Digital Rights Management and Corporate Hegemony

To the extent that data constitutes creative work in a tangible form, it represents intellectual property and implicates copyright. Understanding data mining, thus, invokes an appreciation of the principle and law of copyright. With the advent of digital rights management (DRM), the discourse of the U.S. law of copyright has shifted from fair use to circumventions of copyright-protecting software by hackers. In light of the ever-rising market power of transnational media corporations, this essay engages the political philosophy of Antonio Gramsci to address a normative question of who ought to control protected content and to what extent. It identifies six inflection points for any effort to divest copyright law of the disproportionate influence of corporate lobbying. Underlying the discussion is a presumption that reform of the law of copyright through dialogue among key stakeholders – creative individuals, technology innovators, legislators, policy makers, international mediators, data miners and other scholars, and transnational corporations – would help preempt any Gramsci-prescribed socialist reaction to the exclusive copyright regime enabled by DRM.