Gasser and Ernst’s essay is organized into three parts: the first focuses on digital technologies and the internet, the following is a basic description of contemporary copyright laws, and the final section focuses on the need for reformed copyright laws more amenable to the digital age.  More specifically, the first section focuses on what the authors refer to as “participatory culture,” and how such a thing is facilitated by digital technologies and the internet.  It examines this concept of participatory culture from both a theoretical and practical point of view.  The following section discusses copyright law in its present form, focusing on key aspects of it like the right to make derivative works, fair use, and unilaterally inhibiting technologies such as DRM.  Finally, the essay concludes with reform suggestions for how to enhance creativity by enabling greater participation.  It discusses both why a participatory culture is desirable, and possible strategies for copyright reform that would facilitate participatory culture.
    This essay is a very concise, accessible introduction to copyright law and the concept of participatory culture.  One major flaw that I found with the essay, however, was its demand that new copyright law take “information quality” into account.  Who, for example, will become judge of the quality of information, and upon what standards will they make their judgments?  This would obviously be a contentious issue, and one that the essay only barely addresses.  Also, this essay adopts a fairly utopian conception of digital technologies and the internet, a view that seems to be shared by many contemporary cultural critics.  The authors see digitization and the internet as great tools of democracy that will allow for a “participatory culture” unlike any previously known.  While these are nice, comfortable theoretical positions to take, that does not necessarily make things so.  As regards my own project, I am more interested in how these utopian visions of the “democratization” effect of digital technologies and the internet are coerced and manipulated by larger corporate or commercial interests.  For example, this essay discusses how new copyright law needs to provide for “informational autonomy,” but I am interested in how this so called autonomy is ideologically coded and oftentimes highly coercive.  In addition, this article relishes in the means of production being made available to all through digitization and the internet, but I want to know how this changes and is exploited by companies like Dorito’s that broadcast user generated content.  Will these democratized means of production simply be co-opted by corporate interests, or is there something truly liberating and democratic about these tools?  Anyway, overall this is a great essay to read as an introduction to participatory culture and copyright law.