While major recording artists are sued for alleged plagiarism and most creators earn pennies for their work, media industry profits continue to soar. Libraries face mounting barriers to providing access to ebooks—often while being sued by the very publishers whose books they buy.

In this episode of Future Knowledge, tech and culture writer Glyn Moody discusses his book Walled Culture: How Big Content Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Keep Creators Poor. Moody traces how copyright laws designed for a world of physical scarcity have been repurposed for the digital age—creating legal and technical “walls” that restrict access to knowledge, limit creativity, and overwhelmingly benefit large media corporations over creators and the public. Joining the conversation is Maria Bustillos, writer and editor at the Brick House Cooperative.

Grab your copy of Walled Culture: https://walledculture.org

This conversation was recorded on 11/10/2022. Watch the full video recording at: https://archive.org/details/book-talk-walled-culture

Check out all of the Future Knowledge episodes at https://archive.org/details/future-knowledge

What do jazz, gene sequences, and the World Wide Web have in common? They all reveal what’s at stake when our cultural commons shrinks. In this episode, James Boyle, author of The Public Domain, joins Molly Shaffer Van Houweling to explore why the public domain is essential for creativity, innovation, and a healthy information ecosystem. From surprising case studies to the “range wars” of the digital age, Boyle explains how expanding intellectual property rights can stifle culture—and what it will take to protect the commons we all depend on.

This conversation was recorded on 12/18/2025. Watch the full video recording at: https://archive.org/details/the-public-domain

Check out all of the Future Knowledge episodes at https://archive.org/details/future-knowledge

For this special holiday episode, we’re celebrating the Internet Archive’s milestone of 1 trillion web pages archived with something a little different: live music created just for the occasion.

Join us for conversations with composer Erika Oba, composer Sam Reider, and cellist Kathryn Bates of the Del Sol Quartet, recorded around The Vast Blue We, the concert held at the Internet Archive to honor our shared digital memory. Two new commissions premiered that night: Oba’s “Blue Lights” and Reider’s “Quartet for a Trillion,” both written to capture the wonder and scale of the open web—and brought to life by Del Sol Quartet. Oba later reconfigured “Blue Lights” for a solo performance during The Web We’ve Built celebration.

In this episode, you’ll hear brief conversations with the artists about their creative process, followed by recordings from the performance itself. A short, reflective holiday release that celebrates collaboration, imagination, and what we can build together.

Check out all of the Future Knowledge episodes at https://archive.org/details/future-knowledge