Fans of open access, unite: you have nothing to lose but your chained libraries
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”.…
Trump’s war on knowledge requires re-inventing academic publishing as diamond open access
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…
We risk losing access to the world’s academic knowledge, and copyright makes things worse
The shift from analogue to digital has had a massive impact on most aspects of life. One area where that shift has the potential for huge benefits is…
Digital books do wear out – just like digital music, digital films and video games
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…
If Twitter goes down in flames, what happens to its huge and historically important collection of tweets?
This blog has just written about the likely loss of a very particular kind of culture – K-pop live streams. Culture is culture, and a loss is a…
V Live, the largest archive of K-pop live streams, will soon be V Dead: what happens to all that culture?
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…
Thanks to copyright maximalism, video game masterpieces are likely to be lost forever
Video games are undoubtedly an art form, arguably the quintessential art form of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. They combine graphics, video, music and interactive plotlines…
Technological progress + outdated copyright laws = huge swathes of our cinematic culture lost forever
Physical books can be bought, shared, and accessed in libraries quite easily. Films in a physical form, on the other hand, are hard to acquire, share or view…