Customer Reviews

Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture

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Author Tarleton Gillespie examines digital developments in the cultural realm bordered by United States copyright law, the content and technology industries, and the marketplace. In doing so, he makes some salient and occasionally sublime observations that often go unnoticed when thinking about the future of copyright in a digital age, such as:

-the role of the federal government in largely adopting the perspective of institutional content providers (including record labels and the major motion picture studios) regarding the need for broader and more rigorous enforcement of copyright restrictions during the mid-1990s;

-the extent to which the reliance upon code (developed in secret by private corporate interests) instead of legal provisions (developed in public by popularly-elected representatives) to enforce copyright restrictions threatens to undermine the balance between the interests of creators and users that historically underlies United States copyright law;

-the fact that DVD players have no record function is the result of an alignment between legal, technological, institutional and market forces (the major motion picture studios require DVD manufactures to contractually agree to manufacture DVD players with no recording or copying functions as a condition of making motion picture titles available in the DVD format, without which there were would be much less demand for DVD players);

-the fact than a effective DRM scheme requires alignment between commercial institutions, not just the technology and content sectors, and the failure to achieve such an alignment was the main reason the Secure Digital Music Initiative failed; and

-the extent to which end-users of intellectual property in the digital realm increasingly function as active users of tools, rather than passive consumers of culture, and how focusing on the latter characterization was a key strategy employed the Motion Picture Association of America in its lobbying efforts to enact the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The book suffers a bit from some long passages containing academic material and theorizing. Overall - a good read if you're a copyright geek.

At first glance, this work will inevitably be taken as a highly technical discussion of what may be simultaneously both the most critical and the most boring issue relating to the impact of the Internet: copyright law. However, Dr, Gillespie, an Assistant Professor of Communications at Cornell University, utilizes the topic to markedly enhance the reader's understanding of a wide variety of topics relating to culture in general, and to digital culture in particular.

The work is also a very welcome one in that the author convincingly shows that the current debate over digital rights, particularly as reflected in long-running discussions of music and piracy, has been very ably shaped and controlled by but one side in the debate, at least at the public level. After reading Wired Shut, any reader is going to be a much wiser consumer of information bearing upon public and legal debates over copyright law, and particularly over the technical fixes, such as digital rights management software and hardware so often said to be the solution to the "problem of piracy.

For a full review see Interface, Volume 8, Issue 2.

Here Tarleton Gillespie has created the most comprehensive book-length treatment of a topic that is gaining the notice of more and more researchers in intellectual property and technology law. The digital information revolution has made it easier to trade and share cultural items, with the potential to weaken the financial and political grip of the culture industries. While those industries fought back against Napster and similar technologies by claiming that the copyright protections of starving artists were being trashed, here Gillespie shows yet again that in the modern legal and political environment, copyright law has been mutated into a tool for maintaining corporate profitability. Meanwhile, as they complain about unfair public use of digital technology, the culture industries have used that same technology to lock in profits and social controls that are far beyond what copyright law allows.

Gillespie tackles this unwieldy yet crucial subject with a strong backdrop of theories of society and technology, as well as intellectual property law. He finds that the corporate lockdown of culture has been achieved not by transparent and reviewable changes in the law and the legislative process, but by technological design that cannot be countered by consumers. Not only is this process undemocratic, it also does not bode well for culture unless creative people choose to remove themselves from market forces (actually anti-market politics) over which they have less and less input.

The only real problem with this book is not the strength of the argument, but readability. Some of the different chapters, especially in the middle portions of the book, unnecessarily repeat the main thesis and probably originated as separate research projects (a common occupational hazard for academics); and Gillespie's initially unique coverage of industry standard-building coalitions tends to dissolve into tedious coverage of parliamentary infighting. But with those flaws aside, Gillespie concocts a fascinating argument, utilizing everything from cultural studies to law to scientific philosophy, in bringing together a previously scattershot school of thought into the definitive book-length treatment. [~doomsdayer520~]