Cinema as a community experience opens the door for low-cost films funded by fans
Walled Culture the book (digital versions available free) is about the incompatibility of the traditional copyright system with the digital world, and its failure to reward creators fairly.…
Wikipedia at 25 grapples with new challenges arising from generative AI
Wikipedia celebrated its 25th birthday this month. Given the centrality of Wikipedia to so much activity online, it is hard to remember (or to imagine, for those who…
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…
How GenAI is taking true fans activity – and creativity – to the next level
Walled Culture has written a number of times about the true fans approach – the idea that creators can be supported directly and effectively by the people who love…
Fans of open access, unite: you have nothing to lose but your chained libraries
When books were rare and extremely expensive, they were often chained to the bookcase to prevent people walking off with them, in what were known as “chained libraries”.…
True fans, super fans, core fans: an alternative way to fund creators gains wide industry support
Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) concluded with a look at “true fans”, an alternative way of funding creators that avoids the main problems of the…
Of true fans and superfans: the rise of an alternative business model to copyright
One of the commonest arguments from supporters of copyright is that creators need to be rewarded and that copyright is the only realistic way of doing that. The…
Here’s another way that AI will reduce ad income for publishers – and what they can do about it
New ways in which the latest AI technology can be applied are popping up all the time. Here’s an interesting example discussed by Ben Werdmuller on his blog,…
Streaming services today sell musicians access to their own fans; SoundCloud shows a better way
Back in January, Walled Culture wrote about an interesting initiative by the German online audio distribution platform and music sharing service SoundCloud, with its Fan-Powered Royalties (FPR) approach.…
Generative AI in Google search is great news for the true fans model, but what about publishers?
Most of the analysis of generative AI – things like Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT – has focused on how it will affect creators. But another important aspect is…
Writers and publishers face an existential threat from AI: time to embrace the true fans model
Walled Culture has written several times about the major impact that generative AI will have on the copyright landscape. More specifically, these systems, which can create quickly and…
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…
How Minecraft’s “End Poem” ended up in the public domain
Minecraft is the best-selling video game of all time according to Wikipedia, with hundreds of millions of copies sold. The game concludes with the End Poem by the…
SoundCloud’s “Fan Powered Royalties”: a halfway house towards the true fans approach
Regular readers of this blog will know that Walled Culture is a fan of the true fans concept – the idea that creators can be supported directly and…
Copyright isn’t working: all around the world, writers are struggling to earn a decent wage
One of the central themes here on Walled Culture is that copyright isn’t doing its main job. It is supposed to provide fair remuneration for the work that…
Why the “true fans” model is great not only for creators, but for entrepreneurs too
The “true fans” idea has appeared in many posts on this blog, and also makes an appearance in the last chapter of Walled Culture the book, as a…