Abstract
Creative works are now increasingly distributed as digital “content” through the internet, and copyright law has created powerful incentives to monitor and control these flows.<strong> </strong>This paper analyzes the surveillance industry that has emerged as a result. Copyright surveillance systems identify copyright infringement online and identify persons to hold responsible for infringing acts. These practices have raised fundamental questions about the nature of identification and attribution on the internet, as well as the increasing use of algorithms to make legal distinctions. New technologies have threatened the profits of some media industries through copyright infringement, but also enabled profitable forms of mass copyright surveillance and enforcement. Rather than a system of perfect control, copyright enforcement continues to be selective and uneven, but its broad reach results in systemic harm and provides opportunities for exploitation. It is only by scrutinizing copyright surveillance practices and copyright enforcement measures that we can evaluate these consequences.
Highlights
Much of our daily lives involve interacting with digital “content”
The questions I am posing are: how are the data packets and digital fragments passing through our computer networks identified as copyrighted content? How are these digital flows traced to identifiable individuals, and how are persons held responsible for internet traffic? What are the consequences of these determinations for data flows as well as people?
1990s has entailed treating some digital flows as intellectual property, the idea being that much of the content circulating through the internet has an “owner” with exclusive rights to its distribution
Summary
Much of our daily lives involve interacting with digital “content”. The relationships we have with these digital goods are governed in part by intellectual property rights, and a new industry has developed to take advantage of this legal fact. Individuals can be identified by comparing numeric identifiers (IP addresses) recorded by monitoring software to logs maintained by internet service providers Both methods can result in misidentification and reduce the complexities of copyright law to opaque decisions made by automated systems. Digital networks have threatened copyright, but they allow for pervasive forms of copyright surveillance and enforcement that have become the business model of a dedicated industry. The internet sometimes still seems like a lawless place that frustrates state controls, but it consists of physical networks based in territories and jurisdictions It is these networks’ territorial basis that allows the state-backed monopolies of copyright to have any meaningful effect. This makes copyright and the industries it supports vulnerable to legal and political reforms
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