Techdirt Reading List: Wired Shut: Copyright And The Shape Of Digital Culture

from the digital-locks dept

We're back again with another in our weekly reading list posts of books we think our community will find interesting and thought provoking. Once again, buying the book via the Amazon links in this story also helps support Techdirt.

I've been going back through various books from the past and came across Tarleton Gillespie's amazing Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture from almost a decade ago. However, it's still very, very relevant today, especially as we're constantly discussing how DRM is impacting the way physical products are built and while there is a big debate happening about Section 1201 of the DMCA.

Gillespie saw all of this pretty early on, using many of the early examples of how 1201 basically enabled companies to force certain product design decisions that really had nothing to do with stopping "piracy," but were very much about locking out competition or holding back innovation. The book pulls together the thread on three of the biggest fights from the 2000s around these issues: (1) The silly fight over SDMI, the RIAA's preferred DRM that was so bad that they had to threaten professor Ed Felten for showing how bad it was. (2) The similarly stupid freakout over DeCSS encryption for DVDs. (3) And the attempt to lock down television with a needless broadcast flag. While the specific technologies may have changed, the fights are pretty damn similar a decade later, and it's worth reading (or rereading) Wired Shut to remind you of the past as we prepare to fight for the future.

Filed Under: anti-circumvention, broadcast flag, copyright, decss, dmca, dmca 1201, drm, sdmi, tarleton gillespie

The Propaganda The Copyright Industry Teaches Our Children

from the omission,-overstatement,-conflation dept

Last week, I spent some time highlighting some of the more ridiculous claims found in the RIAA's "classroom materials" which it hopes teachers will use to brainwash students. In the comments, someone pointed out that Tarleton Gillespie wrote up a paper last year examining such "educational materials" from the RIAA, MPAA, BSA, ASCAP and others, and found them to be quite lacking. Rather than actually teaching the ins and outs of copyright, most were focused on normative statements of a world those industries want to exist, as well as seriously questionable descriptions of what copyright is supposed to do and how those industries work. None of the materials seem to recognize that technology has also changed the production, promotion and distribution of new works, and none seem to recognize that content creation can come from those outside of the big corporate entities who paid for these materials in the first place. Again, it's worth asking: why does any educational institution or education professional use such obviously biased (and at times misleading) educational materials?

Filed Under: copyright, educational campaigns, propaganda, tarleton gillespie
Companies: bsa, mpaa, riaa