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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
In stark contrast to the failed SDMI project, the encryption that protects Hollywood DVDs from duplication is a revealing case of how such a trusted system can be produced, and how the necessary institutional alignment can be achieved despite the strategic differences between content and hardware manufacturers. Chapter 6 reveals how the Content Scramble System (CSS) encryption used to protect DVDs is merely the technical edge of a complex arrangement of content, machines, licenses, and industry partners that together work to contain the activities of users.
In this case, the trusted system also required recourse to the law when that arrangement was breached, as it was when a "crack" called DeCSS was posted online. The industry turned to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), itself a dramatic shift in copyright law produced by the rethinking of copyright around the Internet and, in particular, the powerful "Valenti logic" offered by the content industries. Prohibiting circumvention of technical protections rather than copying itself, the DMCA embodies this shift toward technical solutions, while also revealing that the technology cannot function without support from the law. Rather than regulating users, the DMCA shores up the arrangements imposed by the content industries on the manufacturers, and forms the fourth side of this heterogeneous square of regulation: technical artifact, commercial agreement, cultural justification, legal authority. And it does so in a way that allows these industries to impose new controls on users that were not available under copyright law before this moment. The trusted system, then, is built on a fundamental mistrust - a mistrust of the technology manufacturers, who must be licensed into submission, and a mistrust of users, who are seen as immoral pirates until they can be technologically compelled to be good consumers.
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seven ~~ Raising the Broadcast Flag
eight ~~ Effective Frustration
nine ~~ The Cultural Implications of Encryption
references
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