Music

Back in March, Walled Culture wrote about the terrible ruling by US Judge John G. Koeltl that the Internet Archive’s Controlled Digital Lending programme was not a fair use. The Internet Archive has said that it will appeal against the ruling, but in the meantime it has jointly proposed with the publishers involved an agreement …

Mozilla’s Open Policy & Advocacy blog has news about a worrying proposal from the French government: In a well-intentioned yet dangerous move to fight online fraud, France is on the verge of forcing browsers to create a dystopian technical capability. Article 6 (para II and III) of the SREN Bill would force browser providers to …

The creative world is changing rapidly under the impact of digital technologies. That makes the lack of research into how creators are reacting to and working with new technology all the more urgent. One new report that helps to address that gap in our knowledge is The Networked Shift, available as a free download from …

Back in January, Walled Culture wrote about an interesting initiative by the German online audio distribution platform and music sharing service SoundCloud, with its Fan-Powered Royalties (FPR) approach. At the time, we noted that it was a kind of halfway house to the true fans idea this blog has promoted many times. We also pointed …

Ed Sheeran keeps on getting hit with accusations of copyright infringement. It’s partly his own fault, as he himself admits, reported here by the Guardian: in 2017, he settled out of court after songwriters of the Matt Cardle song Amazing claimed it had been copied by Sheeran for his song Photograph. Sheeran later said he …

Back in November last year, Walled Culture wrote about the growing panic in the copyright world as a result of generative AI programs writing music. Since then, the issue the entered the mainstream, not least with the following story, reported here by The New York Times: For Drake and the Weeknd, two of the most …

Most of the stories on this blog are about copyright absurdities, and the poor fit of an 18th-century legal framework for a 21st-century technology. But it’s important to remember that the copyright world is not just silly, but can be downright selfish. Here’s a great example of how copyright’s enforcers cannot imagine forgoing the tax …

One of the most pernicious effects of today’s copyright maximalism is the idea that every element of a creative work has to be owned by someone, and protected against “unauthorised” – that is, unpaid – use by other artists. That goes against several thousand years of human creativity, which only exists thanks to successive generations …

Too often the posts on Walled Culture are about the latest copyright madness, or new laws making copyright even worse for the digital world. Against this background, it’s good to read that, as this blog hoped back in 2021, something positive has just happened in Nigeria that is likely to have important ramifications across the …

Last week Walled Culture noted that there already are two lawsuits against generative AI systems that are causing such a buzz at the moment. Both those legal actions involved the visual arts, but as this blog noted back in October last year, generative AI is going to have a massive impact across all the creative …

Music streaming services are great – for listeners, who gain access to huge quantities of music, even if they don’t end up owning any of it. But it’s hardly a secret that streaming services produce very little income for the musicians involved – even the big names earn a pittance – with most of the …

There’s a great post by Brewster Kahle on the Internet Archive blog with the title “Digital Books wear out faster than Physical Books“. He makes an important point about the work involved in providing and preserving digital books: The Internet Archive processes and reprocesses the books it has digitized as new optical character recognition technologies …

When people speak of culture, and preserving it, they usually mean the works of recognised artistic giants like Shakespeare, Leonardo Da Vinci, Charlie Chaplin, and Miles Davis. They rarely mean things like live streams of Korean pop music, generally known as K-pop. And yet K-pop is undoubtedly an expression – some would say a particularly …

A couple of weeks ago, Walled Culture wrote about the rapid rise and advance of generative AI in the world of visual arts. One key aspect was its impact on copyright, which emerges as making even less sense in a world where AI programs can knock out an infinite number of images on any topic …

Observant readers of this blog may have noticed that the images used to illustrate the posts have changed recently. Previously, I have drawn on photos that were either in the public domain, or released under a minimal Creative Commons licence such as CC-BY 4.0. For reasons best known to itself, Google Image search has gone …

The last chapter of Walled Culture – the book looks at how the many problems of copyright might be mitigated. It concludes with Kevin Kelly’s idea of “1000 true fans“, which has been discussed on this blog previously. One of the most interesting aspects of the true fans idea is that it doesn’t depend on …