Why the emerging new copyright landscape is both good news and bad news for creators and the public
The Walled Culture blog has been writing about the hot topic of generative AI and its impact on copyright for nearly six months now. One of the sharpest…
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 concentration continues: Amazon closes its $8.5 billion acquisition of MGM
There are few more famous studios in the history of cinema than MGM. Wikipedia describes its early days: MGM was formed by Marcus Loew by combining Metro Pictures,…
Time for the copyright world to stop attacking the Internet’s infrastructure
Despite the impossibility of stopping people making copies of digital material, the copyright industry continues to launch ever-more extreme legal actions against outside parties in a desperate attempt…
Nintendo kills off an ad-free YouTube channel where fans could listen to its game music, because copyright
Walled Culture has just written about the way the boundaries between digital platforms and digital producers are becoming more fluid. Here’s another interesting melding of media: the GilvaSunner…
Beyond a game: Microsoft swallows up Activision, a further concentration of power in a few digital giants
This blog has written a couple times about YouTube‘s dominance in the video sector. Spotify may well create a similar leading position for itself in music streaming, while…
The top ten YouTubers collectively earned $300m in 2021: is that good or bad?
It’s always interesting to see hard figures about how much individuals earn online from their activities there. For example, Forbes published an article recently that looked at the…
The copyright industry wants everything filtered as it is uploaded; here’s why that will be a disaster
The history of copyright can be seen as one of increasing control by companies over what ordinary people can do with material created by others. For the online…
Another example of how the playing field is tilted in favour of copyright owners
It’s widely known that artists of all kinds often get a raw deal from the contracts they sign. But this kind of legal unfairness is not the only…
Giant Penguin attack: why the US courts should block a publishing mega-merger
This blog has written recently about the disproportionate power wielded by YouTube in both the video streaming sector, and as part of the music industry. Sadly, that is…
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:…
We don’t have walled culture because of piracy, but because of corporate profiteering
Last week, Universal Music Group (UMG) went public on Amsterdam’s Euronext exchange, and ended up with a valuation of 45 billion euros (over $50 billion). An article on…