Everything is Copyrighted (for 9-23)

Okay, so I jumped the gun for next week’s post (which I should’ve held off until before the 23rd). Chances are I’ll be mercilessly crushed by waves of grading, so better to do this now before my mind turns to mush.

The strands connecting notions of plagiarism, copyright law, and organizational systems are manifold. However, before I jump in please let me take a moment to express what I *really* feel about all of this, in one word:

“Fuck.”

I say this not because the author is dead, nor because there isn’t any sensible way of acknowledging indebtedness, but rather because the borders of what counts as intellectual property are changing in some pretty abstract and difficult to pragmatically approach ways. Weinberger’s mix tape—and his very notion of how we are beginning to organize information in “the third order” faces not only intellectual scrutiny, but mounds of legal issues as well. John Logie, in his rather depressing essay on copyright law, computers, and the composition classroom, exhumes a long legal history documenting the seeds that would lead to a market and intellectual climate dominated by “permissions.” He sees the expansion of copyright laws as a “response to the development of novel communicative technologies,” (137) culminating with analog tape decks and the internet. In short, Logie argues that the vague outlining of the “fair use” statutes in the 1976 Copyright Act fail to fully protect scholarly and non-profit uses of copyrighted material and other intellectual property (139-140). In effect, writing teachers can suffer stiff penalties for violating a poorly defined law. Teachers could even be sued by students for using their work in class exercises (anonymously or not).

‘Better break out the blanket waivers,’ suggests Logie.

To complicate matters, the United Nations’ World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) attempted to strengthen the rights of individual intellectual property holders in an effort to protect third world investors and inventors (143-44), a move supported by President Bill Clinton at the time. As Logie puts it, WIPO cast “the public as passive recipient rather than the grantor of authorial rights” (145). This outcome and the series of court decisions to follow were decidedly “top down” by Weinberger’s standards.

Though it should come as no surprise to note that legal prattle can complicate matters rather than resolve them, composition teachers have inherited a heavy burden to pass onto their students. Danielle DeVoss and Annette C. Rosati, in their essay on plagiarism and the web, outline the web climate that fosters accidental plagiarism. They argue, vast arrays of information are readily available to students looking for ‘more correct’ perspectives than their own, and that the temptation to copy and paste is high due to the text being right at their fingertips (156). So not only are students in this case plagiarizing, violating academic laws, but they are also violating the terms of “fair use,” effectively putting them in double jeopardy. And, even if the plagiarism proves unintentional, students aren’t safe from violating authorial permissions. If avoiding plagiarism means acknowledging indebtedness, how do we then respond to publishers and authors who demand monetary compensation?

The definition of plagiarism—as both Logie and DeVoss and Rosati point out—has expanded via the internet and copyright law. DeVoss and Rosati in particular advocate viewing plagiarism via an intellectual property lens (159). The rationale here is to speak to the web and its content on the web’s, and capitalism’s, own terms using a ‘real world’ approach: property, and by implication, money. While this approach seems sensible enough, the reality is far more complex. In Chapter 7 of *Everything is Miscellaneous* Weinberger points to sites such as Wikipedia and Flickr who rely primarily on user content, instead laying copyright claim over the systems of organization themselves. Though DeVoss and Rosati argue that anyone can become a published ‘expert’ online (157), Weinberger might argue that the “democratized” spaces online (those characterizing tagging, wikis etc.) defy the very notion of individual authors. Sites such as Wikipedia foster a multi-author landscape—anyone (who is registered) can modify others’ work. Thus, the landscape of intellectual property has expanded not just to ideas themselves, but to the frameworks those ideas occupy (should we see ideas as discrete intellectual units).

So again, I ask, how do we teach students to acknowledge indebtedness when we’re all in so much debt, both legally and intellectually? How do we describe ideas versus frameworks for ideas? While some might argue that academic uses of broadly applied theoretical lenses (postmodernism, poststructuralism, etc.) are similar to how students might engage a framework like Wikipedia, those lenses very often don’t include the baggage of as many copyrighted facets: images, sounds, words, paragraphs, phrases in and out of different contexts, and even the page layout containing them. Therefore, it might be tempting all over again to tell students not to use the web. However, such rationale ultimately only perpetuates the problem—students will continue to use the web, and will continue to steal from it both purposefully and accidentally. Though understanding intellectual property law provides a useful if Machiavellian approach to acknowledging indebtedness, this lens doesn’t necessarily help to resolve or foster an understanding of broader intellectual property issues and laws.

Once more, for the last time, what do we do with this mess? Resurrect the author?