Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital CultureHow the shift toward "technical copy protection" in the battle over digital copyright depends on changing political and commercial alignments that are profoundly shaping the future of cultural expression in a digital age. While the public and the media have been distracted by the story of Napster, warnings about the evils of "piracy," and lawsuits by the recording and film industries, the enforcement of copyright law in the digital world has quietly shifted from regulating copying to regulating the design of technology. Lawmakers and commercial interests are pursuing what might be called a technical fix: instead of specifying what can and cannot be done legally with a copyrighted work, this new approach calls for the strategic use of encryption technologies to build standards of copyright directly into digital devices so that some uses are possible and others rendered impossible. In Wired Shut, Tarleton Gillespie examines this shift to "technical copy protection" and its profound political, economic, and cultural implications. Gillespie reveals that the real story is not the technological controls themselves but the political, economic, and cultural arrangements being put in place to make them work. He shows that this approach to digital copyright depends on new kinds of alliances among content and technology industries, legislators, regulators, and the courts, and is changing the relationship between law and technology in the process. The film and music industries, he claims, are deploying copyright in order to funnel digital culture into increasingly commercial patterns that threaten to undermine the democratic potential of a network society. In this broad context, Gillespie examines three recent controversies over digital copyright: the failed effort to develop copy protection for portable music players with the Strategic Digital Music Initiative (SDMI); the encryption system used in DVDs, and the film industry's legal response to the tools that challenged them; and the attempt by the FCC to mandate the "broadcast flag" copy protection system for digital television. In each, he argues that whether or not such technical constraints ever succeed, the political alignments required will profoundly shape the future of cultural expression in a digital age. |
From inside the book
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... Communication at UCSD, and in Communication, Science & Technology Studies, and Information Science at Cornell, for providing the rich intellectual environments from which this work sprang. Thanks to the people at Claire de Lune Coffee ...
... Communication, Cooperation (2006), co-authored with Dan Burk. It appears here with the permission of Triple C, and with gratitude to Dan Burk. A portion of chapter 9 will also appear as “Price Discrimination, Regional Coding, and the ...
... communication networks that we increasingly use to participate in community, in commercial exchange, in politics, and in the conversation of culture. What we might call “social engineering” has come full circle back to actual ...
... communication and culture. Once again, we are putting faith in a technical solution to a social problem. The film and music industries are in some ways following in the footsteps of the software industry, which in the 1980s had to ...
... communication and collaboration encouraged by the particular shape of the Internet may find little space to grow inside restrictions based on traditional copyright, especially as it is understood by those whose business models are most ...
Contents
| 1 | |
| 21 | |
3 The Speed Bump | 65 |
4 A Heroic Tale of Devilish Piracy and Glorious Progress by Jack Valenti | 105 |
5 Why SDMI Failed | 137 |
Locks Licenses and Laws | 167 |
7 Raising the Broadcast Flag | 193 |
8 Effective Frustration | 223 |
9 The Cultural Implications of Encryption | 247 |
Notes | 283 |
References | 345 |
About the Author | 381 |
Index | 383 |