[Air-L] New book: "The Digital Rights Movement The Role of Technology in Subverting Digital Copyright"

[Michael Zimmer]

Colleagues:

If you happen to see Hector Postigo at #IR13 in Manchester this week, congratulate him on his new book, "The Digital Rights Movement The Role of Technology in Subverting Digital Copyright", recently released in the "Information Society Series" at MIT Press.

Better yet -- stop by the MIT Press book stand and buy a copy!

Michael Zimmer
Series co-editor

==

The Digital Rights Movement: The Role of Technology in Subverting Digital Copyright
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12996
by Hector Postigo

The movement against restrictive digital copyright protection arose largely in response to the excesses of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998. In The Digital Rights Movement, Hector Postigo shows that what began as an assertion of consumer rights to digital content has become something broader: a movement concerned not just with consumers and gadgets but with cultural ownership. Increasingly stringent laws and technological measures are more than incoveniences; they lock up access to our “cultural commons.”

Postigo describes the legislative history of the DMCA and how policy “blind spots” produced a law at odds with existing and emerging consumer practices. Yet the DMCA established a political and legal rationale brought to bear on digital media, the Internet, and other new technologies. Drawing on social movement theory and science and technology studies, Postigo presents case studies of resistance to increased control over digital media, describing a host of tactics that range from hacking to lobbying.

Postigo discusses the movement’s new, user-centered conception of “fair use” that seeks to legitimize noncommercial personal and creative uses such as copying legitimately purchased content and remixing music and video tracks. He introduces the concept of technological resistance--when hackers and users design and deploy technologies that allows access to digital content despite technological protection mechanisms--as the flip side to the technological enforcement represented by digital copy protection and a crucial tactic for the movement.

About the Author

Hector Postigo is Associate Professor in the Department of Broadcasting, Telecommunications, and Mass Media in the School of Communications and Theater at Temple University.


-- 
Michael Zimmer, PhD
Assistant Professor, School of Information Studies
Director, Center for Information Policy Research
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
e: zimmerm at uwm.edu
w: www.michaelzimmer.org