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…
As site blocks pile up, European Commission issues subtle slapdown to Italy’s Piracy Shield
As numerous Walled Culture posts attest, site blocking is in the vanguard of the actions by copyright companies against sites engaged in the unauthorised sharing of material. Over…
India spends $715 million on academic journals, but with the wrong kind of open access
Numerous articles here on Walled Culture have chronicled the struggles to turn the aspirations of open access to knowledge into reality. The central reason people do not have…
Is protecting copyright more important than saving lives during the Covid-19 pandemic?
Although the Covid-19 pandemic has wreaked terrible suffering across the world, we are fortunate that we already have several vaccines that have been shown to be highly-effective in…
Will publishers try to shut down the free General Index of 107 million scientific journal articles?
One of the exciting possibilities opened up by the digital world is that access to all human knowledge could be made freely available to everyone with an Internet…