@josey This particular story originally started as an art concept album about copyright in the guise of hymn-filk. (Filk using hymn tunes. It included the complete songbook with CC-BY license.)
When they set out, they basically have the same level of technology that we have. The big thing that makes it different is that instead of sending specially trained colonists that are carefully frozen, they've found a dry preservation mechanism that leverages the simple sugar found in tardigrades... and the whole purpose of the colonization is that the preservation mechanism is horribly unreliable. (The politicians are okay with the colonists dying, just not on Earth.)
Travel time is over a hundred years. We know from the colonization of the Americas that copyright is nonviable without banking that spans the both areas. It's possible to use a sister company in a distant land if trade is reliable and regular. The story doesn't include shipping as a viable use of resources. There's no FTL communication. It's just colonization.
You're also dealing with over a hundred years of travel, so anyone bringing DRM-protected media with them to the planet could break the DRM before it gets there. If there is to be trade and commerce, any ship that is intended to carry media to sell needs to both have media the crew of the ship can't break as well as an encoding that will work on massively obsolete technology. This is non-viable, as a system 100 years more advanced than the target playback device is unlikely to be daunted by DRM protections.
So nothing that is under a commercial copyright is on the ship. The media of the future civilization is known today, regardless of how far in the future it takes place. It's very simply what is public domain now. Particularly in the US, we're unlikely to see any movement on what is currently in the public domain. When Life-of-Author Plus 70 years (or whatever) would allow Disney's work to be public domain, it will get extended (ad infinitum).
This is all well and cool when we're talking about movies and books and music. It results in people with a mental history of pop culture with zero direct records. They'd have a history of something like Star Trek being massively culturally significant, but the records they have of Star Trek are limited to Creative Commons licensed fanfiction and slash. (This is where the filk component came in during the art album.)
However, it gets worse than that. We have a world where all manner of religions tightly control the copyright of their works. The Captain had a powerful spiritual experience and his faith made him a better person. He expected everything to be awesome. He found the religious texts that he depended upon were nowhere to be found. He believed that his faith was the only thing preventing him from being really horrible, and suddenly he found himself without oars thrust in to command out-of-order because the previous Captain was inappropriate with crew member and didn't want to be chastised by his replacement. Between the two, he went really, really bad.
This crew is trying to clean it up. Not a lot, but enough that they don't get in trouble for killing the Captain -- because they all have legitimate reasons for killing the Captain...
Which is to say: The ship doesn't put a person to sleep. But, they do have particular work hours, and the ship is suffering because a previous shift appears to have slacked off. The 26 hour schedule doesn't leave a lot of wiggle room to play. It's possible that somebody isn't keeping to the schedule, and the extended free time means that it should be possible to catch up... but I doubt it would be as easy for someone on the 26 hour schedule than flex their schedule the way we can with a 24 hour schedule.
