I don’t know if I’m actually going to get around to it — so many different directions to take one’s research, one can’t do them all — so I thought I would just post this and let anyone think it out for themselves. But I’ve been thinking a lot lately, ever since I published my book, about how to study copyright “on the ground,” to move from the places where the rhetoric about digital copyright is produced and circulated, to where the mundane practices that grapple with and, in quieter ways, shift the workings of copyright in the contemporayr moment.

One of the most vital questions for how information is regulated and culture is shaped, and that copyright offers such an ideal insight for understanding, is to look into the particulars of the interlocking of technology, law, culture, and practice. However, most of the scholarship so far has tended to look at the issue on a very broad, macro-social level: Congressional mandates, court decisions, public debates, cultural controversies. (My book is certainly guilty of this top-down and sometimes generalized perspective.) To deepen our insight into these problems, we must also examine not just the biggest changes and the loudest debates, but also the ways these arrangements play out “on the ground.” How do designers of new technologies understand their copyright obligations, and how do they incorporate those obligations into the tools they design, amidst other economic and practical pressures? How do corporate partners collaborate on techno-legal strategies for enforcing their copyrights, and how do they persuade legislators, the courts, and the public to see it their way? How do users come to understand what copyright is, and in what way do they incorporate or disregard it in their everyday habits of acquiring and producing culture? Insight into these practices will illuminate the ongoing debate about copyright in a digital age. But the question extends beyond the particulars of copyright: how are the rules of information production and knowledge in a digital environment conceived and imposed? How do the various participants in this process understand their role within it, respond to pressures, and rationalize their activities? How do their efforts extend, normalize, or undercut these changes in copyright and information regulation. How are we building what will become ‘digital culture’?

The discussion of digital copyright needs much more ethnographic attention to the lived realities of all this. These questions require a methodological attention to the real spaces and practices in which decisions are made, elements come together, problems are grappled with. Getting inside the rhetorical debate means examining people in their actual social contexts: in the cubicles of software designers, in the meetings of industry consortia, in the offices of media producers, in the dorm rooms of users. It will be very interesting to figure out what the right ethnographic sites should be, which information practices and local discourses are revealing of the complex lived tensions between property and not, which arrangements most need to be drawn into focus and dissected. Is it something like Pirate Bay, where the political dimension of copyright violation is most explicitly articulated? (There’s been some recent work about Pirate Bay — I saw a talk a few months ago dealing with just what you’re pointing to, the way Pirate Bay is moving itself from an outlaw community to a legitimate political force.) Is it Brazil, where the mew politics of IP is not just technological motivated, but wrapped up in seeking alternatives to Western models? Is it at Creative Commons, where people are seeking to shift the debate and locate a third way? Is it in the dorm rooms of avid downloaders, where the anti-piracy rhetoric of established industry reaches for the American “digital native”? (I don’t much like the term, but it makes the point.) Is it with musicians, grappling with a shifting landscape of circulation, the long and tortured history of the role of record labels, and the swirling rhetoric? I feel like these are the obvious ones, and that part of what needs to be done here is to ferret out where else this lived experience of information and property needs to be studied. Still, each of these (and lots I’m not thinking of) have real potential.