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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
three ~~ The Speed Bump
Using encryption technology to govern cultural distribution is only an example of how we regulate human activity through the built environment. Chapter 3 attempts to arm the reader for scholarly inquiry into this phenomenon by exploring recent thinking in the fields of communication, science and technology studies, and information studies. Technologies can powerfully shape the social activities in which they intervene, sometimes with significant political consequences; at the same time, technologies are also powerfully shaped by the individuals and institutions that produce them and reshaped in powerful ways by users, suggesting that their impact has a lot to do with the meanings that are negotiated and the cultural contexts in which that negotiation occurs. We can resolve this tension between seeing technology as constructed versus seeing it as consequential by noting that technology is constructed so as to be consequential. In every instance, designing and implementing a technology is an attempt to intervene in social practice. To the extent that designers of technology can agree about how they would like to choreograph the practices of users, this regulatory role of technology is enhanced; to the extent that designers cannot control what happens to the technology after it leaves their hands and cannot entirely predict its consequences, it is diminished. Understanding the complexity of technology as a political artifact is useful as we begin to consider the implications of deliberately using technologies in place of the law.
However, while technologies can have political consequences, and the move to install DRM encryption systems into digital distribution of culture seems to depend only on technology's ability to do so, an exclusive focus on technology would mask the way it requires much more than mere objects to effectively regulate the movement of culture. To the extent that the actors powerful in this negotiation about the meaning and purpose of a technology are also often powerful in other domains, they can appeal to law, policy, and public discourse to buttress and normalize the authority of the tools they build. Alongside the new technologies come new laws to back them, new institutional and commercial arrangements to produce and align them, and new cultural justifications to convince legislators and users to embrace them. This is not engineering culture through technology, but a more heterogeneous effort to regulate through the alignment of political, technical, legal, economic, and cultural elements that must be held in place for a new paradigm of copyright to take hold.
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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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