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Wired Shut:
Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture
Tarleton Gillespie
published June 1, 2007 by The MIT Press
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acknowledgments
one ~~ The Technological Fix
two ~~ The Copyright Balance and the Weight of DRM
To understand these controversies, it is important to understand the law of copyright and the forces that have shaped it over three centuries. The law represents the slow accumulation of years of disputes and compromises; cutting it open reveals this legacy just as tree rings reveal seasons of growth and tumult. Chapter 2 introduces the reader to the workings of copyright law and the premises on which it is based. It is written for readers who are largely unfamiliar with copyright law and the recent controversies, but even those well versed in both will find some new approaches for moving beyond the first wave of concerns. Arguments for why copyright exists and how it should be applied are considered in light of its fundamental contradiction: that it aspires to serve the public good by constructing a property regime premised on private gain. The effort to strike a balance between these often competing interests requires limits and exceptions that are both fundamental to copyright law and, at the same time, revealing of its inherent tensions.
The emergence of new technologies tends to disrupt the balances within this legal regime that manage its structural tensions. Like many technologies before it, the Internet made visible ambiguities that copyright law had not had to deal with before, and afforded an opportunity for those most invested in the workings of copyright law to tip the scales to their benefit. In response, traditional content industries and self-appointed Internet enthusiasts made very different claims for how the distribution of culture would work in a digital age, and how copyright should change to accommodate it. This largely theoretical dispute became all too real with the arrival and astounding popularity of Napster and peer-to-peer file-trading. This chapter offers a quick and dirty history of the music industry's legal attempts to shut down the deluge of unauthorized music sharing, and introduces the technical solutions being proposed: digital rights management (DRM), a means of encrypting digital content in order to limit access to it; and the "trusted system," a scheme whereby hardware and software authorized to access encrypted content will police what can be done with that content. The chapter ends by introducing some of the concerns that have already been raised about this shift to DRM as a copyright solution, particularly around its implications for the fair use doctrine of copyright law.
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three ~~ The Speed Bump
four ~~ A Heroic Tale of Devilish Piracy and Glorious Progress, by Jack Valenti
five ~~ Why SDMI Failed
six ~~ Protecting DVDs: Lock, License, and Law
seven ~~ Raising the Broadcast Flag
eight ~~ Effective Frustration
nine ~~ The Cultural Implications of Encryption
references
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