Interview | Fred von Lohmann: Copyright Battles, the US DMCA and EU Copyright Directive, Filters, and Interfaces
In this final bonus Walled Culture podcast episode – recorded mid-2022 and kept under wraps as a special 1st anniversary episode, we welcome Fred von Lohmann, former Electronic…
How backdated articles abuse the DMCA’s takedown system to remove legitimate news items
Online platforms often give access to digital material that is under copyright. If any of that content is infringing, then potentially the platform would be liable as well…
Interview | Katharine Trendacosta: The US DMCA, Upload Filters, SOPA-PIPA, Fanfiction, & Platform Competition
Katharine Trendacosta is Associate Director of Policy and Activism at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Her areas of expertise are competition, broadband access, intellectual property, net neutrality, fair…
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…
How a flawed copyright takedown system is causing problems for online sales of perfume products
The copyright system is flawed at many levels, as hundreds of posts on this blog make clear. One particular class of problems concern takedowns. The best known of…
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…
Music label uses copyright law to ask Google to de-list a Wikipedia page with information it doesn’t like
In Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) there’s a chapter about the widely-used “notice and takedown” system, and its many abuses. One indicator of how bad…
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…
Enjoy digital ownership and public libraries while you can: they may disappear soon…
Michael E. Karpeles, Program Lead on OpenLibrary.org at the Internet Archive, spotted an interesting blog post by Michael Kozlowski, the editor-in-chief of Good e-Reader. It concerns Amazon and…
Even algospeak won’t save us from upload filter overblocking
Over on the EFF blog, Cory Doctorow points to an interesting article in the Washington Post about “algospeak“: “Algospeak” is becoming increasingly common across the Internet as people…
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…
It took a 15-year fight to be allowed to use an existing DRM exception: who still thinks copyright is fair?
In his Walled Culture interview, Cory Doctorow explains cogently why Digital Rights Management (DRM) is such a disaster. It’s also pointless: DRM can always be broken, and once…
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…