What Matters Who Writes?
What Matters Who Responds?
Andrea Lunsford, Rebecca Rickly, Michael Salvo,
and Susan West
Following the conversation on the CNI/COPYWRITE list even for a
few weeks will demonstrate,
I think, how deeply entrenched the "author" construct--as owner of
certain copyrightable or patentable property--is in our legal
system, as well as how many daily challenges to that construct are
coming from the "Net" and from the production and distribution of
software and all forms of digitized information. If the stakes
weren't so high, it would be downright funny to listen in as
lawyers, librarians, software developers, advertisers, publishers,
graphic artists, musicians, and others (even some teachers like me)
fight it out over how these new means and forms of information can
be (or will be?) turned into property that can be owned and
protected and, most of all, kept out of the "public domain"--that
is to say, how they can be kept as the private property of their
"authors" or "author functions." (For instance, there is a
battle between writers, producers, and directors for the locus of
ownership in film, a struggle over whether parodies break
copyright; there is a lawsuit over the representation of a sculptor's
work in Batman Forever without the artist's permission; and there is the
"copyleft" movement and Free Berkeley Radio, etc.) These issues
are, of course, beginning to impinge directly on scholarship in
literature and composition.
Next *
Previous
Postmodern (un)grounding *
Collaboration *
Copy(w)right/Ownership *
Possible Futures
Title Page *
Conclusions