Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture

by Tarleton Gillespie

Winner, ICA 2009 Outstanding Book Award given by the International Communication Association. and Winner, 2009 CITASA Book Award given by the Communication and Information Technologies Section of the American Sociological Association



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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Cultural, Technology, Politics, Law, Writing, Academic

Kindle Edition

First published June 1, 2007

About the author

Tarleton Gillespie is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research New England, part of the Social Media Collective research group. He is an affiliated associate professor at Cornell University, in the Department of Communication and the Department of Information Science. He cofounded the blog Culture Digitally.

He is the author of Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture (MIT, 2007), the co-editor of Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society (MIT, 2014); his newest book is Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions that Shape Social Media (Yale, 2018).

(Text is from the author's website, distributed under a Creative Commons by-nc license.)

Reviews

[Schnaucl · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have very mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, I think it covers a very important topic and I was able to reiterate much more of its content than I thought I would. On the other hand, it's the only book I can recall where I'd become extremely sleepy after reading only a few pages. But frankly, I'm not sure how you could jazz the book up to not have that effect. It's dry, but important.

The book spends much of its time covering history. There's a section on how the Internet came to be but there are also sections on the history of DRM in the music industry and why they've failed to achieve a consensus and there's a section on DRM in the DVD industry and how they succeeded.

The author spends a lot of time talking about the change between copyright protection and content protection and what that means for consumers.

It's a difficult book to get through, or at least, it was for me, but I think it's worth it.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an incredibly comprehensive text that examines how copyright has been shifting with the advent of digital technologies. Rather than being merely a legal protocol that handles rights, copyright is becoming more and more imbricated with technological deployments by the major cultural industries. However, it is not just a technical matter; we must also consider political, legal, economic, social, and cultural forces to understand the complicated latticework that is copyright in the digital age. Gillespie explores the major events that punctuate the evolution of copyright, including the Napster case, the failure of SDMI, and the extensive deployment of DRM technologies. This is an incredibly dense work that rarely gives you a chance to catch your breath, but it is absolutely required reading for anyone interested in copyright in the digital age. My only complaint is that it is readily apparent that I will never write anything as insightful or comprehensive as this.

[Cara · Rating 2 out of 5]

Gillespie brings up some interesting points, such as how copyright owners gain political leverage by keeping their code secret, and he makes some good analogies. However, I felt like the his writing style got bogged down by long-winded political and technical descriptions.

[モーリー · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very repetitive - it could have been 50-100 pages shorter and made the same point. If you can take the academic prose and literature reviews, though, it's an excellent investigation into DRM's implications for our culture and how we interface with technology.

[Ramona · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gillespie has a strong opinion tending toward Larry Lessig, though he doesn't advocate as heavily as Lessig. A little back and forth, but snappy chapter titles.

[Adam Ross · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic book on the problems of DRM (Digital Rights Management) as an alternative to copyright. Very, very good.

[Raoul Boers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very complete overview of the copyrights/DRM debate. Essential reading for scholars in the field of Digital Culture, electronic publishing and digital distribution.