The Book

Ed Sheeran and Dua Lipa get sued for alleged plagiarism and the majority of creators see pennies for their work, while the revenues of the record labels are exploding. Libraries struggle to give access to ebooks and get sued by an increasingly more powerful book industry, while publicly funded research papers get locked up.

Walled Culture is the first book providing a compact, non-technical history of digital copyright and its problems over the last 30 years, and the social, economic and technological implications.

This book recounts the origins and unfolding of that historic clash of irreconcilable ideas by diving into how:

• Big Content have lobbied lawmakers in the US, the EU, and elsewhere to pass harsh laws in an attempt to forbid people from accessing and sharing content;
• As a result, the immense power of the Internet is being throttled, and the knowledge and culture that could flow freely to everyone is being walled up for a select few; and,
• We are losing so much just to prop up outdated and inefficient business models, and what could be done to unleash the Internet’s full potential and fairly remunerate creators by breaking down those walls.

In looking into these events, Walled Culture tries to answer the following key questions:

• What are the problems with copyright in the digital age?
• Why does copyright harm creators and block global access to knowledge?
• How does copyright threaten basic freedoms and undermine the Internet?
• How can we promote creativity and help artists and make a living in the digital age?
• What should we do to solve all these problems?