While recent technical and cultural innovations in who makes and distributes information pose real challenges to the traditional ways in which we participate in culture, these innovations are running up against copyright law, and more importantly, against those who need it to work as it has rather than adapt to what is now technically possible. One response has been to merge copyright law with a combination of technological protections governing how we interact with information and a set of laws and contracts giving those digital barriers political force. One of the most vital questions, then, for how information is regulated and culture is shaped is the particulars of this interlocking of technology, law, politics, and practice. To deepen our insight into these question, we must examine not just the biggest changes and the loudest debates, but also the ways these arrangements play out “on the ground”: how people in actual social contexts resolve the pressures of these competing forces. How do designers of new technologies understand their copyright obligations, and incorporate those obligations into the tools they design, amidst other economic and practical pressures? How do corporate partners collaborate on techno-legal strategies for enforcing their copyrights, and persuade legislators, the courts, and the public to see it their way? How do users come to understand what copyright is, and honor or disregard it in their everyday habits of acquiring and producing culture? This research aims to interview technologists, lawmakers, content producers, and artists who are working at the points of contact between technology, law, politics, and cultural practice.

Most analysis of these controversies, including my own thus far, has tended to look at the issue on a very broad, macro-social level: Congressional mandates, court decisions, public debates, cultural controversies. To deepen our insight into these problems, we must also examine the ways these arrangements play out “on the ground”. How do designers of new technologies understand their copyright obligations, and how do they incorporate those obligations into the tools they design, amidst other economic and practical pressures? How do corporate partners collaborate on techno-legal strategies for enforcing their copyrights, and how do they persuade legislators, the courts, and the public to see it their way? How do users come to understand what copyright is, and in what way do they incorporate or disregard it in their everyday habits of acquiring and producing culture? Insight into these practices will illuminate the ongoing debate about copyright in a digital age. But the question extends beyond the particulars of copyright: how are the rules of information production and knowledge in a digital environment conceived and imposed? How do the various participants in this process understand their role within it, respond to pressures, and rationalize their activities? How do their efforts extend, normalize, or undercut these changes in copyright and information regulation. How are we building what will become ‘digital culture’? Getting inside the rhetorical debate means examining people in their actual social contexts: in the cubicles of software designers, in the meetings of industry consortia, in the offices of media producers, in the dorm rooms of users.

Ethnographic inquiry has begun with a company called kaltura, that designs a collaborative video editing tool.

Research is just getting underway.

Information Technology and Digital Society

Seed grant, Institute for the Social Sciences, Cornell University