Why the spread of powerful local AI models makes copyright enforcement even harder
The central theme of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) is the growing incompatibility between traditional copyright law and the digital, online world. The culmination of…
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…
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…
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…
The Czech Republic’s proposed version of upload filters has a bad idea that could become a great one
A clear demonstration that the EU Copyright Directive is a badly-drafted law is the fact that it has still not been implemented in national legislation by all the…
Interview | Glyn Moody: Walled Culture – A Journey Behind the Copyright Bricks
Glyn Moody has been writing about copyright, digital rights, and the Internet for 30 years. He is the editor of the Walled Culture project and author of Walled…
Upload filters: unjustified blocks, unfair appeals process, and a system rigged in favour of Big Content
The EU Copyright Directive contains one of the worst ideas in modern copyright: what amounts to a requirement to filter uploads on major sites. Despite repeated explanations of…
Twitch mutes top videogame streamer because of claim he used someone’s copyright siren sound effect
Alongside death and taxes, one of life’s great certainties is a constant flow of absurd copyright claims. Here’s one from the world of live videogame streaming on the…
Interview | Mike Masnick: Techdirt, Supporting Creators, the SOPA/PIPA Battle, and NFTs
Mike Masnick explores the intersection of technology, innovation, policy, law, civil liberties, and economics, being the founder & editor of the popular Techdirt blog, as well as the…
Facebook is so sure its erroneous blocking of music is right, there’s no option to say it’s wrong
It’s hardly a secret that upload filters don’t work well. Back in 2017, Felix Reda, then Shadow Rapporteur on the EU Copyright Directive in the European Parliament, put…
Even algospeak won’t save us from upload filter overblocking
Over on the EFF blog, Cory Doctorow points to an interesting article in the Washington Post about “algospeak“: “Algospeak” is becoming increasingly common across the Internet as people…
Applying (artificial) intelligence to the Copyright Directive’s stupid idea of upload filters
Last week the European Union’s top court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), handed down its judgment on whether upload filters should be allowed as…
Copyright industry demands Finland’s version of upload filters should be more unbalanced
Like other EU Member States, Finland is grappling with the problem of how to implement the EU Copyright Directive’s Article 17 (upload filters) in national legislation. A fascinating…
Top EU court hands down judgment on upload filters that is as clear as mud
Walled Culture has just written about the great difficulty national governments are having in transposing the EU Copyright Directive into local law. That’s largely because of the badly-drafted…
The EU Copyright Directive is so bad it’s proving really hard to transpose into decent national laws
Walled Culture has written numerous posts about the EU Copyright Directive, because it contains two extremely harmful ideas. The first is the “snippet tax“, an attempt by some…
Interview | Katharine Trendacosta: The US DMCA, Upload Filters, SOPA-PIPA, Fanfiction, & Platform Competition
Katharine Trendacosta is Associate Director of Policy and Activism at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Her areas of expertise are competition, broadband access, intellectual property, net neutrality, fair…