Audiovisual

Walled Culture has written several times about the “true fans” idea as an alternative approach to the traditional remuneration models employed by the copyright industry players, such as publishers, recording companies and film studios. It’s a simple approach: get the people who really love an artist’s work to support it directly, and in advance, rather …

There’s an interesting post on the TorrentFreak blog about “fast movies“: These heavily edited copies of mainstream movies aim to summarize key plot lines via voice-over narration in about 10 minutes. While no replacement for the real thing, these edits accumulated millions of views and incurred the wrath of rightsholders, leading to the arrest of …

Dr. Seuss (real name Theodor Geisel) is one of the best-known writers for children. He died in 1991, but his books remain extremely popular. Publishers Weekly has a fascinating story about him, his work and copyright. One part concerns a five-year-long legal dispute between ComicMix, a publisher with a Web site about comics, and Dr. …

There’s a story in the Mail on Sunday that underlines why it is important for people to make copies. It concerns the re-surfacing of rare recordings of the Beatles: In the summer of 1963, the BBC began a radio series called Pop Go The Beatles which went out at 5pm on Tuesdays on the Light …

One of the most dramatic differences between the traditional, analogue world of creation, and the modern, digital one, is the democratisation that has taken place in this sphere. Until recently, writers, musicians, artists and filmmakers collectively formed a relatively select group that was hard to enter as a professional. Today, anyone with an Internet connection …

A few weeks ago, a Walled Culture blog post looked at the spate of lawsuits over alleged plagiarism in the world of music. Since the root of the problem here is copyright, which seeks to establish a monopoly over even the tiniest elements of creativity, it’s no surprise that exactly the same issue crops up …

The EU’s Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market is bad news for many reasons. For example, it shows how the copyright industry has succeeded in obtaining yet more legislation to impose its outdated analogue approaches on the digital Internet. It was only able to do that by conducting a dishonest campaign about what …

Walled Culture has noted various signs that the recorded music industry is thriving, particularly the streaming sector. That state of affairs has now been confirmed officially by the Global Music Report 2022 from the IFPI – the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry – which represents the global recording industry. Here’s the summary: In 2021, …

There are few more famous studios in the history of cinema than MGM. Wikipedia describes its early days: MGM was formed by Marcus Loew by combining Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures, and Louis B. Mayer Pictures into a single company. It hired a number of well known actors as contract players – its slogan was “more …

One of the central “justifications” for copyright is that it is indispensable if creativity is to be viable. Without it, we are assured, artists would starve. This ignores the fact that artists created and thrived for thousands of years before the 1710 Statute of Anne. But leaving that historical detail aside, as well as the …

Last month we wrote about an increasingly important trend of digital platforms becoming more involved in digital production. Here’s another striking example: TikTok, best known for its short-form mobile videos, featuring things like dance, jokes, stunts and tricks, has announced the launch of the SoundOn platform, “designed to empower new and undiscovered artists, helping them …

It is established dogma in the church of copyright that the latter is an indispensable tool for promoting creativity. A couple of recent lawsuits against top musicians give the lie to that idea. Here’s one of them, reported on the Copyright Lately blog: On Tuesday, Dua Lipa was hit with a copyright complaint by Florida …

Despite the impossibility of stopping people making copies of digital material, the copyright industry continues to launch ever-more extreme legal actions against outside parties in a desperate attempt to do just that. For example, back in October, this blog reported on an attempt to force a CDN – content delivery network – to act as …

Kanye West has just carried out a fascinating copyright experiment. That probably wasn’t his intention when he released his eleventh studio album Donda 2, but the launch has nonetheless provided some interesting insights regarding the music sector. As he revealed earlier, Donda 2 is not on “Apple Amazon Spotify or YouTube“. Instead, it is only …

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 …

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 …