1.1 Early Promises and Expectations
Since at least the 1990s the sensation has been that digital technology, as with the printing press in the past, is transforming the whole information and communication chain in society: the production and distribution of information and data, and the adaptation and storing of it.
The earlier analog model had one sender, a TV or radio station and many receivers, and it was dominated by unidirectional communication, which mirrored industrial society itself, dominated as it was by large companies, managed by elites of white-collar engineers and middle management, exploiting a working mass of blue-collar workers. These blue-collar workers were the audience or consumers of the analog media content produced by cultural industries that, according to the Frankfurt School, created passive consumers, a herd mentality, and could potentially lead to fascism (Miller, 2011, p. 12).
This hierarchical media landscape was transformed, it was widely claimed, by digital technology and the popularization of the Internet and the web in the 1990s. On the web, interactivity, and two-way communication, was the rule. It was said to be inherent in Internet technology and its infrastructure (Abbate, 1999; Castells, 1999). The earlier dichotomy between senders and receivers, between producers and consumers was loosened up and the categories started to merge with each other, giving rise to new possibilities according to intellectuals of the time (Levy, 1997, 1998). Suddenly, all citizens who had an Internet connection and a PC not only had more information and cultural resources to choose from, they also could publish themselves, meaning that they could start to publish their own cultural works for a broader audience.
Soon people had the same experience as Linus Torwald when he realized that software programming could be carried out by peers in distributed networks (Castells, 2001). From all this developed a bottom-up participatory remix culture (Lessig, 2008), in parallel with a convergence of the media, telecoms and software sectors of the economy in the 1990s. Participatory cultural production included phenomena such as fan-production, peer-production and citizen journalism, which became popular cultural forms (Jenkins, 2008).
Some examples are mash-ups where new sounds were added to a totally different television program, or spoiler sites where fans discussed and investigated the worlds of reality TV series like Survivor. Other fan communities developed platforms dedicated to Star Trek, Harry Potter and so on (Jenkins, 2008). And, of course, one of the best known examples of this kind of peer production is Wikipedia: an encyclopedia that is produced by thousands of Wikipedians in over a hundred different language versions, where motives for taking part ranged from pure non-instrumental play to serious work and positioning in order to earn a wage or forge a career (Lund, 2017b).
All of these projects were thus characterized by a joyful and playful attitude that simultaneously produced utilities, or use values in Marxist terms, sometimes competed with the capitalist mode of production, and often came into conflict with copyright legislation. In relation to video games, for example, gamers were no longer satisfied with simply playing the games, they also wanted to make their own adaptions, so-called modding âcomputer game modification (KĂŒcklich, 2005; Lund, 2015). Conflict also sprang up around the extensive file sharing occurring on P2P-sites, like The Pirate Bay.
These breaches of copyright occurred at the same time as the political authorities strengthened and extended the terms of copyright in the Western world.
Indeed, from the mid-1970s intellectual property in general and copyright specifically began to dramatically expand as a consequence of the most diverse variables (Zukerfeld, 2017b). The US Copyright Act of 1976 was the cornerstone of this legal change and it implemented at least three major changes that would subsequently spread worldwide. Firstly, the automatic grant: authors became rights-holders by default (i.e. without having to register the work) from the moment they fixed their work in a tangible medium. Secondly, the term length was extended to the sum of the authorâs remaining life plus 50 yearsâin 1998 this was expanded again to 70 years after death, or 95 for works owned by companies. Third, the notion of the âauthorâ was broadened far beyond the old flesh-and-blood human beings standard, to include corporations as legitimate owners of works of authorship. Most importantly, in 1980 the Copyright Act was amended to protect software under copyright law. But why did this dramatic expansion of copyright take place? As digital technologies flourished, copying information for free became so easy that music, film and software owners felt that their businesses were under siege. People copying (and later on downloading from the Internet) content threatened the realization of their profits. The first reaction of capitalist owners of content was to build more fences, and strengthen the enclosures as much as possible. This was attempted through the transformation of copyright law.
In parallel with this conflict between a strengthening of copyright law and the participatory and often copyright-breaching digital culture, a new neoliberal ideology began to develop, with the epicenter in Silicon Valley, California. The popularization of the Internet and the birth of the web were assumed to be creating a new economy, which would rejuvenate democracy and promote global understanding in general (Curran, Fenton, & Freedman, 2016, p. 203).
