Copyright madness: YouTube seems to doubt whether Shakespeare is in the public domain
One of the darker threads of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) is how complex copyright enforcement systems can be abused, for example by sending Digital…
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…
A rare copyright win for the public – but a small one, only in Canada, and possibly temporary
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…
Now with added generative AI: a new way to abuse the broken copyright system
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…
Google goes on the attack against the “weaponisation of copyright law”; that’s good – now do it routinely
A few weeks ago Walled Culture wrote about how it is possible to deploy the flawed copyright takedown system for anti-competitive purposes. In that case it was the…
Scammers who made $23.4 million from Content ID must pay back only $3.4 million to cheated artists
In Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available), I linked to a fascinating Content ID scam that TorrentFreak has been reporting on for some years. It revolved…
How a flawed copyright takedown system is causing problems for online sales of perfume products
The copyright system is flawed at many levels, as hundreds of posts on this blog make clear. One particular class of problems concern takedowns. The best known of…
Interview | Fred von Lohmann: Copyright Battles, the US DMCA and EU Copyright Directive, Filters, and Interfaces
In this final bonus Walled Culture podcast episode – recorded mid-2022 and kept under wraps as a special 1st anniversary episode, we welcome Fred von Lohmann, former Electronic…
Copyright enforcement in a nutshell: make the Internet hard work and less fun until people give up
The Internet is amazing, but it’s not perfect. There are many aspects that are unsatisfactory – its protocols are inefficient, and it is far from resilient. The InterPlanetary…
How to use today’s debate about AI to fix yesterday’s mistakes in copyright legislation
Copyright is starting to become a hot topic in the world of generative AI, as the usual culprits start demanding yet more protection for their intellectual monopolies. There’s…
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…
Twitch mutes top videogame streamer because of claim he used someone’s copyright siren sound effect
Alongside death and taxes, one of life’s great certainties is a constant flow of absurd copyright claims. Here’s one from the world of live videogame streaming on the…
Enjoy digital ownership and public libraries while you can: they may disappear soon…
Michael E. Karpeles, Program Lead on OpenLibrary.org at the Internet Archive, spotted an interesting blog post by Michael Kozlowski, the editor-in-chief of Good e-Reader. It concerns Amazon and…
How backdated articles abuse the DMCA’s takedown system to remove legitimate news items
Online platforms often give access to digital material that is under copyright. If any of that content is infringing, then potentially the platform would be liable as well…
Interview | Katharine Trendacosta: The US DMCA, Upload Filters, SOPA-PIPA, Fanfiction, & Platform Competition
Katharine Trendacosta is Associate Director of Policy and Activism at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Her areas of expertise are competition, broadband access, intellectual property, net neutrality, fair…