IP Literature Inside & Outside Writing Studies

Although scholarship on IP issues in writing studies has been extensive, writing studies practitioners often find themselves navigating among assumptions about IP—and how to teach IP—that originated from outside of educational settings. Often, these assumptions are restrictive (and negative), as when college students using peer-to-peer networks are portrayed as copyright pirates (Logie, 2006, pp. 14–16; DeVoss & Porter, 2006, pp. 182–185). At times, writing studies practitioners hear these assumptions echoed by colleagues across campus, as when faculty treat student plagiarism as the "academic death penalty" (Howard, 1995). To counter these assumptions, which exert pressures to restrict definitions of IP and thus approaches to IP pedagogy, we extend Annemaree Lloyd's (2010) definition of information landscapes to offer a different metaphor for thinking about IP. This metaphor, as we explain below, encourages writing studies practitioners and their campus colleagues to broaden the topics taught in regard to IP, reaffirms the importance of individual identity and agency in determining what to do when faced with an IP challenge, and emphasizes the importance of having mentors offer reflections on making IP decisions.

As this special issue, which responds to a special issue of Kairos in 1998, illustrates, scholarship on IP in writing studies has been rich and varied. Indeed, each of the four dimensions we identify and bring together here has been productively addressed before in writing studies scholarship (and beyond). The full scope of work on IP in writing studies that touches on these dimensions is too vast to review in this webtext, but we would like to highlight the special issues of journals that have explored the impact of IP on writing instruction and research: Laura Gurak and Johndan Johnson-Eilola's 1998 special issue of Computers and Composition on Computers, Composition, and Intellectual Property; Kairos' aforementioned 1998 special issue on Copywrite, Plagiarism, and Intellectual Property (Amore et al.); Martine Courant Rife, Steve Westbrook, Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, and John Logie's 2010 special issue of Computers and Composition on Copyright, Culture, Creativity, and the Commons; and Krista Kennedy and Rebecca Moore Howard's 2013 special issue of College English on Western Cultures of Intellectual Property.

Despite this rich tradition of IP scholarship within writing studies, we are frequently reminded that IP in academia is situated within much broader cultural definitions of IP, definitions that are varied, evolving, and frankly not much concerned with the specific needs of academia. For example, as Jessica Reyman (2010) points out, the U.S. entertainment industry has influenced IP debates within Congress to focus on how IP applies to end products (the published text, the musical recording, the film) instead of how it applies to composing processes (pp. 65–66, 74–75). Several initiatives—among them, remix composing, Creative Commons licenses, and open access—have arisen in the last decade to resist the more restrictive versions of IP that entertainment and publishing industries have sought to promote. Even so, some of these academic initiatives themselves are influenced by extra-academic forces. For instance, publishers have begun to charge open access fees for journal articles that scholarly communication researchers fear may exceed subscription prices (Quinn, 2015; Rizor & Holley, 2014). Moreover, despite these initiatives to redefine IP approaches, teachers from primary to postsecondary settings face pressures to focus IP pedagogy on a narrow set of topics with a goal of imparting IP rules. These restrictive approaches are sometimes reinforced with legislative action, such as laws requiring schools that accept government funding for new technology to teach proper respect for copyright (e.g., to teach students to avoid peer-to-peer file sharing. The model for such laws was the 2006 California Legislative Assembly Bill 307; when it proved too restrictive, it was repealed in 2017.).

On college and university campuses, too, even though broader perspectives on IP issues have been researched and published, they have not necessarily been widely adopted in teaching. For instance, as we will discuss further in our results, IP issues in higher education often are equated with plagiarism problems. Yet, the writing studies scholarship on plagiarism demonstrates how complex the issues of determining authorship, reconciling voices, and making appropriate arguments can be. For example, in a 2013 chapter, Sandra Jamieson and Rebecca Moore Howard reported on The Citation Project, a national study of ways in which students from sixteen U.S. colleges and universities incorporate sources into their academic writing. Jamieson and Howard detailed a complex picture of student source use, moving beyond labeling such practices as acceptable or unacceptable per Western academic standards. Instead they identified five source-integration techniques that they found students to use--summarizing, paraphrasing, patchwriting, copying with no quotation marks, and copying with quotation marks--as well as noted from where in source texts students cited sources. Their work challenges that our understanding of student source use can be merely black and white or can follow an easy flowchart to designate it as correct or incorrect (or willfully plagiarized or not). The Citation Project reveals that a student's approach to integrating and citing sources can vary by type of source (e.g., its difficulty, its complexity), type of writing (i.e., their assignment), and other factors. That is, students' choices are situational and multidimensional.

In spite of empirical studies such as The Citation Project, in the last decade, we have seen a consistent demand for a simple solution to the problem of plagiarism, and with that demand, the increasing popularity of plagiarism detection services such as Turnitin. Though writing studies practitioners have critiqued these services, especially in terms of their handling of IP (e.g., Marsh, 2004; Purdy, 2005, 2009; Vie, 2013; Zwagerman, 2008), adoption of these services has continued to rise in secondary and postsecondary education. Indeed, some of us who have published such critiques work at institutions that subscribe to Turnitin or similar services. Despite research, plagiarism detection services thrive across the campus, including within writing programs. Part of the success of plagiarism detection services is the interpretive framework that they advertise: IP issues can be reduced to strict, easy-to-define, rules.

To counter these limited interpretations of IP, we turn to a model that acknowledges the complexity of IP issues as well as provides a metaphor for organizing their components. We follow the lead of Annemaree Lloyd (2006, 2010) in seeking to present IP as a complex landscape on which practitioners position themselves. Lloyd, from Australia, addresses members of a cognate discipline who mentor students on research projects: librarians, and more broadly, information scientists. Librarians frequently are consulted about appropriate research and citation practices, not to mention IP, especially copyright, practices. In her research, Lloyd challenged the definition of information literacy first adopted by the American Library Association in 1989 and quoted in the 2000 standards: "a set of abilities requiring individuals to 'recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information'" (ALA, 2000, "Information Literacy Defined"). According to the ALA's standards, "Information literacy forms the basis for lifelong learning. It is common to all disciplines, to all learning environments, and to all levels of education" ("Information Literacy Defined"). Throughout her scholarship, Lloyd argued that such a definition of information literacy not only reduces complex, situated practices (especially evaluating information) to a limited skill set, but also treats that skill set as decontextualized, universal traits. Her voice was likely instrumental in the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) publishing the Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education in 2015. It offered a new definition of information literacy more in line with Lloyd's vision, particularly its organization around six threshold concepts, the first of which is "Authority Is Constructed and Contextual" (ACRL, 2015; see McClure & Purdy, 2016). We suggest that Lloyd's contention about information literacy may sound familiar to writing studies practitioners who have similarly argued that complex writing and research practices cannot be reduced to a simple skill set that applies invariably and generically across all contexts.

Opposing the ALA and prefiguring the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education, Lloyd offered a new framework for conceiving of information literacy, a framework based on sociocultural theory. In her 2006 article in the Journal of Documentation, Lloyd introduced the concept of the information landscape and expounded it further in her 2010 book, Information Literacy Landscapes: Information Literacy in Education, Workplace and Everyday Contexts. She defines information landscapes as follows:

IInformation landscapes are intersubjectively created spaces that have resulted from human interaction, in which information is created and shared and eventually sediments as knowledge. Consequently as an information landscape (just like a physical landscape) evolves, its social, historical, political, and economic layers are deposited to form the foundations of the intersubjective space. (2010, emphasis in original, pp. 9–10).

Lloyd began with the work of John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid (2017) to argue that information is social: people co-construct, embody, and share it within specific contexts that they inhabit and define. She particularly drew on Etienne Wenger's (1998) concept that people inhabit communities of practice, as well as upon Jean Lave and Wenger's (1991) argument that newcomers learn to recognize salient information and how to use it appropriately by engaging in a community's practices. In addition, she emphasized that such communities evolve, with practices and assumptions not only embodied by the people involved, but also entrenched within the technologies, artifacts, conventions, and narratives that they develop.

Lloyd's focus on narratives illustrates that stories are crucial for understanding the information landscape. She professed narration is a key mechanism for introducing newcomers to the hows and whys of a community of practice. As she and Kirsty Williamson (2008) explained, Lloyd conducted ethnographic studies in different settings to better understand how information literacy "requires a person to experience information in a range of different ways in order to know the setting and its practices" (p. 6). In her study of firefighters, for example, she found that more experienced firefighters furnished "opportunities for novices to access their tacit and experiential knowledge through activities such as storytelling, deconstructing past events as a way of explaining mistakes, and narration of the tacit aspects of professional practice" (p. 6). In other words, novice firefighters could not be information literate in this setting—could not evaluate risks to themselves from a fire, for example—without embodied and articulated experiences to guide them. In an earlier study, Julian Orr (1996) similarly argued that technicians who repaired Xerox machines likewise shared stories to co-construct knowledge about the machines and to make their tacit, experienced knowledge about them more explicit. We argue that academics likewise inhabit information landscapes and that novices are best made aware of how to position themselves on these landscapes through stories from colleagues, mentors, or more experienced practitioners. For academics, these information landscapes are imbued with IP issues. Like the firefighters in Lloyd's study and the Xerox technicians in Orr's study, academics—and especially newcomers to academia—cannot fully comprehend and navigate IP if the issues are presented as decontextualized, generic, and narrowly-focused rules. Rather, they would do better to keep the whole IP landscape in mind.

Our study, therefore, focuses on the narratives that writing practitioners tell about their experiences with IP. In analyzing these experiences, we have chosen to modify Lloyd's approach somewhat. What she calls layers of the information landscape (its "social, historical, political, and economic" components [pp. 9–10]), we call dimensions. We use this different language because our study's perspective differs from Lloyd's: rather than delving into a single situation, we survey and interview writing studies practitioners from a range of contexts. Our participants do share some characteristics, of course, as writing studies practitioners affected by IP issues, but we have taken snapshots of their experiences. We encourage readers to consider them as experienced narrators whose reflections outline the contours, the broad dimensions, of the IP information landscape that readers/users may also inhabit. Our participants identify different aspects of the landscape that readers/users can pay more attention to as they decide where to position themselves within their own specific IP situations. Our participants do not simply provide rules, but model how to think through IP dilemmas while balancing the (sometimes competing) values they embody and articulate.

Method

This webtext draws on data from a multifaceted IRB-approved study that includes recorded, semi-structured interviews conducted in spring and summer 2015 with twenty-eight writing studies professionals of varying ranks at various U.S. colleges and universities as well as, to a lesser extent, a nationwide, anonymous questionnaire with 393 responses from practitioners who identify with the field of writing studies. Our overall research question was, What trends emerge when teachers, researchers, and editors in writing studies are asked to relate their knowledge of and experiences with IP issues? We offered a questionnaire because we wanted people to be able to be honest in sharing their stories and beliefs. Responses to the questionnaire helped us determine the questions and areas of focus for the interviews, and, while we primarily report on the interviews in this webtext, we reference some of the questionnaire responses to reinforce the broader trends interview participants' videos reveal. (We discuss the questionnaire responses at greater length in our book project, The Effects of Intellectual Property Law in Writing Studies.) Our full set of interview questions is available in Appendix B.

We followed up our questionnaire with interviews to balance the broader range of responses from the survey with more in-depth responses from interviews—as well as to balance the anonymous responses of the questionnaire with identifiable reflections and advice from known writing studies practitioners. These seventeen interviews are part of a larger corpus of twenty-eight. We did not have space to provide over 14 hours of interview footage or over 200 pages of transcripts in a single webtext, so we chose particular sections to present. We focused on the most telling reflections, the most explicit commentary, and issues that came up over and over in the interviews. Our interview population included but was not limited to writing studies professionals who research and publish about IP. Indeed, we intentionally sought out a broader population, though, perhaps not surprisingly, many of the folks who accepted our invitations to interview included scholars who study IP. For earlier interviews with some of these scholars, including Karen, regarding their work with the Conference on College Composition and Communication Intellectual Property Caucus, see Amidon (2012). What we offer in this webtext is a broad look into practitioners' approaches to IP, an overview of the landscape; we do not drill down into one specific context (e.g., practicing technical writers, contingent faculty members). Rather, our goal is to acquaint writing studies practitioners with the range of options we saw members of the discipline to use.

Interview participants were recruited through professional listservs (e.g., techrhet, WPA) and targeted social media (e.g., Facebook). Participants included writing studies scholars and journal editors identified through snowballing methods. The 45–90 minute, semi-structured interviews were conducted via Skype, telephone, or in-person; recorded via video and audio methods (e.g., Camtasia screen capture software); and subsequently transcribed. Participants reviewed the transcripts, and they consented to the use of their real names and the recordings. In two cases, only audio was recorded.

Teaching Citation

A theme we found in our interviews is discussion of citation, especially plagiarism, in response to questions about IP, particularly questions involving teaching undergraduates. When we asked interview participants how they (would) teach IP issues at different levels (first-year students, upper-level undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty peers), they often responded in terms of how they teach students to cite sources and avoid plagiarism. Notably, we did not explicitly ask participants to talk about citation. Yet participants commonly—in fact, almost unanimously—referenced citation and plagiarism in their responses. Donna Kain captured this finding: "At any level I talk about plagiarism, obviously—we all do." (See Appendix A for participants' position(s) and institutional affiliations at the time of their interviews in 2015. Note that all interview transcripts have been edited for clarity and consistency.)

Indeed, we found that a prevalent lens participants used for making decisions about IP is teaching students citation and source use practices to avoid plagiarizing. For instance, when asked what IP issues he addresses in his textbooks, Mike Palmquist began a long, eloquent, nuanced response, "I've got, in just about all of them, a full chapter on plagiarism and the usual stuff like that." As Palmquist represented it, approaching IP from the perspective of plagiarism avoidance is the "usual" tack to take. Kain elaborated on how she teaches students to avoid plagiarism: "I have a very strict plagiarism policy and I check. Again, because it is easy to make mistakes [...] I want to make sure that people understand how to do things right." For Kain, part of preparing students to deal with IP is instructing and enforcing clear policies regarding plagiarism. It is also designing assignments that preclude plagiarism: "I think we have to work on doing assignments where the stakes are such that, it doesn't benefit students to do that kind of stuff—to toss it off as, 'Hey, it's just a class assignment; it doesn't matter.' So, I think how we construct assignments is really important, too." From this perspective, if the goal is to instruct students in how to avoid plagiarizing, teachers must create assignments that do not invite plagiarism. Anne Ruggles Gere in speaking in her role as graduate program director, recounted a similar approach in graduate student training. She shared that, in her program's eight "experiences" designed to prepare graduate students to "be ethical professionals," the "first session" was about plagiarism.

That participants framed the issue of plagiarism as a "usual" part of IP instruction (Palmquist) that "we all do" (Kain) and where we go "first" (Gere) gave us pause. Certainly, it makes sense that we, as writing studies practitioners, would approach IP from the perspective of writing practice. In fact, Kairos' 1998 special issue on Copywrite, Plagiarism, and Intellectual Property includes plagiarism as an IP issue. Its section on "Intellectual Property: Questions and Answers" with Johndan Johnson-Eilola, explicitly asks about plagiarism's relationship with fair use and copyright. Yet our study participants' sense of this connection as inevitable—and the regularity with which participants made this connection—surprised us, perhaps partly because it made us aware of our own unconscious reliance on this coupling. Jim, for instance, has published on the potential problems of plagiarism detection technologies (2005, 2009), and this work is what led him to be part of the IP Caucus in the first place. Thus, we do not wish to suggest that writing teachers should not instruct students in how to avoid plagiarizing. However, we do wish to suggest that thinking of IP instruction only in those terms is unduly limiting.

To be sure, some participants did not limit themselves in this way, explicitly explaining how they move source use instruction beyond discussions of plagiarism. For example, Tim Amidon, shared,

I think in the first year composition classroom it's just important to start having conversations about textual appropriation. How do you do citation? What does that really mean? It isn't simply just saying, "I didn't plagiarize." That isn't really what gets me up in the morning so-to-speak. [...] I'm not up here so I can go "You shall not steal from others!" You're going to appropriate ... I have to acknowledge that. And I also want to acknowledge that there's other people that have done things that they've worked really hard on, and I want to do the right thing and say, "Hey! I see that you did something that was pretty meaningful. And I want to give you credit for how that's influenced and impacted me." And I think those are the conversations that really…I think those resonate with students in first-year writing classes because it's not about "gotcha." And those listening that are familiar with intellectual property studies will know exactly what I'm talking about when I say that. It's less about "gotcha" and more about how do I become an ethical composer? How do I integrate a conversation that has existed prior to my use of this conversation in a way that's ethical and appropriate for the type of writing and rhetorical situation I'm entering?

Here Amidon offers questions that guide his approach to teaching first-year writing students about citation in ways that seek to move beyond catching students for citation mistakes or focusing on teaching students how to avoid being caught for plagiarizing. Rather, he situates his approach as helping each student learn how to "become an ethical composer." Michele Eodice, director of the writing center and associate provost for academic engagement at the University of Oklahoma, extended this lens to instruction in the writing center. In discussing training writing center consultants, she noted her approach to be "not demonizing plagiarism so much…kind of taking it out. It's been so many years, Jim, since this has even been an issue. I really think young people have a better handle on this than old people. They're not like, 'Oh! It's my job to be the plagiarism police.'" Like Amidon, and several other participants, she valued source use instruction over plagiarism punishment.

As a way to expand IP instruction beyond teaching only plagiarism avoidance, a few study participants explicitly referenced distinguishing between copyright and plagiarism. For instance, Jeff Galin explained

Often, when I'm introducing plagiarism, I'll talk about the difference between copyright concerns and plagiarism, and how plagiarism is much more…a much lower standard, if you will, than a copyright violation, and how important it becomes for ethical reasons. But, in the end, plagiarism is not so much an IP issue as it is an ethical issue.

Galin's sense that plagiarism is more an "ethical issue" rather than an "IP issue" may suggest why so many participants mentioned it: given its ethical resonance and visibility, it is a writing practice at the forefront of our minds as writing teachers. In identifying this finding of participants associating plagiarism with IP, then, we do not mean that participants necessary confused or conflated plagiarism with copyright violation.

Indeed, like Galin, some participants were motivated to clarify this distinction for students. For instance, John Logie explicitly expressed concern about this conflation of plagiarism and copyright violation. He called for a clearer, more nuanced definition of plagiarism: "I think our whole field needs to do a better job at untangling distinctions between plagiarism and appropriation—plagiarism and, in many cases, unauthorized appropriation for effect." Damián Baca shared Logie's concern, lamenting that his own teaching of IP is too overly focused on citation practices. He confessed, "I'm disappointed in my own pedagogy. [...] I'd like to do a better job [... moving] beyond the concern of making sure that students are submitting their own work."

Several study participants provided alternatives to moving beyond this concern. Cruz Medina for instance, was one of only a few interviewees who did not explicitly use the words plagiarism or plagiarize in his interview. Instead, he discussed source use questions as arising from questions of textual distribution and genre/media convention. For example, he noted teaching IP issues in the context of students asking why their videos were taken down from YouTube and explaining attribution practices in digital media as connected with form, for instance, the use of credits at the end of a video to provide citation information. Michael Pemberton echoed the importance of this attention to delivery in teaching IP.

In this webtext, then, we theorize IP as an information landscape to offer ways writing studies practitioners can move beyond the concern of whether students plagiarized--in particular, by putting into conversation the four landscape dimensions we identify: IP Law, Legal Issues, and Stories about Them; Relationships between Economic Systems and IP; The Evolution of IP: The Past and Future; and Personal Identity: The PI of IP. We turn next to fuller explanations of these dimensions. For each, we offer our argument regarding that dimension, a video of study participants' insights and ideas regarding that dimension, pedagogical approaches that arise from the video, and further resources that readers/users might consult to continue conversations about that dimension with students and/or colleagues.

Dimension: IP Law, Legal Issues, and Stories about Them

We argue for attending to IP law, legal issues, and stories about them alongside instruction in citation to highlight not only the importance of knowing legal rights and responsibilities, but also recognizing the importance of stories. That is, stories (even myths) about IP law, in addition to IP legislation itself, influence IP decisions. Stories shape practice. For example, many academics have heard the 10% myth associated with fair use: it is appropriate and acceptable to reproduce up to 10% of a text without additional copyright permissions. But, as Martine Courant Rife (2006) explained in "Why Kairos Matters to Writing: A Reflection on Its Intellectual Property Conversation and Developing Law During the Last Ten Years," the 10% rule comes from the Fair Use Guidelines for Educational Multimedia report (Lehman) produced by—but never fully endorsed or accepted by—members of the Conference on Fair Use (CONFU). Nonetheless, the Guidelines were promulgated throughout academia, even though they are not the law. (Indeed, the Cambridge University Press et al. v. Patton court ruling rejected the 10% rule as a guideline to determine fair use). The story about fair use continues to shape academic approaches to IP.

see more >>

Relationships between Economic Systems and IP

We advocate that writing studies practitioners address relationships between economic systems and IP because IP, particularly copyright, privileges the financial interests of certain agents over others. And who gets privileged—whether author, audience, or distributor—is dependent on cultural and historical context. Recent legislative developments in particular have emphasized IP's complex role in economic systems. Writing studies practitioners might rightly point to language in the U.S. Constitution that suggests IP's (particularly copyright's) initial (intended) goal was not economic but rather to promote the advancement of knowledge. As readers/users may know the Patent and Copyright Clause of the U.S. Constitution indicated that Congress has the power "[t]o 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" (U.S. Const. art. I,§8,cl.8). In emphasizing "the Progress of Science and useful Arts," this clause suggests that IP's primary purpose is to generate and circulate knowledge through the (eventual) free sharing of authors' and inventors' "writings and discoveries." Still, extensions of copyright terms, we would argue, have served to privilege the financial gain copyright holders might make over the advancement of scientific and artistic work. Although this function of IP was not necessarily codified in the language of the Constitution, it has emerged over time.

see more >>

The Evolution of IP: The Past and Future

We draw attention to the evolution of IP as a dimension that writing studies practitioners should include in their IP instruction because IP legislation, policies, and practices are moving targets. As the study participants we interviewed emphasized—and as scholarship both inside and outside writing studies has explained (e.g., Woodmansee & Jaszi, 1994; Rooksby, 2016, respectively—what IP is and how it is understood and protected has changed over time. Thus, when writing studies practitioners make IP-related decisions—and when they prepare students to make those decisions—they need to consider that past decisions may not apply. Moreover, future developments may change what IP decisions practitioners make as well as the choices available for consideration. As writing studies practitioners, we benefit from carrying the process orientation that characterizes writing instruction to IP. That is, we do well to teach IP as in process, not as fixed and monolithic but rather as contextually situated in time and place.

see more >>

Personal Identity: The PI of IP

We call for attention to personal identity, "The PI of IP," as a dimension of IP to reflect that the subject positions writing studies practitioners inhabit always already shape the IP decisions they (can) make. Knowledge making is at the core of what academics do, and different academics assume different positions toward owning expressions of that knowledge. Those positions are inevitably based on different identities—as academics with different professional positions; as scholars in particular disciplines; as people of particular races, cultures, creeds, sexual orientations, and belief systems; as humans with particular bodies. In other words, perspectives on whether and what property can be owned are inextricably bound up in ways of knowing and being. For IP, such issues can be most visible with digital composing activities of remixing, including what Rodney H. Jones and Christoph Hafner (2012) call "mashing, modding and memeing," the affordances and constraints of which, they argue, include not only what composers can do but also "how we can relate to others, how or what we can think, and, finally who we can be" (pp. 1, 5, emphasis in original). That is, relating, thinking, and being, core elements of identity, foundationally shape approaches to whether and how writing studies practitioners use, integrate, and compose with (other) texts. In terms of IP decisions, for example, these identity considerations may influence choices about what texts can be included in a remix, whether memes are seen as fair use, or whether certain texts can be circulated and shared outside certain audiences.

see more >>