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IN THE 1970s, record companies gave away badges that depicted a blank cassette tape, a pair of crossbones and the words, 鈥淗ome taping is killing music 鈥� and it鈥檚 illegal.鈥�

The badges were meant to attack not only home copying but also other types of copyright infringement: organised piracy, commercial counterfeiting and grand theft. In lumping all these activities under the same banner, the record companies made the same mistake they are making today. People who copy their own discs to play in their cars are not pirates and do not like being branded as such. Meanwhile, badge messages don鈥檛 shame real pirates into mending their ways.

The record companies of the 1970s hoped to develop technology that would allow a user to play but not copy music. Today, record companies and movie studios are chasing the same goal, using digital rights management (DRM) software to control copying while seeking tougher laws to back them up. The results, though, are the same: innocent customers are frustrated while professional criminals carry on as usual.

In Wired Shut, Tarleton Gillespie documents this digital battle with excellent discussion of the key issues and extensive source references. The book is not an easy read, however. It is more like a series of wordy and worthy essays, which left me feeling I was being lectured at. Also, the author seems more confident on law and history than on technology.

The history of DRM is a graveyard of flawed ideas. Take, for example, music CDs and home CD recorders, which use a system called SCMS (Serial Copy Management System) to stop the recorder making a copy of a disc that is already a copy. This system was fatally undermined when home computers were designed to ignore it.

Hollywood then developed a code called CSS, the Content Scramble System, and made it an essential part of the DVD system. No CSS, no movies, the studios decreed. But CSS was soon hacked by a student who published its shortcomings on the internet.

The Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) of 1998 was the first serious attempt at developing a digital rights management system that might be fair all round. The idea was to watermark music with inaudible patterns that a decoder could recognise so music could be marked as free to copy, or blocked, according to the copyright holder鈥檚 wishes. Then the head of the project, digital media engineer Leonardo Chiariglione, bravely handed over the SDMI watermarking system to a public hack challenge on the internet. SDMI was quickly broken and the venture collapsed in 2001.

So here we are today with a plethora of incompatible, and even disastrous, DRM systems. Some companies have given up on DRM altogether. British company Linn Records and music giant EMI have both decided to sell their recordings online without it. DRM offends consumers, says Linn, and anyone who really wants to make a copy can easily do so 鈥� if necessary by re-recording the analogue audio output. As Gillespie neatly puts it, 鈥渁ny system built can be unbuilt鈥�.

鈥淎nyone who really wants to make a copy can easily do so鈥�

The entertainment industry still hopes to find an effective protection system, though. This is why the DRM built into the new blue laser disc systems Blu-ray and HD DVD, called the Advanced Access Content System (AACS), is designed to be easily updated. AACS has already been hacked 鈥� lists of decryption keys for movie discs are on the internet. But now DVD manufacturers can modify the DRM in blue laser players in people鈥檚 homes without their customers even knowing it. Contrary to what Gillespie suggests, this does not require a phone line connection 鈥� it can be done using codes buried in the movie discs that consumers buy or rent.

That may or may not make AACS more secure: it has never undergone a hacking challenge. What happens next is anyone鈥檚 guess. But I鈥檝e held on to my crossbones badge 鈥� it鈥檚 a nice reminder that despite the music industry鈥檚 worst predictions, the music never died.