Walled Culture: The Digital War on Free Expression Through Copyright

Book: Walled Culture by Glyn MoodyThis work explores the contentious evolution of copyright in the digital age, focusing on how large media and publishing entities use legal and technological barriers to maintain control over culture and information. It details the transition from analogue scarcity to digital abundance, highlighting how laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act were designed to impose old restrictions on new technologies. It examines the struggle of libraries and archives to digitize and preserve history, specifically through initiatives like the Internet Archive and Google Books, which often face aggressive litigation from publishers. Additionally, the text chronicles the open access movement in academia, illustrating how researchers have fought to make publicly funded knowledge freely available despite corporate efforts to monetize it through high fees and restrictive licensing. Ultimately, the author presents a conflict between corporate monopolies seeking to "lock down" content and a global community striving for unrestricted access to the world’s collective knowledge.