book – The MIT Press – ISBN 9780262072823
In a “neutral” more than activist analysis this book tries to outline how the U.S. culture industry lobbyist have tried to build a “trusted system” for their digital contents, generating different bad side effects on their own market. One of the industry postulates (sharing=piracy) is here questioned also in terms of customer’s dissatisfaction and in the more than evident frustration and ineffectiveness generated by extensive DRM use (that strategically capitalized on the very symbolic SDMI failure). The preventive use of cryptography on digital devices almost instantly silenced the debate on new copyright definitions, restricting its implementation to a content industry – manufacturing industry agreement, shifting from the legal layer to the code / software layer. So one of the major content industry aspirations is to definitively influence the design of technology, but what is almost hidden are the social costs of content protection. This vision of industry strategies and policies clearly describes how the free culture availability on the net and, in the end, the right to share everybody’s own cultural background without any mandatory (industrial) mediator is at risk.