks
The terrible lawsuit against the Open Library for daring to increase access to books during the Covid pandemic is not just an attack on the Internet Archive’s selfless…