Events - Colloquia & Seminars

CCIS Colloquium Spring 2006

Designed to Effectively Frustrate:
    Technical Copyright Protection and the Agency of Users

Speaker: Prof. Tarleton Gillespie (Cornell University, Ithaca, NY)

Host: Carole Hafner

Date: Thursday, February 23, 2006

Talk: 3:00 pm, 110 WVH

Abstract

Recently, the major U.S. music and movie companies have pursued a dramatic renovation in their strategies for copyright enforcement. This shift, from the "code" of law to the "code" of software, looks to technologies to regulate or make unavailable those uses of content traditionally governed by the law. Many are worried about the compliance rules built into such systems: design mandates telling manufacturers what their users can and cannot be allowed to do under particular conditions. But these rules include a second set of limitations: robustness rules. These obligate manufacturers to build their devices such that they prevent users from tinkering with them. Not only must the technology regulate its users, it must be inscrutable to them. I will examine this aspect of technical copyright enforcement, looking particularly at the CSS encryption used in DVDs and the recent "broadcast flag" proposed for digital television. In the name of preventing piracy, these arrangements threaten to undermine users sense of agency with their technologies.

Biography

Prof. Tarleton Gillespie researches recent controversies concerning copyright and the Internet to investigate the historical contestation over the nature of authorship and ownership, the character and characterization of new technologies, and the regulation of communication through the arrangement of material technologies, legal constraints, and political and economic institutions. His book on the subject, Technology Rules: Copyright and the Re-Alignment of Digital Culture, will be published in Fall 2006 by MIT Press. His broader interests include the peer-to-peer file-sharing debates, mobility of technological metaphors, theories of authorship, the critical discourse around technology, animation and children's media, and the cultural implications of the First Amendment. He is affiliated with the Information Science program and the Department of Science and Technology Studies.