The digital rights movement: The role of technology in subverting digital copyright

This thesis analyses the "Digital Rights Movement." Section 1 of this dissertation traces the development of the policy recommendations for digital copyright originating in the working Group on Intellectual Property (WGIP), These recommendations informed the formulation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The origins of the Digital Rights Movement can be traced to the consequences of the anti-circumvention provisions of DMCA and to the biased approach to policy formulation which did not truly consider the practices of digital media users. The DMCA policy-making process helped precipitate the Digital Rights Movement in some important ways. First, a prevalent fear of the negative consequences of digital technology along with an attempt to preserve the copyright balance (rather than re-evaluate it) motivated copyright owners to propose techno-legal regimes that constricted consumers' personal non-commercial uses. Second, the DMCA's policy-making process legitimized the use of technological measure (technological enforcement technologies or TETS) as an important strategy for enforcing copyright in digital media. Third, the DMCA criminalized the manufacture of technologies used to circumvent TETs. By doing so, the DMCA criminalized hacker communities and businesses working on technologies needed to make media accessible in varying technological formats.; Section 2 analyses the structure of the Digital Rights Movement. Section 2 describes the early court cases that helped define the meaning of important values (free speech and fair use) within the movement. Section 2 also shows that circumvention technologies became an important tactical tool in resisting the strictures of the DMCA. I call this tactic technological resistance and the circumvention tools it deploys, technological resistance technologies (TRTs). The use of technological resistance has consequences for the Digital Rights Movement structure. The adoption of technological resistance as a movement strategy creates a technologically organized and mediated type of collective action which re-structures the traditional relationship between organizations and actors in the movement.