• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2101 0

initiatives demonstrated the potential. The organization oversaw the insertion of undetectable traces on the 35 millimeter prints of movies distributed to cinemas. When these marks reappeared in pirated copies, they revealed which cinemas had served as sources. A series ofpolice raids followed, which successfully suppressed what had been the country's most successful pirate movie ring. From successes like this grew a devotion to visionary technologies, some of them preventative, others aimed at revealing (or retaliating for) piracy that had already occurred. Such technologies had long been proposedthe record industry had envisaged them for decades, and arguably printers pioneered the idea in the Renaissance.14 But now they became the subject of sustained, well-financed, and state-sanctioned researches. By the end of the century they were starting to bear fruit. The satellite broadcaster DirecTV confirmed as much in what remains to this day the most spectacular of all antipirate tech operations. It was targeted at "signal pirates," as the company called them. These hackers used unauthorized decoder cards to receive its satellite's encrypted transmissions gratis. For years they could buy cards relatively freely in Canada, where DirecTV was not a licensed broadcaster. Like Preston, DirecTV pursued the signal pirates not just as copyright violators, but as conspirators, while Canadian entrepreneurs responded by appealing loudly to principles ofpublic interest and open access. In the end the company would win its case in the Canadian courts. But meanwhile, in a feat that became legendary among cognoscenti, it took action of its own. Having quietly prepared the way by transmitting sections of code over a number of months, it broadcast an instruction at the start of the Super Bowl in early 2001 that simultaneously disabled roughly a hundred thousand unauthorized decoders. It reportedly even rewrote the first few bytes of the destroyed cards to read: "Game over." The event became known to traumatized hackers as "Black Sunday."15

Spectacular as it was, this action was also unrepresentative. Most antipirate tech has been preventative, aiming to make piracy impracticable. The quest for it took off amid the home taping furor. It did so because of the political unease generated (as always) by the recognition that effective antipiracy actions would require violations of domesticity. If homes were sacrosanct, the thinking went, then the onlywayto stop home piracy was to forestall it before copying could even be attempted. The most notorious countermeasure to home taping was thus a technology projected by CBS that would have added a high-pitched signal to LPs to prevent their being recorded onto cassettes. The measure aimed to secure intellectual property at the expense of degrading the content itself. It was never deployed in earnest, largely for that reason. In the digital era, however, schemes revived for some such system, because in a digital file a signal can be incorporated without impinging on the recording's quality. The many different digital rights management (DRM) programs of the 199os and 20oos all exploited that principle. But as such systems proliferated, so they raised two profound-and consequential-difficulties.

In the first place, technological fixes proved notoriously poor at accommodating themselves to the variety of mundane practices (or, put another way, to the moral economies) that existed in their many contexts of use. Being algorithmic, they tended to be inflexible. They could be sophisticated in their handling of encodable rights, yet at the same time crudely imperceptive of fuzzier things like "fair use." By the same token, they were also insensitive to location. In a context of globalizing intellectual property laws, and of expansion by media companies and antipirate bodies into coordinated transnational enterprises, this at first seemed a peripheral concern. But local practices and sensibilities across the world proved stubbornly resistant to subsumption under uniform institutions and doctrines. This was not