Google’s “Web Environment Integrity” is an attack on the open Internet and user freedom
Back in July, Walled Culture wrote about a terrible proposal from the French government to force browsers to incorporate a list of banned Web sites at the software…
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…
Generative AI in Google search is great news for the true fans model, but what about publishers?
Most of the analysis of generative AI – things like Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT – has focused on how it will affect creators. But another important aspect is…
The EU link tax was bad enough, but Canada’s threatens to be even worse
At the heart of Walled Culture the book (available as a free ebook in various formats) is the story of the disgraceful EU Copyright Directive and how it…
Like news publishers, magazine publishers want money from Google; here’s why it is happy to pay
Last week, Walled Culture noted that newspaper publishers still don’t understand what has happened in their industry. They labour under the misapprehension that the digital giants like Google…
Two reasons the snippet tax won’t wash as a solution, and what to do instead
Walled Culture has written a number of posts about the so-called “snippet tax” – the idea that platforms like Google and Facebook should pay for the privilege of…
How to save the newspaper industry (hint: not with snippet taxes)
There’s no denying that the newspaper industry is in trouble. In part, the publishing companies have themselves to blame. For too long, they have fought against the Internet,…
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…
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…
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…
Copyright concentration continues: Amazon closes its $8.5 billion acquisition of MGM
There are few more famous studios in the history of cinema than MGM. Wikipedia describes its early days: MGM was formed by Marcus Loew by combining Metro Pictures,…
Beyond a game: Microsoft swallows up Activision, a further concentration of power in a few digital giants
This blog has written a couple times about YouTube‘s dominance in the video sector. Spotify may well create a similar leading position for itself in music streaming, while…
The top ten YouTubers collectively earned $300m in 2021: is that good or bad?
It’s always interesting to see hard figures about how much individuals earn online from their activities there. For example, Forbes published an article recently that looked at the…
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…
A few companies dominate the music market; meet the rising giant that could beat them all: Spotify
Back in September, a blog post noted that Universal Music Group (UMG) regarded streaming as key to its future. Investors agreed, pushing the company’s valuation to 45 billion…
YouTube is “neck-and-neck with Netflix”, and bigger than the world’s entire recording industry
Everyone knows that Google (strictly speaking, the parent company, Alphabet) is a digital giant. But recent figures reveal that YouTube alone is also enormous, and in two markets:…