Cinema as a community experience opens the door for low-cost films funded by fans
Walled Culture the book (digital versions available free) is about the incompatibility of the traditional copyright system with the digital world, and its failure to reward creators fairly. That raises the question of what might replace it, and the book’s last chapter offers one solution in the form of true fans. These are people who …
Why the spread of powerful local AI models makes copyright enforcement even harder
The central theme of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) is the growing incompatibility between traditional copyright law and the digital, online world. The culmination of that process was the EU Copyright Directive, passed in 2019. The Directive was supposed to be transposed into local laws by 2021, but a year after that …
Hadopi, perhaps the world’s worst copyright law, is moribund but not quite dead (yet)
One of the best demonstrations that an obsession with protecting copyright’s intellectual monopoly drives politicians insane is the French law known as Hadopi, an acronym for ‘Haute Autorité pour la diffusion des oeuvres et la protection des droits sur internet’ (High Authority for the Dissemination of Works and the Protection of Rights on the Internet). …
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 and film-makers feel very strongly about their creations, and members of the public can relate easily to the issues that AI raises for this kind of creativity. …
Copyright litigation over Anne Frank’s writings likely to impact the fate of VPNs in the EU
“The Diary of a Young Girl” is a Dutch language diary written by the young Jewish writer Anne Frank while she was in hiding for two years with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Although the diary and Anne Frank’s death in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp are well known, few are aware …
Wikipedia at 25 grapples with new challenges arising from generative AI
Wikipedia celebrated its 25th birthday this month. Given the centrality of Wikipedia to so much activity online, it is hard to remember (or to imagine, for those who are younger) a time without Wikipedia. The latest statistics are impressive: That’s testimony to the global nature of Wikipedia. But there’s something else, not mentioned there, that …
Walled Culture the book, three years on
Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) was launched just over three years ago. A few weeks afterwards, I talked with journalist and editor Maria Bustillos about the book and its background, as part of the Internet Archive’s Book Talk series. That interview has just been added to the Future Knowledge Podcast series in …
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 of abundance. One manifestation of that is how lawmakers struggle to adapt the existing copyright rules to deal with novel technological developments, like the new generation of …
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 the serious problems that soon emerged. But instead of fixing those issues, the government body that runs the scheme, Italy’s AGCOM (the Italian Authority for Communications Guarantees), …
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 that threat can be gauged by the flurry of AI lawsuits that publishers and others have launched against generative AI companies. Since the first of these, reported …
Top German court says maybe the Web should be more like television in order to protect copyright
Back in 2022, Walled Culture wrote about a legal case involving ad blockers. These are hugely popular programs: according to recent statistics, around one billion people use ad blockers when they are online. That’s a testament to the importance many people attach to being in control of their browser experience, and to a wide dislike …
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 the past few months, this approach has become even more pervasive, and even more intrusive. For example, in France, the Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare was forced to …
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 early 2013 with the usual “stakeholder dialogue”, in which the European Commission sought the views of the various constituencies affected. It generated an unprecedentedly large response that …
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 ever true is one question, but it is certainly not the case since we entered the digital era, for reasons explained at length in Walled Culture the …
True fans, super fans, core fans: an alternative way to fund creators gains wide industry support
Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) concluded with a look at “true fans”, an alternative way of funding creators that avoids the main problems of the current copyright system. The approach is based on nurturing the connection between artists and their most dedicated fans, allowing the former to generate extra revenue by providing …
Yes, let’s “Make it Fair” – by recognising that copyright has failed to reward creators properly
A few weeks ago, the UK’s regional and national daily news titles ran similar front covers, exhorting the government there to “Make it Fair”. The campaign Web site explained: Tech companies use creative content, such as news articles, books, music, film, photography, visual art, and all kinds of creative work, to train their generative AI …