Sharing material used to be the norm for newspapers, and should be for LLMs
Even though parents insist that it is good and right to share things, the copyright world has succeeded in establishing the contrary as the norm. Now, sharing is…
Why Google’s new AI-saturated search page will be a disaster
Google didn’t invent full-text search of the Internet – that honour belongs to early pioneers such as WebCrawler, Lycos and AltaVista. But for the last 25 years or…
Welcome to the future, where AI agents hunt down alleged online copyright infringement
As readers of this blog have doubtless noticed, the latest hot tech – and investment – area involves “agentic AI”, where AI systems are allowed to operative autonomously…
Why genAI means the end of copyright for software and the re-invention of open source
Most of the discussions about the impact of the latest generative AI systems on copyright have centred on text, images and video. That’s no surprise, since writers, artists…
Common Corpus, an open training set for AI, goes global – and so should support for it
As many of the AI stories on Walled Culture attest, one of the most contentious areas in the latest stage of AI development concerns the sourcing of training…
Anthropic’s AI lawsuit settlement may not go through, but it exposes a truth about copyright
The latest generation of AI systems, based on large language models (LLMs), is perceived as the biggest threat in decades to the established copyright order. The scale of…
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…
European Publishers Council stays true to the tired old trope about “copyright theft”
A few weeks ago Walled Culture explored how the leaders in the generative AI world are trying to influence the future legal norms for this field. In the…
As AI agents become ubiquitous, expect the copyright industry to try to turn them against you
One of the many interesting aspects of the new wave of artificial intelligence systems is that with them, copyright has moved from the fringe to centre stage. There…
A lawsuit against OpenAI has mainstream media finally asking if copyright is fit for the digital world
Last year saw great excitement over a new wave of AI services based on large language models (LLMs). That enthusiasm was somewhat overshadowed by a subsequent wave of…
Writers and publishers face an existential threat from AI: time to embrace the true fans model
Walled Culture has written several times about the major impact that generative AI will have on the copyright landscape. More specifically, these systems, which can create quickly and…
Ed Sheeran must face yet another music copyright trial, even more outrageous than the others
Back in April, Walled Culture wrote about Ed Sheeran’s victory in a case alleging copyright infringement. Unfortunately, the copyright world’s obsession with ownership means that Sheeran can’t simply…
Top Harvard lawyers don’t think making and sharing unauthorised digital copies is theft
TorrentFreak has a report about a piece of research – sadly behind a paywall – by Malgorzata Ciesielska and Dariusz Jemielniak, that looks at copyright from an unusual…