Gillespie's research interests lie at the intersection of culture and technology. While many people are at least vaguely aware of the ongoing legal struggle between the music industry and users who share music through so-called “peer to peer” networks, at stake is much more than your right to download the latest Shakira track for free. According to Gillespie, such laws as 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) go well beyond the provisions of old-fashioned copyright law.

The film industry, for instance, has been instrumental in devising restrictions that not only penalize unauthorized copying, but affect consumers' rights to open up and tinker with devices such as DVD players, personal music devices, and computers. Gillespie argues that using the rhetoric of protecting intellectual property, the powerful interests behind the DMCA want not only to define legal behavior, but also to set the limits of possible behavior, by building regulations deep within digital devices themselves.

“There's always been a tradition that you can open the devices that you own … There's no economic rule that only authorized people can, say, put a spark plug in [a car].”But the new industry ideal of “robustness” means, in Gillespie's view, “literally locking the hood; it literally means closing the box and hiding the software code, for instance … . The implications of that are dramatic. Many of today's engineering students and computer science students honed much of their skill set and gained much of their knowledge by cracking things open, ripping code apart, recreating, rebuilding. … There's a risk of all that [hands-on experience] going away.”

On the information side, where traditional copyright law allows some legal copying for specific purposes, the emerging digital standards are displacing “fair use” with a notion of “licensing” cultural property to individual users—with ambiguous implications.

“The whole idea of cut and paste, of selecting and reworking culture [is essential],” Gillespie argues. “This is where early work comes from, where early filmmakers and software designers and musicians came from. That's how we innovate.” Powerful economic interests resist applying a digital fair use standard, however, because they see fair use as a gateway to piracy. The result for makers of art and culture may well be chilling.

Gillespie, who came to his currect position in the Department of Communication from Cornell's program of Science and Technology Studies, is writing a book about this vital subject, titled Technology Rules: Copyright and the Re-alignment of Digital Culture.