Project Proposal: The Impact of Creative Commons Licensing on Composition

In the midst of the 1995-2005 free-for-all of copyright violation, where end-users by and large felt justified in copying music and texts rampantly, lawyer and author Lawrence Lessig founded Creative Commons. Its purpose was to encourage authors, performing artists, academics, and film producers to share their own creative work to the extent that they wished to share it, while feeling secure in the protection of those writers' rights they wished to maintain. With my project, I want to perform two operations: to make a reference article for those educators who are interested in employing materials protected by these new forms of copyright, including licensing their own classroom materials; the second task will show how Creative Commons, the next stage of evolution in both our laws and the cultural conception of the artist, can influence both the teaching of writing and the production of compositions.

Bas Bloemsaat and Pieter Klave, in their article “Creative Commons: A business model for products nobody wants to buy,” that since Creative Commons licenses are not legally sanctioned internationally, a plagiarist feels free to violate CC licenses with impunity (248). I disagree that art projects offered “to the commons,” in Lessig's terms, are those that are otherwise unwanted and unpublishable. Bloemsaat and Klave worry that an ill-intentioned distributor could apply for a CC license on works belonging to others (248). This demonstrates a misunderstanding of the legal basis for Creative Commons, but more importantly, it spreads the word that CC licensure is not safe or profitable for writers and artists.

Henry Jenkins' work argues for a change in the U.S. copyright law that appeals not to mass culture and its capitalist aspirations, but to the folk culture that had arisen by the end of the twentieth century. He recognizes that the masses have always influenced the style and marketing of artists; he also believes that media consumers are engaging with texts in a manner that is incompatible with rigid copyrights pre-dating the establishment of this country. In the heyday of Napster, according to Jenkins, when millions of listeners and readers copied texts to their hearts' content, “nobody minded, really” (140-141). With the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, publishers and artists' unions such as BMI-ASCAAP sought to solidify copyrights that “should last forever” (141).

Jenkins encourages us to view those consumers of texts who also produce texts as “contributors” rather than “pirates” (198-9). He carefully distinguishes between the types of Fair Use which were deemed legally appropriate, with particular attention to the different between derivative work without defensible purpose and parodic interpretations, which change the thrust of a work sufficiently to become works in themselves. This seems particularly germane to a composition teacher, since one quite well-known traditional composition assignment includes studying the irony in Swift's “A Modest Proposal” and emulating it in the very first essay for a freshman composition class.

Lessig claims the U.S. Constitution does not mention IP, intellectual property, but does mention 'exclusive rights' to 'writings and discoveries,' which Lessig refers to as monopolies (260). I’m not at all clear on how writings and discoveries are monopolies, even if one holds exclusive rights to the ideas within them.

I am convinced that today's college freshman is familiar with many forms of copying and copyright violation, from cutting-and-pasting, manipulating bibliography pages to avoid the detection of piracy, and which peer-to-peer programs offer the greatest selection of (illegally) shared music. My students today were about ten years old when colleges nationwide banned the use of resident P2P programs on the college network. They grew up, in other words, half in the years of piracy, but for the last half of their lives, they have seen instead a proportional increase in copyright control and threatening language as a preface to every textual medium. Universities mandate the printing of similar messages on every syllabus.

This attitude appears outdated, hegemonic, and flailing, futile, perhaps pitiful. While I don't agree with Lessig that the younger generation has been demonized by Interpol, the FCC, and BMI-ASCAAP, I do believe that a productive approach to derivative texts is 1) traditional, 2) effective, and 3) may be harnessed in newer and more fruitful ways than we are currently exercising in the classroom. It has worked in music, it has produced academia as we know it, and it will work for creative writers in ways we have yet to imagine.

I plan to begin with questions of piracy and plagiarism, as music careers and college composition courses so often do. For instance: claiming not to have written something I did write is plagiarism.

Today authors are sued for plagiarism, but in the past, publishers were held responsible (even through James Frey's notable case from 2003-2005. Publishers are held responsible for their artists' plagiarism. This was true five years ago in UK's CATS Center, where the facility was enmired in problems when a paid tutor helped a funded student write a paper a bit too much.

Emily Apter, in her article “What is Yours, Ours, and Mine,” traces the questions of plagiarism through the history of literature. After developing that history, Apter asks a series of poignant questions in the end of her 2008 article. Hers question are effectively those I wish to answer with my project, with respect to composition: “How will knowledge production be

affected by the shrinking field of free intellectual property at the very moment

when planetary access to the open source has expanded and when apparitions

of anonymous, de-owned, collective intellectual property (blogs, Wikipedia,

group art) are legion?” She does not venture to answer these questions, but the hermeneutic Apter sets up will serve to guide my essay.

Working Bibliography

Apter, Emily. “What is Yours, Ours, and Mine: Authorial Ownership and the Creative Commons*.” October [magazine] 126 (2008): 91-114. Print.

Bairstow, Jeff. “Great ideas and digital barbarism.” LaserFocusWorld (June 2009): 96. Web. 5 Apr. 2011. .

Binder, Terry, Eva Brandt, and Judith Gregory. “Design Participation (-s) – a creative commons for ongoing change.” CoDesign 4.2 (2008): 79-83. Print.

Bloemsaat, Bas and Pieter Kleve. “Creative Commons: A business model for products nobody wants to buy.” International Review of Law, Computers & Technology 23.3 (2009): 237-249. Routledge / Taylor and Francis Group. Print.

Buranen, Lise and Alice M. Roy, Eds. Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual Property in a Postmodern World. Albany, New York: SUNY P, 1999. Print.

Coley, Gerald. [Texas Instruments.] “Take Advantage of Open-source Hardware.” EDN 20 Aug. 2009): 20-23. Print.

Doctorow, Cory. “With a Little Help.” Publishers Weekly 19 Oct. 2009: 28-31. Print.

Flew, Terry. “Sovereignty and Software: Rethinking cultural policy in a global creative economy.” International Journal of Cultural Policy 11.3 (2005): 243-260. Print.

Geach, Neal. [University of Hertfordshire.] “The future of copyright in the age of convergence: Is a new approach needed for the new media world?” International Review of Law, Computers & Technology 23.1-2 (2009): 131-142. Routledge / Taylor and Francis Group. Print.

Hilton, John III and David A. Wiley. [Brigham Young University.] “The Creation and Use of Open Educational Resources in Christian Higher Education.” Christian Higher Education 9 (2010): 49-59. Print.

Jones, Richard. “Technology and the cultural appropriation of music.” International Review of Law, Computers & Technology 23.1-2 (2009): 109-122. Routledge / Taylor and Francis Group. Print.

Jones, Richard and Euan Cameron. “Full Fat, Semi-skimmed, or No Milk Today – Creative Commons Licenses and English Folk Music.” International Review of Law, Computers & Technology 19.3 (2005): 259-275. Print.

Kelty, Christopher M. [Rice University, Houston, Texas.] “Culture's Open Sources: Punt to Culture.” Anthropological Quarterly 77.3 (2004): 547-558. Print.

Kleinman, Molly. “The Beauty of 'Some Rights Reserved': Introducint Creative Commons to librarians, faculty, and students.” College & Research Libraries News [C&RL News] 69.10 (Nov. 2008): 594-7.

Leaver, Tama. “Book Review: Brian Fitzgerald (ed.), Open Content Licensing: Cultivating the Creative Commons.” CATLyst 1 (May 2007): 33.

Leaver, Tama. [Curtin University, Australia.] “Creative Commons: An Overview for Educators.” Screen Education 50 (2008): 38-42. Print.

Marandola, Marco. “El Sistema de las Creative Commons.” El profesional de la información 14.4 (2005): 285-289. Print.

Meyer, Katrina A. [University of Memphis.] “What's Yours is Mine: An Investigation of Current Copyright Policies of Education Journals.” Innovative Higher Education 34 (2008): 3-18. Springer Science + Business Media, LLC. Print.

Salpeter, Judy. “The New Rules of Copyright.” Tech & Learning 15 Oct. 2008: 33-36. Web. 4 Apr. 2011. <www.techlearning.com/article/14522/>.

Valenza, Joyce Kasman. “Opening Gates: On Celebrating Creative Commons and Flexing the Fair Use Muscle.” Library Media Connection Jan./Feb. 2009: 30-32.

Valenza, Joyce Kasman. “Tools of the Trade: Creative Commons.” Library Media Connection Jan./Feb. 2009: 50.

Yoshida, Junko. “Creative Commons.” Electronic Engineering Times 3 Mar. 2008: 60. Proquest Computing. Web. <www.eetimes.com/>.