Common Corpus, an open training set for AI, goes global – and so should support for it
As many of the AI stories on Walled Culture attest, one of the most contentious areas in the latest stage of AI development concerns the sourcing of training…
Copyright litigation over Anne Frank’s writings likely to impact the fate of VPNs in the EU
“The Diary of a Young Girl” is a Dutch language diary written by the young Jewish writer Anne Frank while she was in hiding for two years with…
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…
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…
How copyright chaos reigns among the UK’s top cultural institutions
The perennial attempts to widen the reach of copyright in the pursuit of yet more revenue is something that is to be expected from companies. After all, maximising…
How to stop video games being made unplayable once support ends
The Pirate Party has long played an important role in fighting the worst excesses of copyright in the EU. For example, when a major copyright update was being…
Forgotten books and how to save them
On the Neglected Books site, there is a fine meditation on rescuing forgotten writers and their works from oblivion, and why this is important. As its author Brad…
How copyright makes the climate crisis worse
Many of the posts here on the Walled Culture blog examine fairly niche problems that copyright is causing. Although they are undoubtedly important, in the overall scheme of…
Texts of laws must be freely available, not locked away by copyright; in Germany, many still aren’t
It is often said that “ignorance of the law is no defence”. But the corollary of this statement is that laws must be freely available so that people…
Important court ruling on copyright ought to lead to a blossoming of UK open culture – but will it?
There’s a post on the Creative Commons blog with some important news about copyright (in the UK, at least): In November 2023, the Court of Appeal in THJ…
Mickey Mouse is public domain now, but the battle to prevent copyright term extensions is not over
The beginning of the year is a great time for the public domain, since it sees thousands of copyrighted works released from the intellectual monopoly that prevents their…
Generative AI will be a huge boon for the public domain – unless copyright blocks it
A year ago, I noted that many of Walled Culture’s illustrations were being produced using generative AI. During that time, AI has developed rapidly. For example, in the…
Copyright’s legal stranglehold on creativity has made putting works into the public domain absurdly hard
Bill Willingham is a well-known writer and artist of comics, famous for his work on the series Elementals and Fables. He’s written a long and interesting post on…
Interview | Fred von Lohmann: Copyright Battles, the US DMCA and EU Copyright Directive, Filters, and Interfaces
In this final bonus Walled Culture podcast episode – recorded mid-2022 and kept under wraps as a special 1st anniversary episode, we welcome Fred von Lohmann, former Electronic…
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…