The copyright world is preparing to hobble yet another innovative technology – generative AI
Last week Walled Culture noted that there already are two lawsuits against generative AI systems that are causing such a buzz at the moment. Both those legal actions…
Finnish Parliament reminds us that copyright should not trump fundamental human rights
One of the key dogmas the copyright industry fights hard to impose on the world is that copyright should trump all other considerations, and in all situations. For…
Top EU court’s advisor points out that geoblocks can be easily circumvented: time to get rid of them
One of the central ideas of both Walled Culture the blog and Walled Culture the book is that copyright simply doesn’t work in the digital world. One proof…
Canada is planning to take the EU’s link tax as a model for one of its own new and bad copyright laws
One chapter of my Walled Culture book (free download available in various formats) looks at how the bad ideas embodied in the EU’s appalling Copyright Directive – the…
Facebook is so sure its erroneous blocking of music is right, there’s no option to say it’s wrong
It’s hardly a secret that upload filters don’t work well. Back in 2017, Felix Reda, then Shadow Rapporteur on the EU Copyright Directive in the European Parliament, put…
Even algospeak won’t save us from upload filter overblocking
Over on the EFF blog, Cory Doctorow points to an interesting article in the Washington Post about “algospeak“: “Algospeak” is becoming increasingly common across the Internet as people…
Applying (artificial) intelligence to the Copyright Directive’s stupid idea of upload filters
Last week the European Union’s top court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), handed down its judgment on whether upload filters should be allowed as…
Top EU court hands down judgment on upload filters that is as clear as mud
Walled Culture has just written about the great difficulty national governments are having in transposing the EU Copyright Directive into local law. That’s largely because of the badly-drafted…
The EU Copyright Directive is so bad it’s proving really hard to transpose into decent national laws
Walled Culture has written numerous posts about the EU Copyright Directive, because it contains two extremely harmful ideas. The first is the “snippet tax“, an attempt by some…
Microsoft tries to cosy up to newspaper publishers, forgets that for them, enough is never enough
A few months after the snippet tax was agreed as part of the EU Copyright Directive, Australia indicated it wanted to take the same route. The government there…
Why the snippet tax of the EU Copyright Directive is pointless and doomed to fail
The EU Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market contains two spectacularly bad ideas. One is the upload filter of Article 17, which will wreak havoc not…
The ratchet: even demonstrably ineffectual and unnecessary copyright laws are never repealed
The European Union is working on a number of important new digital laws. These includes the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, and the Data Act. A…
Why add to Ukraine’s problems with an unnecessary implementation of a bad EU copyright law?
It would be something of an understatement to say that Ukraine is facing serious problems currently. Against that background, this news from the IPKat blog is rather surprising:…
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…
The copyright industry wants everything filtered as it is uploaded; here’s why that will be a disaster
The history of copyright can be seen as one of increasing control by companies over what ordinary people can do with material created by others. For the online…
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…