Tarleton Gillespie is an assistant professor in the Communication department at Cornell University, with affiliations in the Information Science program and the department of Science & Technology Studies. His PhD is from the Communication department at the University of California, San Diego.
He is currently completing a book for MIT Press entitled "Technology Rules: Copyright and the re-alignment of Digital Culture" (that should see the light of day in fall 2006) that joins the ongoing discussions about digital copyright. While part of it is thinking about the implications of the DRM strategies being explored by the entertainment and information industries, his focus of inquiry is on the elements that have to be brought into alignment for a such systems to work: institutional alliances between manufacturers of content and hardware, licensing obligations that put those agreements into practice, legal structures such that users who circumvent and manufacturers who stray from the pack are constrained, cultural justifications such that this arrangement can be installed and justified as a public good. His argument is that whether a particular DRM system actually succeeds, these developing alignments will have their own consequences. A recent article laying out osme of these concerns, called "Copyright and Commerce: The DMCA, Trusted Systems, and the Stabilization of Distribution" can be found in the September 2004 issue of "The Information Society".
What he hopes to add to the discussion is an examination of these issues from a social science vantage point: concerned not only with how copyright will work today and in the future and with what consequences, but also with using these cases to better understand the rules that structure culture, the political economy of cultural expression, and the social valence of technology.
Beyond these copyright issues, Gillespie teaches courses that address the intersection between media (new and old), culture, and society; his broader interests include the ways in which information is structured and organized, the power and mobility of technological metaphors, theories of authorship and expertise as they tangle with new technologies of cultural expression, animation and children's media, and the cultural implications of the First Amendment. His article on the social construction of the "end-to-end" design of the Internet, "Engineering a Principle: 'End-to-End' in the Design of the Internet" is slated to appear in the June 2006 issue of "Social Studies of Science".