Materiality and Textuality in Digital Rights Management

The 1998 enactment of the anticircumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the United States amended the Copyright Act to prohibit disabling or circumventing technical protection of copyrighted works. Consequently, over the last decade, the development of copyright law has been inextricably intertwined with the development of “digital rights management” (DRM) systems, intended to protect digital content, and the laws that were intended to safeguard DRM systems. In this paper, I review the interconnection of copyright and DRM, arguing that DRM constitutes a conscious attempt to re-impose upon digital works the material exclusion that has been lost through digitization. Pre-determined material affordances are re-inscribed on digital content through discursive DRM technology. DRM imposes pre-determination of use and access on creative works, which is reinforced by anticircumvention laws. Pre-determination, however, imposes unexpected constraints on the use of creative works, limiting the prospects for creative interaction with secured texts.