Beyond the Bricks

One of the many interesting aspects of the current enthusiasm for generative AI is the way that it has electrified the formerly rather sleepy world of copyright. Where before publishers thought they had successfully locked down more or less everything digital with copyright, they now find themselves confronted with deep-pocketed companies – both established ones …

Taylor Swift is in the news, and not just because she has become the most decorated solo artist of all time. The fact that Taylor Swift has already been mentioned multiple times on Walled Culture underlines that she is also an important – if surprising – figure in the world of copyright. That’s because Swift …

One of the reasons that today’s copyright is such a bad fit for the modern digital world is that its roots lie deep in 18th-century law and analogue objects like books. This fact has created a kind of legislative drag that means copyright is always decades behind the latest technological developments. A case in point …

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is one of the most influential funding bodies in the world. According to one ranking, it is the second largest charitable foundation, and as of 31 December 2023 had an endowment of around $75.2 billion. That makes a shift in its publishing policy hugely important. An article in Chemical …

It seems so long ago that people were trying to stop the worst aspects of the EU Copyright Directive. It was quite a battle, as Chapter 6 of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) recounts in detail. The final legislation was passed in March 2019, but it is important not simply to accept …

Back in March, Walled Culture wrote about the terrible job that academic publishers are doing in terms of creating backups of the articles they publish.  We also mentioned there two large-scale archives that are trying to help, Sci-Hub and Anna’s Archive.  Legal action by publishers against the former seems to have led to a halt …

Even though parents insist that it is good and right to share things, the copyright world has succeeded in establishing the contrary as the norm. Now, sharing is deemed a bad, possibly illegal thing. But it was not always thus, as a fascinating speech by Ryan Cordell, Associate Professor in the School of Information Sciences …

One of the supposed justifications for the intellectual monopoly called copyright is that it drives creativity and culture. In the last few weeks alone we have had multiple demonstrations of why the opposite is true: copyright destroys culture, and not by accident, but wilfully. For example, the MTVNews.com site, along with its sister site CMT.com, …

It is extraordinary that within the copyright world it is accepted dogma that legal protections for this intellectual monopoly should always get stronger – creating a kind of copyright ratchet. One of the manifestations of this belief was the WIPO Copyright Treaty, signed in 1996, which extended copyright in important ways. A key element was …

One of the central ideas of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) is that there is a fundamental difference between analogue and digital, and that copyright fails to recognise that. Instead, it seeks to impose what is an inherently analogue approach based on scarcity to the online world where abundance is the norm. …

One of the arguments sometimes made in defence of copyright is that without it, creators would be unable to compete with the hordes of copycats that would spring up as soon as their works became popular. Copyright is needed, supporters say, to prevent less innovative creators from producing works that are closely based on new, …

It is hard to imagine the world without the Web. Collectively, we routinely access billions of Web pages without thinking about it. But we often take it for granted that the material we want to access will be there, both now and in the future. We all hit the dreaded “404 not found” error from …

The problems and unfairness of the copyright system are so manifest that many would like to adopt alternative approaches. But that’s a big step, and one that undoubtedly requires a certain courage. Every example that shows how the move worked for others is important, since it not only demonstrates that alternatives exist, but that they …

At the heart of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) lies the sorry tale of the EU Copyright Directive. Its stated aim appeared reasonable enough: to update EU copyright law for the digital age. But unprecedented lobbying by the copyright industry saw it become yet another failure to understand the online world, and …

A year ago, Walled Culture wrote about an extremely important case that was being considered by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the EU’s top court. The central question was whether the judges considered that copyright was more important than privacy. The bad news is that the CJEU has just decided that …

The Pirate Party has long played an important role in fighting the worst excesses of copyright in the EU. For example, when a major copyright update was being discussed, the Pirate Party MEP Felix Reda wrote an insightful and practical report on what needed changing. Most of his recommendations were ignored in the final EU …