Tarleton Gillespie
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act has been criticized for granting too much
power to copyright holders, offering them new technological controls that may
harm the public interest. But, by considering this exclusively as a copyright
issue, we overlook how the DMCA anticipates a technological and commercial infrastructure
for regulating not only copying, but every facet of the purchase and use of
cultural goods. In upholding the law in Universal v. Reimerdes, the courts not
only stabilized these market-friendly arrangements in cultural distribution;
they extended these arrangements into realms as diverse as encryption research
and journalism, with consequences for the very production of knowledge.