Penguin Random House hopes copyright bluster will scare off generative AI
As Walled Culture has reported, a number of major publishers have brought legal actions against generative AI companies, alleging copyright infringement. These cases are still grinding through the…
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…
China fully embraces Western copyright, and inevitably suffers from its ills
Modern copyright was invented in the West, with England’s 1710 Statute of Anne. But in the last few decades, the US and other Western nations have pushed for…
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…
In a world where AI art is cheap and easy to generate, do we still need copyright?
To say that AI-generated art is controversial would be something of an understatement. The appearance last year of free tools like Stable Diffusion has not just thrown the…
Copyright is indispensable for artists, they say; but for all artists, or just certain kinds?
One of the central “justifications” for copyright is that it is indispensable if creativity is to be viable. Without it, we are assured, artists would starve. This ignores…
New Zealand is about to commit copyright theft – the real kind
When modern copyright was invented with the Statute of Anne in 1710, it consisted of a bargain. In return for a time-limited, government-enforced monopoly, creators agreed that their…
It’s time to end the anti-circumvention exemption circus
Copyright as we know it goes back to the Statute of Anne of 1710. A law that old is clearly going to struggle to cope with the enormous…