Free as in Regulated: Television Copy Protection,Cultural Enclosure,and the Myth of User Sovereignty

Abstract

Following Foucault’s demystification of liberal rights, this article complicates narratives of cultural enclosure in intellectual-property regulation, and especially their central figure of a right-fully sovereign user constrained by copy protection. First, it problematizes the freedom imagined for the user, as a specific and ambivalent orientation to contemporary cultural transformation. Second, in a reading of the Federal Communication Commission’s proceedings on “broadcast flag” protection for digital television, it reconsiders apparent constraint as productive rather than simply repressive regulation, which goes to constructively map uses and users in new domains of digital media.