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,…
As site blocks pile up, European Commission issues subtle slapdown to Italy’s Piracy Shield
As numerous Walled Culture posts attest, site blocking is in the vanguard of the actions by copyright companies against sites engaged in the unauthorised sharing of material. Over…
Fighting fire with fire: how to tackle the AI bots that threaten the open Web
It is a measure of how fast the field of AI has developed in the three years since Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) was published…
EU prepares to give new rights to live streaming sites, to the detriment of the Internet and its users
At the heart of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) lies the dispiriting saga of how the EU Copyright Directive came into being. It began in…
Why Italy’s Piracy Shield risks moving from tiresome digital farce to serious national tragedy
Walled Culture has been following the sorry saga of Italy’s automated blocking system Piracy Shield for a year now. Blocklists are drawn up by copyright companies, without any…
Now the copyright industry wants to apply deep, automated blocking to the Internet’s core routers
A central theme of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) and this blog is that the copyright industry is never satisfied. Now matter how long the…
The new Hadopi? Piracy Shield blocks innocent Web sites and makes it hard for them to appeal
Italy’s newly-installed Piracy Shield system, put in place by the country’s national telecoms regulator, Autorità per le Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni (Authority for Communications Guarantees, AGCOM), is already failing…
Copyright enforcement in a nutshell: make the Internet hard work and less fun until people give up
The Internet is amazing, but it’s not perfect. There are many aspects that are unsatisfactory – its protocols are inefficient, and it is far from resilient. The InterPlanetary…
Bad news: copyright industry attacks on the Internet’s plumbing are increasing – and succeeding
Back in October 2021, Walled Culture wrote about a ruling from a US judge. It concerned an attempt to make the content delivery network (CDN) Cloudflare, which is…
Time for the copyright world to stop attacking the Internet’s infrastructure
Despite the impossibility of stopping people making copies of digital material, the copyright industry continues to launch ever-more extreme legal actions against outside parties in a desperate attempt…
A good copyright ruling from a wise judge means you still don’t need to care what a CDN is or does
Many people are unaware of what a “Content Delivery Network” (CDN) is, or does, even though they probably make use of one hundreds of times a day. And…