Beyond the Bricks

Walled Culture has been following closely Italy’s poorly-designed Piracy Shield system. Back in December we reported how copyright companies used their access to the Piracy Shield system to order Italian Internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to all of Google Drive for the entire country, and how malicious actors could similarly use that unchecked …

One of the darker threads of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) is how complex copyright enforcement systems can be abused, for example by sending Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests for material that is perfectly legal. A recent post on the Public Citizen blog offers an extreme example of this blight. …

Walled Culture started covering generative AI relatively early, back in October 2022. That’s just two years ago, and yet the technological progress since then has been extraordinary, whatever you think about the other issues gen AI raises. The latest breakthrough is particularly interesting because it has come from China. The site Live Science explains why …

Walled Culture has noted previously the fabulous levels of profit that many academic publishers have achieved, largely through the abuse of copyright, as explained in Walled Culture the book (free digital versions). And yet those levels are apparently not enough for perhaps the most successful of the academic publishers, Elsevier. A story on the site …

Numerous articles here on Walled Culture have chronicled the struggles to turn the aspirations of open access to knowledge into reality. The central reason people do not have free digital access to all academic knowledge is that publishers have been successful in subverting attempts to provide it. Publishers are strongly motivated to undermine open access, …

Last week, an interesting problem with the generative AI system ChatGPT emerged, reported here by Ars Technica: people discovered that the name “David Mayer” breaks ChatGPT. 404 Media also discovered that the names “Jonathan Zittrain” and “Jonathan Turley” caused ChatGPT to cut conversations short. And we know another name, likely the first, that started the …

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 review, or the possibility of any objections, and those blocks must be enforced within 30 minutes. Needless to say, such a ham-fisted and biased approach to copyright …

The perennial attempts to widen the reach of copyright in the pursuit of yet more revenue is something that is to be expected from companies. After all, maximising profits is basically what companies do. But as previous Walled Culture posts have lamented, there is also a widespread tendency among non-profit cultural institutions – museums, art …

A couple of weeks ago, Walled Culture wrote about the deeply unsatisfactory process for obtaining exemptions to the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s ban on the circumvention of copyright protection measures. As the post explained, meaningful and useful exemptions are blocked by the copyright industry as a matter of course, and only the tiniest and …

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 term of copyright, publishers and recording companies want more. No matter how harsh the punishments for infringement, the copyright intermediaries want them to be even more severe. …

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was passed in the US in 1998, at an early stage of the shift to a digital world, with little concern for the serious harm it would cause as everything became suffused with software. The problem is that the DMCA prevents circumvention of copyright protection measures (generally known as …

As Walled Culture has reported, a number of major publishers have brought legal actions against generative AI companies, alleging copyright infringement. These cases are still grinding through the courts, but one publisher, Penguin Random House – one of the so-called “Big Five” publishing houses that dominate the industry worldwide – is not simply sitting back …

Copyright is built on a lie that most people seem to accept: artists can make a decent living from the current system of rewards that copyright provides. As Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) explores, all the data about artist remuneration shows that isn’t true. Alongside such dry statistics, it’s good to hear …

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 previously on Walled Culture. We now have our first decision in this area, from the regional court in Hamburg. Andres Guadamuz has provided an excellent detailed analysis …

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 addresses) to fight alleged copyright infringement – particularly the streaming of football matches – was flawed, and risked turning into another fiasco like France’s failed Hadopi law. …

The open access movement has been trying for over 20 years to promote the widest access to knowledge. Sadly, as numerous Walled Culture posts have chronicled, what should be a matter of social justice has been subverted by clever and cynical moves from the academic publishing industry in order to retain their fabulous profit margins. …