Why genAI means the end of copyright for software and the re-invention of open source
Most of the discussions about the impact of the latest generative AI systems on copyright have centred on text, images and video. That’s no surprise, since writers, artists…
Copyright litigation over Anne Frank’s writings likely to impact the fate of VPNs in the EU
“The Diary of a Young Girl” is a Dutch language diary written by the young Jewish writer Anne Frank while she was in hiding for two years with…
Canada’s new right-to-repair exemptions to copyright law are as useful as a chocolate teapot
A couple of weeks ago, Walled Culture wrote about the deeply unsatisfactory process for obtaining exemptions to the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s ban on the circumvention of…
How an “absolutist position” seeks to block even minor copyright exemptions, and usually succeeds
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was passed in the US in 1998, at an early stage of the shift to a digital world, with little concern for…
Music label uses copyright law to ask Google to de-list a Wikipedia page with information it doesn’t like
In Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) there’s a chapter about the widely-used “notice and takedown” system, and its many abuses. One indicator of how bad…
Time for the copyright world to stop attacking the Internet’s infrastructure
Despite the impossibility of stopping people making copies of digital material, the copyright industry continues to launch ever-more extreme legal actions against outside parties in a desperate attempt…
It’s time to end the anti-circumvention exemption circus
Copyright as we know it goes back to the Statute of Anne of 1710. A law that old is clearly going to struggle to cope with the enormous…