Seven Red

So I saw a good talk today by one of my colleagues (MC), who discussed the teaching of intellectual property and its relationship to writing. This has been, of course, the major (and perhaps dominant) topic in the field of writing studies since the mid-1990′s, as I never tire of noting. MC has designed a graduate course on writing and intellectual property, and is currently working on an edited collection on the same. All good. In any case, his talk today was about the framework he’s trying to establish for an undergraduate course on writing and intellectual property in a “digital age,” so he basically laid out four primary topics that such a course should address. For my money, the suspect category was something like “development of a personal ethic for information production.” As I understood it, he had his graduate students articulate what kinds of licenses they’d prefer for their digital work, which could range from standard copyright, to the various levels of Creative Commons licenses, to pure public domain release. Through this discussion, students would have to better understand the ethical decisions they make when they use others’ works or release their own, etc. It should be said that this development of an ethical relationship, and understanding the emerging ethics of digital production, has been the primary answer that the field of writing studies has offered up in the face of the expanding copyright regime, together with various disputations on fair use doctrine and similar activist related issues. MC, for example, cited the now oft-quoted DeVoss and Porter article (“Why Napster Matters to Writing”), which is all about rethinking the ethics of digital production through the rhetorical canon of delivery, asking students, ultimately, to consider why they are writing/producing/remixing, etc. It’s this seemingly telescoped turn to an ethics that I’d like to discuss a bit here, and I’ll do that by pausing on one of the keywords of MC’s talk, the category of the prosumer.

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