Rewiring the DMCA’s history: 20th-century new media and the expanding imaginary for infringement

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as a refinement of governmental techniques developed for technologies such as piano rolls, reprography, DAT, and VCRs. The technological history recontextualizes legal transitions in copyrights during the 20th century and builds on poststructuralist work on law, technology, and government. Building on Kittler’s understanding of symbolic/technical media and storage/processing, I develop a framework for disentangling the relationship among copyright, DRM, and media technologies. The case studies indicate ICTs are vectors for extending copyright into previously unimagined territories. I argue cultural practices become problematized as they are remediated in new technologies. The evidence suggests the shift from governing storage to processing corresponds to broader rearrangements in power, binding our rituals and means of perception ever more tightly to articulations of industry and state.

KEYWORDS:

• Copyright
• critical information studies
• Kittler
• media theory
• piracy

Notes

¹ Transmission DRM technologies like the broadcast flag deserve their own analysis.

² Perhaps uncoincidentally, Sony bought CBS Records in 1987. During the diffusion of MP3 technology, competition shifted to intra-company fights over profits from content versus technology (Sterne, 2012).

³ Decentralization/distribution do not mean “more free” or “less constrained.” Neither are they counterposed to centralization. Like regimes of power, networks contain traces of prior formations. (Galloway, 2004).

⁴ I use “culture industries” to emphasize the heterogeneity of industries profiting from the production, commodification, and distribution of culture (Miége, 1989), not to favor his social scientific intervention in Horkheimer’s & Adorno (2000) critical approach to the “culture industry.”