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Wired Shut:
Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture
Tarleton Gillespie
published June 1, 2007 by The MIT Press
Buy the book:
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
nine ~~ The Cultural Implications of Encryption
Just as digital rights management threatens the agency we have with the culture we encounter, these robustness rules threaten our sense of agency with the technology itself. Critics of the CSS encryption and the broadcast flag made this point by noting that both systems exclude the possibility of open source innovations in the distribution and consumption of film and television. To prevent users from seeing how content is protected and potentially circumvented, robustness rules require technology designers to "weld the hood shut" - something very much at odds not only with open source design, but with the traditions of user appropriation and innovation. What is clear is that these solutions are not just strategic, they are paradigmatic, embodying and imposing a persistent worldview on what is otherwise a much richer set of options for how we interact with culture and technology.
Chapter 9 attempts to step back from these cases in order to consider the cultural implications of the technology at the heart of these protec- tion schemes. Once a mechanism for ensuring secret communication between confidantes, encryption is being employed here for a very different purpose: extending control over otherwise public materials. In terms of the distribution of culture over the Internet, encryption is the digital means to assure a subtle, complex, and context-sensitive system of regulation. By encoding a film, the owner of the copyright can dictate to an unprecedented degree what can and cannot be done with it. Most importantly from a philosophical perspective, encryption intervenes before an infringement occurs rather than after. Such a preemptive measure not only treats all users as would-be criminals, it makes the imposition of copyright less open to exceptions like fair use, renders unavailable the ability to challenge a law through civil disobedience, and undercuts the individual's sense of moral agency in a way that can undermine the legitimacy of the rule itself.
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