Glyn Moody

Even though parents insist that it is good and right to share things, the copyright world has succeeded in establishing the contrary as the norm. Now, sharing is deemed a bad, possibly illegal thing. But it was not always thus, as a fascinating speech by Ryan Cordell, Associate Professor in the School of Information Sciences and Department of English at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, underlines. In the US in the nineteenth century, newspaper material was explicitly not protected by copyright, and was

One of the arguments sometimes made in defense of copyright is that without it, creators would be unable to compete with the hordes of copycats that would spring up as soon as their works became popular. Copyright is needed, supporters say, to prevent less innovative creators from producing works that are closely based on new, successful ideas.

We live in a world where there are often both analog and digital versions of a product. For example, we can buy books or ebooks, and choose to listen to music on vinyl or via streaming services. The fact that digital goods can be copied endlessly and perfectly, while analog ones can't, has led some people to prefer the latter for what often amounts to little more than snobbery. But a fascinating Tech Policy Press article by Maroussia Lévesque points out that in the face of increased AI decision-making, there are

Wikipedia seems such an essential and benign aspect of the online world that it is hard to understand why people would want to attack it in the courts. But it is nonetheless subject to lawsuits that try to force it to censor its articles because they contain facts that are inconvenient for someone. The

Back in March, Walled Culture wrote about the terrible job that academic publishers are doing in terms of creating backups of the articles they publish. We also mentioned there two …

Wed, Sep 25th 2024 12:09pm - Glyn Moody One of the reasons that today's copyright is such a bad fit for the modern digital world is

Wed, Oct 23rd 2024 01:51pm - Glyn Moody One of the many interesting aspects of the current enthusiasm for generative AI is the way

Wed, Nov 20th 2024 12:10pm - Glyn Moody Despite widespread beliefs to the contrary, patents are not a measure of innovation , nor

One of the most important shifts in computing over the last few decades has been the increasing use of open source software on nearly every platform, from cloud computing to smartphones (well,

The perennial attempts to widen the reach of copyright in the pursuit of yet more revenue is something that is to be expected from companies. After all, maximizing profits is basically what companies do. But as previous Walled Culture posts have lamented, there is also a widespread tendency among non-profit cultural institutions – museums, art galleries, libraries etc. – to use copyright to generate revenue from images of their holdings, to the