Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages
383. premise: "the time has passed when teachers of composition and communication could ignore debates about intellectual property, if indeed we ever should have"--b/c there's a bill on the table, the "proposed National Information Infrastructure Copyright Protection Act of 1995" (i suppose i'll have to find out what ever happened to that)
384. for teachers the "stakes are...high" & the field needs to "finally move beyond [its] limited and limiting models, in both theory and practice"
386. the document itself "would make browsing among electronic databses (simply viewing documents on a computer screen) tantamount to copying and thus subject to a fee; and allow information providers...to install devices that would track the retrieval of all information, protected or not"--a "radical invasion of privacy" for users.
387. "the field's silent complicity in shrinking the intellectual commons" has been & remains a problem; "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"
388. history: "the passage in the constitution which sanctions u.s. copyright law articulates this balance, empowering congress 'to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries' (article 1, sec. 8, cl. 8). this passage envisions an ideal reciprocity between inducements for creators in the form of limited rights and, on the other hand, the public interest in an expanded body of knowledge"
389. today's important questions: "what exactly is the contemporary american copyright law protecting? whose interests are being served by the current intellectual property regime?"
390. & the unfortunate answer: copyright lately is more & more "a tool for the protection of large commercial third parties"
391. taking the problem head-on means hearing from theory, science, & technology: (1) derrida, foucalt...
392. ...barthes, lefevre, brodkey, ede & lunsford more unintended theorizing: lunsford-and-west write about "ede-and-lunsford" as if there's no overlap. so another collaborative configuration makes a 3rd-person remove an appropriate way to refer to the first collaborative configuration, even when there's an "i" in common (although who would "we" be?)? (s) science & patent law--> "what one researcher calls the 'nightmare scenario of conflicting claims to various parts of the genome'"
393. & companies' fights to "level the playing field for marketers of drugs based on genetic sequencing information so that their own company might then achieve a larger share"
394. (3) the proliferation of material available "free" on the web--"we are...being led to understand communicating in an electronic environment as a social activity, as the necessarily collaborative process of creating and consuming information"; "until recently the information exchanged on the burgeoning electronic frontier has been relatively free from regulation, a situation that has caused users to feel uniquely empowered and also has contributed, in the opinion of some commentators, to the explosive growth in new information forms and delivery systems characteristic of the digital highway"
396. it's comp's problem b/c (1) "members of our profession must take strong stands on proposed copyright legislation, law that will profoundly affect us and our students as creators and consumers" & (2) "we must examine the assumptions about language that inform our rhetorical practice and our pedagogy and decide what kind of culture we want to promote in the classroom and beyond, particularly in cyberspace"
397. (even if we're "uneasy" about the issues)--we have a "deep and abiding investment in knowledge as a product to be traded in the academic marketplace"--"the academy's nearly compulsive scholarly and teacherly attention to hypercitation and endless listing of sources are driven, for the most part, by the need to own intellectual property and to turn it into commodities that can be traded like tangible property, a process of alienation that is at the heart of copyright doctrine based on the abstract concept of 'work'"
398. complications: "teachers often in effect appropriate the writing of students--in the kinds of assignments we make...in how we read and respond to student compositions...and in how we use their work with or without citation"; & "students are themselves often engaged in staking out territory to call their own"; "even such apparently alternative evaluation techniques as portfolios depend for their efficacy on the traditional notion of authorship, a notion dependent in turn on seeing knowledge as a marketable commodity"--so "it is not insignificant that the academy has been obsessively concerned with plagiarism, with 'false' ownership."
399. the big picture: "traditional notions of authorship, intellectual property, and commodified knowledge inform work in the academy, and much about public and private middle- and high-schools as well. indeed, from this viewpoint, the business of education is that of accessing and trading knowledge packages, accumulating and using them for advancement toward grades, graduation, admission to graduate or professional school, jobs, promotion, tenure, and so on. what what happens if this business...is no longer prfitable....if the knowledge products...are now readily accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime?....if the producers of such knowledge...are so widely dispersed as to be invisible...if the forces surveyed above...effectively destroy old systems of the 'right' to copy?"
400. first "we must begin to reimagine the space of the classroom"--"such metaphoric space is no longer commensurate with theories of learning, however, much less with the realities of late twentieth-century existence in a quite literally electrified world"; new classrooms need to be envisioned as "open and public," "as often virtual spaces where people meet to make meanings together"; hypothetically "our classrooms would not be separated from what anne gere describes as the rich 'extracurriculum'" (in which case it wouldn't exactly be "extra" anymore); also, of course, "teachers of writing must reimagine 'authorship'"--"there are many other ways [than the traditional] of locating 'authorship' and of invoking and enacting collaborative practices"--> "why not alternatively understand the creation of intellectual property as a temporary appropriation of linguistic territory from the cultural commons, an appropriation meant to enrich not only the 'creator/s' but the public domain as well?" better metaphor: "stewardship"
401. in such an imagining, copyrights would then "carry with them the steward's traditional responsibilities"; "there are alternate ways of imagining not only copyright but rhetorical invention as well, of where knowledge comes from and who has access to it"--i.e. esther dyson (& googlezon!)