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Disciplinary
Perspectives
CCR 747: S13

Sunday, February 24, 13

Authors of work published in the journal are attentive
to the legal and economic landscape in which their
professional lives happen. This may seem a relatively
mundane and obvious claim, but it’s an important one.
We are not, nor have we ever been, naive about the
ways in which we are surrounded by and implicated by
issues of Intellectual Property--in terms of our work
(Corbin; Francis; Nagourney; Nagourney and Steiner),
the porous boundary of academia and the world
beyond (Bourque; Corbin, Hastings, Robinson; Wheeler)
and the impact of the decisions we make on our
students and our classrooms (Cargill; Corbin,
Frederick; Kolich; Nilsen; Nydahl; Poulin; Turner.) (540)


When did all this start?


DeVoss: 1943


Corbin, 1965
As a profession, we must educate ourselves about the whole
business of copyright. As users of books, it is very much our
business, in fact. Under the present law we have been guaranteed
by the courts certain fair and necessary uses of copyrighted
materials in our classrooms and scholarly pursuits ... Our ﬁrst
responsibility, therefore, is to inform ourselves about the issues
involved in the proposed revision of the law.


Borque,“The Humanist as
Computer Specialist” (1983)


1994: CCCC IP Caucus


6 threads (1994-2012)
• Romantic notions of authorship anchor us in dangerous ways
and align to the ways in which copyright restricts texts.

• IP is problematic in the way that authorship and/or property
is situated along race, class, and gendered divisions.

• Digital networks and changing technologies are transforming
the textual landscape.

• Writing is a commodity that can be owned and sold;
authorship is murky and complex, and authrorship is held by
companies more than by individuals.

• Visual rhetoric and visual studies demands more focused
attention ... to issues of copyright and IP.

• English studies scholars have a signiﬁcant stake in copyright
issues. (544).

Lunsford & West, 1996


chilling effects


Speciﬁcally, this document would make browsing among
electronic databases (simply viewing documents on a
computer screen) tantamount to copying and thus
subject to a fee ... Those corporations would be
encouraged, in other words, to keep records on who
reads what on whose network... Even more important,
such a reading regime would exert largely silent but
powerful controls over what gets read and how, and,
eventually, over what gets written.

According to the WSJ, the president of the Software
Publishers Association called the document’s proposals
“great news. Our greatest fear is that the Internet will
become a vehicle of free distribution of
information” (Cooper) (386-87)


is that just then?
a concern of nearly
20 years ago?


Composition’s position in this debate is all the more
problematic, we will argue, because of the ﬁeld’s silent
complicity in shrinking the intellectual commons. After
all, the teaching of writing has traditionally been
invested in a model of composing that makes solitary
reﬂection central to the production of “original” texts
absolutely “owned’ by their creators, a model of
singular authorship and ownership perpetuated
effectively by teachers of writing (and educational
systems in general). (387)


Such an argument focuses attention once again on the
Western privileging of the Romantic conception of
“creation”: in this case, a corporate inventor/author
may claim property rights that are denied to those
whose discoveries are the results of collective action or
a process of cultural transmission. (393)


international information
economy (Boyle)


cultural commons


What might a reimagined
system look like from the
perspective of Rhet/Comp?


Lindsey:
First I wanted to discuss if the trade off of "new ideas
and expressions" instead of monetary gain is realistic in
terms of "where the values lies in terms of our
discipline." I realize teachers do not necessary make a
lot of money from teaching or academic publications,
but our students are not indoctrinated that way. As they
point out, the battle cry seems to be "mine." In a digital
age I'm wondering if this will be a trickle down effect or
a trickle up effect. Will we teach our students to move
away from "mine" and value new ideas, or will we be
forced to move into a position where "mine" because
our go to response.


Jess:
–What does collaborative authorship look like in a classroom?
What is the role of the teacher?
–How does the concept of community engagement help us re-
imagine teaching in this newly constructed space L & W
describe? [See also: “extracurriculum.”]


Lindsey:

Finally, in regards to "added to information" and "added value" I
couldn't help but think of how academics write their articles.
Articles and dissertations operate under the idea that new work is
being produced. But often times when an author introduces their
project at the beginning of an article they make a move that states
they are "extending, building, complicating, etc" so-and-so's work.
They establish a "gap," and new place, but they also (like we teach
our students) strongly establish their ethos and their right to be
occupying that space by hitching their work to someone else's
wagon. Thus, their new work isn't wholly original but "exists in the
connections the rhetor poses between certain taken-for-granted
bits of knowledge" (402). Again this relates back to my question of
what are we actually valuing.(esp considering this article was
written in 1996 and its 2013).


pedagogical
responsibilities (397+)


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