US government argues that fair use applies to OpenAI’s training of LLMs in key copyright case
Historically, legislation and court decisions have always lagged behind technological change. But the gap between the two is even starker in the world of generative AI. The large…
Anthropic’s AI lawsuit settlement may not go through, but it exposes a truth about copyright
The latest generation of AI systems, based on large language models (LLMs), is perceived as the biggest threat in decades to the established copyright order. The scale of…
Leaders in the generative AI world are daring to say the unsayable: that copyright is not sacrosanct
For the last hundred years or so, the prevailing dogma has been that copyright is an unalloyed good, and that more of it is better. Whether that was…
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…
After publishers, now recording companies want to stop the Internet Archive from sharing culture
Back in March, Walled Culture wrote about the terrible ruling by US Judge John G. Koeltl that the Internet Archive’s Controlled Digital Lending programme was not a fair…
Warhol understood what transformative art looked like, the US Supreme Court doesn’t
Last year Walled Culture wrote about an important copyright case before the US Supreme Court. It concerned Warhol’s images of the musician Prince, which are based on a…
How to update copyright: Nigeria shows the way for Africa – and the world
Too often the posts on Walled Culture are about the latest copyright madness, or new laws making copyright even worse for the digital world. Against this background, it’s…
Good news: Taiwan creates a new fair use of copyright material; bad news: it’s tiny
Too often we assume that copyright is something that only concerns Western nations like the US and EU. But it’s important to remember that copyright has been exported…
Singapore starts making its copyright law fit for the digital world; others need to follow its example
The Walled Culture blog is principally about the ways in which outdated copyright is preventing the full potential of the digital world to be realised. As such, its…
Can Nigeria lead the way in modernising outdated copyright laws through expanded exceptions?
When people talk and write about copyright, they generally mean US or EU laws. It’s true that most recent developments in the field – notably many bad ones…
Technological progress + outdated copyright laws = huge swathes of our cinematic culture lost forever
Physical books can be bought, shared, and accessed in libraries quite easily. Films in a physical form, on the other hand, are hard to acquire, share or view…