Thoughts

Copyright is built on a lie that most people seem to accept: artists can make a decent living from the current system of rewards that copyright provides. As Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) explores, all the data about artist remuneration shows that isn’t true. Alongside such dry statistics, it’s good to hear …

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 …

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 …

The latest obsession in the world of copyright is trying to get generative AI companies to pay for using creative material for training purposes. As various posts have noted, this makes no sense, because training is just a matter of analysis, which requires no permission. What the copyright world wants to do is to erect …

As Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) recounts, one of the many problems with copyright is that it can be used – and abused – for purposes that have nothing to do with its original intent of promoting creativity. One of the best known of these is to force people to take down true …

Back in October last year, Walled Culture wrote about a proposed law in France that would see a tax imposed on AI companies, with the proceeds being paid to a collecting society. Now that the EU’s AI Act has been adopted, it is being invoked as another reason why just such a system should be …

Walled Culture has been warning about the financialisation and securitisation of music for two years now. Those obscure but important developments mean that the owners of copyrights are increasingly detached from the creative production process. They regard music as just another asset, like gold, petroleum or property, to be exploited to the maximum. A Guest …