Invention, Copyright, and Digital Writing

Invention, Copyright, and Digital Writing
Author: Martine Courant Rife
Publisher: SIU Press
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2013-01-31
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0809330989

This is the first empirical, mixed-methods study of copyright issues that speaks to writing specialists and legal scholars about the complicated intersections of rhetoric, technology, copyright law, and writing for the Internet. Martine Courant Rife opens up new conversations about how invention and copyright work together in the composing process for digital writers and how this relationship is central to contemporary issues in composition pedagogy and curriculum. In this era of digital writing and publishing, composition and legal scholars have identified various problems with writers’ processes and the law’s construction of textual ownership, such as issues of appropriation, infringement, and fair use within academic and online contexts. Invention, Copyright, and Digital Writing unpacks digital writers’ complex perceptions of copyright, revealing how it influences what they choose to write and how it complicates their work. Rife uses quantitative and qualitative approaches and focuses on writing as a tool and a technology-mediated activity, arguing the copyright problem is about not law but invention and the attendant issues of authorship. Looking at copyright and writing through a rhetorical lens, Rife leverages the tools and history of rhetoric to offer insights into how some of our most ancient concepts inform our understanding of the problems copyright law creates for writers. In this innovative study that will be of interest to professional and technical writers, scholars and students of writing and rhetoric, and legal professionals, Rife offers possibilities for future research, teaching, curriculum design, and public advocacy in regard to composition and changing copyright laws.

The Effects of Intellectual Property Law in Writing Studies

The Effects of Intellectual Property Law in Writing Studies
Author: Karen J. Lunsford
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2019-12-06
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1351015176

This book documents the intellectual property experiences of writing studies scholars and challenges naturalized ways of responding to intellectual property concerns. Analyzing results of a nationwide survey and semi-structured interviews to examine ways decisions about intellectual property (IP) during academic knowledge-making are mediated by histories of enculturation, ethical lenses, and IP sponsors, the book: Identifies and illustrates a range of ethical stances that academics might adopt in regard to IP and the range of human, institutional, and technological sponsors that can mediate IP decisions; Provides evidence that IP affects all of the processes of academic knowledge-making, not just the final product; Offers heuristic questions that academics can and should ask throughout their teaching, research, and editing to make proactive IP decisions. The book is an essential read for academics working in writing studies and the humanities as well as those interested in IP. This text could also be used in graduate student training in writing studies and related disciplines.

Mass Authorship and the Rise of Self-Publishing

Mass Authorship and the Rise of Self-Publishing
Author: Timothy Laquintano
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2016-10-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1609384466

In the last two decades, digital technologies have made it possible for anyone with a computer and an Internet connection to rapidly and inexpensively self-publish a book. Once a stigmatized niche activity, self-publishing has grown explosively. Hobbyists and professionals alike have produced millions of books, circulating them through e-readers and the web. What does this new flood of books mean for publishing, authors, and readers? Some lament the rise of self-publishing because it tramples the gates and gatekeepers who once reserved publication for those who met professional standards. Others tout authors’ new freedom from the narrow-minded exclusivity of traditional publishing. Critics mourn the death of the author; fans celebrate the democratization of authorship. Drawing on eight years of research and interviews with more than eighty self-published writers, Mass Authorship avoids the polemics, instead showing how writers are actually thinking about and dealing with this brave new world. Timothy Laquintano compares the experiences of self-publishing authors in three distinct genres—poker strategy guides, memoirs, and romance novels—as well as those of writers whose self-published works hit major bestseller lists. He finds that the significance of self-publishing and the challenge it presents to traditional publishing depend on the aims of authors, the desires of their readers, the affordances of their platforms, and the business plans of the companies that provide those platforms. In drawing a nuanced portrait of self-publishing authors today, Laquintano answers some of the most pressing questions about what it means to publish in the twenty-first century: How do writers establish credibility in an environment with no editors to judge quality? How do authors police their copyrights online without recourse to the law? How do they experience Amazon as a publishing platform? And how do they find an audience when, it sometimes seems, there are more writers than readers?

Research Handbook on Intellectual Property and Digital Technologies

Research Handbook on Intellectual Property and Digital Technologies
Author: Tanya Aplin
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 607
Release: 2020-01-31
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1785368346

This Handbook provides a scholarly and comprehensive account of the multiple converging challenges that digital technologies present for intellectual property (IP) rights, from the perspectives of international, EU and US law. Despite the fast-moving nature of digital technology, this Handbook provides profound reflections on the underlying normative legal dilemmas, identifying future problems and suggesting how digital IP issues should be dealt with in the future.

Moral Rights, Creativity, and Copyright Law

Moral Rights, Creativity, and Copyright Law
Author: Sarah Hook
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 189
Release: 2023-12-29
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1003835031

This book argues that moral rights provisions in copyright law rest on a misunderstanding, or romanticisation, of the role of the author. The Romantic conception of authorship, as a lone genius, creating from nothing, sensitive and vulnerable, has helped publishers push for strong copyright reform. But is this conception borne out in practice – especially in a world of meme culture, of artificial intelligence generated art and poetry, and of open source and fan fiction? This book probes the romantic vignette of the author through its legal adoption. Moral rights are rights that attach to the non-economic – for example, intellectual or emotional – interests of an author in their work. Much like defamation, moral rights see the right of reputation as superior to the right of freedom of expression. However, unlike defamation, moral rights are not protecting against defamatory actions against a person. In most jurisdictions, they are provisions set within copyright regimes; regimes whose purpose is to incentivise innovation. Challenging the way we think about authorship and how it should be protected by law, the book draws on a wide range of historical and contemporary examples to demonstrate how moral rights can constitute a barrier to transformative creativity. While authors and artists require strong rights to protect their ability to earn an income and incentivise creativity, moral rights, the book argues, may in turn actually harm their ability to do so. This timely criticism of moral rights will appeal to researchers, students, policy makers and lawyers working in the area of intellectual property law, as well as legal theorists, sociolegal scholars and legal historians with relevant interests.

WIPO Guide to Using Patent Information

WIPO Guide to Using Patent Information
Author: World Intellectual Property Organization
Publisher: WIPO
Total Pages: 44
Release: 2018-04-30
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9280526510

This Guide aims to assist users in searching for technology information using patent documents, a rich source of technical, legal and business information presented in a generally standardized format and often not reproduced anywhere else. Though the Guide focuses on patent information, many of the search techniques described here can also be applied in searching other non-patent sources of technology information.

Critical Conversations About Plagiarism

Critical Conversations About Plagiarism
Author: Michael Donnelly
Publisher: Parlor Press LLC
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2012-11-10
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1602353514

Critical Conversations About Plagiarism is an edited collection of essays that addresses traditional, overly simplistic treatments of plagiarism by providing approaches to the topic that are complex, critical, and challenging, as well as accessible to both students and teachers.

Digital Copyright

Digital Copyright
Author: Jessica Litman
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Total Pages: 216
Release:
Genre: Law
ISBN: 161592051X

Professor Litman's work stands out as well-researched, doctrinally solid, and always piercingly well-written.-JANE GINSBURG, Morton L. Janklow Professor of Literary and Artistic Property, Columbia UniversityLitman's work is distinctive in several respects: in her informed historical perspective on copyright law and its legislative policy; her remarkable ability to translate complicated copyright concepts and their implications into plain English; her willingness to study, understand, and take seriously what ordinary people think copyright law means; and her creativity in formulating alternatives to the copyright quagmire. -PAMELA SAMUELSON, Professor of Law and Information Management; Director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, University of California, BerkeleyIn 1998, copyright lobbyists succeeded in persuading Congress to enact laws greatly expanding copyright owners' control over individuals' private uses of their works. The efforts to enforce these new rights have resulted in highly publicized legal battles between established media and new upstarts.In this enlightening and well-argued book, law professor Jessica Litman questions whether copyright laws crafted by lawyers and their lobbyists really make sense for the vast majority of us. Should every interaction between ordinary consumers and copyright-protected works be restricted by law? Is it practical to enforce such laws, or expect consumers to obey them? What are the effects of such laws on the exchange of information in a free society?Litman's critique exposes the 1998 copyright law as an incoherent patchwork. She argues for reforms that reflect common sense and the way people actually behave in their daily digital interactions.This paperback edition includes an afterword that comments on recent developments, such as the end of the Napster story, the rise of peer-to-peer file sharing, the escalation of a full-fledged copyright war, the filing of lawsuits against thousands of individuals, and the June 2005 Supreme Court decision in the Grokster case.Jessica Litman (Ann Arbor, MI) is professor of law at Wayne State University and a widely recognized expert on copyright law.

Copy(write)

Copy(write)
Author: Martine Courant Rife
Publisher: Parlor Press LLC
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2011-10-09
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1602352658

Brings together stories, theories, and research that can further inform the ways in which writing teachers situate and address intellectual property issues in writing classrooms. The essays in the collection identify and describe a wide range of pedagogical strategies, consider theories, present research, explore approaches, and offer both cautionary tales and local and contextual successes.

Patents and Strategic Inventing: The Corporate Inventor's Guide to Creating Sustainable Competitive Advantage

Patents and Strategic Inventing: The Corporate Inventor's Guide to Creating Sustainable Competitive Advantage
Author: Nicholas Nissing
Publisher: McGraw Hill Professional
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2012-09-28
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0071783873

A true original—the first practical guide to patents written specifically for corporate scientists, engineers, and product developers Patents and Strategic Inventing spells out exactly what a typical corporate inventor needs to know about patents and patent strategy, as well as how these topics can be used to guide the creation of new products. It explains in clear, easy-to-understand language how to secure patents that deliver the most possible value to the organization and build legal protections into properties from the outset. Nicholas Nissing was an inventor at Procter & Gamble, founded the consulting firm Luminosity LLC, which focused on new product development and patent strategy for large corporations, and is currently the Biotech Competitive Strategy Lead at the Monsanto Company and an adjunct professor at Washington University.