Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture.

• Author: Davisson, Amber

Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture. By Tarleton Gillespie. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007; pp. vii + 395. $29.95 Cloth.

Almost anyone who has spent time in cyberspace, or simply sitting in front of a computer, has run into various obstacles that either stopped or redirected their movement. To most users these obstacles appear to be mere annoyances. It is not often that individuals consider, in more than a passing way, the legal, ethical or philosophical reasoning that goes into the construction of many of these roadblocks. When dealing with physical roadblocks, Langdon Winner pointed out in 1980 that scholars must focus on the way these objects subtly alter individuals' daily movements. Lawrence Lessig (1999, p. 64) translated these principles to digital roadblocks, saying that "spaces have values. They express these values through the practices or lives that they enable or disable." Winner and Lessig both argued that the architecture of a space determin the politics of that space.

Tarleton Gillespie's new book Wired Shut builds on these principles with an eye toward the way copyright code has become a series of technological "speed bumps" that determine the politics of online spaces. In the digital world, Gillespie argues, copyright laws are coded into the architecture of a site or software in order to slow down or redirect communication, cultural expression, and information access; structures that may appear arbitrary "help publicly perform the state's authority ... and thereby reinforce the state's societal ideals" (p. 194). As copyright laws have been built into new technologies, the nature of these laws has changed. Wired Shut describes the evolution of copyright law, details the way information architecture is changing the law, and addresses how these changes may ultimately impact the marketplace of idea. In the physical world these laws were constructed to facilitate the movement and production of cultural objects. In the digital world, these new structures function to slow down or stop the movement of cultural objects.

According to Gillespie, prior to the Internet, the structure of copyright law was not designed to control access to information; it was designed to control distribution. Copyright law was originally written "to regulate the movement of culture by making it a market commodity" (p. 5). The goal of these laws was to make artistic pursuits profitable in order to spur the marketplace of ideas. When art has...