Walled Culture the book, three years on
Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) was launched just over three years ago. A few weeks afterwards, I talked with journalist and editor Maria Bustillos about…
The long road to Marrakesh: 40 years of copyright obstruction to human rights and social justice
One of the little-known but extremely telling episodes in the history of modern copyright, discussed in Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available), concerns the Marrakesh Treaty.…
Top German court says maybe the Web should be more like television in order to protect copyright
Back in 2022, Walled Culture wrote about a legal case involving ad blockers. These are hugely popular programs: according to recent statistics, around one billion people use ad…
EU prepares to give new rights to live streaming sites, to the detriment of the Internet and its users
At the heart of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) lies the dispiriting saga of how the EU Copyright Directive came into being. It began in…
German court: LAION’s generative AI training dataset is legal thanks to EU copyright exceptions
The copyright world is currently trying to assert its control over the new world of generative AI through a number of lawsuits, several of which have been discussed…
The link tax’s failure to deliver meaningful benefits is a lesson for the copyright industry
It seems so long ago that people were trying to stop the worst aspects of the EU Copyright Directive. It was quite a battle, as Chapter 6 of…
Texts of laws must be freely available, not locked away by copyright; in Germany, many still aren’t
It is often said that “ignorance of the law is no defence”. But the corollary of this statement is that laws must be freely available so that people…
How copyright drives Internet fragmentation, and why it is hard to fix
The EU Copyright Directive is arguably the most important recent legislation in the area of intellectual monopolies. It is also a failure, judged purely on its own terms…
Long overdue, but good to see: Germany’s new copyright exception for pastiche applied for first time
Although overall the EU Copyright Directive is bad news for the digital world because of things like its need for the use of automated upload filters, it does…
Germany wants to include copyright infringement as an example of “digital violence”
The hyperbolic rhetoric that is a feature of the copyright industry, which tries absurdly to characterise making an additional digital copy as “theft”, can lead to some serious…
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…
Bad news: copyright industry attacks on the Internet’s plumbing are increasing – and succeeding
Back in October 2021, Walled Culture wrote about a ruling from a US judge. It concerned an attempt to make the content delivery network (CDN) Cloudflare, which is…
Copyright means you may need permission to put photos of your own furnished room online
One of the life’s certainties is that copyright maximalism will continue to encourage absurd rulings by complaisant courts. Here’s a rather spectacular case from Germany. It involves a…
Publishers seem to believe their outsized sense of entitlement should trump democracy
One of the striking features of the copyright industry is its insatiability. No matter how long, broad and strong copyright becomes, the copyright world wants it to be…
Copyright means you can’t tweak how a Web page appears on your screen, according to media giant
Advertising is one of the commonest ways of financing Web sites and services. There’s nothing wrong with that, at least in principle. But the fact that, according to…
Rock star worth $450 million wins copyright case against widow who offered bootleg CD for €9.95
As the very first post on this blog pointed out, copyright is fundamentally unsuited to the digital world. It assumes that copying material is hard, and can therefore…