The copyright world’s obsession with ownership will throttle AI innovation and boost today’s tech giants
Generative AI is still one of the hot topics in technology, even if the initial, rather breathless excitement has cooled down somewhat. It clearly represents an interesting new…
No big deal: calling the publishers’ bluff on high-price access to publicly-funded research
This blog has written a number of posts about open access, and its difficulties. One important impetus for the move towards open access was the increasing use by…
Copyright isn’t working: all around the world, writers are struggling to earn a decent wage
One of the central themes here on Walled Culture is that copyright isn’t doing its main job. It is supposed to provide fair remuneration for the work that…
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…
Guest post | Au-delà de l’attentisme, une voie expérimentaliste pour l’avenir du droit d’auteur ?
Pourquoi protéger les droits d’auteur ? A moins d’être partisan des justifications lockéennes de la propriété intellectuelle (et d’être prêt à assumer leurs conséquences radicales dans le domaine de…
Running up that hill: Kate Bush shows the best way to make lots of money in pop music
Anyone who watches the Netflix sci-fi drama “Stranger Things” probably also knows about Kate Bush’s song “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)“, originally released in 1985.…
Top Harvard lawyers don’t think making and sharing unauthorised digital copies is theft
TorrentFreak has a report about a piece of research – sadly behind a paywall – by Malgorzata Ciesielska and Dariusz Jemielniak, that looks at copyright from an unusual…
NFTs are mostly useless or worse, but here’s one important way they could help creators
As you may have noticed, the Internet is awash with hyperbolic claims about non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. From the volume of that discussion, and some of the numbers…
US publishers sue to stop a new law requiring them to offer ebooks at a “reasonable” price to libraries
Yohanna Anderson has just written eloquently about ebook price-gouging by publishers. As she notes, this is not just a UK problem, but affects many countries around the world.…
Is protecting copyright more important than saving lives during the Covid-19 pandemic?
Although the Covid-19 pandemic has wreaked terrible suffering across the world, we are fortunate that we already have several vaccines that have been shown to be highly-effective in…
ResearchGate: academic publishers forbid scientists from sharing their own papers, because “copyright”
ResearchGate is a social network for scientists, whose ideas seem pretty closely aligned with those of this blog: Our mission is to connect the world of science and…