Spain’s Net blocks have a flimsy legal basis, and lack both oversight and accountability
A few weeks ago, Walled Culture wrote about Hadopi, France’s infamous copyright enforcement mechanism. The so-called “graduated response” – aka “three strikes and you are out” – has…
Copyright industry intensifies efforts to undermine core Internet plumbing: VPNs
Last month Walled Culture wrote about an important case at the Court of Justice of the European Union, (CJEU), the EU’s top court, that could determine how VPNs…
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…
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…
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…
Top EU court’s advisor points out that geoblocks can be easily circumvented: time to get rid of them
One of the central ideas of both Walled Culture the blog and Walled Culture the book is that copyright simply doesn’t work in the digital world. One proof…
Upload filters: unjustified blocks, unfair appeals process, and a system rigged in favour of Big Content
The EU Copyright Directive contains one of the worst ideas in modern copyright: what amounts to a requirement to filter uploads on major sites. Despite repeated explanations of…
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,…
Academic research finds economic, technical and operational harms from Italy’s Piracy Shield
Walled Culture first wrote about Piracy Shield, Italy’s automated system for tackling alleged copyright infringement in the streaming sector, two years ago. Since then, we have written about…
Leaders in the generative AI world are daring to say the unsayable: that copyright is not sacrosanct
For the last hundred years or so, the prevailing dogma has been that copyright is an unalloyed good, and that more of it is better. Whether that was…
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…
Italy is losing its mind because of copyright: it just made its awful Piracy Shield even worse
Walled Culture has been writing about Italy’s Piracy Shield system for a year now. It was clear from early on that its approach of blocking Internet addresses (IP…
Italy’s new Piracy Shield has just gone into operation and is already harming human rights there
Back in October, Walled Culture wrote about the grandly-named “Piracy Shield”. This is Italy’s new Internet blocking system, which assumes people are guilty until innocent, and gives the…
Publishers have long hated libraries; here’s the history, and the next attack
As a Walled Culture post last year noted, publishers hate libraries (well, many of the bigger publishers do, at least.) A handy piece of research entitled “The Publisher…
Copyright is more important than privacy, says top EU court advisor
We recently wrote about the preliminary decision of Advocate General Szpunar, an advisor to the EU’s Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), concerning geoblocks. The same…