Glyn Moody

When modern copyright was invented with the Statute of Anne in 1710, it consisted of a bargain. In return for a time-limited, government-enforced monopoly, creators agreed that their work would pass afterwards into what came to be called the public domain – free for anyone to do anything with. Whatever you might think of the …

It would be something of an understatement to say that Ukraine is facing serious problems currently. Against that background, this news from the IPKat blog is rather surprising: While certain EU Member States are still to transpose Directive (EU) 2019/790 (Copyright [Digital Single Market] Directive), Ukraine, a non-EU country, has decided to implement certain provisions …

Most people are familiar with the Dymo label printer in some form or another. Not an exciting product perhaps, but quite a useful one. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has some bad news – Dymo is adding DRM to its label paper in the form of RFID chips: Dymo’s latest generation of desktop label printers use …

Many people are familiar with The Little Mermaid statue, perched on a rock by the waterside in Copenhagen, Denmark. What is less well-known is the absurd copyright maximalism it has given rise to. The latest manifestation concerns a cartoon depicting the statue as a zombie, and a photo of it with a facemask, reported here …

I’ve written a couple of times about a worrying new trend: music copyrights becoming completely divorced from the original creativity that lies behind them, thanks to the increasing financialisation of the sector. As songs are viewed simply as assets that can be bought and sold, they can also be manipulated in other ways, including securitisation, …

Back in December I was extolling the virtues of green open access, which involves academics self-archiving their work so that anyone can freely download it and read it. In that article, I also mentioned diamond open access. It’s like gold open access, with articles published in a digital journal, but without the gold OA charge …

Auguste Rodin is without doubt one of the greatest sculptors in history. Equally without doubt, his works are now in the public domain, since he died in 1917. Unfortunately, the situation in France is a little more complicated, for reasons the artist and public domain campaigner Cosmo Wenman explains: Shortly before his death, Rodin willed …

Walled Culture has just written about the way the boundaries between digital platforms and digital producers are becoming more fluid. Here’s another interesting melding of media: the GilvaSunner channel on YouTube, which consists of nothing but video game soundtracks, mostly from Nintendo games. It’s a pity we can no longer visit it (original account that is …

Last week Walled Culture wrote about Microsoft’s planned purchase of the video gaming company Activision. That’s been followed by some other news stories that may not involve such headline-grabbing acquisitions, but which do form part of the same larger trend. First, there’s the Joe Rogan kerfuffle at Spotify. Tim De Chant on Ars Technica explained …

There are a number of problems with academic publishing, which open access has been trying to fix for over two decades. Back in 2020, a “Manifesto to Liberate Science: Organic knowledge(s)” appeared, with the following interesting framing of the issues: We have inadvertently handed over the pursuit of knowledge to those who wish to commodify …

This blog has written a couple times about YouTube‘s dominance in the video sector. Spotify may well create a similar leading position for itself in music streaming, while a mega-merger underway would shrink publishing‘s Big Five into the Big Four. A recent article in The Hollywood Reporter shows that a similar concentration of power is …

Many of the worst ideas in recent copyright laws have been driven by some influential companies’ fear of the transition from analogue to digital. Whereas analogue formats – vinyl, books, cinematic releases of films – are relatively easy to control, digital ones are not. Once a creation is in a digital form, anyone can make …

It’s always interesting to see hard figures about how much individuals earn online from their activities there. For example, Forbes published an article recently that looked at the top ten YouTubers. The income of the stars in this relatively new medium turns out to be comparable to that of those working in traditional ones like …

Earlier this week, Dr Emily Dolson, Assistant Professor at Michigan State University, posted the tweet shown above. It’s a warning that one of Dr Dolson’s files violates Google Drive’s Copyright Infringement policy, and that some features related to the file “may have been restricted”. As she tweeted, the file contains a single line with the …

Video games are undoubtedly an art form, arguably the quintessential art form of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. They combine graphics, video, music and interactive plotlines to produce a uniquely rich and complex creation only possible thanks to the widespread availability of powerful but low-cost systems like game consoles and personal computers. Clearly, …

Advertising is one of the commonest ways of financing Web sites and services. There’s nothing wrong with that, at least in principle. But the fact that, according to one estimate, 42% of Internet users worldwide employ an ad blocker to remove those ads from their screens is a clear sign that something is seriously wrong. …