UK Performing Right Society insists that every copyright is sacred – no exceptions
Most of the stories on this blog are about copyright absurdities, and the poor fit of an 18th-century legal framework for a 21st-century technology. But it’s important to…
Copyright has been one of life’s certainties: but will it always be?
Copyright seems to be a fixture of our legal, economic and social systems. For 300 years, it has formed the backbone of the structures used to incentivise and…
Coming soon: the next phase of copyright maximalism – destroying the public domain
The public domain is the natural state of creative material. It’s where creations end up once copyright’s monopoly has expired. Crucially, it is the quid pro quo for…
Amazon’s doubly amazing achievement in becoming the backbone of Hollywood
Back in March, Walled Culture reported on Amazon’s acquisition of MGM, and how it was a logical move for the company given that it is seeking to establish…
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…
The ratchet: even demonstrably ineffectual and unnecessary copyright laws are never repealed
The European Union is working on a number of important new digital laws. These includes the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, and the Data Act. A…
DRM on paper shows why anti-circumvention laws are copyright’s biggest blunder
Most people are familiar with the Dymo label printer in some form or another. Not an exciting product perhaps, but quite a useful one. The Electronic Frontier Foundation…
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:…
Yet another move to funnel money to big copyright companies, not struggling creators
When modern copyright came into existence in 1710, it gave a monopoly to authors for just 14 years, with the option to extend it for another 14. Today,…