Libraries

Google didn’t invent full-text search of the Internet – that honour belongs to early pioneers such as WebCrawler, Lycos and AltaVista. But for the last 25 years or so, Google has been synonymous with online searching, providing the quickest and most effective way to find things online (although its results may be getting worse.) More …

As numerous posts on this blog have emphasised, the underlying idea of open access (OA) – allowing anyone to read and share published academic research for free – is great in principle, but in practice has failed in important ways. That’s because traditional academic publishers have subverted the open access model to such an extent …

As many of the AI stories on Walled Culture attest, one of the most contentious areas in the latest stage of AI development concerns the sourcing of training data. To create high-quality large language models (LLMs) massive quantities of training data are required. In the current genAI stampede, many companies are simply scraping everything they …

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 (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 …

One of the little-known but extremely telling episodes in the history of modern copyright, discussed in Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available), concerns the Marrakesh Treaty. A post on the Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) site from 2017 has a good summary of what the treaty is about, and why it is important: It …

A quarter of a century ago, I wrote a book called “Rebel Code”. It was the first – and is still the only – detailed history of the origins and rise of free software and open source, based on interviews with the gifted and generous hackers who took part. Back then, it was clear that …

When books were rare and extremely expensive, they were often chained to the bookcase to prevent people walking off with them, in what were known as “chained libraries”. Copyright serves a similar purpose today, even though, thanks to the miracle of perfect, zero-cost digital copies, it is possible simultaneously to take an ebook home and …

It is a measure of how fast the field of AI has developed in the three years since Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) was published that the issue of using copyright material for training AI systems, briefly mentioned in the book, has become one of the hottest topics in the copyright world, …

A year ago, Walled Culture wrote about a growing risk that we will lose access to the world’s knowledge, because of a failure by traditional academic publishers to place copies of the articles they publish in key backup archives. Although unacceptable, that oversight is more a matter of laziness and cost cutting on the part …

A few weeks ago Walled Culture explored how the leaders in the generative AI world are trying to influence the future legal norms for this field. In the face of a powerful new form of an old technology – AI itself has been around for over 50 years – those are certainly needed. Governments around …

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 …

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 …

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 …