Page 75 - Culture Technology Communication

60 Steve Jones

instance one of economics, but again one of control. Who will have
the right to do something with a work is not a decision inherently
connected to determining who will profit from it. As with aforemen-
tioned privacy issues, control is the root concern, for as soon as we
have externalized (commodified) a work, it can migrate away from
us in the same fashion that credit and medical (or any other) infor-
mation can be passed around.
Moreover, control is the primary concern of entertainment and
electronic industries that struggle with the structural overcapacity
of production whose only traditional solution (one in name only, for
each solution has begotten another problem) has been the evolution
of distribution. Consequently, the development of distribution chan-
nels has outpaced the ability of the sociolegal complex to maintain a
civil order that has traditionally offset the tension between pub-
lisher and author, the two sides of the production chain that coexist
least easily. The Internet is thus a project alongside that of the open-
ing of markets and borders, epitomized by the GATT and the
NAFTA, trade agreements that provide the greatest freedom to
movement of abstract commodities, or, namely, intellectual property.
The development of the Internet has bumped up against legislative
issues, and is only further evidence that the decentralization of dis-
tribution as an aid to mass production and consumption, is in fact in-
imical to control by legislative means.

Protection
If legislative means are unable to protect us from the flow of infor-
mation, what might? To return to the concept of electromotive force,
the lines of magnetic force created by a current flowing through a
wire are directional, and move in the same direction as the current’s
flow. Moreover, these magnetic lines of force are elastic, and cannot
be broken. One might imagine that the current is that which is cre-
ated, distributed and consumed, and the magnetic force is the socio-
cultural change occurring external to such a Fordist system.
Historically, protection has been understood as the attempt to
regulate the “current,” in this case, namely, the content of what flows
through the system. Consequently, authors have long sought protec-
tion for their work, but it has been producers, manufacturers, and dis-
tributors who seek ways to ensure income, and to do so requires some
form of protection against copying. However, experience (particularly
recently with Digital Audio Tape and its Serial Copy Management
System) has shown that a technological anti-copying solution is rarely