The Digital Rights Movement―The Role of Technology in Subverting Digital Copyright

The movement against restrictive digital copyright protection arose largely inresponse to the excesses of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998. In TheDigital Rights Movement, Hector Postigo shows that what began as an assertion of consumerrights to digital content has become something broader: a movement concerned not just with consumersand gadgets but with cultural ownership. Increasingly stringent laws and technological measures aremore than incoveniences; they lock up access to our "cultural commons." Postigo describesthe legislative history of the DMCA and how policy "blind spots" produced a law at oddswith existing and emerging consumer practices. Yet the DMCA established a political and legalrationale brought to bear on digital media, the Internet, and other new technologies. Drawing onsocial movement theory and science and technology studies, Postigo presents case studies ofresistance to increased control over digital media, describing a host of tactics that range fromhacking to lobbying. Postigo discusses the movement's new, user-centered conception of "fairuse" that seeks to legitimize noncommercial personal and creative uses such as copyinglegitimately purchased content and remixing music and video tracks. He introduces the concept oftechnological resistance--when hackers and users design and deploy technologies that allows accessto digital content despite technological protection mechanisms--as the flip side to thetechnological enforcement represented by digital copy protection and a crucial tactic for themovement.