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,…
Spain’s Net blocks have a flimsy legal basis, and lack both oversight and accountability
A few weeks ago, Walled Culture wrote about Hadopi, France’s infamous copyright enforcement mechanism. The so-called “graduated response” – aka “three strikes and you are out” – has…
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…
Good news: laws to tackle AI deepfakes are coming. Bad news: they are based on copyright
A key theme of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) is that copyright, born in an analogue age of scarcity, works poorly in today’s digital world…
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…
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…
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…
As AI agents become ubiquitous, expect the copyright industry to try to turn them against you
One of the many interesting aspects of the new wave of artificial intelligence systems is that with them, copyright has moved from the fringe to centre stage. There…
Why Italy’s Piracy Shield risks moving from tiresome digital farce to serious national tragedy
Walled Culture has been following the sorry saga of Italy’s automated blocking system Piracy Shield for a year now. Blocklists are drawn up by copyright companies, without any…
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…
The new Hadopi? Piracy Shield blocks innocent Web sites and makes it hard for them to appeal
Italy’s newly-installed Piracy Shield system, put in place by the country’s national telecoms regulator, Autorità per le Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni (Authority for Communications Guarantees, AGCOM), is already failing…
Italy’s new Piracy Shield has just gone into operation and is already harming human rights there
Back in October, Walled Culture wrote about the grandly-named “Piracy Shield”. This is Italy’s new Internet blocking system, which assumes people are guilty until innocent, and gives the…
A welcome attempt to take down Piracy Shield, Italy’s pre-emptive and unfair Net block system
The copyright industry’s war on the Internet and its users has gone through various stages (full details and links to numerous references in Walled Culture the book, free…
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…
Here’s a puzzle: when is the public domain not in the public domain?
Walled Culture is a big fan of the public domain. The amazing artistic uses that people are able to make of material only once it enters the public…
A concept that should not exist at all is already implemented: the “paying” public domain
A couple of weeks ago, Walled Culture reported on a terrible idea in France: requiring companies to pay for the use of public domain material. As the post…