Despite being here in this program Becky calls home, I haven't put much of my intellectual inquiry time into thought about copyright law/intellectual property. But in "Parsing Codes," Logie's positioning of the historical expansions of copyright law over the last couple of centuries as a particular concern for technical communicators for whom-as we saw last week-writing is often a matter of remixing/textual curation, sets up the topic as something I am instantly more curious about than I've been up til now. Especially of interest to me is the degree to which he traces the extent of parallel between copyright law and technological developments as relates to reproduction and distribution, and memory technologies in different media.
Looking further into the more frequent and high-impact changes made to copyright law in the digital age, Logie highlights the US's adoption of the European model of not just legal permissions connected to the author's control of a work, but also a moral understanding of textual ownership, which he explains "are grounded in a belief that an artist's act of creation carries with it certain natural rights that typically include exercising a measure of control over a given work even after it has been sold" (230). As Logie then explains four monumental changes in copyright law made since 1997 which have totally changed the landscape of copyright towards serving not the public good, but rather the interests of whoever stands to make money on a particular text, we see the familiar problematic that repeatedly emerges when attempting to balance a positive, protection-of-the-individual perspective with the frequent consequence of the serving of capitalistic interests: the individual corporation (like Sony, for instance), becomes protected, while smaller-sized individuals-to be frank-get screwed.
Porter, in "The Chilling of Digital Information: Technical Communicators as Public Advocates" nicely follow's Logie's critique with a discussion of ways in which not only the shifting legal landscape, but relatedly the cultural landscape of intellectual property law is having disturbing consequences for the public sphere. Not only is the all-important fair-use doctrine under attack, but the very act of linking which practically defines web writing is also facing attack by (often corporate) authors who wish to prohibit deep-linking which subverts a site's homepage and instead links directly to one of the many pages buried within a site. As Porter describes it, "The AMC citation principle [which views linking as an online version of citation] is based on an academic, gift-exchange model that encourages cross-referencing and acknowledges the interconnectedness and collaborative nature of knowledge. But that philosophy runs counter to an ownership model that attempts to establish clear, unambiguous proprietorship" (251). This made me wonder whether there was perhaps some of this "chilling effect" at work behind MLA's 2009 style changes.
I wondered if the recent decision to no longer include url's in works cited entries for online texts, and to replace the url with the word "Web" was potentially motivated by fear of being labeled, as the DMAC prohibits, a force that helps circumvent copyright law (and thus erode fair use). The MLA handbook, though, presents itself in fairly neutral terms however, explaining that:
In the past, this handbook recommended including URLs of Web sources in works-cited-list entries. Inclusion of URLs has proved to have limited value, however, for they often change, can be specific to a subscriber or a session of use, and can be so long and complex that typing them into a browser is cumbersome and prone to transcription errors. Readers are now more likely to find resources on the Web by searching for titles and authors’ names than by typing URLs. You should include a URL as supplementary information only when the reader probably cannot locate the source without it or when your instructor requires it. If you present a URL, give it immediately following the date of access, a period, and a space.The rhetoric describing the shift as one that facilitates ease of cross-referencing and research might be disarming, but is not wholly satisfying. Either way, I will keep my ear to the ground as I continue to work in the field, considering what it means, as Porter argues, to be a public advocate for access to information (255).
