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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
eight ~~ Effective Frustration
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.
The attempts thus far to impose technical solutions onto the promiscuity of the Internet have all faced intrepid users who refuse these constraints: from the casual users of peer-to-peer networks to the amateur DJs creating innovative forms of digitally reworked music; from the widespread use of "black market" circumvention technologies to the hackers that take on every new system; from academic critics who challenge these strategies to the campus activists who mobilize against them. This kind of agency with culture and with technology has been the biggest hurdle for content owners' attempt to realign digital culture in more commercially viable terms. In some ways, it is this agency that must be curtailed if the broad and heterogeneous strategy of technolegal control is to succeed. Chapter 8 turns its attention to the robustness requirements that accompany most DRM systems, which require manufacturers of hardware and software not only to limit what users can and cannot do, but also to design their tools to fend off the attacks of hackers, the prying eyes of hardware enthusiasts, the curiosity of tinkerers.
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nine ~~ The Cultural Implications of Encryption
references
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