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 …
As AI agents become ubiquitous, expect the copyright industry to try to turn them against you
One of the many interesting aspects of the new wave of artificial intelligence systems is that with them, copyright has moved from the fringe to centre stage. There are continuing debates about what role copyright should play in the world of generative AI, not to mention various lawsuits asking the courts to rule on that …
From DeepSeek to Stargate: How dramatic AI developments will re-shape the copyright landscape
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 …
Publisher’s cost cutting, including the botched use of AI, pushes editors of top journal to resign
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 …
India spends $715 million on academic journals, but with the wrong kind of open access
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, …
How modern Mountweasels could block generative AI and undermine access to knowledge
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 …
How copyright chaos reigns among the UK’s top cultural institutions
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 …
Canada’s new right-to-repair exemptions to copyright law are as useful as a chocolate teapot
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 …
Now the copyright industry wants to apply deep, automated blocking to the Internet’s core routers
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. …
How an “absolutist position” seeks to block even minor copyright exemptions, and usually succeeds
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 …
Penguin Random House hopes copyright bluster will scare off generative AI
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 …
German court: LAION’s generative AI training dataset is legal thanks to EU copyright exceptions
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 …
Where open access has failed to reform academic publishing, perhaps antitrust law will succeed
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. …
Another sign that gold open access was a mistake, and that diamond open access is the future
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 …
OCLC says “what is known must be shared”, but sues Anna’s Archive to stop it sharing knowledge
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 …
Yet more examples of how copyright destroys culture rather than driving it [Updated]
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, …