How copyright is being abused to censor Albania’s Flamingo Revolution
For the last couple of years, the copyright world has been grappling with the latest generation of AI, as numerous posts on Walled Culture attest. That’s hardly surprising, since AI is currently delivering the greatest challenge to the foundations of copyright since the arrival of the computer, which was discussed at length in Walled Culture …
US government argues that fair use applies to OpenAI’s training of LLMs in key copyright case
Historically, legislation and court decisions have always lagged behind technological change. But the gap between the two is even starker in the world of generative AI. The large language model (LLM) that kicked things off, ChatGPT, was only released in November 2022; the pace of development since then has been dizzying. Meanwhile, nearly 200 lawsuits …
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 …
Spain’s Net blocks have a flimsy legal basis, and lack both oversight and accountability
A few weeks ago, Walled Culture wrote about Hadopi, France’s infamous copyright enforcement mechanism. The so-called “graduated response” – aka “three strikes and you are out” – has been around for over 15 years now, has cost French taxpayers a fortune, and has never achieved any of its aims. As the Walled Culture post suggested, …
Why Google’s new AI-saturated search page will be a disaster
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 …
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). …
Copyright industry intensifies efforts to undermine core Internet plumbing: VPNs
Last month Walled Culture wrote about an important case at the Court of Justice of the European Union, (CJEU), the EU’s top court, that could determine how VPNs can be used in that region. Clarification in this area is particularly important because VPNs are currently under attack in various ways. For example, last year, the …
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 …
How GenAI is taking true fans activity – and creativity – to the next level
Walled Culture has written a number of times about the true fans approach – the idea that creators can be supported directly and effectively by the people who love their work. As Walled Culture the book explains (available as a free ebook), one of the earliest and best expositions of the concept came from Kevin Kelly, …
The long road to Marrakesh: 40 years of copyright obstruction to human rights and social justice
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 …
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), …
Fighting fire with fire: how to tackle the AI bots that threaten the open Web
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, …
European Publishers Council stays true to the tired old trope about “copyright theft”
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 …
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 …