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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
five ~~ Why SDMI Failed
six ~~ Protecting DVDs: Lock, License, and Law
seven ~~ Raising the Broadcast Flag
The record industry tried to organize a voluntary agreement with technology manufacturers, and failed; the movie industry got one by holding their content ransom and forcing technology manufacturers to sign away their interests, but found they were still vulnerable to upstart manufacturers who would not agree to their terms. The next step is to seek the authority of the state to make such systems mandatory. Calling on the state promises to more powerfully bind this trusted system together and impose it on users, but it also brings new forces into play. As chapter 7 describes, the movie studios hoped to impose similar technical controls onto digital television, and called upon the FCC to give their system legitimacy and assure its imposition. An industry coalition proposed the "broadcast flag," a technical means to mark digital TV content as deserving protection, and to set rules for manufacturers for how to treat that content so as to prevent redistribution over the Internet.
Ideological gaps between these industries, and between these industries and the regulators who have jurisdiction over them, have always been narrow; nevertheless, they have been important in preventing an industry view of copyright law from completely dominating other public interests. Now these gaps are closing around technical copyright protection, thanks in part to the efforts of these industries, the increasing sense of the inevitability of this project (and thus the desire of manufacturers to be on the winning side of its commercial consequences), and the persuasive power of the piracy narrative. This suggests that, whether or not such trusted systems are ever installed and ever succeed, the changes in industry alignment being pursued in order to produce them may themselves have consequences for culture and technology. This may extend to the increasingly close ideological partnership of the content industries and legislators. However, as the broadcast flag case reveals, the FCC did make significant adjustments to the plans proposed by the movie industry and its consumer electronics partners. Furthermore, the courts subsequently decided that the FCC did not have the authority to install such a technical control regime, revealing further cracks in the political alignments necessary for a comprehensive trusted system to work.
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eight ~~ Effective Frustration
nine ~~ The Cultural Implications of Encryption
references
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