“The Future Is Open” for Composition Studies: a New
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THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES “THE FUTURE IS OPEN” FOR COMPOSITION STUDIES: A NEW INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY MODEL IN THE DIGITAL AGE By CHARLES LOWE A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Degree Awarded Summer Semester, 2006 Copyright © 2006 Charles Lowe All Rights Reserved The members of the committee approve the dissertation of Charles Lowe defended on May 25, 2006. ______________________________ John Fenstermaker Professor Directing Dissertation ______________________________ Ernest Rehder Outside Committee Member ______________________________ Eric Walker Committee Member ______________________________ Deborah Coxwell-Teague Committee Member Approved: ______________________________ Hunt Hawkins, Chair, Department of English The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members. ii This text is dedicated to Wendy Bishop, John Lovas, Candace Spigelman, and Richard Straub, four teachers and researchers in the field of composition studies with whom it was my pleasure to work. I only wish I could have the opportunity again. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT...............................................................................................................................vi INTRODUCTION.......................................................................................................................1 The Future Is Open.............................................................................................................. 1 1. WHAT RIGHT TO READ?: DRM AND THE DMCA.......................................................12 Locking Up the Content.....................................................................................................17 Changing Expectations...................................................................................................... 32 2. ENCLOSURE OF THE COMMONS AND THE ENCROACHMENT OF FAIR USE..... 34 Fair Use: Fair for Whom?..................................................................................................37 The Digital Enclosure Movement......................................................................................43 Writing Might Not Be Allowed......................................................................................... 52 3. OPENNESS: UNDERSTANDING FREE AND OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE............... 54 Free and Open Source Software Licensing........................................................................57 Licensing Other Creative Works........................................................................................64 The Open Source Development Model..............................................................................68 Producing Other Creative Works.......................................................................................77 4. THE SHIFT IN SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING TOWARD ACCESS..................................80 Alleviating the Cost........................................................................................................... 82 Making Scholarly Articles Publicly Available...................................................................88 The Importance of Licensing............................................................................................. 93 Scholarship Doesn’t Need to Pay.......................................................................................95 iv 5. OPEN SOURCE, COLLABORATIVE LEARNING, AND ACADEMIC PUBLISHING..96 Borrowing from Open Source..........................................................................................101 Revising Academic Publishing and Peer Review............................................................109 Progressive Publishing Examples....................................................................................113 Complications for Revising Scholarly Publishing...........................................................115 CONCLUSION....................................................................................................................... 117 Exercising Our Right to Choose: Just Ask...................................................................... 117 REFERENCES........................................................................................................................122 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH...................................................................................................144 v ABSTRACT “The Future Is Open” for Composition Studies: A New Intellectual Property Model in the Digital Age examines problems with the current intellectual property paradigm and focuses on the application of open source methods of knowledge production as the potential solution. Since the birth of copyright with the Statute of Anne in 1710, commercial interests have continually worked toward the enclosure of intellectual property. Despite the value to society of having a public commons of works which anyone may access and use, these companies champion romantic ideals of authorship as a means to privatize all intellectual property. This particular situation has accelerated as of late with the formation of large media conglomerates and other companies who own creative works of all types—music, scholarly articles, works of fiction, patents on new technologies and biological processes, etc.—and who vigorously protect and extend their ownership rights, including lobbying for and receiving recent legislation which solidifies their control even further: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (1998) and Copyright Term Extension Act (1998). As we move from a print-based culture to a society whose texts are mostly electronic, enclosure will continually cause negative effects on literacy, a stifling of technological innovation, a worsening crisis in academic publishing, a further encroachment of fair use rights, and self-censorship by creators of works. In response to such problems with intellectual property, significant grass roots movements have begun in the past twenty years centered around the idea of “openness”: open source software development, open access to scholarly publishing, and Creative Commons. Writing teachers will find that within the principles of openness these movements represent, they will recognize an ideology parallel to their own beliefs about sharing and social constructionist epistemology and come to understand that the Utopian dream of an open source idea economy is the antithesis of the dystopia imagined by content providers. vi INTRODUCTION The Future Is Open In Spring 1999 while taking a graduate Computers and Composition course at Florida State University, I began to experiment with Linux, an open source operating system which can be installed on a PC (and more recently, Apple Mac’s) as a replacement for Windows. The versions—or distributions—of Linux I worked with—Red Hat and Mandrake—were freely available for download off the Internet. Having been very recently exposed to research on the effects of access on literacy and the historical problems that education has had affording hardware and software, Linux seemed a promising potential solution for the classroom. Red Hat and Mandrake each came with word processing and other office productivity software, email clients, Internet browsers, and image manipulation tools with similar functionality to Adobe Photoshop. The fact that Linux and other open source source software is often free or low cost is indeed incentive for considering its use in education. For instance, in the years since, open source projects such as Sakai and Moodle have evolved as alternatives to WebCT and Blackboard. However, the more that I became involved in working with open source software, the more that I realized that open source offered an alternative perspective on intellectual property, one which centers on an important new ideology in today’s information economy: “openness.” Open source programmers believe in the importance of denying individual ownership in favor of group ownership, and sharing intellectual property as the most efficient and economical means for developing software applications. Unlike proprietary software vendors who sell binary versions of their programs in shrink-wrapped packages with End User License Agreements (EULA) specifying extremely limited use, open source generally involves a highly collaborative development process. Everyone who owns a piece of software is invited to work on the source 1 code themselves and contribute back improvements to the community. The openness of the code is guaranteed through the use of open source intellectual property licenses such as those listed with the Open Source Initiative. These licenses grant users the right to copy, modify, and redistribute the source code. Linux and many other open source projects make use of a special type of open source license: copyleft. Under non-copyleft types of open source licenses, an individual or corporate entity may take what has been given to the public commons, modify it, and copyright it without releasing it as open source again. Linux uses the Free Software Foundation’s GNU General Public License (GPL), a copyleft license which guarantees the rights listed above along with one important restriction: that any redistribution must include the same license, thus guaranteeing that all future derivative versions are also licensed with the GPL. Within the open source community, openness represents both a social constructionist