The EU link tax was bad enough, but Canada’s threatens to be even worse
At the heart of Walled Culture the book (available as a free ebook in various formats) is the story of the disgraceful EU Copyright Directive and how it…
Canada is planning to take the EU’s link tax as a model for one of its own new and bad copyright laws
One chapter of my Walled Culture book (free download available in various formats) looks at how the bad ideas embodied in the EU’s appalling Copyright Directive – the…
Interview | Cory Doctorow [Part 1]: Newspapers, Big Tech, Link Tax, DRM and Right to Repair
Author, journalist, and activist Cory Doctorow talks about the evolution of newspapers, the role and threats posed by big tech, the collateral damage created by link taxes and…
Newspaper publishers’ obsession with link and snippet taxes is bad for society – and bad for them
Traditional newspapers have been complaining about the rise of the digital world for decades. Their discontent derives from the fact that they failed to recognise opportunities early on,…
How to save the newspaper industry (hint: not with snippet taxes)
There’s no denying that the newspaper industry is in trouble. In part, the publishing companies have themselves to blame. For too long, they have fought against the Internet,…
Why the snippet tax of the EU Copyright Directive is pointless and doomed to fail
The EU Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market contains two spectacularly bad ideas. One is the upload filter of Article 17, which will wreak havoc not…
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…
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…
Publisher wants $2,500 to allow academics to post their own manuscript to their own repository
As a Walled Culture explained back in 2021, open access (OA) to published academic research comes in two main varieties. “Gold” open access papers are freely available to…
Copyright has been one of life’s certainties: but will it always be?
Copyright seems to be a fixture of our legal, economic and social systems. For 300 years, it has formed the backbone of the structures used to incentivise and…
Public domain: a belated step forward, two huge steps back
The first day of the year is a special time in the copyright world. It’s when a flood of works whose copyright has expired finally emerge from behind…
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How copyright’s ownership obsession has turned magazine contracts into intellectual extractivism
The indispensable Cory Doctorow, who was the first person to speak with Walled Culture as part of its interview series, has yet another great post that encapsulates a…
Like news publishers, magazine publishers want money from Google; here’s why it is happy to pay
Last week, Walled Culture noted that newspaper publishers still don’t understand what has happened in their industry. They labour under the misapprehension that the digital giants like Google…
The EU Copyright Directive is so bad it’s proving really hard to transpose into decent national laws
Walled Culture has written numerous posts about the EU Copyright Directive, because it contains two extremely harmful ideas. The first is the “snippet tax“, an attempt by some…
Microsoft tries to cosy up to newspaper publishers, forgets that for them, enough is never enough
A few months after the snippet tax was agreed as part of the EU Copyright Directive, Australia indicated it wanted to take the same route. The government there…