Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Chasing Down the Social Meaning of DeCSS: Investigating the Internet Posting of DVD Circumvention Software (15 Jun 2005) We draw several conclusions about the symbolic meaning of DeCSS from this observed variation. First, DeCSS posting can be better understood if one views DeCSS as a symbol laden with meaning rather than as an algorithm or a software tool. But while DeCSS is sometimes used as shorthand for arguments about the changing relationship between owners of digital media and intellectual property owners, DeCSS does not stand as a symbol for those arguments everywhere. In some places it has more value as an example of an audio-visual tool or as an example of a cracking tool. In other places, it seems to have no evident symbolic value, as no one posts it. Second, while DeCSS posting seems to be used as a symbol indicating F/OS group affiliation in many websites in the United States and certain nations in northern Europe , DeCSS does not have this same value everywhere. Our data suggest that F/OS developers in Italy and Spain do not post DeCSS because, despite healthy numbers of F/OS developers within these nations, the data from those nations contain few DeCSS postings. Using social informatics facilitates these types of insights. Article URL: http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Jun-05/eschenfelder.html Read 126 more articles from American Society for Information Science sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: IBM Systems Journal: Open Source Software     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy