Digital Rights Management, Internet Governance and the Autopoiesis of Modern Copyright Law

Abstract

The introduction of legislation on the legal protection of anti-circumvention devices into copyright law has caused fierce controversies. Perhaps the most important critique concerns the issue of a copyright nexus between a tort of circumventing and a subsequent act of copyright infringement. Technological protection measures not only protect a work against illicit copying but arguably grant the entertainment industry a positive right in controlling access to a work. The effect is to potentially transform important copyright principles. Its novelty lies in the ability to allow the person applying technological protection measures to set, independently, terms and conditions for use and access, and the related debate whether copyright embraces an access right. The article aims to place the tendency towards private regulation of access into a broader framework. It discusses and compares copyright legislation with divergent trends of how fundamental guarantees are emerging in fields outside copyright law, and asks what the impact of the new normativity emerging from technological control means for the future treatment of rights and interests in information.