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Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture

Author

Listed:
  • Tarleton Gillespie

    (Cornell University)

Abstract

While the public and the media have been distracted by the story of Napster, warnings about the evils of "piracy," and lawsuits by the recording and film industries, the enforcement of copyright law in the digital world has quietly shifted from regulating copying to regulating the design of technology. Lawmakers and commercial interests are pursuing what might be called a technical fix: instead of specifying what can and cannot be done legally with a copyrighted work, this new approach calls for the strategic use of encryption technologies to build standards of copyright directly into digital devices so that some uses are possible and others rendered impossible. In Wired Shut, Tarleton Gillespie examines this shift to "technical copy protection" and its profound political, economic, and cultural implications. Gillespie reveals that the real story is not the technological controls themselves but the political, economic, and cultural arrangements being put in place to make them work. He shows that this approach to digital copyright depends on new kinds of alliances among content and technology industries, legislators, regulators, and the courts, and is changing the relationship between law and technology in the process. The film and music industries, he claims, are deploying copyright in order to funnel digital culture into increasingly commercial patterns that threaten to undermine the democratic potential of a network society. In this broad context, Gillespie examines three recent controversies over digital copyright: the failed effort to develop copy protection for portable music players with the Strategic Digital Music Initiative (SDMI); the encryption system used in DVDs, and the film industry's legal response to the tools that challenged them; and the attempt by the FCC to mandate the "broadcast flag" copy protection system for digital television. In each, he argues that whether or not such technical constraints ever succeed, the political alignments required will profoundly shape the future of cultural expression in a digital age.

Suggested Citation

  • Tarleton Gillespie, 2007. "Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 0262072823, December.
  • Handle: RePEc:mtp:titles:0262072823
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    Citations

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    Cited by:

    1. Kathleen S. Micken & Scott D. Roberts & Jason D. Oliver, 2020. "The digital continuum: the influence of ownership, access, control, and Cocreation on digital offerings," AMS Review, Springer;Academy of Marketing Science, vol. 10(1), pages 98-115, June.
    2. William Aspray & Philip Doty, 2023. "Does technology really outpace policy, and does it matter? A primer for technical experts and others," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 74(8), pages 885-904, August.
    3. Peter K. Yu, 2018. "Customizing Fair Use Transplants," Laws, MDPI, vol. 7(1), pages 1-15, February.
    4. Olga Sezneva, 2013. "Re-thinking Copyright Through the Copy in Russia," Journal of Cultural Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 6(4), pages 472-487, November.
    5. Leslie Regan Shade & Tamara Shepherd, 2013. "Viewing youth and mobile privacy through a digital policy literacy framework," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 59447, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    6. Martin Fredriksson, 2021. "Open Source Seeds and the Revitalization of Local Knowledge," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(21), pages 1-16, November.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    copyright; digital culture; fcc;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • O34 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Intellectual Property and Intellectual Capital

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