Sleight of hand: Law, technology, and the moral deployment of authorship in the Napster and DeCSS copyright cases

Inside the doctrine of copyright, authorship is the foundational distinction for what work enjoys legal protection; but the law, and its emphasis on authorship, is often invoked to serve dramatically different ends. This dissertation begins by considering how the moral, technological, and commercial interventions the law makes into cultural discourse are tacitly informed by our ideas about authorship and its cultural value; it ends by wondering whether these legal debates have now been lost inside techno-social arrangements.; I focus on the Napster and DeCSS cases, two high profile disputes in the current war over digital copyright. In making legal claims for or against these tools, and the practices that accompany them, litigants and observers strategically characterized the Net in which they flourished—a technology with the potential to be many things in many circumstances—to highlight one set of uses and meanings as its natural, inevitable purpose. And as the technology was being described to fit the logic of copyright, the law itself was being massaged to better fit the technology. Throughout, the principles of authorship were being conjured and deployed—all in the hope of constructing a set of seemingly inevitable associations that make particular legal and commercial goals seem like foregone conclusions.; From these cases, I discuss the way this legal emphasis on authorship masks the extent to which these disputes are really about distribution: how cultural expression circulates, by whom, and to what ends. Their outcomes, both of which have ratified corporate systems of distribution, will have lasting consequences for the tenor of digital culture. I also consider the increasing shift from legal to technological solutions in legislating cultural expression, a strategy that uses our faith in technology to impose a “regime of arrangement”: institutions, tools, and practices arranged such that the preferred behaviors most easily follow. Finally, I suggest that the interests of copyright owners around authorship, technology, distribution, commerce, and law have been aligned so successfully because each is premised on a similar notion of communication—one that highlights the transmission of information rather than the social dimensions of communicative participation.