Copyright and Technology: Hearing the Dissonance

This thesis concerns copyright and technology. It investigates their ever-growing dissonance, currently intensified by the processes of digitisation taking place in society at large. If there is a pressing need to reassess/modify copyright law against the backdrop of digital technology, the thesis argues that a prerequisite of this is that it divorces itself from the limitations in the existing copyright paradigm and, accordingly, recognise technology as a quality and condition for both its emergence and subsistence. In contrast to the prevailing tradition of viewing technology as an extrinsic condition affecting copyright, here its intrinsic quality is traced and emphasised. This is accomplished by means of circumventing copyright’s fundamental orienting principle of property and drawing instead on the notion of communication, which in turn enables us to recognise and reconstitute the ever-present intertwinement of copyright and technology. While communication as an approach is not foreign to the copyright discourse, it has rarely been deployed in investigating the relation between copyright and technology. The thesis advances from an understanding of communication focused on the end points and recognises the middle as a prerequisite and an essential element of communication. This shift in view does not only allow recognition of noise as an intrinsic feature of communication but also becomes a methodological tool through which the dissonance of copyright and technology can be ‘heard’ and comprehended. In doing so, the thesis draws on information theory, the work of the French philosopher Michel Serres, media and sound studies. By traversing different fields of study, in the end, the thesis immerses itself into a soundscape, and thus ‘aurality’ becomes a sensible manner for answering the guiding research question of what is the actual dissonance between copyright and technology. Ultimately, it argues that this manner of displacement provides new passages of investigation that go beyond the limitations of copyright’s normativity, and sets a conceptual basis for addressing the issues and re-articulating the relation between copyright and technology.