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…
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…
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…
How to make money from scarcity, in a world of digital abundance
The current crisis in the copyright world is being driven by the once-in-a-civilisation transition from an analogue world to a digital one. Initially the copyright industries fought the…
It took a 15-year fight to be allowed to use an existing DRM exception: who still thinks copyright is fair?
In his Walled Culture interview, Cory Doctorow explains cogently why Digital Rights Management (DRM) is such a disaster. It’s also pointless: DRM can always be broken, and once…
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…