How copyright is being abused to censor Albania’s Flamingo Revolution
For the last couple of years, the copyright world has been grappling with the latest generation of AI, as numerous posts on Walled Culture attest. That’s hardly surprising,…
Why Google’s new AI-saturated search page will be a disaster
Google didn’t invent full-text search of the Internet – that honour belongs to early pioneers such as WebCrawler, Lycos and AltaVista. But for the last 25 years or…
Wikipedia at 25 grapples with new challenges arising from generative AI
Wikipedia celebrated its 25th birthday this month. Given the centrality of Wikipedia to so much activity online, it is hard to remember (or to imagine, for those who…
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…
Academic research finds economic, technical and operational harms from Italy’s Piracy Shield
Walled Culture first wrote about Piracy Shield, Italy’s automated system for tackling alleged copyright infringement in the streaming sector, two years ago. Since then, we have written about…
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…
Massive expansion of Italy’s Piracy Shield underway despite growing criticism of its flaws
Walled Culture has been following closely Italy’s poorly-designed Piracy Shield system. Back in December we reported how copyright companies used their access to the Piracy Shield system to…
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…
From DeepSeek to Stargate: How dramatic AI developments will re-shape the copyright landscape
Walled Culture started covering generative AI relatively early, back in October 2022. That’s just two years ago, and yet the technological progress since then has been extraordinary, whatever…
Italy is losing its mind because of copyright: it just made its awful Piracy Shield even worse
Walled Culture has been writing about Italy’s Piracy Shield system for a year now. It was clear from early on that its approach of blocking Internet addresses (IP…
Juicy licensing deals with AI companies show that publishers don’t really care about creators
One of the many interesting aspects of the current enthusiasm for generative AI is the way that it has electrified the formerly rather sleepy world of copyright. Where…
New research shows that the 2023 Canadian link tax has already failed – just like all the others
At the heart of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) lies the sorry tale of the EU Copyright Directive. Its stated aim appeared reasonable enough: to…
Why generative AI companies should pay artists to create new works, and give away the results
The latest obsession in the world of copyright is trying to get generative AI companies to pay for using creative material for training purposes. As various posts have…
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…
Newspaper publishers’ obsession with link and snippet taxes is bad for society – and bad for them
Traditional newspapers have been complaining about the rise of the digital world for decades. Their discontent derives from the fact that they failed to recognise opportunities early on,…