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.…
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…
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…
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 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…
Why generative AI companies should pay artists to create new works, and give away the results
The latest obsession in the world of copyright is trying to get generative AI companies to pay for using creative material for training purposes. As various posts have…
The new Hadopi? Piracy Shield blocks innocent Web sites and makes it hard for them to appeal
Italy’s newly-installed Piracy Shield system, put in place by the country’s national telecoms regulator, Autorità per le Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni (Authority for Communications Guarantees, AGCOM), is already failing…
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…
Scammers who made $23.4 million from Content ID must pay back only $3.4 million to cheated artists
In Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available), I linked to a fascinating Content ID scam that TorrentFreak has been reporting on for some years. It revolved…
Newspaper publishers’ obsession with link and snippet taxes is bad for society – and bad for them
Traditional newspapers have been complaining about the rise of the digital world for decades. Their discontent derives from the fact that they failed to recognise opportunities early on,…
Music label uses copyright law to ask Google to de-list a Wikipedia page with information it doesn’t like
In Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) there’s a chapter about the widely-used “notice and takedown” system, and its many abuses. One indicator of how bad…
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…