US government argues that fair use applies to OpenAI’s training of LLMs in key copyright case
Historically, legislation and court decisions have always lagged behind technological change. But the gap between the two is even starker in the world of generative AI. The large…
Why “public AI”, built on open source software, is the way forward for the EU
A quarter of a century ago, I wrote a book called “Rebel Code”. It was the first – and is still the only – detailed history of the…
Good news: laws to tackle AI deepfakes are coming. Bad news: they are based on copyright
A key theme of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) is that copyright, born in an analogue age of scarcity, works poorly in today’s digital world…
German court: LAION’s generative AI training dataset is legal thanks to EU copyright exceptions
The copyright world is currently trying to assert its control over the new world of generative AI through a number of lawsuits, several of which have been discussed…
European Parliament sabotages the AI Act by failing to recognise that the right to read is the right to train
Walled Culture recently wrote about an unrealistic French legislative proposal that would require the listing of all the authors of material used for training generative AI systems. Unfortunately,…
A “blatant no” from a copyright holder stops vital linguistic research work in Africa
Copyright discussions typically concern texts in just a few languages, and often only in English. In part, that’s because copyright law has evolved most quickly in anglophone countries.…
Yet again, the copyright industry demands to be shielded from technological progress – and the future
Back in October last year, Walled Culture was one of the first blogs to point out the huge impact that generative AI would have not only on copyright…
The EU has brought back opt-in copyright for text and data mining: let’s build on that foundation
The central theme of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions) is the clash between copyright, devised for an analogue world, and the Internet, which is inherently digital.…
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…