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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
four ~~ A Heroic Tale of Devilish Piracy and Glorious Progress, by Jack Valenti
Chapter 4 analyzes the construction of the cultural justifications necessary for the trusted system approach to gain any traction at all with manufacturers, artists, legislators, and users. The regulation of the Internet had, before the copyright wars, been largely hands-off; when it first appeared, Napster was wildly popular not only with music fans but with the press as well. To counter these attitudes and to justify a massive change in the character and enforcement of copyright law required a powerful tale of sin and redemption. This narrative not only reframed the debate, it set the stage for the kind of institutional alignments that content providers needed to establish.
In his role as the director of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the U.S. film industry's powerful lobbying organization, Jack Valenti was the most powerful and articulate of the storytellers, offering up a narrative arc that went something like this: Movie production is an economic boon to the nation; Internet file-trading is a financial danger to that business; content producers, faced with this threat, will withhold valuable content and the medium in question will suffer; however, with stronger copyright protection and technical measures of self-enforcement, the culture industry will provide a rich consumer experience. The entire chain of assertions was wrapped in a narrative of good beset by evil, coated with dramatic metaphors and salacious scares, and contrasted against a rosy alternative only possible if copyright law were strengthened. Valenti's logic is just one version of the situation, and has been contested on a number of fronts. Nevertheless, it is slowly becoming the standard understanding of how copyright does and should work, and how digital culture depends on the fullest imposition of technical copy protection.
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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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